Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of DockerCon 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Got a great segment here, one of the big supporters in open source, Amazon Web Services, returning back second year on DockerCon virtual, Deepak Singh, Vice President of the Compute Services at AWS. Deepak, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on remotely again. Soon we'll be in real life. Reinvent is going to be in person. We'll be there. Good to see you. Yeah, good to see you too, John. It's always good to do these sites. I don't know how often I've been at theCUBE now, but it's great every single time. You're a legend and getting on there. A lot of important things to discuss. You're in one of the most important areas in the technology industry right now. And that is at the confluence of cloud scale and modern development applications as they shift towards, as Andy Jassy says, the new guard, right? It's been happening. You guys have been a big proponent of open source and enabling open source as a service, creating business models for companies. But more importantly, you guys are powering, making it easier for folks to use software. And Docker's been a big relationship for you. Could you take a minute to first talk about the Docker AWS relationship and your involvement and what you're doing? Yeah, and actually it goes back a long way. Just in, we announced ECS at Reinvent in 2014. And ECS at that time was very much managed orchestration service on top of Docker. That time I think were the first really big one. Out there from a cloud provider and since then of course the world has evolved quite a bit and our relationship with Docker has evolved a lot. The last thing I'd like to talk to is something that we announced with Docker last year. I don't remember if I talked about it on theCUBE at that time. But last year we started working with Docker on how can we go from Docker run, which customers love or Docker desktop, which customers love and make it easy for people to run containers on ECS and Fergie. So most new customers running containers on AWS today start with ECS and Fergie, or half of them. And we wanted to make it very easy for them to start with where they are on their laptops, which is often Docker desktop and have running services in the AWS. So we started working with Docker and that collaboration has been very successful. We want to keep, we look forward to continuing to work on evolving that where you can use Docker compose, Docker desktop, Docker run, the tool that Docker customers use and then we will run production services on AWS side, which is a part that we hang up on. So I think that's one area where we work really well together. The other area where I think the two companies continue to work well together as open source in general. As some of you know, AWS has a very strong commitment to container D. EKS, our Kubernetes service is moving towards container D. Fergie actually runs all on container D today. And we collaborate Docker on that on the OCI specification because the OCI image spec is becoming the de facto packaging format at AWS. This morning we launched, well yesterday we launched a service called AppRunner and the main expected input for AppRunner is an OCI image. We did this with Lambda as well where the OCI image is now a way of packaging for Lambda. And I think the last one I'd like to call out and which has been an amazing partnership and it's an area where most people don't pay attention is image signing. There's a project called Notary V2, the second version of the Notary spec for image signing and AWS, Docker and a couple of other companies have been working very closely together on bringing that spec, finalizing Notary V2 so that at least in our case we can start building services for our customers on top of that. You know, it's a great relationship and I expect to see it continue. Well, I think one of the themes this year is developer experience. So good call out there and the new announcements on the tools you have and software, because that seems to be a great developer integration with Docker. The question I have for you is how should the customers think about things like ECS versus EKS, AppRunner, Lambda for kind of running their containers? How do they understand the differences? What's the thought process there? What's the thinking? It's a great question actually, when we announced AppRunner I think that was one of the questions I started getting on Twitter. You know, let's start at the very beginning. Anyone can pick up a Docker container and run it on EC2 today. Like you can run it on EC2 or you can run it on LightSale but Docker on works just fine. It's a Linux machine. Then people want to do more complex things. They want to run large scale orchestrated services. They want to run their entire business on containers. We have customers who do that today. You know, you have people like Vanguard who runs a significant portion of the infrastructure on ECS and Fargi and all your fidelity which is a heavy user of EKS or Kubernetes service. So in general, if you're running large scale systems you're building your platforms you're most likely to use ECS and EKS.  