So we have Michael Feathers, the legend himself, at least for me, reading his book about working effectively with Legacy Court was such a refresher and it was a mind-blowing experience and having known Michael for a few years now, we were just talking backstage that me and Michael could spend hours talking about all kinds of things such a such a deep thinker and influencer in the agile community and in the teen code community. So Michael, it's a real honor to have you with us and talk about, you know, your net positive development thought process. So greatly appreciate you joining us today from California and without much delay, I want to hand it over to Michael. So yeah, if you could please go ahead and present your screen. Okay, so I hit camera and then present. Present first. Yeah. Okay, present. Okay. And then go to this. Hang on, I think you need to turn your camera on, sorry. Okay, so I'm going to switch back. Okay, so. And while you're there, you could just hide that thing on the bottom as well. Right. Perfect. Okay, is that good? Awesome. Yeah, I think you're all set. Great. Well, I'd like to thank everybody that's attending. It's really kind of interesting and cool to go and do a conference from California all the way, you know, broadcast across Agile India. And yeah, so the thing I want to go and talk to you about today is something I'm calling net positive development. Best way to go and describe this. It seems like there are many different ways of going and looking at problems and looking at situations that we approach in the world, and particularly for us, as like systems designers, it's valuable to go and find certain frames that kind of give us a lot of benefit. And what this talk is about really is really kind of using like the science of networks and graph theory to go and basically develop a frame for understanding different social phenomena and different code phenomena that we encounter all the time in design. So I'm going to kind of like walk through a series of different things and different situations and show you, you know, how some of the tensions that we have in networks really kind of like apply both in the social realm and also in the technological realm. And I think what's interesting to me about this is that the fact that we don't do this as much basically leads us to go and sort of like arrive at solutions, which might not be the best in certain circumstances. So I just want to kind of jump ahead here and just kind of talk about graphs. Okay. It really I guess depends upon where you go to school or how you learn computer science, how much you actually might know about graphs and graph theory. But you know, the notion of graph is really fundamental within computer science. It's really the notion that we can model many systems as nodes and edges. Okay. So nodes are just basically points that represent things. And edges are basically things that are relationships between the different points. And, you know, again, you can model just about anything using graphs. And one more common things that we model using graphs are like networks, for instance, like, you know, the telecommunications networks that we deal with all the time. But you can you can model like word usage, you can model relationships, you can model, you know, organizational structure, you can model structured entities within code. The history of graphs, though, is kind of fascinating. Graph theory is basically pretty much assumed to have started with a particular problem called the Kernesburg bridge problem. And this was something that essentially the mathematician oiler solved a long time ago, centuries ago. The idea behind this problem was essentially you have this particular particular layout of rivers and bridges within the city of Kernesburg. And the idea was to basically see if you can travel from a complete path going and crossing the rivers using these bridges without ever taking a particular bridge twice. And what oiler basically did was he sort of said, okay, look, we can have the pictorial representation of this problem where you can actually see the rivers and the bridges here. We can also go and basically sort of like just sort of map it out with a simple notation of nodes and edges. And then with that, start to go and see the problem in a rather abstract way. And once we see it abstractly, we can go and basically sort of like try to go and apply some mathematical machinery in order to basically figure out whether that particular problem is solvable or not. From those humble beginnings, graph theory has kind of grown into a very huge discipline.  The way that it kind of intersects with computer science, though, is kind of interesting. You might have heard of Dijkstra, Edgar Dijkstra, who basically was one of the earliest computer scientists. He basically specialized in creating algorithms for graph theoretic problems. And one of the key contributions he made is something which still buries his name, Dijkstra's algorithm. And it's really all about finding shortest paths and graphs. And you can see here that essentially we have different numbers for the nodes, like the top one is five, and we have six, three, and four. But the thing is that also within graphs, you can basically assign weights to the edges, and there are numbers that basically represent these particular weights. He was able to go and basically find this nice algorithm which very simply and cleanly can find in any graph the shortest path between any particular nodes that you happen to have. And yeah, so Dijkstra himself, he was a physicist by training. And it seemed like what happened within the early computer science community was that there were many people who were kind of like came on exodus from physics. There was like a glut of physicists back after World War II in the US and around Europe. And they basically needed something to do because a lot of the nuclear programs were winding down. So they basically moved into the nascent field of computer science and started basically applying mathematical tools that they had to problems in computer science. So Dijkstra was an interesting guy, quite a character. Beyond his work though, it seemed that a lot of the hotbed for computer science research was really in places like AT&T Bell Labs. Dijkstra never worked there, but the thing that's fascinating is that most of the early applied work that was ever done in graph theory and things like combinatorics really kind of occurred at Bell Labs because they had essentially network problems. They had to basically figure out routing of things and very different complicated problems that we never really had kind of like confronted before within the context of engineering. So that formed the basis of a lot of the work that we do. But you know, the thing is like, what about today? You know, where do we actually go and use networks and graph theory to go and solve problems? And how do we actually use them to understand the world? Well, I want to come and take a little bit of a segue into scaling first so we can kind of talk about that and how you can see different things as graphs and as networks and sort of solve problems that way. An interesting thing that we're going through right now in agile software development is the issue of how do we scale up teams and organizations. And I'm sure you're aware of the skill of agile framework and various different ways of going in and sort of like orienting organizations for like maximal software delivery and stuff like this. But the big question is like, why are those things so complicated? Especially when we kind of started out with like things like extreme programming where you basically had a process that was like good for maybe six to eight people working together to go and deliver software.  But it's quite amazing to consider there are so many different moving pieces and something like this relative to the simple thing you can do it like a much lower scale. And I think we just basically don't really spend enough time thinking about why the problem gets harder as we get bigger. Okay. So let's talk about that a little bit, right? Scaling in general, you know, we've moved from say model list to microservices, right? So instead of having one big hulking mass, a big thing that we're working on, we try to break it up into many, many small pieces. And that's just basic modularity. But we find ourselves doing this in software architecture, after a long time of trying to go and basically build these huge monolithic things. Now we're basically going and trying to go and build smaller things we interconnect in order to go and solve problems. For scaling, it's kind of interesting to go and notice that this problem of scale and how things change as they scale is, you know, just like the underlying basis of so much of what we do. And I think a way to go and kind of like see it in sharper leaf is to kind of look at science fiction. So here's like a still picture from an early 19, you know, early science fiction from the 1950s, 1954, right? And this particular trope has been used across science fiction for decades that you have some creature that we're basically used to seeing like an insect, which is like, you know, very small, grows to like this huge size and just becomes this monster that everybody goes and has to deal with. But we all kind of know in our hearts that this is not possible and it's not really true. And the reason why we can't have insects at like such large scale is really down to physics. Okay, here's a piece of an essay called on being the right size from 1926. Insects being so small do not have oxygen carrying carrying blood strains. A little oxygen, their cells require is absorbed by simple diffusion of air through their bodies. But being larger means an animal must take on complicated oxygen pumping and distributing systems to reach all the cells. In other words, as things grow, their structure has to change. Now, this is, you know, basically holding basically going and explaining this here, but he's not saying why at all. The real reason why structure has to change as we scale is something that basically Galileo discovered, you know, centuries ago. He basically articulated something that's now known as the square cube law, or sometimes just basically known as Galileo scale scaling law. He basically said that as things grow, essentially, the volume grows faster than the surface area of the thing that's growing. Okay. So for instance, if