Hello. Thank you. Thank you all for being here. Thank you all for coming. I saw the presentation by Amber Balde and Patrick Nielsen yesterday, and there was a really good joke. When they got to the part of their presentation that was about their own project, Amber was talking, and Patrick stopped her and interrupted and said, have we reached the shilling point? So my talk today is 100% about Zcash, so it's like all shilling point, but not in the sense of asking you to buy more to pump the price, but to share a bunch of stuff that we've learned recently in cryptography and in regulation that everyone else can hopefully reuse and benefit from. Okay. First of all, can we bring up the house lights so I can see you better? I can see these people. All right. Will everyone please put down your phone and stand up for a minute? You and ZZ99 up there, would you please put down your phone and stand up for a minute? Okay. Everyone except that guy have stood up. Okay. Good. If you have never heard of Zcash, will you please sit down? Okay. Great. Wow. Okay. So if you've heard of it, but that's really like you've just heard of it, but you don't know anything about it. Would you please sit down? So that's like 10th. Okay. Sweet.  Thanks. But don't get your phones out. Leave the phones out away. Yeah. I was practicing my talk and I realized that I put like an hour's worth of content into the slides and that we have 28 more minutes and I want a lot of questions. So I'm going to talk too fast and skip a lot of the technical content. But the goal is to say what we've just recently accomplished in cryptography, a couple pointers to possible future work that other people might also want and then talk about the regulatory situation. So what we've just now accomplished, Zcash, as you all know, except for that guy and like 10% of these guys, is a separate cryptocurrency that includes encryption and cryptography to make all the transactions private. And it was launched two years and four days ago on October 28th. So Zcash is two years old and that makes it like Ethereum, a grizzled veteran of the space. And four days ago on Zcash's second birthday, we introduced the first major upgrade, which is called sapling or Zcash 2.0. And the improvement, so the first thing we did, which most of you probably kind of know, is we pioneered the use of zero knowledge proofs. Just real quick, raise your hand, you know what a zero knowledge proof is or you've heard of it or whatever, great, this is great, what a great audience. So I'm really proud that zero knowledge proofs are so widely appreciated for what they could potentially do today because Zcash was the first application of them to anything in the real world as far as I know. That was two years ago. But the first version we put out two years ago was not efficient enough. It took 37 seconds on a like supercomputer laptop and it was not even possible on a mobile phone to generate the zero knowledge proof necessary to protect a single Zcash transaction. So what we've just activated on mainnet four days ago is Zcash 2.0 and we've reduced the time from 37 seconds in the first version to 2.3 seconds in the new version. Thanks. Yeah, so that's really great because now it's possible for people to generate these on their mobile phone. Now no one's actually implemented it and made available. There's not a client yet for someone to download and use, but the cryptography has made it possible to implement that client and for every exchange everywhere to support these zero knowledge proof based transactions and so forth by Corey. Oh, Corey's just getting ready because he's next. So real quick, there are basically three components of the cryptography that we have worked on for the last two years. We have a really, really great team of cryptographers and engineers who've been working on this really hard for two years straight to get us this far. So it's really a substantial advance that everyone else can benefit from because it's all open source, all the science results we had to come up with have been published in peer reviewed science papers. We didn't apply for any patents and there's no barriers to anyone else we're using this for any other purpose. Okay, the three major advances we had to do, the first one is replacing the hash function inside the so-called circuit that you have to prove when you make a transaction. And this is potentially useful for a lot of other people because hash functions are used everywhere. A great cryptographer once said that hash functions are like the nails of the internet. They're used to hold everything together. There's nothing you do that doesn't have at least one hash function inside. Well, two of our cryptographers came up with a more efficient way to implement a certain kind of hash function called a Peterson hash inside of zero knowledge proofs. And all by itself this reduced the runtime by 75%, which is a really great improvement. You might be able to use this yourself, but you have to be careful because SHA-256 and Peterson have slightly different properties so it's not just a simple drop in replacement for every use. And the result of like nine seconds per payment is still not quite good enough. So we kept looking for a couple of other innovations that would improve the performance while being safe enough and practical enough that we would be able to deploy it. The next one, well, this is a complicated slide. I'm going to gloss over this, but this is a bundle of a proving system, which is a SNARK. That's BCTV14, which we upgraded to GROT16. 2014 and 2016 are the years that these science papers were published. There's an elliptic curve, it's a BN128 that we upgraded to BLS12381. And by the way, we helped Ethereum add BN128 into Ethereum and the Metropolis upgrade. So now we have different elliptic curves from each other, but whatever, that's probably fine. And then there's the implementation, which is just open source library that anyone can use. The older implementation is called LibSNARK and the new implementation that we wrote over the last two years and we've now deployed is called Bellman. The old one's written in C in assembly, except we never use the assembly because assembly is dangerous. And the new one's written in Rust, which is even safer than C. And all of this stuff is reusable for any zero-knowledge proof system. And all bundled together, it gives you twice as fast, which can be necessary for some uses. And then the last thing is a thing called a split circuit design, which I probably don't have time to explain, but it gives us another 50% improvement and that's how we get down to 2.3 seconds for a typical transaction. That's where we're at today. Okay, next, where would we like to go next? Well, Zcash 2.0 sapling, it's really fantastic. It might be good enough for the foreseeable future, but there's at least one thing that bothers me. The SNARKs, which is the proving system that we've started with all along, it has this thing called toxic waste, which is why I call toxic waste. Cryptographers call it a structured reference string, but toxic waste is a much better word because it makes it clear to you that this is a thing you should worry about. If the toxic waste is an unguessable long random number, it's like a private key, and if you knew it, you could forge Zcash out of thin air. Now, that's terrible, but even if you knew the toxic waste, you can't violate anyone else's privacy. You can forge new Zcash for yourself, but you cannot see or manipulate anyone else's Zcash. So there's a limit to how bad it is, but it's still pretty damn bad. If you could forge Zcash, that would ruin the whole point. So we went to this extravagant effort and did, I'm pretty sure, the most secure, sophisticated cryptographic ceremony ever in 2016 to set up the system while preventing the toxic waste from ever coming into existence, making sure that nobody at any moment ever had a chance to generate that number. And then we did a way, way more sophisticated and secure ceremony last, just recently this year, for the new version. So I'm really sure that the toxic waste can't possibly exist, and a lot of people in this room actually contributed to that process to make sure that even if I were cheating and trying to steal a copy of the toxic waste, they would have prevented me from doing that and vice versa. However, this still bothers me, because for one thing, I can't convince everyone else in the world of this. There could still be a fud where someone says, I don't know, I think maybe Zuko is saying that, but he and 100 other random people around the world were actually secretly in cahoots. So it would be cool for Zcash as well as for other uses of zero-knowledge proofs if you could use one of the newer proving systems which have no toxic waste. And this slide is all about how we can't yet in Zcash, because we need all of the fields to be green for it to be efficient enough to put into the Nakamoto blockchain design where the like the Zcash sapling design where every transaction has to have a zero-knowledge proof generated and then the proof has to be transmitted with it and verified by all the miners. That puts a lot of constraints on the performance. And the new things like Starks, which was a hugely popular overflow talk yesterday by Eli Bin Sasan, who's one of the Zcash founders. Starks take 45 kilobytes at least per proof string, and that 45 kilobytes is just way too much to put into the blockchain with every single transaction. So that's a non-starter for now. Bottom line is there's only one row so far. That we can do this with. Okay, so other people could use Starks for other things that have different performance constraints. And we could potentially improve Zcash and like Zcash 3.0 with a few possible techniques that don't only have time to explain. Here are four things that you should take a picture of because I don't have time to talk about them, but they might be useful for Zcash or other zero-knowledge proof systems for the next generation. And we have some very rough estimates of how much savings we could get. So it's like, hmm, it's close, it's interesting. All right, I'm just going to scoot along. Here's something else I totally don't have time to talk about, which is what if we change the architecture? Okay, I have to talk about it. What if we change the architecture? So it's not a simple Bitcoin-inspired Nakamoto consensus where you have to generate a zero-knowledge proof with every transaction and then carry it along. So what's good about it is that we separated privacy from mining. All the privacy happens on the end-user computer who generates an encrypted and zero-knowledge proven transaction. And then all the rest of the consensus algorithm just deals with these encrypted blobs. But what if we changed it to a new consensus algorithm, sharding? Maybe you can use zero-knowledge