That's what we see our customers doing. If you just want to run containers you want to use AWS to its fullest extent where you want the container API to be part of the AWS API set. Then you pick ECS and I think one of the reasons you see so many customers start with ECS and Fargate is with Fargate you get the significant ease of use from an operational standpoint and we see many startups and enterprises especially security-focused enterprises leaning towards Fargate. But there's a class of customers that doesn't want to think about orchestration that just wants, here's my code, here's my container image just run my service for me. And that's where things like app runner comes come and that's one of the reasons we launched it. Lambda is a little bit different. Lambda is a unique service you have to buy into an event-driven architecture if you do that and you can fit our application into this that's where it should start, it's magic. The container part there is what Lambda announced that we invented where they now support container packaging. So instead of zip files you can package up your functions as containers and Lambda will run them for you. The advantage it gives you is all the tooling that you have to build your containers now works for Lambda as well. So I won't call Lambda container orchestration service in the same sense that ECS, ECS or app runner are but it definitely allows the container image format as a standard packaging format. I think that's the sort of universal common theme that you'll find across AWS at this point of time. You know, one of the things that we are observing at this event here is a lot of developers KubeCon and Linux foundations, a lot of operators too Kubernetes hits that, but here's developers. And the thing is I want an ease of use simplicity experience, but also I want the innovation. I want all of it. When I ask you what does Amazon bring to the table for the new equation? What would you say?  Fargate's unique to us. It takes a lot of what we have learned about operating infrastructure at scale. The question we asked ourselves, you know in many ways we thought about Fargate even before we launched ECS, but we had to learn on what it meant and what customers really wanted. But the idea was when you're running clusters of instances or machines to run containers on you have to start thinking about a lot of things that in some ways VMs in the cloud have taken away capacity, what kind of infrastructure to run it on? Should I have been packed? Should I not been packed? Where is my container running? Those are things you suddenly started having to think about. Those felt kind of backwards almost. So the idea was how can we make your containerized bundles? So ECS task or a Kubernetes pod, the thing that you talk to and that is the main unit that you operate on. That is the unit that you get built on and meet it on. That's why Fargate comes in. And it allows us to do many interesting things. We've effectively changed the engine of Fargate since we've launched it. We run it on EC2 instances and we run it on Firecracker. We've changed the Fargate agent architecture. We've made a lot of underneath the hood changes that even take that take advantage of the broader innovations in AWS. We did a whole bunch more to launch Aprona which runs on top of Fargate. And customers don't have to think about it. They don't have to worry about it. It happens underneath the hood. It's always you upgrade the engine as you go along. And it takes away all the operational pain of managing clusters, of running into picking which instances to use, figuring out, trying to figure out how to bend back and get efficiency. That becomes our problem. So that is an area where you should expect to see us do a ton more. It's becoming the fabric of so many things that AWS now. And in some ways we're just starting. There's a lot more to do. Yeah, and it's a really good time. A lot more wave of developers coming in. One of the things that we've been reporting on on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE with our CUBE videos is more developers keep on coming on, more people are coming in and contributing to the open source community, even end users, not just the normal awesome hyperscalers.  So two things I want to ask you on the customer side because you have kind of two customers. You have the community, open source community and you have enterprise customers that want to make it easier. What are you seeing and hearing from customers? I know you guys work backwards from the customer. So I got to ask you, work backwards from the community and work backwards from the enterprise customer. What's going on in their environment? What's the key trends that they're riding? What's the big challenges? What's the big opportunities that they're facing and saying for the community? Yeah, I'll start with enterprise. That's almost an easier answer, which is we are seeing increasingly enterprises moving into the cloud wholesale. Like in some ways you could argue that the pandemic has just accelerated it, but we have started seeing that before and they want to move to the cloud and adopt modern best practices. If you see my talk at Reem when last few years I've talked about modernization and all the aspects of modernization. And that's 90% of our conversations with enterprises. I've walked into a meeting supposedly to talk about containers, but about half a conversation is spent on how does an organization modernize? What does an organization need to do to modernize? And containers and serverless play a pretty important part in it because it gives them an opportunity to step away from the shackles of sort of fixed infrastructure and the methods and approaches that built in. But equally we are talking about CI CD in a fully automated deployments. What does it mean for developers to run their own services? What are the, how do