an elephant is growing, it's kind of like, you know, its volume grows as the cube of n, whereas its surface area grows as the square of n. And you might say, okay, well, who cares? Why is that a big deal? But the fact of the matter is with that increased volume is increased weight. Standing in relation to gravity basically means that a lot of the internal structures and the external structures of the elephant have to grow in a particular way to go and basically make, you know, the elephant, you know, possible, right? You simply couldn't take a mouse and grow to the size of an elephant without it kind of like collapsing, you know, into a puddle of blood really, because it doesn't really have the bone structure or the organ structure or anything that's necessary to support the weight of being at that volume at that size. Now, it's not just biology, though, that has this constraint. If you look at buildings as well, you can't take a little hut or a little cottage and basically grow to the size of a skyscraper without changing materials or changing the building technique, because essentially there's this relationship between the growth of volume, which is n cubed, and the growth of surface area, which is n squared. And because of the way that this happens in geometry, things have to change structure as they scale. Now, you might look at this and go and say, well, gee, you know, why is that, you know, why is that relevant to us in software? But we'll talk about that a bit more as we go forward. So yeah, can anything scale without different structure? You know, as I said, physical structure basically has its own constraints like this. But is that true of like, say, network structure, like the structure of social systems and the structure of like communication pass across an object oriented design or microservice design? Well, let's look a little bit further. Okay, so there's that tension between n cubed and n squared. And we can look at how structure grows now, what about. So let's assume that we have an organization. And in this organization, we have all these people that have communication pass between them because they're, you know, they basically need to go and carry on and do their work. One of the things that we kind of learned from cognitive science is the notion of Dunbar's number that it seems that human beings are kind of tuned to go and have no more than about 150 relationships within a context.  And it really has to do with like the brain, the way our brains evolved. We kind of evolved to basically handle communication in relatively small groups of people around 150. And this was first made as an observation by an organizational theorist, Robin Dunbar. But also there's a lot of empirical support for this, that we really have trouble going and scaling beyond 150 people. And it's interesting to kind of notice that, you know, as we're trying to grow, you know, software development teams and software development organizations, we encounter that same thing. It's also kind of well known that basically when you have a startup, if you once you get past about 150 people, you definitely have to change organizational structure to basically be efficient enough to actually do the work that you need to do. So there's that aspect of things as well. So social systems have limitations like this as well. Fred Brooks, okay, wrote this book, The Mythical Man Month, decades ago. And one of it, one of the things that he kind of pointed out was something that's now known as Brooks law, which is that essentially as if you have a late project, if you add people to it, it becomes later. And the corollary to this, the way that he kind of like sort of like articulated this was to point out that when you have n people working on a team, they're actually like about n squared communication paths between those n people. And it's kind of like, as you add more people to that team, you know, n squared is going to grow much faster than n does. So not only by adding people, do you have more people, but you have more possible communication paths. And when you have more communication paths, things can slow down because there's more work involved in developing consensus. As an example of this sort of thing, just imagine the scenario that you happen to be out with a group of friends, if you have like three friends and you're trying to decide where to go to dinner, it's pretty easy. If you have 15 friends, it gets really kind of weird because you have a lot of work to do to basically figure out everybody's really on board with where you want to go out to dinner. And this consensus problem is really just a very common thing that happens in software development teams as teams grow, developing consensus and basically getting all the feedback and input that you need to make decisions effectively across that team tends to grow as well. So there is this thing where basically we have trouble scaling teams. Let's look at this in a graph theory point of view as I was mentioning a little bit earlier. Here's a fully connected graph. We have nodes and edges, and you'll notice that every single one of the nodes is connected to every single one of the paths. So it's n squared, n squared pass and n nodes. Now, it's kind of interesting with this. If there's a cost to going and basically having communication between each one of these nodes, then what happens if we try to reduce costs of it? Well, one thing we can do is we can still keep the graph connected by removing some edges. Okay? So I've removed some edges, but still there's a way to go and get from every node to every node, even if you have to go through another node.  This is fully connected. And this is a graph that's just connected, meaning you can always get from one node to another, even if you have to go through other nodes. What does this look like? It's kind of a hierarchy in a way, isn't it? It's kind of like you have this one node, which is carrying a lot of communication costs, and essentially to talk to your coworker, you have to go through this hub. It's almost like having an organization where you have separate divisions, and then you have like the CEO that basically you go through to communicate, you know, rather than communicating laterally, we're basically having a manager to separate people that don't talk to each other. So this is kind of like the hierarchy problem. And we've basically been trying to solve the hierarchy problem in Agile for decades now, right? Going and saying disintermediate, basically don't have team leads, all these things in order to go and actually have more peer-like communication. But the thing about this is that there is a cost to having more interconnection within teams. So there's a natural tendency to move towards this as we're trying to remove the cost of communication. And, you know, it's weird about this to just go and say that this right here is better, because the thing is, as it grows, as you have more and more nodes, at some point, it becomes unwieldy. So you really have a choice between having small teams that basically have great culture and a lot of intercommunication and having bigger teams where you're almost obliged to go and form hierarchy, just because of the network dynamics. So I think it's an interesting thing for us to kind of recognize within Agile that when you see hierarchical structure in organizations, it's not necessarily because people are trying to be evil or something like that, it's just basically a natural response to forces of trying to minimize or trying to sort of like prevent slowdowns and basically sort of minimize communication overhead within teams and organizations. And this is, again, something we can see through graph theory and network dynamics. So, yeah, there's a big difference between these two graphs, but there's a natural tendency to move towards the one that's on the right. Now, an interesting thing about this too is that in some organizations that try to be very flat and yet still have separate teams, it's interesting to notice that there's almost like this natural tendency towards having people that are acting as gatekeepers or managers. A friend of mine told me this story once that basically he was working on a team and they were all peers on that team, but they were having trouble because they were really getting tired of having meetings with the product people. So they'd actually get together several times a week and then it was kind of like all of them and sitting in a room. The conversations became a bit tedious, but what they did is developers, they hired another developer who basically was a manager previously and he actually enjoyed going to meetings and they thought this was a great solution because then he could go to the meetings and they could basically just go and kind of like stay away. So it seems like a little bit of a lazy solution in a way, but the thing that's kind of fascinating about what happened with this is that that one developer kept going to the meetings and meeting with the product people and then what happened then is that in meeting with the product people, the product people would say, hey, can the developers do this? And that developer would run back to the development team and go and say, well, yeah, can you do this? They'd say, oh, yeah, I guess we can and then he'd run back. And the product people started getting frustrated because they said every time we want to go and sort of get a commitment, we've got to go and tell it to you and then you've got to go and run back to the team and get it and come back to us. So it's really like this kind of crazy situation. And you can easily imagine a situation where at some point that developer would start just saying, yeah, sure, they can do it and then just go back and start telling them that they had to do it. So there's almost like this way in which because of the dynamics of situation, you almost start to evolve managers, evolve them from just like the natural state of the system that because you want to kind of like reduce the number of meetings, some people will take on this hubbush role and then start to go and actually act as mediators. And that's just part of the dynamics of what we have is we scale things up in organizations. So it's interesting with this that there really is like this tension between excuse me, n squared and n, much like with the Galileo scaling law, we have a tension between n cubed and n squared. When I'm talking about n