proofs to solve some of the problems in some of the currently unsolved problems in consensus algorithms and sharding. Anything like that would open up the constraints back here. So if we had a much, much more high bandwidth consensus algorithm, then we could use Starks, even though they have, like, two orders of magnitude greater bandwidth requirements and stuff like that. Okay. Possible changes. Not coming anytime soon to Zcash because we're conservative and it took us two years to upgrade the cryptography. It'll probably take another two years to make the next upgrade. All right, now I mentioned back here one of the three improvements that we've already vetted and gotten security audits and deployed and tested and activated on mainnet and now people are using it today. The third one is split circuit design and it's specific to a payment system like Zcash. It's not... Well, I don't know if you could apply the same kind of principle to other zero-knowledge proof systems, but I'll describe it real quick. This is the old Zcash 1.0 core. This is all the bits of data coming in and out that need to be proven by the zero-knowledge proof. You don't have to understand any of it except for... Well, these big old things on the left, ZUTXO, that's two coins that are being consumed and two new coins that are coming out. So if you are paying someone, you're probably going to consume a coin that's worth 10 Zcash and you're going to give them five and then you're going to give yourself change for five. This is the so-called UTXO data model from Bitcoin, which is different than the balanced data model from Ethereum. So the zero-knowledge proof in the original Zcash 1.0 has to prove the correctness of all of these pieces even if you were only spending one coin. You have to prove the correctness of that coin and a dummy, which takes twice as long. So the split circuit design is we'll have two proofs, one proof that you're consuming a coin and a different proof that you're producing a new coin. And that way, if you're consuming only one coin, you don't have to prove that you're consuming two coins. And that all by itself is a 50% savings, and it's useful for all UTXO-style systems. Earlier, I said it's for transaction systems, but the UTXO-style might also be useful for Ethereum-style smart contracts. There's a new paper by some scientists that includes some of the Zcash scientists called ZEXE, which describes how to extend the Zcash-style data model and zero-knowledge proving system to prove the validity of arbitrary smart contracts without having the miners run all the smart contracts. So instead of someone submitting a smart contract or executing a smart contract and all the miners run it and then they can sense on the resulting output, instead, the first person runs it and generates a zero-knowledge proof that this is the correct output. And then all the miners just verify the validity of the zero-knowledge proof. That's a new paper. Okay. Oh, good. I'm going to have lots of time for questions. I hope you have questions, because I totally lost over all the complicated stuff in the last two slides. You can ask me about those if you want. All right. Finally, about the regulatory situation. So you have probably heard that law enforcement and regulators and governments fear privacy or that privacy technology like Zcash is incompatible with regulation, and I'm here to say that's totally wrong. It's not incompatible with regulation and the actual regulators are not afraid of it and are not trying to prevent it. So there's this widespread common myth that is the actual problem. It's not the regulators that are the actual problem. Here's the current very simplified state of the important things in the world, which is that almost everywhere the legal status of cryptocurrencies in general and Zcash in specific is ambiguous. In China and in India, it is all cryptocurrencies, Zcash, Bitcoin, Ethereum, et cetera, are all effectively banned. And here's the really interesting little appreciated fact that I want to tell you. In the United States, there's a regulator called the New York Department of Financial Services, which is the most important regulator of cryptocurrencies because even though technically they're only supposed to be regulating the state of New York, but almost every company who wants to serve Americans does not want to exclude New York. And this regulator, the New York Department of Financial Services, set themselves up as the gatekeepers and the arbiters of all cryptocurrencies years ago when they made this thing called the BIT license, which says if you're a company, you want to sell cryptocurrencies like you're in exchange or whatever. You want to allow people to trade in cryptocurrencies and you're serving citizens of New York, regardless of where you're located, if citizens of New York are among your customers, then you require our prior permission to do anything. That's how the BIT license works. And so therefore, all the cryptocurrency companies have been queuing up to ask this regulator for permission to do all the things ever since. Here's the little understood fact. That regulator has approved about seven different coins as being legal for people to serve to the citizens of New York, and Zcash is the seventh one, the most recent one. Yeah. Thanks. That's really important. And they explicitly went so far as to put out a press release under their official logo in the name of their official leader and superintendent and all that, which expressly mentions the encrypted feature of Zcash. And when I tell people about this, they sometimes ask me, why did they do that? What are they thinking? And I don't know for sure because they didn't give a justification or an explanation of their decision in their public press release. And I met with them in private to explain cryptography to them many times. And they didn't tell me anything in private either because they're the government and they're the ones who ask the questions. But one thing I do know is that I've become very familiar with all the rules and regulations in the United States and in Europe and so on. And one thing I do know is that Zcash and cryptography mixed with blockchains in general is absolutely compatible with the rules and regulations. As an exchange or any business that's dealing... The regulations, the way that's currently done, they apply to businesses like exchanges or financial institutions. They don't apply to software developers or individual users. But as an exchange, you can comply with all of the requirements while supplying encrypted Zcash to your customers. That's a fact. So that's something that the NYDFS, the New York Department of Financial Services, and my team discussed. And then this really interesting thing happened where they called my team back to New York for another meeting. I've never talked about this publicly before. And I thought to myself, I think we covered everything in all the previous meetings, so it's not clear why they need another meeting. Maybe it's to tell us something. And we all filed into the official building in New York City and we all lined up on the opposite sides of the official table. And they opened the meeting by saying the leader of the NYDFS who was present in the room gestured to their colleagues and said, we all agree that we don't want the pocketbooks of our families and the citizens of our communities to be exposed to everyone on the Internet. Yeah, so that's all they ever said. I think that was why we had that meeting. But I think it really shows that regulators and the rest of us in this community share a lot of values. We want a safe and prosperous society and we all want a society in which the citizens have meaningful political participation and we want people to be protected from crime and fraud. And encryption technology is compatible with all of that. I'm reminded of 25 years ago now when I was playing a tiny niche role in an earlier round of this drama when SSL was being invented, SSL slash TLS. And at that time, the United States, one small faction within the United States government created by the FBI and Al Gore and the NSA opposed the invention of SSL because it might allow criminals to use the Internet or something. And that's funny now because 25 years later, the US government requires you to use SSL, right? There's a ton of laws which say if you do not use SSL to protect your customers then you were in violation in a lot of specific cases. And I kind of think that's the same thing that's going to play out with encryption on blockchains and hopefully a lot less than 20 years. All of the good regulators in all of the good countries will require this kind of encryption to protect the people. And lastly, I want to say that I myself and everyone involved in the Zcash project is doing this just because we care about what kind of world we're building for our children and grandchildren to grow up in. Because privacy is a human right and it's necessary for political participation, for morality and for intimacy and human relationships. And it is not okay for our societies to continue careening into a world where there's pervasive and intimate violation of everyone's privacy by one or three centralized actors that's never been tried before. It's wrong and it's dangerous. Thanks. And all of us are part of our opportunity to change that and to make a world that's safe and healthy for our children to grow up in. That's it, ready for questions? You got to come down to the, or you got to acquire a mic so that the people on the live stream can hear the question. Thank you. Thanks for your thoughts and I really like how you actually twisted that whole thing that people often say about like think of the children, right? Yeah. But in the right way, right? That's really good. So I wanted to ask you what your thoughts are on similar privacy projects like Monero. And I also wanted to ask you about smart contracts and other features that you seem to have not focused on yet and if you have any intention to look at those. Well, those are two big questions. Okay, so first of all, there was a really great talk by Zcash founding scientist Ian Myers yesterday in which he laid into Monero and all systems that use what he calls decoy-based privacy. So you should go watch the live stream, or the recording if you haven't seen it. Now the zero-knowledge based privacy that we have has different problems, but privacy is really, really hard and I wouldn't want it to look like we've solved it but we've made a substantial improvement that everyone needs to learn from. And I like to work with the Monero people on that and we both benefit from each other. And the other question was about smart contracts. Yeah, so it's something that we've deliberately kept out of Zcash and kept out of the public discussion of the future of Zcash and were to keep things