you monitor and instrument your services? How do you do observability in a modern world? So a lot of those are the challenges that enterprises are going towards and we are spending a ton of time helping them there. But many of them are still running infrastructure on premises. So, we have our posts for them. This last week you're talking to a bunch of our customers and they have lots of interesting ideas and things that they want to do with our posts. But many of them also have their own infrastructure and that's where something like ECS anywhere came from which is, hey, you like using ECS in the cloud. You like having this API that just orchestrates containers for you it does it in an AWS region. It'll do it in an outpost, it'll do it on wavelength, it'll do it on a local zone. How about we allow you to do it on whatever infrastructure you bring to us? You want to bring a Raspberry Pi, you can do that. You want to bring your on premises, data center infrastructure, we can do that. Or a point of sale device. As long as you can get the ECS agent running and you can connect to an AWS region, even though it's okay to lose connectivity every now and then. We can orchestrate your containers for you over there. And the same customer that likes to use the ECS and the simplicity really resonated but that message really resonates with them. So I think where we are today with the enterprise is we've got some really good solutions for you in AWS and we are now allowing you to take those APIs and then launch containers wherever you want to run them whether it's the edge or whether it's your own data center. Now I think that's a big part of where the enterprise is going, but by and large, I think yes, a lot of them are still making that change from running infrastructure and applications the way they used to to a modern sort of if you want to use the word cloud native way and we helping them a lot with that. The community is interesting. They want to be more participatory. That's where things like co-pilot comes from. But honestly, the best thing we've ever done in my org is probably our open road maps where the community can go into the roadmap and engage with us over there. Whether it's an open source project or just trying to tell us what the feature is and how they would like to see it. It's a great engagement and it's taught us a lot. It's helped us prioritize correctly and think about what we want to do next. So I think that's a great part of being out there. That must be very hard to do for opening up the Kimono on the roadmap because normally that's the crown jewels and it's secretive and now it's all out in the open. I think that is a really interesting experiment and what's your reaction to that? What's been the feedback on the roadmap piece because I mean, I definitely want to see the roadmap. So we do it pretty much for every service in our organization and we've been doing it now for three or so years. I forget, I think about three years. And it's been great. Now, we are very upfront, which is security and availability, our job, zero, zero, zero and 100 times out of 100 if I were to choose between a new feature and helping our customers be available and safe, we'll do that. And which is why we don't put dates in there. We just tell you directionally where we are and what we are prioritizing. There every now and then we'll put something in there that we will not choose not to put a feature in there because we want to keep it secret until it launches. But for the most part, 99% of our roadmap's out there and people engage with it. And it's not proven to be a problem because you've also been very responsible with how we manage and be very transparent on whether we can commit to something or not. And I think that's helped a lot. I got to ask you as a leader, a threaded leader on this group, open source is super important. As you know, and you continue to do it for many years. How are you investing in the future? What's your plan, plans for your team, the industry? Obviously very inclusive, which is very cool. It's going to resonate well. What's the plans? Give us some details on what you're investing in. What's your priorities? What's your first principles? Yeah, so it goes in many ways. One, I also have the luxury also on the Amazon open source program office. So I get the chance to, my team rather, not me, help Amazon engineers participate in open source. That's a team that helps create the tools for them, makes it easy for them to contribute, creates some, you know, manages all the licenses, et cetera. I'll give you a simple example.  And he kind of just wrote it because he felt it was something that we needed to do and we made it open source. In general, in many of our teams, the first question we asked is, should something be open? And why is this thing not open source? Especially if it's a utility or some piece of software that runs along our services. So that was step one. But we've done some big things also. I, you know, a couple of years ago, we launched a Linux operating system called bottle rocket. And right from the beginning, it was very clear to us that bottle rocket was two things. It was both an AWS product, but first it was an open source project. We'd already learned a little bit from what we've done with Firecracker, but making bottle rocket an open source operating system was very important. Anyone can take bottle rocket, we open sourced our build tooling, you can run it wherever you want. If you want to take bottle rocket and build a version and manage it for