squared and n, it's kind of like this is a fully connected graph on the left, which is really n squared, you know, connections. The one on the right is really more closer to n. It's kind of like, excuse me, we have, we have like six, you know, six nodes and we've had basically like five connections between them. So as these things grow up, these two different schemes, you know, it's kind of like as you fully connect, you have n squared and as you basically use this tree like spanning structure, you have something which is closer to n. So yeah, there's tension between those two things and much the same way that we have tension between volume and surface area and physical systems. And most everything that we deal with in terms of scaling systems is about going and dealing with this tension. Let's look at something else. Anybody know what this is at all? I guess I'll just kind of like tell you this is really like an airport routing map, okay, for an airline. And you can see that essentially most of the flights seem to kind of like go in and out of Atlanta, which is that big cluster that we have in the lower right hand side of this map. And we have a couple of other clusters in different areas of the map. This is really a natural thing that happens across many systems. This is kind of like called power law networks or kind of like a skill free network. It turns out that for economic reasons, it's really kind of hard to have a fully connected graph among all the airports in say a country, for instance, you know, going and having like direct flights from say Dallas to Phoenix doesn't give you as much benefit as going and routing through an existing hub. So if you're looking at basically going and sort of like figuring out where you want your airline to fly to, it's much more valuable to fly to hubs to basically go and have like lots of flights going out from them, because then the people that are coming on your flight can basically go to many, many different destinations. So this kind of a network evolves in many systems where there's like competition in a way or where there's an advantage to basically going and connecting with something that already has value. And you'll see this also in things like income distribution, for instance, okay, inside countries, for instance, it tends to be the case that if people are rich, they tend to go and get richer. And quite often you can look at this as being a the result of corruption and things like this. And often it is, but sometimes it's also because when people are richer, they get more opportunities thrown their way, so they get the chance to become more rich. So in income distribution, if you when you graph it out tends to you want to have exactly the same kind of graph as you might when you graph out the number of connections for particular airports in a system. It's because the network dynamics are roughly the same. It's fascinating that the same thing happens with leaf structure that you tend to have like, there's value if you're like the vein of a leaf to go and basically sort of like merge into one which already has a wider structure. So it's kind of like this arterial structure tends to go in like when you graph out the number of connections that each vein has, it tends to have that same kind of structure as well. So this is called sometimes the Pareto or power law distribution. You have on the left hand side here, you have this is a histogram, you basically have the things on the left hand side are basically the number of the number of things that have low connection and then basically the number of things that have high connection on the right hand side. And the shape of this graph is ubiquitous across many different systems. So like I said, you'll see it with income distribution, you'll see it well, with publishness of airports, you'll see that the natural structure of computer networks. Another fascinating thing is that you'll basically go and see the same thing when you look at say method size in software systems. And if you doubt me, I'd say actually go and sort of graph it out. If you have a tool that goes and gives you the size of methods, one of the things that you'll discover is that you can use exactly the same graph here. You'll find that you have hundreds and thousands of very small methods like one or two lines. Then you have a small number of very large methods. And those are the ones that you would see on the right hand tail of this distribution. The dynamics behind this are essentially when it's when you can preferentially attach to something of higher value, then you basically start having this dynamic growing within the system. A great book that goes into Lusace, this is Network Science by Albert Barabasi. He's like the preeminent researcher in the world right now of power law networks, scale-free networks. And it's a bit math heavy, but it also has great, great examples showing how particular networks evolve over time. And the entire book is available online as well. So it's really worth looking into that if you want to understand more about these network dynamics. The thing I mentioned earlier about method size, there's research around this that essentially many things other than just method size going forward, power law distribution, the size of classes and the size of subsystems all tend to go and have this same structure. And so it's really kind of fascinating to go and see this sort of thing happen. Right now I'm actually like working on a book, which is kind of fun, right? One of the things that's interesting as well is to kind of notice that as I make changes to the various chapters, the number of changes I've made to each chapter follows a power law distribution. There's one chapter where I've made many, many changes. And there's like a trailing list of basically ones that haven't made quite as many changes to. And this is, you know, I have a graph that goes and shows me how this is going. And I can't, for myself, really see why it is this one particular chapter is getting most of the changes. But it just seems to be like, I guess a side effect of how my attention is focused on things. So it's worth going and looking into this distribution and seeing what's interesting about it in relation to your work. As I mentioned earlier, 80-20 rule. You know, a fascinating thing about this, which is like a nice coral area as well, is if you look at commits within a system, you'll basically discover that 80% of the work happens in 20% of the system. That you have some files in your submit system that get most of the commits and most of the change. And once you kind of know this in the context of your work, you can recognize that basically not all the goodness that you spread across the code base in terms of refactoring is of equal value. If you concentrate refactoring on the areas where you're receiving the most change, then you're going to go and get most of the benefit you would get from refactoring. And so it's kind of useful to go and know as you go forward with things. I read this fascinating paper a while back, which is another example of the application of this kind of network science to organizations. It had a very provocative title, How to Prevent Coding Heroes from Destroying the Team. Actually, no, this is the title of the referred to paper, Why Software Projects Need Heroes Lessons Learned from Over 1,000 Projects. There were some people who basically did analysis of a bunch of different GitHub projects, over 1,000 projects. And what they basically discovered was that the contribution across the teams that were working on these projects was not uniform. It wasn't equal. It wasn't like if you had any people, it's kind of like the amount of work done by any one person was one divided by n. Rather, there were a couple of people on each team that tended to basically do the most commits and participate in most of the conversations around pull requests. And this was just like a natural tendency that kind of occurred in open source software development. This was actually posted on Hacker News website around the time that it came out. And there was a lot of controversy because some people were just saying, well, surely this is just something that's true about open source projects. But it's not. If you actually look across in-house projects and there's tooling that can do this, you'll discover that just about every project, there are some people that basically make far more contributions than other people do. Now, it's weird about this because they use the controversial term here hero for basically people that do this kind of thing. And we have this thing in the industry like we don't want people to be heroes. We want to basically spread out the work and basically make sure that everybody is doing an equal amount of work and knows as much about the system as they can so that we have redundancy and everything else and good culture. But this thing just tends to naturally happen. And I guess there's a couple of different ways of looking at this. One is to go and say that the people who are basically going and doing most of this work are the mean people who are trying to basically hog up all the work. But I think what happens more naturally is that as people are working on systems, some people gain a little bit more expertise in certain areas. And then they become the natural person to go to in order to go and get some of those things done. And so they start to take on more responsibility for those things. So it's an interesting thing with this. If we try to go and flatten out the structure entirely, we were really kind of working against our natural tendency on these things. And we have to go and ask ourselves whether it really is worthwhile. As part of the research that they were doing, one of the things that they kind of discovered was that the teams which basically had or actually the contributions made by the people who did the most, who made the most commits actually were of higher quality than people who basically didn't do as many commits. And you might look at this and wonder why. And I think some of that really comes down to familiarity. If you are one of the people who are most familiar with the system, chances are the changes that you make are going to be more in line with the architecture and basically more in line with the correctness of the existing code. So again, this is really kind of a fascinating thing. And it's weird about this because it kind of runs