simple. Like in theory, we could extend Zcash to execute arbitrary smart contracts. And as of about three weeks ago maybe, a few scientists that include some of our scientists published a paper describing in a lot more detail how that would work and what the efficiency would be and what the security properties would be and so forth. But so far I kind of want smart contracts to keep working on Ethereum and just pure private payments to be the focus of Zcash. But that could change. Hey, so besides just winning the, or educating users about shielded transactions, could you talk a little bit about the rest of the stars that need to align across governance, business and technology to make that become a default? So Amber, the questioner is a member of the board of the Zcash Foundation, which is a separate thing from my company. I'm the CEO of the company and the Zcash Foundation that Amber is a director of, is a completely separate independent thing. And it sounds like a question that Amber should answer. What was that? Aside from educating users, governance and business, oh, can I have my slides back? I have a slide about this. Anyway, the major touch point between, oh yeah, thanks, perfect. The premier touch point between regulators in the technology and between users in the technology right now is exchanges, right? This is a map of all of the exchanges that already provide Zcash to their users. And so they are actually the most effective, both at educating the users and at educating the regulators. Note that there are none in India or China. There are lots in US and there are lots in Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, et cetera. One more thing that is really necessary is better UX as everyone, I think, has figured out. We've all done this backwards by building the technology first and then trying to figure out how to put a user experience on top of it. So now we have to fix that and make a really good user experience and then figure out how to fit it to the technology. That's my answer. Any other questions? Yeah. Do you think a connection between Zcash and Ethereum is possible? Oh, a connection between Zcash and Ethereum. Oh, that's a great question. Hey, listen, there's this EIP for Blake 2, a secure hash function. Please, please contact your friendly neighborhood Ethereum developer and tell them that you support the Blake EIP because that would be one way to reduce the gas costs of Ethereum smart contracts, evaluating the Zcash proof of work, which might allow certain kinds of connection. There's this whole crazy idea that is purely hypothetical, but Vitalik brought it up first, so I can say it, which is Zcash and Ethereum could just merge. So I don't know how this would work. Yeah, thanks. I appreciate the support. In the meantime, I think people using multiple different networks and technologies for different purposes is the practical, the pragmatic thing to do. But there are a few technical ideas for how we can have decentralized, trustless, cross-chain interop, and one of the details that would help is the EIP about Blake 2. Thanks. Question over there. Hi. I heard you saying a couple of months ago in a podcast interview that approximately 7% of all the transactions on Zcash are shielded. What's the state of the shielded transactions today and what needs to happen that technically we will see more of them? Right. So Zcash, I didn't get into this. Zcash supported backwards compatible clear text mode. It's like HTTP and HTTPS. For a long, long time, everyone still supported HTTP, but then more and more people started supporting or even requiring HTTPS. Zcash allows the old Bitcoin-style non-private mode and the questioner was pointing out that most transactions use only the old unencrypted mode and what needs to change. So the first, there's two things. First of all, well, three things. Sorry, there's a lot. But first of all, the cryptography, which is the whole first part of my talk, is that we needed to reduce the computation cost from 37 seconds on a laptop down to a couple of seconds so that that reduces the barrier. By the way, this also reminds me when SSL was new, it was expensive and computers were a lot weaker back then and that was one of the reasons why it took so many years for SSL to become ubiquitous. But the other one is all these exchanges need to start supporting all these exchanges, need to start supporting the encrypted mode in order to protect their users. And they need to understand, which they mostly don't because of this FUD, they don't realize that the regulators are almost certainly okay with that. They just need to tell the regulators this is user protection, it's compatible with all of the regulations and we need to do it to protect users. So after you contact your friendly neighborhood Ethereum developer, contact your friendly neighborhood cryptocurrency exchange and say you want encrypted, shielded transactions like SSL instead of HTTP in order to protect you. The last thing is UX. Like we're making a new wallet and stuff that I didn't have time to get into. Any more questions? Hi, thanks for moving this project forward. So I have a question about, so say you are doing a service for the business, where the business resolves their transactions, payments and of course there is this notion of privacy that you know, different parties they don't want to know about like with who the business is done. So perfect use case. Do you think that or up to your knowledge, if for the tax reasons, some regulatory or tax authority could come and ask to the service provider, so let's say in this case, which is built on top of the ZCache to reveal all the details about like a certain entity? Okay, I think I understand the question. If you have encrypted transactions on a public blockchain like ZCache, can some party, in your case, it's a tax authority, come ask some other party to reveal some of the transactions? Yes, this is a really ill-appreciated fact about encryption. Encryption doesn't give you all dark all the time where no one can see anything. What encryption gives is selective disclosure of data. So ZCache is the first-ever thing that it combines the blockchain properties of canonical append-only data with the encryption properties, which is that if you have the decryption key that lets you see some of the data in the blockchain, you can give that decryption key to a third party and then they can see that data in the blockchain. See what I mean? That's really interesting. Yeah, so it's subtle, but the bottom line is it's possible to reveal data to some parties without revealing it to unauthorized parties in the blockchain, which is good. But that would require to share the private key? No, not the key that allows you to spend money, a different key that allows you to see the transactions, but not to spend the money. Make sense? Hey, Zuko, you talked a little about the Banscape and the ban in India. Do you have any, like, more insights to share or anecdotes from what's going on out there? It's not too much my place to say. I mean, the government of India banned banks from serving Bitcoin companies in India several weeks ago, and then just a few days ago the most terrible thing happened. One of those Indian Bitcoin exchanges, and Bitcoin exchanges in the world, they set up, since the banks had been required to cut them off, they set up ATMs that would take rupees in paper and give you Bitcoins. Okay? Because that was the only remaining legal thing for them to do. And then the most horrible thing happened about two weeks ago is that they were arrested, which doesn't make any sense under any law that I've heard. That's what's going on. So that's the last thing I heard about India. Zugo, as somebody who thinks about privacy all the time and can you paint a picture for us? Let's say, you know, projecting from today to end years into the future, how would decentralized applications actually provide privacy for people, not just on the transaction level, but on other levels? Yeah. That's that technology it's possible technologically and there's this thing called ZXE, Z-E-X-E, which is a science paper that describes a technology that could accomplish something along those lines. It's possible cryptographically speaking to have shared distributed apps, which you get the property you want. I don't know the right word for it, but the property that you know the app is going to do the right thing and it can't be subverted by the owner of the server since there's no server. You can have a distributed app, which when you use it, you don't have to link what you're doing to anything else about you. You don't even have to necessarily reveal the moves you're making within the app. So it's a lot of work. No one's actually implemented it yet, but scientifically it's possible. Why do you think the adoption of Zcash on darknet markets has been almost zero and is that something that bothers you or do you not really care? Why do I think the adoption of Zcash on darknet markets is almost zero and is that something that bothers me? I think, you know, my best guess is, so I mean part of it is I've made some tweets saying screw you criminals go away this isn't for you and that doesn't really change the scientific or the open source code but I honestly think, because I heard this from someone who studies like the criminal underground that criminals don't trust Zcash because they don't trust me and that doesn't bother me. I think that's good. It's like the darknet markets are a shitty early adopter market because they're small, they wouldn't be very active users.  So it doesn't bother me. So, how Zcash is expanding in Japan? There are some outlets which can legally accept currencies put on balance sheets. Are there any obstacles for wide adoption into fear to the world because of this privacy? I didn't understand the beginning of the question. How is Zcash what? Are there any obstacles from regulators and other authorities to use Zcash in Japan? Yes, in Japan where the cryptocurrencies are allowed to be used for local goods. There is an obstacle which is the there's a Japanese self-regulatory organization, which is the Japanese exchanges that have published a draft proposal for how they think the government ought to regulate them, which says that the government should require them not to supply Zcash. And I think that's a mistake on their part is that they, like a lot of people incorrectly think that encryption is incompatible with consumer protection and AML KYC processes and computer security and all that. So I'm hoping that they will notice the example of NYDFS doing the opposite. Maybe they'll even learn from the example of HTTPS 25 years ago, but that's currently in play. So Japan is gray on the map because it's not an ongoing conversation right now. It's not settled. Okay, no more questions. Thank you very much for being here.