another provider, or another provider wants to do it, go for it. There's nothing stopping you from doing that. So you'll see us do a lot there. Obviously there's multiple areas you've seen AWS invested in on the open source side. But to me, the wins come from when engineers can participate in small things, release little helpers, or get contributions from outside. And I think that's where we're still, we can always get better. We're going to continue to strive to make it better and easier. And as I said, I have me and my team, we have an opportunity to help there with inside the company and we continue to do so. But that's what gets me excited. Yeah, that's great stuff. And congratulations on investing. The community really enjoys it. And I know it moves the needle for the industry. Deepak, I got to ask you while I got you here, DockerCon, obviously developers. What's the most important story that they should be paying attention to as a developer? Because a lot's going on, shift left for security, day two operations, also known as AI ops, GitOps, whatever you want to call it. Ongoing, you get serverless, you got Lambda. I mean, all kinds of great things are going on. You mentioned Fargate. What should they be paying attention to that's going to really help their life, both innovation-wise and just the quality of life. Yeah, I would say, look at, in the end, it is very easy, developers in particular want to build their builders. And it's very easy to get tempted to try and get, learn everything about something, have access to all the bells and whistles and knobs. But in reality, if you want to run things, you want to focus on what's important, the business application, the end-user application. And I think a lot of what I tell developers, and I think it's a lot of where the industry is going is, we have built a really solid foundation, whether it's Kubernetes or ECS and Fargate or container industries out there, we have a very solid foundation that our customers and developers all of the work can use to build upon. But increasingly, we are going to provide tools that sort of take that, wrap them up and provide them a nice package solution after another great example. Our collaboration with Docker around Docker desktop for a great example where, forget all the muck, focus on the application and build on top of that and you can get so much done. I think that's one trend you'll see more and more. Those things are no longer toys, they're production grade systems that you can build real world applications on, even though they're so easy to use. The second thing I would add to that is GitOps. It is, you can give it whatever name you want and there's nuances there, but I actually think GitOps is the way people should be running the infrastructure. This is my bias and my personal, it's something that we believe a lot in our side, is how do you go towards immutable infrastructure and infrastructure automation. We think GitOps plays a significant role. I think developers naturally gravitate towards it. And if you want to live in a world where development and operations are tightly linked, I think GitOps is a huge role to play in that. And it's actually a big part of how we're planning to do things like ECS anywhere, for example, and GitOps is a significant player in that. Take AWS Proton, I think GitOps will be a significant trend in the future of Proton as well. So, I think that's the other trend. If you wanted to pick a trend that people should pay attention to, that's what I believe in a lot. Yeah, well, you're an expert. So I want to get you a quick definition. What is GitOps? How would you define it? Because that's a big trend. What is it? What does that mean? Alexis Richardson will probably shoot me for getting this wrong. Actually, how I think about it, which is, in many cases, when you're doing deployments, you're pushing a deployment. GitOps is more of a pull deployment when you are pushing code to a Git repository. You have a system that knows that the event has happened and then pulls from there and triggers the thing, as opposed to you telling it, hey, I have this new piece of code, now go deploy it everywhere. So to me, a biggest change is that two parts. One is it's more of a pull mechanism where you're pulling because something has changed. So it needs systems like container orchestrators to keep them in sync. And the second part is a natural evolution of infrastructure as code, which is basically everything is code. Configure as code, infrastructure as code, code is code, and everything is getting stored in a software repo and the software repo becomes your store of record and drives everything. So for a class of customers, that's going to be a pretty big deal. Yeah, when you're checking in code, again, it's like a compiler for the compiler, a container for the container, you got things for each other. Automation is ultimately what we're talking about here and that's to me, we're machine learning kicks in. So again, having this open source foundational fabric, as you said, forget about the muck or the undifferentiated heavy lifting. This is what we're talking about, automation, isn't it, Deepak? Yes, I mean, as I said, the thing where we hang our hat on is there's such good stuff out there in the world which we like to contribute to. But the thing we like to hang our hat on is, why don't you run this? How do you do it this in ways where you can uniquely bring capabilities to customers where there's things like Nitro or things that Nitro opens up? Or the fact that we have