against some of the things that we kind of talked about in Agile. But we'll talk a little bit more about that later. There is an alternative to this, which is really kind of like almost anti-Agile in a way. Which, you know, it's kind of funny going to remember this back after I saw that paper about the distribution of commits on teams. And this paper was written by Harlan Mills. He basically hypothesized back when Fred Brooks was doing his first research in the software development about something he called the chief programmer team. And he basically said that an interesting thing to consider is that since we know that we get increasing benefit from having, you know, having like one mind understanding the whole system, maybe it's good to go and have teams where there's only one programmer. And then there's a person who does testing. And there's a person who's basically in charge of version control and in person who's in charge of documentation. Maybe you only have four or five people, but maybe there's only one programmer along with an assistant programmer in case that one programmer leaves. As far as I know, nobody's actually ever done this sort of thing. But the thing that they kind of recognized even as Roy's 1971 is that smaller teams are better. And having systems where basically the entire system can fit in one person's mind tends to be better. It just doesn't seem practiceable today when we build large systems like we are. So, yeah, there is this thing where basically cognitive limits can constrain structure. As we, as systems grow, we need to go basically sort of like build up different ways of going and structuring ourselves to basically go and deal with the fact that we can't fit the entire system in one mind. And that's a lot of the scaling development we have within software development today. So there is this thing, we can go and break things as well into smaller teams, big projects done by small teams that have to communicate with each other. But as we do that, we end up building a lot more complexity into our systems. And this is true not just in organizations, but also in software itself. You can have a giant method, for instance, and it's kind of like it's terribly complex inside, but there's a different form of complexity that manifests itself. When you take that method and break it into many small methods, and then you have to deal with the relationship between all those small methods. So we make complexity explicit when we basically more, we modularize things a bit more. And sometimes that modularity is a bit harder to change. So I don't know, it's funny, I want to go and take that thing of the chief programmer surgeon team and kind of talk a bit about how we might go and approach that in an agile context. Let's take a look at this for a second. When we talk about cognitive load, the things that we have to deal with mentally, the things that kind of go and sort of make system grow outside of our control are the size of the team, the number of tools we use, the amount of code that we have. Now we can almost imagine that there's like a way of going and making a formula out of this. If we had some scaling factor for the number of team members and the number of tools and the number of code and the number of lines of code, for instance, and just said that if we just sort of set the scaling factors right, we would end up with a number that's less than some number n. And that should be the thing that we really want to go and have in software development. Because it costs us a lot mentally to go and keep track of all these things, we're better when we're working on a smaller amount of code with a smaller number of tools and with a smaller team. And the fact that we can't go beyond n, really, is the reason why we basically have trouble more scaling up software development. One way of going approaching this is to say, well, why don't we just basically have one person teams using only a couple of tools and have them write only a small amount of code? And if we do then we solve all of our problems. But we have the other tension as well that essentially people want more and more features. So systems do tend to grow and they have to grow. So we really can't go and just do this thing of going and having single person teams would be kind of ridiculous. But there are some alternatives. There's this very cool blog called Powers of Two. It was written by a friend of mine, Jake, a long time ago. And he basically made this observation that when you have a particular configuration, some things can kind of just evaporate away in process terms. He worked at a company where basically they had relatively small applications that were supporting experts in a particular field. And they were scoped in such a way that they never really had too much code. They could delete code when it kind of fell out of date. What they were able to do is basically just have two person developer teams. And that's way smaller than a lot of what we consider to basically do with an agile. I mean, you can count peer programming in one way, I guess. But they had teams of just exactly two developers. And so these two developers would pair all day long. They basically would talk to their customer because their customer was in the same room with them all day long. They would be able to talk to their customer. They basically were able to go and sort of trade off the support tasks because a lot of the support tasks were really kind of like across the workday. They didn't really impact nighttime schedules all that much. Version control was very easy. They wrote all their tests. And everything was just very simple. And they were amazed at how little process they had because they were just basically only two people working on the system. And essentially, the system was kind of constrained such that it didn't really have to grow all that much. And to me, that's kind of like the sweet spot for us in a way in software development is can we basically go ahead and sort of structure ourselves so we have smaller projects, smaller numbers of people working on those things and kind of avoid some of the accidental complexity of having large software organizations working on things. And it really comes down to fit against the problem, I think. Some problems are really amenable to this and others really aren't. And then when they aren't, we really are back into that space of going in like trying to figure out how do we grow? How do we basically go into the best deal of communication structure across an organization? And I think it's really fascinating that the issues of communication structure we have across the organization mirror themselves within the structure of the software as well. Microservices were not just a technical thing when they first came into the industry. It was also a way of going and basically getting very small teams able to work independently. And so, yeah, we really are continuing down this path of going and sort of like figuring out how best to go and sort of like manage the tension between the desire to grow and grow teams and grow software and also the limits that we counter along the way as we're going and doing those things. And that thing of the power law distribution, that's definitely an issue that we have to go and deal with. When we have groups of people and when we have groups of software structures, such that there's like a magnetic attraction to go and grow more and more to them, then you basically increase the communication structure. And things start to kind of fall apart. So, yeah, the tension is between n squared and n for us in software development. That's our primary design challenge. Now, if you're trying to scale building, you've got to deal with volume versus surface area. When you're trying to grow an organization, we're trying to grow and grow software. It's all between massive communication structure and stuff which is a bit more like a tree, as opposed to a fully connected graph. And we just have to go and basically balance those things. And I hope that in the context of this talk, I'm going to give you some things to think about and also some things to kind of like dig into as you're trying to go and understand more about how these things impact design. Because I think this frame by itself is very valuable for design thinking and something you can probably carry forward through the rest of your career. So, thank you all very much. And I guess I'll just kind of like open this up for questions at this point. All right. Fantastic, Michael. Like always, you really make us think deeply. So, thank you very much for that. Love the whole power law. I think Adam earlier today was also showing in his court scene tools, he's been trying to analyze and he found the same. So, kind of quite a bit of correlation. And also this whole thing about trying to scale organization, trying to scale agile, what it can do to without changing the structure, I think is again a very important point that you made. So, yeah, thanks again. I will quickly look at the questions that we have here. So, we have a few questions. Wow, we have quite a few questions. All right. So, I'll just quickly read out those questions. So, the first one I'm looking at here is from Vinaya. She's asking following the hero discussion, what are your thoughts on the idea of lone genius? Is it a myth or reality? Is it a myth or reality? Well, I think there's like an issue in the industry where basically what we want to do is we want to go and sort of like say that there are no heroes or no lone geniuses because we know that there's issues in culture when that kind of thing happens. That sometimes people think that they're too good for the team around them or something, which is really a horrible situation where they get special privileges or people put up with bad behavior from people like this. I think that's a significant problem, but I think that the thing that we have to kind of recognize is that that problem is really independent of whether there are some people that just are able to do some things that other people can't, right? Across my industry I've witnessed a wide variation in the amount of ability and software development and some people can just knock out some problems very quickly but they do need to collaborate with others well socially in order to go and be able to solve their problems, solve problems in general. So I think we need to deal with cultural problems, but we also have