So we're back, and we're continuing on 611, and welcome to Jana. You would state your name, you need a run change, and all of that. Yeah, thank you. My name is Jana Claire. Thank you, representatives, serving on the House Human Services Committee and others present for receiving testimony from service providers and participants as you consider H611 legislation for an Older Vermonters Act. I'm pleased to see this bill making progress, along with the continuity of the Older Vermonters Caucus that meets Thursdays at noon this session. And I'll just mention that myself and a couple other senior center directors will be at the caucus on March 12. We're looking forward to that. My name is Jana Claire, again, and I work for the City of Montpelier as director at Montpelier Senior Activity Center. I served on the Older Vermonters Act workgroup that made recommendations for H611. As I was in the workgroup, I'm here today representing many of my colleagues who work at the dozens of senior centers and meal sites around the state. We established the Vermont Association of Senior Centers and Meal Providers, also known as VASCAM, about five years ago with the mission to provide senior center and meal providers advocacy on a statewide level, promote the growth and quality of all centers, and strengthen the professional skills of their staff and volunteers. VASCAM has no staff, budget, or office. Those of us who are involved are volunteering our time for it. It does have a steering committee of members committed to continuing the advocacy and building on professional development and networking opportunities. We've created in recent years with some great support by Dale, including most recently from Angela Smith-Jing, who's been a great advocate. We've also had several opportunities to work with Janet Hunt of V4A and the AAA directors, though there's inconsistency in how that looks around the state. Senior centers are not part of the Dale funding stream, and if the Older Vermonters bill ended up being limited to supporting services funded or administered by Dale, then senior centers would be among the VAS network of vital community-based services not adequately included in the important broad-based work going forward. We all rely on a strong system of interconnectedness as individuals and as organizations, whether private or public. Vermont senior centers are on the front lines of supporting socialization and engagement and preventing isolation. They are essential in the state's effort to support healthy aging and to prevent or delay institutionalization. They are the ones who provide meals, activities, and lifelong learning opportunities for little or no cost to participants. These include classes, health clinics, trips, educational initiatives, multi-generational initiatives, technology training, and so much more. Movement classes are among the most important services offered. Senior centers play key roles and are essential, in fact, for successful outcomes for the state of Vermont's plan on aging, and they are also the sites for most senior nutrition programs, including production and distribution of congregate meals and home-delivered meals on meals. Additionally, many of the state's fall prevention efforts rely on senior center located and managed programs, such as Tai Chi for fall prevention and arthritis and bone builders, strength training and exercise classes. Many people are surprised to learn, and so we are compelled to raise awareness that Vermont senior centers receive no state funding or that funding they receive from their local communities is inadequate. While centers do receive Federal Older Americans Act-funded reimbursements through AAA contracts that cover a portion of senior meal costs, only about a third of the actual costs at some sites and some meals being totally unfunded and unreimbursed, all centers struggle to raise money to maintain and meet the demands of their nutrition programs and other services offered. These include meeting the expenses of staffing, facilities, insurances and more. Capacity and sustainability of senior centers and meal sites, especially with growth in older adult population and demand, is stretched. Unlike the area agencies on aging, there's no state or federal funding that goes directly to senior centers or meal sites for operations or administration, and most rely on small, often unpaid or underpaid personnel to fundraise and meet operational expenses. 65% of senior centers serve between 3 and 10 towns and a quarter serve over 15 towns. With an average budget less than $100,000, many senior centers are hindered in their ability to reach more people and provide more services. We have evidence that those centers who are better staffed and funded by their local communities and skilled fundraising efforts are able to do more and serve more, including the examples of Thompson Center and Woodstock and Montpelier Senior Activity Center. Only four centers in the state are municipal departments, most are tiny nonprofits, and many have staff who will be retiring in coming years without succession plans or adequate budgets to attract skilled workers. Indeed, some are staffed entirely by volunteers. For Vermont seniors, for Vermont seniors entering... Sorry, I've got a little typo here. For Vermont senior centers to thrive into the future and continue to help Vermont meet the goals of its state plan on aging, senior centers and meal sites need to transform and evolve, but they cannot do this alone. They need more support to build capacity, so our ultimate goal is to have senior centers receive better recognition and additional funding support for the vital and valuable role they play in supporting healthy aging, keeping people in their homes and reducing social isolation. More works remains to be done at a state level to understand and support the needs of senior centers and meal sites. Please pass the Older Vermonters Bill, as it includes so much we need to be thinking about and addressing, and please be sure to include in it the comprehensive network of community-based centers and services like senior centers that are vital to older Vermonters and to successful outcomes for Dale, the AAAs, and the state plan on aging. The Older Americans Act gives great recognition to the importance of senior centers and other community sites. If H611 only supports the work of Dale and the AAAs, it will miss the mark on hundreds of community-based services like senior centers. We all strengthen each other and are making great progress in serving older Vermonters, and more remains to be done. Please ensure the Older Vermonters Act reflects that well. So, do you have specific suggestions about how the Older Vermonters Act can be more reflective of Vermont's network of senior centers? There has been some dialogue of how it could be supportive for Dale to commit to supporting further study of the needs of senior centers. Well, we can all recognize current funding and budget realities are what they are. We think it could be a good use of a small pot of money, perhaps, or an intern through Dale or something like that to do some further study into the budgetary and professional development needs of senior centers and perhaps create a plan for the coming years. And we don't feel that's adequately happening now nor do staff like myself that work at the centers have time or budget to do that on our own. One of the things that the Older Vermonters Act and the Older Americans Act call for is this state plan on aging and calls for the AAAs to do essentially a needs assessment looking at their communities that they serve and incorporating recommendations for the state plan on aging. So do you feel like that process that happens once every four years is reflective of the needs of senior centers? I think it could be improved. Another area that we're really interested in seeing better supported is when Older Americans Act funding increases have happened for senior nutrition, there has not been transparency with the meal sites about how those increases are distributed to the sites. There's a lot of inconsistency in the five agencies across the state about what happens, what kind of increases do or don't happen. It's very inconsistent across sites. There's a real inconsistency in support provided to the contractors and I think that's an area that we'd like to see change, as well as just greater recognition that what the centers are doing is part of health care. I know there's some progress in discussion of medical meals. Truly, I think as many of you are aware so much of the home-delivered meals, meals on wheels that are delivered are results of discharge planning when people are coming out of the hospital and so they're receiving perhaps physical therapy or occupational therapy or other services at home and they're told to get meals on wheels and the sites make it happen. They just make it happen. They raise the money to make it happen because the reimbursements are not enough. All of those other discharge planned services are reimbursed through health care and the meals are not and the Older Americans Act funding helps a little bit, but it's not enough and it only covers a small portion and doesn't help the sites with their operational and administrative costs. So we would like to see greater advocacy for changing that and supplementing the federal funds. Carl. Should funding that you might seek would it flow through the area, the area of agencies on aging or not? Would it come straight from the state? Yeah, well currently the Older Americans Act funding is funneled through the area agencies on aging. We think there's potential for direct funding to the centers. I think there needs to be study about how that would look. Centers come in so many different shapes and sizes and what they offer. Whether it's a capital for capital based thing or a grant program there's a lot of unknown about the best way to do that but I think there could be some greater efficiency and more direct funding. So does each of the centers work with their area agency? Each of the centers who serve meals or have transportation services that are funded through federal dollars has a relationship with their local AAA but I just want to emphasize this huge inconsistency about what those relationships look like. And they're very strong and effective in some cases and from what I hear less so in some cases. Jenna, is what you're saying that there's I've heard you use the word a lack of transparency in the meals reimbursement aspects of that. So are different rates to different senior centers depending upon which AAA that they are affiliated with? Yes. And some have received increases in recent years and some have not. Thank you. And I think we believe that needs addressing. Carl. You're not in this particular area but I understand our senior centers up there in a way from getting meals through carry on the aging and I don't know how they're going in on their own but anyway do others have that same problem? I heard there was another senior center that's had the same problem. I'm probably not the best person to respond to that but I have heard cases of some communities going outside of what's available for federal reimbursements. I think that might be a question for Janet who works with all those to try to get a picture of what it looks like statewide. So that would be all the best reason. It's my understanding for my senior center that for the meals that are supported by the older Americans act that only not even suggest a donation but they only ask for donations because they can't like say you know we have little placards so for any site receiving those reimbursements there's lots of hoops to jump through in terms of meeting nutritional requirements and so forth you cannot charge for the meals so for folks 60 and older you can suggest a donation and as I understand across the state there's a group on average far below the suggested donation so often many people are not in a position to donate at all and the meals are there to help those people and others some people donate the full suggested donation and very many less or nothing and sites who serve people under 60 can be charged for those meals but there is a great challenge in fundraising and so sites are doing a wide variety of fundraising efforts whether they have the skills to write grants in some cases do events do appeals it's a tremendous effort for many of them to raise enough money and in particular at sites where there's no paid staff or staff who have the training to do fundraising and so the way that it's a state last question from Jessica it seems to like I used to visit senior centers for work that I did for a US senator and it was very different in the price and what they put out is how much to donate and also how much the area agency and aging was involved in the center like gay but all of the different things that they did depended on where you were which was hard on some