built up this operational infrastructure over the last decade plus or in the container space over the last seven years where we really, really know how to run these things at scale and have made all the investments to make it easy to do so. That's where we hang our hat. Keeping people safe, helping them run highly available applications. They're a new startup that just completely takes off in over a weekend for whatever reason, because you're the next hot thing on Twitter. And our goal is to support you whether you are enterprise that's moving things up from the end frame or you are the next hot startup that's growing virally. And we've done a lot to build systems to help both sides and we are pretty proud of that. It's interesting if you think about open source where it's come from. I mean, I remember that days when open source wasn't open, I would be peddling software, hey, there's a free copy of Lynne Unix in college and now it's all free. But I mean, just what's changed now it used to be just free software. Download software, you got it. Now it's a service. Service now can be monetized quickly. And what you guys are offering with AWS and CloudScale is, you've done all these things as I don't have to, I'm a developer. I get the benefits of the scale. I can bring my open source code to the table, make it a service, integrate it in with other services and be the next Snowflake, be the next company that could scale. And that's the innovation, right? That's the, this is a new phenomenon. So it also changes the business model. So- Yeah, actually, you're quite right. Actually, I want more things to it. If you look at how a lot of enterprises use containers today, most of them are using something like ECS and Farvee or EKS to build an internal developer platform and the internal developer portal. And then the question then become this, how do you scale this modern development practices to an entire organization? What is your big bank that's been around as thousands and thousands of IT staff that may not all be experts at running Kubernetes how do you scale it out? That's where systems like Proton come into play. That was actually the inspiration is, how do you help an organization where they're building these developer portals and developer infrastructure, developer platforms? And how do you make it easy for them to build it? B, almost use it as a way to get these modern practices into the hands of all the business units where they may not have the time to become experts at the modern ways of running infrastructure because they're busy doing other things. And I think you'll see a lot more happen in that space. There's stuff happening in the open source community. There's Proton. There's a bunch of interesting things happening here. And we're interested to see how that evolves. And also, the communal aspect of not just writing code together but succeeding, building something. I mean, that's when you start to see the commercial meets open kind of ethos of communal activity of working together and sharing. A big part of this year's DockerCon is sharing, not just running and shipping a code, but sharing. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, Docker's original value was you build, run and ship, right? You use the same code to build it. You use the same code to ship it, same sort of infrastructure interface. And then you run it. And the fact that the Docker image is such a wonderfully shareable entity and that can run everywhere is such a powerful, I mean, so it's called, it's an OCI image now. I still call it Docker images because it's this easier. But to me, that was a big deal. And I think it's becoming an even bigger deal over the years. I came from, before Amazon, I used to work in the sciences in bioinformatics and the ability to share code, share dependencies and package all of that up in a container image is a big deal. It's what got me, one of the reasons I got fascinated with container seven, eight years ago. So it'll be interesting to see where all of this goes. It's great stuff, great success. And congratulations, Deepak. Great to always talk to you. Got a great finger on the pulse. We lead a really important organization at AWS and Docker has such huge success with developers, even though the company has gone through kind of a changeover and a pivot to what they're doing now. They're back to their open source roots, but they have millions and millions of developers use Docker and new developers are coming in. Dotnet developers are coming in. Windows developers are coming in. And so it's no longer about Linux anymore. It's about just coding. Yeah, big job. And it's part of this big trend towards infrastructure automation and development and deployment practices that I think everyone is going to adopt faster than we think they will. But companies like Docker and open source projects that they're involved in are critical in making that a lot easier for them. And then folks like us get to build on top of that and or with them and make it even easier. Well, great, Tesla wanted Docker that you guys based your ECS on Docker. Docker has a critical role in the developer community by Run Compose and their hub with Docker desktop and we'll be watching Amazon and the community activity and see what kind of experiences you guys can bring to the table and continue that momentum. Thank you, DPEG for coming on theCUBE. Oh, thank you, John. It's always a pleasure. Okay. This is theCUBE's DockerCon 2021 virtual coverage. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.