to recognize that sometimes there are some people that are great performers that basically can be thrown at some hard problems and do very well by them. I don't think these two things are incompatible. Okay, cool. Quickly reading the next question from Praveen. His question is how do we measure positiveness in a team of developers, QAs, DevOps, Ops, PO, etc. Because for every member has different responsibility and separate, they all have separate or different goals. So would this lead to some kind of chaos? How do you manage that I guess is this question because each person may have a different responsibility and a goal. Yeah, well it's funny. I guess the question comes down to why do you want to measure those things? I think one of the things that's really kind of very helpful for us is when we're kind of like evaluating teams is how does the team work together to go and solve common goals regardless of what the individual people are doing? And then there's the thing of like how how do we feel about like how are individual people going and doing, you know, contributing? And I don't think this is really something which is really kind of tied to role. It's really just more like what does the team and what is that person able to, what's the team need and was that person able to provide? Are they getting along with their co-workers? Are they basically contributing? Well, I think there's a lot around this. I think in the end it really just becomes subjective. It's really a matter of like maintaining good relationships with your co-workers and contributing to a goal which is bigger than yourself. Okay, cool. Thanks. The next question is from Carol. If we have one individual working on the program or a system, heroes it causes others not to be accountable or take ownership and would that lead to building compliance in others? So what are your thoughts around that? I think the main thought I have is smaller teams, you know, frankly. I think that there's this natural tendency for this kind of dynamic to emerge and it really comes down to people basically becoming, how can I say, you want to take advantage of the fact that some people are going to basically sort of really dig into particular areas of the system and do well with that. But you also want to basically make sure that you don't have a situation where if they leave you don't really have the capability to go and basically sort of like do that kind of work. So there's a balance between these things. But I think we can't kind of deny that essentially it's not going to be completely uniformed contribution across the team. So I think it's definitely one of those like middle path things where you have to kind of like find the right way to go and sort of like balance the fact that some people are going to kind of like dig into particular areas and others not so much and you know a way of going and sort of like making these effects kind of disappear a bit is to just keep your team size as small as you can. Absolutely. Okay, great. There's the next question from Siddharth. Would it help to scale down your code by using the language like APL or J where all your business logic could fit in on a single page? Yeah, that's an interesting question. It's kind of funny when I'm imagining whoever proposes that kind of smiling as they do this because when you look at the logic it almost seems like that's the thing to kind of do. But language choice is a much bigger issue than just you know raw efficiency. It really comes down to can you hire people that basically will understand code that was written a couple weeks ago or written in a language that they're unfamiliar with. I do think that there's a long arc within the industry towards more terse code in a way. You see it now with a lot of the same things that we're doing with functional programming where basically we're kind of like taking a lot of boilerplate code is kind of disappearing because people are able to use like maps and folds and and various different functional things to go and sort of like articulate algorithms and much smaller amounts of code. So we're going to keep on moving in that direction. But the thing is that really comes down to what things are like for an organization in the context of hiring pool and other organizations. Can they basically create systems that will be maintained in the future? So yeah, I don't see us moving to APL anytime soon. But I expect APL and J like features to start to kind of propagate across programming languages much like functional has propagated across the object-oriented languages. Awesome. I would love to see that. All right. I think there's a last question that is from Rob and he's asking how should we change teaching in software to prepare learners for this future of software engineer where we start designing our software systems and organizations together? I don't know. I haven't really thought about the teaching aspect of it. I think that just getting enough practitioners right now to go and understand these things is probably a good path and kind of hoping that this stuff kind of backtracks into education. But I really think the graph theory network theory are really that kind of the key things here are people to see things in terms of those frames. But maybe I want to have that discussion offline. I think be a great one. I think that this frame is so valuable for understanding design and networks and social systems that it probably should be taught in an integrated way. We see the word socio-technical used quite often these days. And I highly recommend the book team topologies because it kind of touches on these particular things. I think it's really like the first book to try to deal with this in an integrated way. And I'm sure we'll see more and more of that over time. All right, Michael. That was fantastic. Thank you so much. I think we have killed all the questions. So thanks again, Michael. It's a real honor to have you back. Thank you. It's been hard to be here. Thanks.


Okay, so I guess we'll go ahead. It's okay if everybody will go ahead and call the meeting to order and then when Susie gets available then she can join us. So, I'm not going to do roll call. Joanne, unless you want me to, but I think you can see everybody's little face. Oh, I've got it. Thank you though. Okay, so the first thing is to look at the minutes from last time. Does anyone have any corrections or comments? I move we approve the minutes as distributed. Is there a second? Second. Thank you, Thomas. And all in favor of approving the minutes from October or sorry, not from October from September as written, say I or wave your hand or something. All opposed. Okay, so that looks like an unanimous vote to me. Thank you very much. I guess we're up to you, Eric, with the proposed accessions for October. All right. Steph, do you have the PowerPoint that you can share great. All right, so we have quite a number of accessions this month. Go ahead go to the next slide. So the first one is the largest of the ones for this month it is several boxes worth primarily archival material. Relating to the Carol family. They were lived in Longmont from 19 teens to the early 1940s. Carol pharmacy. And Lauren Carol is very involved in the Elks there's a number of photographs of the Elks man. And it's it's generally a nice photographic collection within some additional certificates and so forth that tie to the action. So that is the Carol family collection. Go to the next slide. So the next several accession relate to our project on sending out a call for collections related to the ongoing COVID situation and I believe we have seven total collections related to digital photographs. So the two on this page one woman wearing a hand sewn COVID mask. Another, it's actually an art and public places sculpture that someone has placed a COVID mask on. Go to the next slide. Health care worker again wearing COVID masks and then several photographs of various aspects of COVID so empty store shelves, cordoned off playgrounds celebrating that they could actually find toilet paper. There's also which I couldn't really show you in the PowerPoint, but a brief digital video of a flyover one of the jet flyovers that was done in Longmont. Go to the next slide. So then we have some photographs related primarily to the mask project that and Mac at the museum headed up, and then also a couple photographs of the Black Lives Matter protests at Roosevelt Park. The next one is participant in virtual boulder boulder the person depicted had participated nearly every boulder boulder. And so it was very disappointed when it was canceled and so decided to participate virtually. And then there was also a zoom birthday party screen capture of that kind of cool. Next slide. And this is our last COVID related collection. This one relates a little more to kind of the personal stories. These are the photographs of schools. The signs are the donor called them kind of family harmony. Things they could post on the doors to say either, don't bother me or yes it's fine to come in that kind of thing. And then the one in the lower right corner is kind of a touching story they went to retrieve their daughter from Georgetown after it had closed and you could only bring home a couple of suitcases. And so the suitcases are actually sitting outside. While they're, you know, hopefully the sunlight is killing off the COVID that might be on them. So those are all of the COVID related collections so any questions on any of that I know it's it's quite a lot of collections. Certainly anyone has any thoughts or questions about kind of that contemporary collecting aspect we haven't done a lot of it in recent years but with COVID we thought it was appropriate to do it. So Eric, will you be continuing to collect things as it seems appropriate as obviously this isn't over yet. Yes, there's actually a couple more collections that are still kind of being processed related to COVID. And then at some point and I'm not, we're sort of trying to figure out when we could safely do that. We would probably open up a call for 3d artifacts as well. And talk to talk to a curator at Lakewood and said, they've kind of had the same experience people were willing to share digital photos but really not 3d objects and like masks everybody's still using their masks so. Yes, the thought is certainly we would continue to do collecting in the future and maybe do another call, sort of gets to be a point where it