of the seniors in some of the more rural areas where they needed the most health and that's I believe because I looked into it because this was at the beginning of the Over Americans Act and that was really just because the older the agencies didn't have as much ability to do as much in some of those communities either because of their support but this is a I am grateful that you came and talked to us about this because this is something that I haven't even thought about in all these years it's a tremendous effort for sites to pull off the programs including nutrition, the movement programs the hosting drop-in groups of all kinds and as you mentioned groups that donate cleaning and so forth senior centers are a really great example in so many cases of bringing community together so many other small nonprofit community groups congregate as a hub to integrate with senior services being offered whether it's cleaning organizations CSAs the local health agencies offer a lot of their services the hospitals in many cases do stuff many sites serve as facilities where lots of other groups rent space for meetings and activities they have in many cases become and in other cases have great potential to be community hubs and places where people of all ages can come together we need to we're already turning the site to get to your bill so your choice yes I will answer use the phone bank to get it some sites do not all sites do thank you very much thank you for your time I really appreciate it so folks we're going to shift gears totally here remember to take out H635 regulation of long-term care facilities and we have not only Ledge Council but Ledge Council has a special assistant today No way no way No way Yay No way for punt though you may get him back again and less alright H635 Go look at that right Jennifer Kari legislative council this is H635 It is a short form bill, which means it has only the statement of purpose. It doesn't have the rest of the bill making the actual statutory or session law changes or provisions. So introduced by Representative McFawn, and the statement of purpose, I think, kind of explains what the proposal is anyway. Would propose to make modifications to some laws around the state's regulation of long term care facilities. First, it would authorize the Department of Disabilities aging independent living to take immediate enforcement action to eliminate a condition that can reasonably be expected to cause mental harm to residents or staff. Under existing law, the licensing agency is authorized to take immediate enforcement action when necessary to eliminate a condition that can reasonably be expected to cause death or serious physical harm through residents or staff before the condition can be eliminated. This would also expand that to be a condition that can reasonably expected to cause mental harm, so not just death or physical harm, serious physical harm, but also mental harm. Would also add a definition of insolvent to be applied in the context of regulation of long term care facilities. So under existing law, a complaint requesting the appointment of a receiver can be filed in the superior court when the facility is insolvent, but there is no definition of insolvent. And so I think the proposal from Dale, if it hasn't changed, would be to potentially use a definition that exists already in our law that's based on the Uniform Commercial Code for the insolvent. And then third, the bill as proposed would prohibit any actions that are taken by a court-appointed temporary receiver from being used by a long-term care facility in support of its opposition to the department's request for a receivership. And I'm sure you'll hear more about this, but my understanding is it has sometimes come up that the court appoints a temporary receiver to start managing the affairs of the facility, pending a hearing on the merits of the complaint request from the department for a receiver. And so if that temporary receiver does some things to stabilize, for example, the long-term facility, the facility should not be able to point to those actions by the temporary receiver in support of saying, we don't need a receivership. See, we're already turning things around because it was the temporary receiver who took those actions. So you'll hear, I think, more about this from people who have been involved in the process. But that's what this bill would do if you choose to turn it into a long form or put it onto something else. Since it doesn't have any real words. Yeah, that was it. It does have a title. But that's it. I suggest that we be here for witnesses before we question the judge too much. Welcome to Goal for the Love Law, representing about holiday and true spirit. And see you tomorrow. We are revamped for as mentioned from Essex Town. Nice to meet you. Carl Brooks, representing the town of Georgia. Jessica Bromstead, representing Shelburne and St. George. Sandy Hoffman Rochester, also representing Gufford, Stockbridge, and Pittsburgh. Paul McFawn, representing the very town. Theresa Wiss from Laudervere, also representing Golden Beale Square in Paiton. James Craig-Bortfair, Peter Fletcher, and make us food. Nice to meet you. Kelly Payella, London Dairy, Weston Strat, Jamaica, and... Great, thank you. Nice to meet you all or see you all again. So my name is Jamie Renner. I'm an Assistant Attorney General at the Vermont Attorney General's Office and Chair of our Office's Elder Protection Initiative. I'm also a member of the Attorney General's Trial Team that recently represented Dale in asking a Vermont court to appoint a receiver or interim manager over the Pillsbury senior communities, which are three residential care homes that house and provide care to over 200 Vermonters. I mentioned my participation in the Pillsbury case because in the process of that lawsuit, my trial team and Dale identified a few places where our long-term care statute can and should be amended to help clarify and strengthen the state's ability to seek receiverships over long-term care facilities when that's necessary. The purpose of this bill is to bring about those amendments. So today my plan is to share some brief necessary background on the Pillsbury case itself, and then I'll turn to the proposed amendments explaining each of their significance in light of that Pillsbury experience. In terms of the Pillsbury case, and this case may be familiar to you by virtue of its presence in the media in the past couple of years, but by November of 2018, Dale in my office had learned that the owner of the Pillsbury facilities, or the then owner, had stopped paying for critical services like electricity and food, leaving the facilities residents in imminent danger. To be clear, the facilities had received electricity shut off notices, meaning that their heat, computerized medicine management systems, and oxygen nebulizers were all about to fail. The facilities food service company had stopped delivering the facilities food. Kitchen staff were dipping into their emergency food reserves and scrambling to local stores to buy protein sources and fresh produce using their personal credit cards for the facilities residents. And all of this was occurring against an otherwise ominous backdrop, which was that for months, and with increasing frequency, the owner had been failing to pay all vendors in a timely manner. For months without any explanation to his staff or the residents at the facility, the owner hadn't invoiced or cashed any of the resident's rent checks. And with significant staff attrition, the facilities were experiencing severe nursing shortages. And the facilities owner to boot was increasingly in communicado with both his staff and the residents about all of these issues. He was also increasingly in communicado with the state. Given these circumstances, residences were experiencing extremely high levels of mental stress. They worried about a total collapse of their home and their care. So in November of 2018 to address these increasingly dire circumstances, and after Dale had already attempted an escalating course of corrective approaches with the owner, we took the extraordinary step of asking a Vermont court to appoint a receiver over the facilities. So to be clear, a receiver stands in the shoes of a facility's owner. Their job is to write the ship, to safeguard the residents, and to either return the facility at the end of the day to the owner or more likely sell the facilities to a new responsible owner. Along with our lawsuit, which I'll refer to as our complaint, which was the actual legal document we filed requesting the receiver. Along with that lawsuit, which we knew would require a trial, we asked the court to also immediately appoint an emergency temporary receiver, which Jen referenced, to run the facilities during the course of the trial to safeguard the residents in the meantime. And the court granted that request. So after a trial that stretched over November, December, and January, the court ultimately ruled that a receiver was merited. So for the last year, the receiver has been managing the Pillsbury facilities and preparing them for a sale to a new owner. And in fact, the facility recently sold, and that sale I hope for the residents' sake is closing sometime soon. So with that as some background, let's circle back to H635. Like I mentioned at the start, I'm gonna explain the significance of each of the proposed amendments in light of our Pillsbury experience. And just as a warning, the proposed amendments are fairly technical. So as I sort of walk through the rationale for them, please bear with me and feel free to ask any questions as they arrive. I'm just gonna jump in for a minute, so you're reading something, and I hope that we're gonna get it in something. I'm happy to provide it. We don't have it now, okay. Yep, I'm happy to provide it. So I'll start actually with, if we look at the short form items two and three on the short form bill, because they most squarely relate to receiverships. And then I'll circle back to item one, which relates to strengthening Dale's long-term care authority more generally. So let's start with item two, adding a definition of an insolvent to the long-term care regulation. So one of the grounds on which the state can seek a receivership is that a long-term care facility is insolvent. However, the long-term care statute, and we're talking about Title 33, Chapter 71, doesn't define insolvency. Big picture and law, there are two definitions of insolvency. The first is that a business can't pay debts as they become due in the ordinary course of its business. That is, it doesn't have the revenue to pay for its accruing debts. The second definition is that a business isn't paying debts as they become due in the ordinary course of business. Never mind whether they can or can't. So the first definition looks to a business's resources. The second definition looks to a business's behavior. The Vermont Uniform Commercial Code, which is consistent with Black's Law Dictionary and other legal sources, already defines insolvency as being both or either of these two things. It's just not defined in the receivership statute. So why does this matter or why did it matter in the Pillsbury case? Well, in the Pillsbury case, we had substantial proof that the owner was not paying the facility's vendors like the utility vendors, the electric vendors, the food service providers I mentioned. As those bills were becoming due, the owner of the facilities argued though, well, that doesn't matter because I'm well resourced and therefore you can't find me to be insolvent. So the question of whether the court could find him insolvent ultimately turned on how the court would decide insolvent should be defined. And at the end of the day, the court did find that the Pillsbury owner was insolvent in line with definitions in our commercial code and Black's legal dictionary and in line with the definition that we argued then and we're urging for now. But we just wanted a flag that going forward, and this is the rationale behind the proposed amendment, long-term care facility residents will be better protected and we at the Attorney General's office will spend less time litigating the meaning of insolvent. If the long-term care statute simply defines insolvency to mean the same thing it already means in our state's uniform commercial code. So simple cross-reference. Can it be done with a simple cross-reference in the statute? I don't see why I couldn't though. I guess I would defer to legislative counsel on the best approach.  