starts to feel like we're on the tail end of it and people maybe have a little more perspective that we might put out another call for, for collections. Great, thanks. I have a question it's Tom. Yeah, regarding all the COVID stuff. And you know you've included BLM which really wasn't covered or related, but it happened during the same time. And my question was, wasn't, are you going to try to include, since you've included the BLM stuff are you going to try to include anything Eric for blue lives matter, which is kind of, you know, there's been some. Advocations of those things to and different parts of the state that I can't remember if there was something actually a long one that occurred I know there was up in Berthand and a few other towns. So yeah, we would certainly be open to blue lives matter donations. It's, and we're really at this point, kind of. We're limited in what people have offered us. So that's, that's certainly something that if we put out another call we could, we could certainly indicate that because I think we actually put out the first call before even the black lives matter protests had really started and just what people were, we're sending in. So that's one of the questions since that was included it seems like you should include the other half the other side to some. Yeah, certainly we would, we would want to document anything relating to long month that people feel like was was significant happening during this time. Okay, thank you. Thanks. I interject before we move on this is council member you'd all go faring. So, um, so I think I wanted to provide a little perspective on the notion of the blue lives matter or the thin blue line. And, and really looking at it, not as an opposition to black lives matter, but it is its own separate entity. Yeah, I think is is that I excuse me, excuse you. That's choice of words. No, that's all right. So, but I wanted to kind of add some context. So last, um, last Friday, I had a conversation with our, the president of the fop the fraternal order of police. And then additionally we had lunch together on Monday. I really was talking around the social justice work, the, the, what the perception of the thin blue line means, and over the years so how it originated so we really went back and looked at history. We looked at how, how it's become an issue of.  Oh well blue lives matters too. And it we need to go. We, you know, really wanting to look beyond that, that aspect of valuing black lives matter for what it means and it is a social justice issue. So, the other thing is so back in 2016, not long after black lives matter started to emerge. Um, a national education association conference where we had a panel, and they were it was the women who started that movement. That hashtag. And really what they what the reason why they brought that forward was because of the police brutality, things that were happening of black youth, black, predominantly black men who were getting beaten up and assaulted by people by law enforcement and so what that meant so we had a really good conversation with the president of the fraternal order of police so he's the president of the police union, and really talking about what that means and that perspective. So I want to make sure that if we do bring in artifacts from that include the thin blue line, or the flag with the blue line that it comes with context. And so really talking about the what the impacts that it had on has on some individuals in our community for some individuals in our community, especially our community of color are black and brown residents. It feels like a very intimidating view so looking at it and just having the sense of intimidation or threat or threat. And so one of the things that I spoke with Stephen about is really reclaiming that. And so if that was a notion of having police pride, then we need to make sure that the whole community feels that sense of pride. So, you know, I want to be careful that when we start adding in different. So like I think about the black lives matter. So we have the protest we were protesting. This was the sign of the times protesting for social justice equity. So just really making sure that everybody, you know that we are, we are thinking about our, our black and brown community members who have felt under attack from racist attacks, you know, just kind of verbal verbal abuse things that we've dealt with over the years. So I think because there's been organized rallies, we want to make sure that that that piece is included when we bring in blue lives matter because I've also seen rallies around that, but really making sure that the context is there. So and why maybe why the opposition was there so really bringing in that historical component and what it means. And with public safety on is implicit bias and cultural proficiency and looking at impacts versus intent. So sometimes people feel like oh I'm doing this this piece or I'm advocating for this, you know, all lives matter. Okay. Yeah, of course all lives matter nobody's saying it's not. But the impact that it has is that you're devaluing other people of color who've been oppressed who felt very oppressed over the years so making sure that all those all that context is brought to light, and I hope that I kind of added some clarity and not confusion to this because it's a long topic. Yeah, I've been studying this work for the last 30 years to so it's been part of my world. So, okay. Thank you. Sorry. Thomas, you are muted by the way. I may want to unmute. Okay, sorry. Yeah, I said I totally agree with you. I think but you know I think both view those both groups need to be if we're going to talk about one I think we should talk about the other a little bit. Particularly if that's what the purpose is. I don't think we can really talk about one and not the other. So and then I don't know if you caught what I had said because I also said that that's important to have if we know I'm just we but we also need to have make sure it's context. It has context to it. Yeah, I totally agree. And now I was muted when I said, I thought, you know that I totally agreed with you. I just didn't want us to forget about it either. And that's why I brought it up. Because I think reminded me because I think I've seen the city, and I don't know how it's related to all of it, but was requesting membership people membership for kind of a police. Over now I won't say oversight committee but a police committee to the to review certain things with the police department. I mean this I read this a couple weeks ago so it's not real clear in my mind. So I think that made me think about it when I saw when I was looking at these exhibits. Thank you both that very, very helpful discussion. Thanks, sir. Oh, Eve, I think you're muted. Am I muted again. Oh no I'm, I'm just talking away and I'm on mute. I think what this brings up to me too is that I think, and I'm your Eric you're very good at this but it seems to me we could get carried away and get all sorts of things, like anything that's happening during coven, you know it's like okay what does day of the dead look like during coven and maybe that's still interesting and something that we should preserve but I mean you could. We got the grocery store you know I mean you could kind of get carried away and have, you know, examples of everything and maybe that's okay but you know I can see how you could sort of get carried away or get overwhelmed with, you know, every little bit minutia. Yeah, I did. Some people sent in photos of their dogs, and I decided that photos of dogs were not really connected as far as I could tell to what was going on now so I politely declined those and photos of birds and things like that. I tried to focus it on really the issues that we're dealing with now. I mean to me almost you know like the fires. It's not hitting long exactly, but there's you know the issues with the smoke and some of that kind of thing I mean those those things are all happening in a different situation because of the virus so maybe some of that is. I don't know I'm sure you'll figure out what we should have but it could be broad. Was that the end. Sorry, I don't have there are a couple more accession so if we could go back to the PowerPoint, and we can go to the next page. So these are now non non COVID related more more historical documents so we have a certificate issued by the Longmont Flying Service in 1945. Which is kind of cool just just before they opened Longmont Municipal Airport. They were in existence. The next one on this page is two maps of Boulder County. I was having a hard time that one of them is extremely large I mean it's about five feet long so a little hard to see in this but quite a nice map from 1902 in Boulder County. And then the other one that you can just sort of see off in the distance there in this photo is 1976 map which was just after kind of a rationalized and standardized all of the street names in Boulder County so one of the first ones where every road in the county had a name. And I believe next slide will be our last Eric I have a quick question about the large map printed it I mean what is the origin of it. It. It came from was hanging in Longmont City Hall for many years. I have to confess I actually have not yet completely unrolled it to see the name of the publisher but it looks to me like it might be a drums map Henry drum was a local map maker. I made a number of Boulder County and St. Rain Valley maps in in that time period. This one has that style. Thank you. And the last last item is there's a very interesting types manuscript. The author's experience with working with great Western sugar for you know 60 years really from from being a young boy in 1915 all the way up to 1975. The frustrating thing is he never gives us his name but he does at one point mentioned his father's name is JF Gerald so we know he's a son of JF Gerald but beyond that, not 100% certain who wrote it but still fascinating information. Been a program from the potpourri players. Now long month theater company from 1979 and a pamphlet making history with lamb. That was also owned by the all owned by the same same woman Barbara Connor. I've lived in Longmont for many years. That is all of the accessions any questions on on any of those. Thanks Eric, and thanks everybody for comments and questions I think that's very helpful to for us to talk about some of these things as they come up so that we're all on