You don't have to do that. I am. I am. For better or worse. You would have to do two if you did that. It's defined in two places. Well, well, well, well, we'll let Jen figure that out. Yeah, so that's item two. So in terms of item three on the short form bill, this notion of essentially preventing the owner of a facility to benefit from the work that a temporary receiver has been doing, I can back up and explain where this came from. So at the start of the Pillsbury trial, to our surprise, the court announced to the parties that it was going to judge whether a receivership was needed by the facts on the ground at the Pillsbury facilities at the close of trial, not at the start of the trial or as of the time of filing of our complaint. And this approach was unusual and presented us with various concerns. So first, as we read then and read now the receivership statute, that statute envisions a world in which the state files a complaint that makes allegations that a receivership is needed. It then has to prove those allegations at trial. And because those allegations invariably regard conditions at the facilities at or before the time the complaint was filed, proof of those allegations that's put forward at trial is always proof of past conditions. Also, sort of setting aside the logistical challenges of trying to prove to a court in real time evolving facts over the course of a two to three month trial that in and of itself, I think, is unworkable as an approach. This approach also risks leading to undesirable results. So for example, and this was flagged, if an emergency temporary receiver who's tasked with fixing the problems at the facility actually fixes all the problems at a facility during the course of their temporary receivership and the state therefore can't prove by the end of trial that a receivership is still needed, then in theory, a receivership wouldn't be granted and our concern is that would mean that ownership would revert back to a bad actor. And so our view is that shouldn't be able to happen that a receivership should be appointed if the complaint alleging that a receivership is needed is proven and then there's already a separate statute that provides for how a receivership is terminated. And basically it says that any party to a receivership preceding the defendant, the state, Dale, the receiver, him or herself can say to a court, we're done now, we don't need this. And that goes forward as a court proceeding. So in our view, that's the intended process for ending a receivership that the state has proven to be deserved. So one clean way to approach this might be that the legislature clarify that a complaint seeking a receivership should be judged by a court based on the merits of the complaint as of the time of the complaint's filing. If a court always does that, we're never in a position where a court's having to look at what did the temporary receiver do during the court's trial and what does that mean for the outcome? So that's item three. So lastly, let's turn back to item one. And I can speak a bit to item one, but my hope is that Pampota will be able to put me on the bones of this as well. So Dale has a range of tools it can use in addressing long-term care facilities of concern from simply requiring corrective action plans to imposing fines to banning the admission of new residents to revoking licenses to seeking receiverships. But generally before it takes or undertakes any of these actions, and this is by statute, it has to provide facilities with the opportunity to correct the problem at hand. But what happens, and we encountered this in the Pillsbury case, when there's no longer time or no longer reason to provide an owner of a facility opportunity for corrective action. And what if you're at that stage, but a receivership might not yet be needed. There's one statute that allows Dale to take what's called immediate enforcement action where Dale can use its enforcement tools, but it can just do so without giving the facility the opportunity to correct the issue in question. Dale can only do that where it's, and I'm just reading directly from that statute, necessary to eliminate a condition which can reasonably be expected to cause death or serious physical harm to residents or staff. So we as a trial team and Dale noticed back then when we were grappling with deteriorating situations at the Pillsbury facilities, and also in reflecting on the statutes now, that this statute that authorizes Dale to take immediate enforcement action doesn't reference mental harms as a valid basis for emergency action. And this is out of step with the needs of long-term care facility residents. So in the Pillsbury case, aside from the looming physical danger, the majority of actual harms the residents experience were mental harms. They were anxiety, profound anxiety and fear and uncertainty. The residents were so profoundly stressed by their circumstances. And as a window into that, I'll just share that when one member of our litigation team, this is Bessie Weiss, arrived at one of the facilities to announce that a temporary receiver had been appointed, she received a standing ovation. So Oliver Munner's requiring long-term care should not be in a position of cheering at freedom from anxiety. And in fact, one of the grounds for receivership and temporary receivership that we proved was in fact imminent danger of mental harm. So it's already in the receivership statute. And in the Pillsbury case, we relied on and won on those grounds, among others. So in item one, Dale's proposing and we support Dale in proposing the addition of mental harms to the list of legal bases for Dale's immediate enforcement powers under their statute. That would broaden Dale's tools and flexibility in addressing concerns at long-term care facilities. And again, I would leave it to Pam Coda to give more examples about wearing how that might come into play and be useful. So that was the only testimony I had prepared. I'm happy to answer any questions. And you are gonna submit that to Julia for us to come. Thank you. That was very helpful. Okay, great. So I have notes. Monica, and just of note, Monica's testimony is mislabeled as H611 when it does address this H635. So just for your clarification. So Pam Coda, licensing chief of for the division of licensing and protection within Dale. And honestly, Jamie laid the stage so well that all I really have to say is that we agree with Jamie. And to expand on the first item, that definition or the adding mental to why we can impose immediate enforcement action is important when we consider and contemplate how we're gonna approach various situations moving forward. So this Pillsbury receivership worked well because the facilities were making money. So receivership companies were willing to come in and take over. And write the ship. Yes, and they were, you know, they're profitable facilities regardless of whether they're collecting rent or not. So as the department and my division contemplates how to move forward with receiverships when the facility is not financially stable and doesn't have any capital to pay out of state or a firm or a company to come in to assume control. We're contemplating taking immediate enforcement action instead and so there have been situations where we have sought receivership in the past and it was pretty complicated because the facilities weren't making any money. So basically people volunteered their time because they were good natured people to come try to save these facilities. But moving forward, we need a different model than that. The state ended up having to pay for those receiverships prior to Pillsbury and so we're contemplating how to address these situations moving forward. And one of them actually did involve mental harm. So the residents were being verbally and mentally abused by the manager and we didn't have a way to seek immediate enforcement action because we didn't have the physical harm or risk of death piece. So it does get in the way when we're not allowed to seek immediate enforcement action when there's mental harm, which I could argue is just as important as physical harm in many aspects. So when we're dealing with a situation like that where we have a facility that is, where residents are being tormented mentally, but no, not physically, it would be very helpful to have this tool so that we can explore different options moving forward with facilities that don't have the financial resources to support a firm coming in and taking over through a court ordered receiver. And it's also certainly much less resource intensive when we're not seeking receivership through the court where we can take our own action. Now all this being said, we do not take immediate enforcement action lightly. Up until this point, we really haven't had to use it. So it's there, but it's not like a tool that we are using all the time. It is for very extreme circumstances, which hopefully don't happen very often because hopefully our homes are being run well with our current oversight. So that's really where the mental harm is needed. Not only does it give us a little more basis for the receivership action itself, but if we choose to not go the receivership path with a facility that is putting their residents at great risk via mental harm, it does give us some tools to use to try to either improve conditions very rapidly or to assist with transferring the residents successfully to somewhere else where they won't be in danger. It also got a little bit in the way when we were contemplating the Pillsbury receivership. I can remember sitting at the table and saying, wait, we don't have death or serious physical harm here. Can we even do this? When we knew that people were suffering and we knew that they were experiencing mental harm, I had to kind of put the brakes on and say, wait, we have only have authority to take immediate enforcement action when we have risk of death or serious physical harm. So it did get in the way. It didn't stop the process, obviously, as you know, it played out. But it was a barrier and a barrier that we really had to address as a team moving forward. So that's really all I wanted to add to Jamie's testimony. It was just a little more clarification on the mental harm, but I'm certainly happy to answer any questions. And looking at Monica's prepared, that has your suggestions for language for the bill itself. So if people want to look at that, it's under Monica and the list. So this is, obviously, we're going to spend more than 30 minutes on this bill, going forward, and if we are going to go forward. Any quick questions for Pam? I suspect you'd be willing to come back. I just have one statement. The definition of mental harm is going to be consistent with the mental health status. What do you mean by mental health status? I'm sorry. I'm just asking. Oh, yes, yeah, yeah. Of course, we'll try to make it consistent with any other state definitions of mental harm. I'm actually looking at it and it says mental harm means dot, dot, dot. So I think we still have some work to do here. There is. There's no one definition. So I'm kind of... I was trying to, I know at lunch, just speak to the whether you need to define mental harm at all. I don't think you need to define mental harm. The phrase already exists and is working in statute. It's already a grounds for receivership that we proved and won on. We went before the court, argued like you do for physical harm. It's just a term of our, and you have to prove it. So we said to the court, there was mental harm here. And the court said, okay, prove it. So we put on witnesses. We put forth evidence. And then it's ruling the court said the state proved mental harm. So it could be a really complicated radical to wander down and try and define that into the sense of the goal of the committee and the legislation and the policy of the receivership statute is to be as much probably protective of the residents as possible. I would recommend considering being open. Okay. Yep. I would agree with that. Yep. Thank you, Jamie. That's fine. Okay. I'm ready. One, two, three. I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go. I'm not a lawyer, so... Neither am I. Is there any chance that mental harm can be one person feeling mental harm or the whole place being mentally harmed? So is that written somewhere so that you're not getting calls or you can dale it saying, I'm being mentally harmed here? So that would certainly be, and we would take all of this into consideration. We wouldn't, so of course we take complaints about one person being mentally harmed. That's taken care of through our normal enforcement processes. We'd go out and investigate. We'd cite. We'd allow for correction. When we're talking about immediate enforcement action under the part of the statute that we are looking to change, it is about the whole facility. So if there's a practice where a majority or a great deal of residents are at risk for this serious mental harm, it wouldn't just be one person unless there was some extreme circumstance I can't dream of. I was just worried that you could end up with people saying, hey, I'm being mentally harmed. Yeah. We wouldn't interpret it under this part of the statute. We would use our normal processes for that. Thank you very much. Yes, thank you. You're very welcome.


And President Bellatino will announce his administration's plan to revolutionize agriculture to make Nigeria self-sufficient in food production and a net exporter of agricultural products. He also pledged to support plants to ease and support hard pilgrims, underscoring the federal government's commitment to supporting religious activities and ensuring the ease and comfort of pilgrims. We will be able to feed ourselves. We are going to cultivate more farmlands. We are going to bring tractors into this economy. We are going to invest in irrigations for this country. Nigeria would become net exporters of food. That is the sooner and that is where I grew up to understand the problem of the country on livestock. We will change that. Nigeria will live in harmony and become economically viable, buoyant and happy with production of milk, production of animal husbandry, production of veterinary jobs and all of that. That is my own concern. And meanwhile the Nigerian Labour Congress said that it is insulting to Nigeria and for the federal government to provide grains as a palliative for the food insecurity that has besieged Nigeria in recent times. We recall that last Thursday President Tinnable ordered the immediate release of 102,000 metric tons of rice, maize, millet and garrie from government reserves and stores of the rice millers to the Nigerian market. Speaking on the development, Adero said he feels sad when we talk of federal governments giving people grains as if it were grains fed to pigeons and all these other birds.


Obviously, Title X U.S. Code, all of the acquisition authorities, all of the authorization acts and appropriation acts impact us. Our federal acquisition regulations, defense federal acquisition regulations, DOD instructions, every service has their own instructions. So we get lots of help from everyone on how to do acquisitions. At last count, it was 547 distinct documents telling us how to acquire things. But of late, we've evolved our understanding of MOSA. The modular open systems approach acronym first appeared, anyone want to guess? In the 90s, so we've been talking about it for some time. What we haven't been doing is defining what we meant. So now we're getting to the point of doing that. So now our understanding has evolved. They've defined in the last NDA, so now it's in 10 USC. They define a major system platform, a major system component, and a major system interface. Yay, the government now knows about interfaces, we're very happy for that. Congress actually caught up with the idea. We also have this thing about standards preference, and it's again in 10 USC, where we have to prefer commercial standards and other widely adopted standards ahead of our own. So military standards, government standards are generally our last choice. We're supposed to be using what industry is providing. But in some cases, we have to go help industry get there. Some general types of standards that we look at, this is a bit of an eye chart, I do apologize. But we have government standards that take a long time to come together, but then they tend to have a longer life. And then we have these program specific, and I'll show you an example of that later, where a program says, I need a standard and I need it really fast. So we'll go with that in a moment. And of course, we're supposed to favor non-government standards. So consortia, like the face consortium and the social consortium, we also can use a proprietary standard if it's widely adopted. Sometimes we do that simply because we need the interoperability it provides. But I won't mention Microsoft by name. And then standards development organizations, the larger idea of organizations, something like SAE or IEEE, where they have a long history of putting standards together. Those bodies tend to be of various sizes depending on who they're talking to. And they tend to take a long time to get things. How long did it take for us to get 802.11 and Alpedore? We had draft standards for about six, seven, eight years before the final standard came out. So sometimes those bodies move slowly as well. Two methods that we have used in the government to get to standards quickly, more quickly than waiting for industry to provide them are these two, collaborative working groups. Now this is where we have a limited number of parties, often because it's classified event or something like that, some sensitivities in the programs, etc. This is paid performance. We put people on contract to develop a standard for the government. So we get all the data rights we need, we have everything put together. The benefit of this is that we have a fairly predictable schedule of labor. We know people are going to be working on this for X hours per week. We're paying for it. So we can get a fairly good rapid development of a standard that way. The problem with it is because you're limited in scope of how many people you're willing to pay and how many people may or may not have access to it. That can really hinder your further adoption because you're getting a soda straw view of the requirements. So you don't tend to have a good widely open standard when that happens. For consortia, they're much more open. It's a pay to participate. So people need to see an incentive in there. There needs to be a business model for the consortium in order to encourage people to see the value in it. It's diverse, it's voluntary labor. And of course, schedules, what's a schedule? I mean, we can set up schedules, we set objectives and goals, but we don't have as much determinism in achieving those in a broader open consortium. The benefit of this that's undeniable is that the broader the consortium, the more open the standard will be and the more adoption and uptake will come about. Now, as an example of the collaborative working group, I'll talk about the open mission systems or OMS. Now, this is government owned. A collaborative working group was funded for years to do this. And we got through to a standard, the first edition was out in less than two and a half years, that's pretty good. And the first edition was actually fairly good. We're now out to version 1.3. And this is a single abstraction, basically a service oriented bus architecture where we just defined one layer, this is it. But we also used other work that had already gone on in a particular organization, the Universal C2 interface as its new name. And that message set was used as part of the specification. What this does is it allows us to more rapidly integrate things to keep things moving. So we can put things together quickly with high specificity and have things integrated. The issue with this standard is it's focused on mission systems in the Air Force definition of that. That means the non-critical, non-safety critical, non-real-time type systems. Additionally, this one is restricted to US persons only. Simply because of the genesis of the requirement, some of the messages that were built to go with it. That drives a level of sensitivity that makes it really hard for the rest of the world to adopt the standard. Now, it's adopted in many Air Force standards. It's been mandated for mission systems in the Air Force. And one Navy program so far. So as you can see, there isn't a definite impediment to adoption. Now, the face technical standard. This is one of the two consortia I work with on the open group. And I'm happy to tell you that the face consortium has just put live their version 3.0 of their conformance test suite. So that's a tidbit. Official announcement will be tomorrow. But with the face consortium, this was, again, a volunteer consortium of people coming together. With the safety and security and general profiles, it tried to cover a very broad area. And it defines actually three interfaces and five layers. And with that, we decided after version 1.0 and into version 2.0, we really needed to have a data model. So now that's growing. So now the snapshot of the universal domain description language, or UDL, has just been released as well. So this grew into much more than it was initially intended to be. The soda straw wasn't there, it was much broader. And so it has been a little more open and it's much easier for folks to adopt in other places. The sensor open systems architecture are SOSA consortium. Now, we use these words here because our general said to. Integrative, inclusive, and incremental. What we mean here is the standard is trying to integrate a lot of other existing standards in a sense that makes sense for sensors for DOD and beyond. Most of our DOD sensors are one-offs or two-offs or three-offs. We put one or two of them onto a particular platform and then we have that platform go fly its missions. And then we get into the sense where, okay, now we need to do something different. Well, we need another platform because this one's only got that on it. So one of the goals of sense is to have that interoperability, the interchangeability of parts to get there. Our second snapshot, actually an update today, the SOSA second snapshot of the technical standard is published. Yay, or no, published this week, I'm sorry. I don't want to upset Judy or Sharon. But it will be published before the end of the week. Now, the challenge is here is there's a lot going on in that standard and it's very active, it's doubled in size in less than a year. So there are a lot of workers together. And the focus is being somewhat driven by the urgent needs of programs today. We're bringing that abstracted information into the consortium and pushing them forward. So we're struggling with the architectural independence because we're getting a lot of hardware specification type input as well. So it's something that's a bit of a challenge to manage. But one thing about all of those is we're trying to keep them balanced. We've got conflicting interests. We have government interests. We have industry interests. So from a strategy perspective, balance is the key word. Obviously, you need to not tick off too many people and please enough people to maintain your involvement and your work going forward. So in order to do that, I'm using the carpenter rule here. Use the right tool for the job. And in order to do that, you have to know what the job is. You have to be familiar enough with your challenges, with your issues, with your problem set that you can effectively elaborate it to a five-year-old, all right? You also have to be familiar with your tools, train if needed, because you want to be able to have the right tools in the right place to do the job. You have to apply them properly. You can drive a hammer or you can drive a nail with a pipe wrench, but I don't recommend it. You cannot drive a deck screw with a pipe wrench. So use the tools properly that you have and then maintain your tools. One of the things we've seen from the government side is we have a terrible time keeping our software up to date because it takes somewhere between six and 12 months for us to get certification to run a piece of software on our big integrated super safe network. Remember, safety is the enemy of usability. Now when it comes to supporting these standards forums, we have business strategies there. We can adopt any one of these roles here. We can be passive, wait and see, it might be good. We'll just wait and see what comes out. We're not going to worry about it too much. We can participate. We can come in and say, hey, we're going to serve on a couple of committees, provide some input. We can also be pushing a standard. And this is roughly where we are with the SOSA standard today. The government is pushing that standard. Now that last one possessive is generally only true of collaborative working group type standards or of proprietary standards. Where you own it and you're driving it through with all the funding effort. Now when it comes to adopting standards, we can take all of these approaches too. And the old breakfast joke is here. So in a bacon and eggs breakfast, the cow's indifferent, the chicken's involved, but the pig is truly invested. So if you're indifferent here, this is one of those where, eh, I'm not going to worry too much about the standard. It's not a big deal to me. I don't see it breaking my business model. We can also say, oh, this is one we need to be involved in. And then there are times like with SOSA where we're invested because we started up the effort to try to get the standard going. We chose a consortium method to get it going. So the government adopts the different levels depending on the nature of the standard and who's driving. So how do we apply these standards once they're out there? Well, we have many approaches. We can