the same page. Is there a motion to accept these accessions I know that we accept the sessions. And is there a second. Okay. Go ahead. Okay, Rio will let you second. All in favor of accepting the these accessions entirely. I'll say I please or raise your hand or wave. Whatever our new thing is. Those opposed. Okay, so that's a unanimous approval of those accessions. Oh, there she is. Kim, if you'd like to give us your report, I'd be great. I'd be happy to. Hi, everybody. This was part of the packet that go and shared with you so I won't go. I won't read every word of it for you like I do, but I will try to get some of the highlights for you. We, I think we let you guys know a while back that we had applied for and received a museum assessment program which is a test that happens through the American Alliance of museums and the Institute of Museum. Library services and the friends of the Longmont Museum paid for that assessment for us. And then of course we had coronavirus hit so it's been weird, I will say, but we have basically completed all of the work on the assessment it starts with a self assessment so as a staff and a few outside folks like you. In a couple of those meetings. We had a whole series of questions that we answered and for the self assessment part of it. And then we submitted all of that information to peer reviewers and then we had to try to figure out how we were going to work with our peer reviewers through the pandemic. And we were lucky that one of them is from Colorado Springs. And so he actually was able to join us for a day. And then the other peer reviewer is from the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth and so he was remote. But I do think that we got some really, really good work done a lot of, you know, hard questions were asked and diving into some real nuts and bolts of who we are and who our visitors are. So they will take all of that information. And the two of them will write a report for us. And so we've really just finished that process. I think that really was part of one of the last meetings that we had. I think they've been very productive. Sort of information gathering meetings and so they will then issue a report and some suggestions. And they've said very clearly that there's nothing that stands out that we are doing poorly. It's just a matter of getting some outside perspective and some other professionals in the field to kind of look at what we're doing and give us some point to how to go to the next level. For us, really the next level is going to be looking at how we can get accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. And so this is one step in that process. And I think that there'll be some really pointed recommendations as far as that goal goes. And so we're looking forward to that. Let's see. On to the marketing and membership portion of that report we sent out you probably most of you got something in your mail, which was an annual appeal that we really focused on coronavirus recovery. And so from that annual appeal, we've gotten about $6,200 so far. So that's great. The very first night that that appeal went out, we got $1,000 through PayPal. So it was a nice entree into that endeavor. And then we've also gotten another grant of $3,000 from the Community Foundations Serving Boulder and that's for the Dia de los Martos, and then also another $1,500 from Boulder County Diversity Funds. So we've actually been doing quite well with some grants this year. So we're pretty thrilled about that because it's also a way that we'll be able to kind of offset some of the losses that we've seen with coronavirus. In our education department, we really are all over all day of the dead all the time. And so you may have participated in the virtual opening reception that happened when we opened the exhibit, which was very, very, I was tearful, like everybody was crying, it was so meaningful. It was hard to keep it together. It was so meaningful.  We did a virtual opening, which was the first time we've ever done anything like that before. So there were some glitches, but we pulled it off and it came across as very authentic. So that was kind of, I think it worked out okay. And then the rest of the celebration is also going to be a virtual festival. And so up and end up being there's a kind of repository of different programs that will have that kind of expand even on what we've been doing in past years for Day of the Dead. And then we also did our first virtual school tour for the Day of the Dead exhibition. You all might know that we have typically our exhibit gets a lot of attention by school groups that come in. And this year, of course, that's very difficult to do. So Anne's been able to do these as a virtual school course. So that's, you know, I think kind of roll out even bigger later. She's also spearheaded 500 Dia de los Muertos kits, and distribution starts tomorrow. And basically those include all kinds of different things that you could do at your home to celebrate Day of the Dead. And so it's sort of an easy quick way to get all the materials and festivities that you need to celebrate Day of the Dead. So I'm picking mine up. You guys should too. They are going to be available at the museum at the library and then a few other locations as well. We've also with the grant that we received from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we've hired Scott Yoho as a digital communications specialist. And so he's been working very hard on that activity with the content for Dia de los Muertos and a lot of other things. Courtney Pletcher is also new to us. She is actually a VISTA volunteer. And a VISTA volunteer is someone that we contract with basically for one year. And she will be working with Ann in the education department. And so she's working right now on the projects that we are collaborating with, with the school district, with the mobile lab. You may recall, Boyoff will totally lost track of time, but we received or we gave $25,000 to the school district from the museum as a sponsorship for the mobile lab. And part of that arrangement is that we will have content on the mobile lab and there will be collaborations that are going to happen kind of for a three or four year period. And so that was, you know, it was on hold for a while because of coronavirus and now we're getting it kind of moving again. So we'll work on that. And what they're trying to do is to get a project going with fourth grade social studies students and their standards. And so they're targeting topics that are hard histories, if you will, like the Amanche Japanese internment camp, the Sand Creek Massacre, Buffalo Soldiers, that sort of thing. And they're trying to be able to create some programs that are able to deal with those hard topics in a way that kids can really come away with some good lessons. So then going on the discovery days, this is really exciting to us. I mean, there's so many things that are silver lining through all of this and I think it's a virtual program, and it's totally sold out. So they're doing 80 kits per month and there's a waiting list for it. So this has been a raging success. And we're very excited to be able to do these. Ann and Lee have really come up with some creative shifts for that program. And I think it's it's it's showing that people are responding to it. So we're really excited about that. And then on to Eric's section. You guys know that Elizabeth Baldwin has left us as the museum technician, and she she left to take on a curator's role. So we wish her the best, but one of she was working on when she was with us is the innovative women in Longmont on a virtual tour, the walking, the walking tour on the virtual app. So she was working on that and now that she's gone, Scott Yohoh is going to pick up the project and so we'll be able to finish that out. Eric's also got volunteers sort of coming in to the archives we've we're finally been able to bring volunteers back into the offices. But he's making sure that everybody is especially distance and the staggering things that no one is being put at risk. Eric has got two sets of proof for his book and so we're expecting that to show up soon. You guys may have seen that those are available for presale even now. And then I think we're going to try to get them in a couple of bookstores to even so that's going to work out really nicely we're excited to show up any day now sometime in November it should be here. Eileen has done conditional reports for outgoing and incoming artwork for the exhibits that we've covered and the gallery is in the galleries. And you should really take a look at it. We haven't already before the basically half the gallery is Tony Ortega's work and half the gallery is the alters for the day of the dad. And it's one of the best I've ever seen it's I mean it's such a great great exhibit and also augmented by a mural that Tony Ortega did on town that was installed on Friday. So as you're driving by on Main Street you should be able to see that in one of the breezeways so we're excited. Oh, let's see what I've been leading walking towards so again socially distance and masks but we're able to do those. So, you know the outdoors which makes that a little bit easier and to be able to adhere to the restrictions. But of course we've always got great people are itching to take those tours with Eric so he's he's done four of those. And then we also finished out on the two year old year long IMLS grant that helped us move the collections out to the new storage facility. And so that was sort of the final work that Elizabeth Baldwin did to finish up that grant and it we successfully moved and rehoused over 11,000 objects and photographs and over 8500 objects. So it was a big job and they were really really thorough in doing it so that's very cool. And one of these days we're going to have you guys come visit but as soon as we got the official occupancy certificate we've got a pandemic hit so we haven't been able to actually bring you guys out there. One of these days it's pretty out at the collection center. So I've already talked about a little bit maybe I'll just move on. Tony Ortega has been dreamed to work with so he Jared included some quotes in there from Tony. And then he also included a note that for the first time in six months the Exhibition Department did not have to make any barriers. BRAC have been cranking out plexiglass barriers for offices all over the city of Longmont to help people from the coronavirus. That work is kind of coming in but we were sort of the default for being able to fabricate those things said they really appreciate it. I'm sure by everyone. And then one other little note that we are also working with the Colorado State University on borrowing some making materials for the upcoming Impressionist. Impressionist show will feature prints from the Impressionist period and we wanted to try to demonstrate the process of printmaking so we're going to be borrowing some collections from CSU for that. So that'll be kind of cool I think to be able to see how the process works. And then you see there the auditorium updates we've had some really great successes in terms of moving those programs to an online format. We have had a handful of members who are coming in person to see some of those things because we have to limit the number of people that are in the auditorium. And then we also did have an in person frequent flyers aerial dance event. And so that was kind of a staggered attendance and bringing small groups of people through the museum and that was very successful. Let's see. Total of 19 programs that were live streamed and those 19 programs were viewed. So another silver lining for us is despite having to take these events online. What we're seeing is that we're getting a lot of engagement and you know there's no way we would have been able to host this many people in person. And so it's it is a very, very nice thing to be able to have these big that number of people that are joining us virtually and from all over the world they're joining us so that's nice. Thank you Parker Robinson with this and then the day of the dead opening reception was also virtual. We have had a couple of very small rentals. And we're getting some inquiries about additional ones. And so, again, there were limited enough capacity that we're making sure that we're keeping people at a distance when we are able to do those in person facility rentals. And then in terms of the sponsored programs. We worked with the Centennial State LA on their fall showcase to do some filming for them. Is there a question? Yeah, what else. October events have included Colorado poet laureate Bobby LaFever, which was quite a cool program. Activists and allies was a conversation with a couple of professors with a moderator talking about social justice and the history of race. And then tomorrow is a program called stranger than fiction, which is really a conversation with several writers, kind of reflecting on what we're living, living through at the moment. And so, really just a kind of reflection of how, you know, what's happening during this very, very strange time in our history. And then on the 29th, it's going to be a program about 100 years of women celebrating the suffrage movement and when separate. And so that I think is going to be a really cool program. We're trying to get Patty limerick to join us for that. That's not that's inside information at this point, but we're working on getting her on the panel as well. So that'll be a cool one. So then in for the visitor services section there and we had with our numbers are visitors have not been high so 130. The number of visitors down from August as we've been in the past few weeks that we were closed or basically closed for a couple of weeks and we did we have very little visitation while we were doing that. And over to the people will come and knowing that there wasn't anything in the rotating gallery. They would just leave. And so we didn't have a lot of visitors that all but we did have a really great September the 12th. We had 46 people come through and see Terry makers exhibit before it closed. And then let's see we had a really I don't think she included in here but we had for the day of the dead first free Saturday we had really big numbers I think we had something. Joanne do you remember all the cut of your head but Elizabeth said how many people we had. I don't remember. And that was that free Saturday. We're seeing our numbers increase really slowly but but nicely. Let's see. A lot of day of the dead stuff in our shop if you guys are interested in that including some of your take is artwork and then working on rec track for the maintenance on the back end. Our public places has a new installation or some major by Parker McDonald and that was installed in the breezeway between 3rd and 4th. You may have remembered this piece. It was actually on the tree great probably right around 3rd and 4th along Main Street. And we had borrowed it for the art on the move program and so it was installed here. And then everybody loved there was such great feedback about that sculpture that the public places commission and decided to buy that piece and so it's now a permanent part of the collection and it's permanently installed there. We also had that collaboration between us and our public places for the deal is March is near all that Tony created for us and there were 70 community over 70 community members that helped complete that work so that was a very very fun project. The last one there is the our public places task force is looking for new sites for 3 pieces, which will need to relocate as a result of the resilient St. Brain project. And so they're searching for new sites. That's all of the report. Does anybody have any questions me on that. All righty then. Thanks everybody. Great. Thank you. Kim I don't know what happens if it's when you get closer to your microphone or what but we kind of get garbled sound. So I don't know if it's your connection or sometimes it's fine. Sometimes it isn't so I don't know. Like right now I can't understand you at all. What. Read the report. How's that. It's great. Okay. Thank you. Let me know if you have questions. Great. Thank you. I do not have a report. I don't think we have any old business. So we'll move right into new business. Kim unless you want to take a drink of water or something. Since you've been taught. Okay you have to unmute to. Yeah. Okay. So I shared a couple of versions of this executive summary and then I shared right before the meeting and your email box. You see a sort of more pulled together but still draft version of this executive summary and for those especially who weren't with this. And when we were working on our strategic planning process we hired this has been several years ago now. We hired a guy named Mark orphan who does a process of strategic planning process at Fox which is basically a combination of strategic and operational to work on helping us develop. And we went through that process. And came up with a lot of initiatives that we wanted to work on as a me as a staff as a group. And what we discovered in doing all of that is that we it was internally we still found it difficult to talk about it. And so what we realized that we needed was a more kind of executive summary that pulled together all of the work that we had done through Stratops. So that's what I'm sharing with you now. It really is a draft and I welcome your feedback. I would like to have us adopt this at our next advisory board meeting. And so I would like to give you a little bit of time to spend with it and review it. I think it may be useful and I will do this and to look at those strategic planning documents as well. So that you get a little bit more background about what this what this executive summary is rising. Again, I think some of you we you saw some of that information but not everybody did. So I want to make sure that everybody is on the screen page with the Stratops. So I don't know if there's any initial feedback that anybody might have had based on the time that you've been able to look at this. But yeah, we had you. I just have one question. So just as sort of a general kind of a thing, the strategic plan from 2016 to 19, which is available on the museum website was in a, you know what I would say is fairly slick. The presentation form. I'm assuming that this plan is something that gets or a plan is something that gets shared when we are writing grants or when we're trying to get people to give us money, that kind of thing. So one question is the idea for the, this new strategic plan to have it eventually be in some kind of format, more like that, you know, rather than sort of spreadsheet. I'm just curious, like, is there a, how do you envision that looking when it's really done. I just wanted to say that I heard the question from a document that the Denver Museum of Paper and Science had put together, which really was the summary type information. And I just want to look different than that the previous plan. I think it needs a little bit more graphic design work on it.  So long as it's got information about what our plan is, you know, maybe it doesn't matter too much. If it's super slick. The, the thing that we are seeing is that more like this that what they are doing is they are looking at measures, and they're looking at updates continual. And they're meant to be living. And so if, if you start to look at additional plans, this is what I'm seeing over and over again is that the trend really is have more of these sort of graphs and charts. Okay, that's great. Yeah, I don't have that background. So that's, that's helpful. So, thank you. Anybody else have questions. But if you wouldn't mind just spending a little bit of time with it, we'll revisit it again at the next board meeting and hopefully we can stop it. And there are some things that I am waiting for yet from the friends. So you'll see some kind of placeholders in there. Certainly if you've got things that you think we need to add or if the change or something's not clear, just let me know because it's meant to be a tool for communication. So if you don't understand it, then that's a problem. Okay. That's great. So if we have questions, can we email you is that okay. All right, cool. All right, does anybody have any comments with regard to that or other comments or anything. Okay. Great. Well, then, is there a motion to adjourn. Okay, emotion to adjourn. Second. Okay, thank you very much. Tom, and all in favor of a journey. Raise your hand. Do something. Okay, great. Thank you. All opposed. Okay, so everyone is in favor of a journey and I thank you all very, very much for your time. And all your comments and I think this is still a little strange, but I think we're doing okay. So thank you. Have a good evening. You're doing great. Yeah. Have a good evening. Bye.