mention them like the MOSA approach back in the day. We can say, oh, yeah, yeah, do that with no further instruction, no references, no nothing. That's not terribly useful. We can also mandate them, say, go use the standard again without providing any instruction. We can say, you should use the standard. Now, again, standards should be applied in the right places, and they should be applied in the right ways. So you have to be careful with that. Now, mediate it. That means you're actually out there telling people, this is how you use the standard. Here's some guidance for you. Here's some do's, do nots. Here's a checklist. You're giving them enough to worry about. And the last one is one we have not achieved yet. That's modeled. If we model a particular standard or methodology and say, here's the model built from this, that's a much better starting point for our programs going forward. We're hoping to achieve this within the next decade. Conformance strategies. Conformance is important to us. You want to know why? Because everyone will tell me, yeah, I did that. We need to know for sure. We need a way of assessing. So conformance programs are important to us that way. So we have different ways of looking at this. We can have a compliant standard. They can verbally tell us, hey, we've complied with the parts that were applicable to us. But we ignored these because we don't like them. Well, they're compliant to a degree. That's a partial satisfaction. If they've got the key interfaces you're worried about, that might be OK in some cases. Conformant here means that there's a complete conformance to all of the applicable standards. Every last one of the applicable standards has been conformed to. That's important to us because then we know that if we bring someone else in that interface, that they're conforming to the standard. And then if we have an issue, there might be an issue in the standard, but generally not. Finally, confirmed. This is where we have an independent verification of conformance. Now, this can be done in a number of ways. But if there's an independent verification, I find that to be very valuable from a government perspective because it's not an opinion of someone bringing it forward. Now, lessons learned. Specificity is paramount. This is very important because we've seen a lot of application of standards in the government where they were just left out there and they weren't properly mediated. They were mandated without any further guidance on when they didn't apply or how they didn't come together. So you have to understand how and where each standard applies or may apply. You may have an interface where two different standards could apply. How do you choose the best one? Well, you need to be specific about what your intentions are in that particular case. And one thing we're moving towards is to model what you know, or in some cases, model what you believe to be true. With a more formal model, it actually drives you to the point of understanding your requirement. And in the government, that is a radical concept of understanding your requirement. We know we need something to go boom, but we have to get through the various steps of how to do that, what's acceptable, what's not, what are the restrictions, how does that come together. The second bullet there, be open to other views. We in the government have tended to be so, so distraught specific in our views. All of our programs are funded in a silo. So we have excellent silos. But if you don't want corn, you're in trouble, because that's what we put in our silos. So how do we get between the two? There's no cross bridges. There's nothing there. We've been incentivizing people to do things in an isolated fashion. Now, the benefit from that is they tend to be really good at that. The lack in that is that they tend to be very bad at talking to others about what could help them. So we have no enterprise crosstalk level, and we're beginning to approach that from a digital engineering and a modeling perspective to say, we need to change that. But if you're open to other views, then there may be another approach. It may not be optimal for your program to do X, but it may be optimal for your enterprise to do X. Can you take a 95% solution and work with that for most cases? The answer is yes. In many cases, you can work with an 80% solution that is cheaper across the board and satisfies several other people's needs. We haven't had the way to do that yet, so we have to work on that. The other thing is tooling. There may be other tools available and different methods than you've been using. If you've always done it this way, this way may not be the best way to do it. It might have been 10 years ago or 15 years ago when you started it, but you have to look forward to that. The other thing we see is folks not planning and taking reasonably sized steps. As we say, if you go for the all or nothing approach, nothing is definitely a possible outcome. So you have to be careful to understand how big your effort is and what you're going to try to do in doing it. That's why the sensor open systems architecture is the sensor open systems architecture, not the everything OSA. You have to have a specific focus that scopes it appropriately for you to work in. Here's another one that General Palankowski gave us a talk once at a particular open standards event on the Air Force Base at Wright-Patterson. And you need to understand the risks of the status quo. What she says is we're really good at seeing the risk of change, but we're really terrible at seeing the risk of not changing. So you need to understand the risk of your status quo. Is your software 20 years old and suddenly it's been aggregating over that time and nobody's bothered to re-architect it because you've been trying to get the next capability in? Well, a lot of our aircraft are in that position today. And how do we get them to do the re-architecting needs to be done? It's a difficult problem. But as we say, if you are a fan of the Princess Bride, are there rocks ahead? If there are, we'll all be dead. So, but you want to assess the risk of change, of course, but also assess the risk of not changing. That's the thing we tend to miss the most. So in conclusion, open's not optional. You have to find the balance between all of those competing interests as you're going forward. You know your situation from one perspective. Others may see it from another. Talk to people about it. Understand your situation from more than just your point of view. And collaborate wherever possible. There are other people out there that have had other experiences that may contribute positively to what you're trying to do. And finally, calculate all your risks, including the ones that you can't easily see unless you take a step back. John, thank you. Please take a seat. Where should I take? You threatened not to leave enough time, but you did, so we've got some questions for you. You mentioned CWGs in the presentation. Is there any discussion of leveraging the open group for the open architecture CWG recently announced? Promise I didn't write that. The answer is I don't know. That's not my lead, so I can't provide an input on that. So in the best government ease, no comment. Very no. Where does OMS fit in the support and adoption strategies with Part B being, is there a roadmap to more government direction? The open mission systems standard is successful in its own right because it started with a very small focus and a very sharp focus with some good people working hard to bring it forward. One of my goals, and this is a personal comment, not a government comment, one of my goals is to get the OMS standard to segregate itself from the UCI standard such that the service oriented architecture and the layering they've selected is retained, but can then be used in a data model environment similar to what the face consortium is bringing forward. I think that is the place. A lot of folks don't know it, but the OMS standard was initially given a copy of the Face 1.0 technical standard as a starting point so that they didn't have to reinvent wheels. And indeed, they ended up with a significant commonality in the APIs, the POSIX APIs chosen. So there is a lot of commonality between them. The significant differences between them are in the message set utilization. You gave us a sneak peek that the latest version of the test suite is coming out for the Face technical standard. What's the significance of that? What's the significance of having a test suite generally and specifically an updated version? Well, the conformance test suite is important to the government from the perspective of giving us assurance, independent assurance, that someone has achieved the intent of the standard in creating an open interface so that we'll have the ability to interchange as needed later on. Our goals are to drive our costs down and drive our response times to a lower level so that we can make changes more rapidly. As it is today with a legacy architecture, it can take years to make a change to a platform. We'd like to be able to cut that down to a matter of months in the future with the appropriate standards instantiated at the appropriate places in our platforms. Question just come in. Have you considered the application of data science to your standards modeling efforts? Indeed we have. The problem is, if you ask anyone in any of the services, what's the specialty code in the Air Force for a data scientist? We don't have one. Yeah, okay. What's the specialty code for an efficient modeler? Oh wait, we don't have one yet. We have to make some changes to our personnel and training systems and in the meantime, we will be buying services. So if you offer those services, be aware that the government is interested in finding them at the right price with the right focus going forward. Specificity is often considered the enemy of innovation. How do you balance these things? Well, specificity in understanding what you're trying to do is critical. Now, as again, I said, also leave yourself open to the views of others. When we take a view of something, we have our own perspective, our own mindset coming forward with it. There's more than one way to skin a cat, if one were to try to skin a cat. I prefer to just put them out myself, but it's a matter of simply being specific at the right places. For instance, if we're talking in architecture, from my perspective, one of the main reasons to build an architecture is so that you can specify interfaces. You specify interfaces sufficiently to allow interoperability and interchangeability. In order to do plug and play like Microsoft has done and Intel has done with USB, it took years and millions of dollars and a lot of concerted effort to get to the point where you can literally just plug a device in, it will load its drivers and it will start up and it will work. If you remember USB 1.0, it wasn't quite that advanced. So having that level of interoperability is a goal and you don't get there unless you highly specify the right parts of your interfaces. Which leads perfectly to our final question, which is you explained that SOSA was the sensor open systems architecture because it needed to be something you could focus on. Nonetheless, that's focused on military sensors right now. Is there thought in the group of how that could be more generally applicable in the world of IOT and IIOT? Absolutely, we don't want to try to walk on the IIOT guys at any point in time, but we are looking for commonalities between them. We're pursuing a dual path in the SOSA consortium. The architecture level is intended to be generic enough and common enough to allow us to look at the modalities, not necessarily the military instantiations of them, but the modalities of the various sensors we understand today. It is certainly extensible in the future and we do want to see if we can get that aligned with where we're going with all other types of sensors. We don't want to diverge from where industry is headed to any degree at all, but we do have some driving requirements on the specification side to get us to an initial capability for programs. When you're talking about a consortium, a consortium needs the pull from the customer, if you will, from the government in this particular case. So we need to drive that forward by telling people we have a need. We do that through programs and programs themselves have the funds to help this happen. So we're balancing those two conflicting requirements as business strategies are all based on trying to do specifications while also building the long lasting architecture. We'll leave it there. Thank you very much.