Sam here, lane sports cards. We are rippin' 22, Bowman Inception, baseball, hobby, 8 box, half-case break, number 34. Pick your team style. Dylan, do you mind dropping your first link for Sonic? Dylan's gonna do that right now, Korra. I got you. All right, we've got Adam K., Reds, Yankees, Alvin S., Rockies, Astros, Andrew P., Rangers, Brendan L., with the Guardians, Christopher G., Orioles, Rays, Daniel R., Marlins, Darius M., with the Angels, Bluejades, Griffin C., Metz, Cubs, Jay Pion, with the Red Sox, Jason L., Dodgers, Jeremy H., Cardinals, Joe T., Mariners, Joseph L., Brewers, Joshua B., with the White Sox, Joshua R., Nationals, Matt M., Tigers, Matthew S., Phillies, Matthew P., Pirates, Michelle K., Athletics Giants, Nathan S., Royals thing, Nathan, Nick L., with the Diamond Macs, Sean F., Twins, Sho F., with the Padres, and Teddy K., with the Braves. Let's get on. Let's do it. Again, guys, first Sonic break. Half the teams are gone. We're down to 15. Teams are on sale over there as well. So if you want to chase some rookies, you want to chase some Pocotrone parallels, colored raywaves come out of there. You're looking for the reds, the black, red pulses, the blues, all that kind of stuff. So definitely check it out. It's going to be a lot of fun. Dustin Harris and Max Muncie. There's Trey Sweeney to 99. Joshua, we got, I got you, Joshua. I got you. You can mag this one. That's going to be 29 of 50 Gold Primordial Mr. Oscar Coloss. There you go, buddy. Let's go, Joshua.  Easy money right there, Joshua. Easy money on the Coloss. Very nice. Then we've got a Ranged Cone. That is 142 out of 250 for the Dodgers. That's when they're LA. That's what I thought. Oh yeah, you know I always got. If no one got you, Joshua, Sam got you. And to answer your question, Ed, this is a Hawaii, University of Hawaii Rainbow Warriors hat sent to me by John in YouTube chat. Actually, from straight from the source from Hawaii. So thank you again to John, dude. I do love this hat. It's awesome. Jackson Cherry up. Nice one there for the Brewers. And Jordan Walker. There's a Gold Christian Hernandez, 49 of 50. I'm assuming in Don Russ. We've got Alex Pinellis that is 105 out of 399 for the Red Sox. Nice one there, Balsam. And Andrew Painter. Nice one there for the Phillies to 99. He is going to be a stud, man. Stud Andrew Painter. Do you know how to tweet as well? Okay, I would say just tweet all. Every time you drop a link, just tweet it. Oh, Bowman's Bass. Oh boy. Lakers and everyone's smart. Bowman's Bass. I can imagine you're chasing a bunch. Jackson Job and Kurt Smith. Bass, Bass. There's a Yasser Mercedes. Yes, sir. Mercedes to 99 on the blue. That's what we're here going to the Brew Crew. Hedbert Perez on the silver signings. Love that. 20 out of 100. 65 teams total. Let's go, Joshua. Nice one there. Hedbert Perez for Brew Crew. And 9 of 50. Mr. Brian Acunha. Baby Acunha. That is Gold. Congrats on that. Minnesota. Oh yeah, definitely. There's a Super Fractor lurking in there somewhere, especially with Matt. You know there's going to be some sort of Super Fractor. Hedbert Perez and Norhei Vera. Bass, there's a Tyler Whitaker to 99 for the Astros. Nice one there. Here you go. Matthew P. had the Pirates in this one. One of 75. Lonnie White Jr. on the Fuchsia. Nice first one stamped. Lonnie White. One of the Pirates top prospects currently. I believe he's still top 100. And Connor Norby. 30 out of 50. Gold for the Orioles. Nice one there. That is on Card Aroni as well. Next box. Bass. That's going to be Gold Dorel Hernáez. 14 of 50. Got 76 of 99. Blue is Kyle Menzardo. Going to the Rates. Nice one there. Tampa. 76 of 99. Menzardo. And 45, 75. Yosua Garcia for the Phillies. On the Fuchsia kind. Not really going to match that one. It's going to be a bit of a stretch. What's up Gary? How are you doing buddy? We're having a good day. Here's Daniel Vazquez. 19 of 99 for the Kansas City Royals. Last team taken. Very nice. Take it, we'll take it. National's gone in Sonic. There's West Cat. That's going to be Gold. 44 of 50 for the White Sox. There you go again, Joshua. Good to hear, man. And 250. Victor Labrada for the Mariners. That's one at 75 of 250. Victor Labrada. I wonder if I believe Joe T had the Mariners in both races. Thank you there, Joe. Congrats on that. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Thanks again Nate taking the Royals. We'll take it, Nate for sure. See if we can get Shane Otto coming out of here now. It's like some sort of silver, gold, some sort of signings coming off here. There's a Benjamin Bailey to 75 for the White Sox. Joshua again. We've got a nice one here. It's going to be going to the Guardians. George Valera. That is three of 100. Congrats, Cleveland. Again, one of the last teams taken. Picking up a Valera. I think Valera came out in both breaks now. And going back to Matthew. It's going to be one at 60 out of 200. Henry Davis, 2021 number one overall draft thick, Henry Davis. Future all star catcher in the MLB. Henry Davis. Louisville legend, Henry Davis. Where the Raiders going to do it? They got a draft, right? Some sort of signings again here. Gunnar Hogland and Christian Santana. Nice, there you go. Yeah, Henry Davis is a stud, man. There's a Averson Artega, 12 out of 99 for the Giants. We've got 173 of 199. Brian Bale. Magda's one, I'd say. Still be going to the Rockies. One of the last teams taken again. Seven of 25. Benny Montgomerie on the gold signings. Congrats on that one there, Colorado. Very nice. Alvin, congrats, buddy, for you as well. Do a quick recap. We've got the Brian Bale, Alex Benales, Michael LaVerada, Raymond Cohn, Henry Davis, George Valera, Hedbert Perez, Andrew Painther, Kyle Menzardo, Yoshua Garcia, Guanyi White Jr., Conor Norvey, Brian Acunha, Westcalf. We had an awesome Oscar Colas, 250 on the primordial. Very, very cool card. Congrats again on that one, Joshua. And going to Alvin, we had the Benny Montgomerie, seven out of 25 gold signings. That will do it for the break, guys. Thanks again for the fill. Next up, we've got full case random divisions.


For Monday, October 28th, it is 7.15 and it's time for us to start the meeting. I want to remind everyone that this meeting is being recorded probably by both by the press and by our cable group, ACMI. ACMI tonight has two special assistants. Milo and James are here who are helping out in back with doing the recording and making sure it all works. They're in from the middle school. I also wanted to say up front that if you're here for 6A, which is a one handicap space on the heights business district, I anticipate that we're going to postpone that. So if you're here for that one, we probably aren't going to actually spend much time on it. So that said, our first item up is the consent agenda. We have the minutes of the meeting September 30th, which was a regular full meeting on a Monday. We also had a one item special meeting, a regularly scheduled but unusual meeting on October 24th. We have new business hours from Adrona Tree. We have a request for two one day beer and wine licenses for the taste of Greece cuisine from the Greek Orthodox Church. We have a request for a drain layer license from the Shuddy Construction Company of Johnston, Rhode Island. We have two new election appointments, John Lally and Camelia Donovan. And we have a request for a permit for the Veterans Day Parade Monday, November 11th. So just for those of you who are regular with the parade, the parade is November 11th, which is Monday. It leaves from 1030 and it forms up on Mass Ave down by Walgreens and it heads up to Arlington Center to the memorial there. So that is at November 11th at 1030. Do I have a motion? I move approval of some of the 12 conditions are set forth. Second. Is there anyone here for any of these items who wants to talk about them? I think is there an election work right now? Anyone who wants to talk? All right. I'm seeing any. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. I have to abstain from the 1024 meeting, Marie. But I approve my colleague. Of course. All right. Anyone else? Okay. Moving on. First up, Mr. Gilligan, general obligation, bonds and notes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Members of the board. I'm here to request the board to authorize the execution of $6,851,000 in general obligation bonds and a $450,000 bond anticipation note. These borrowings were effectuated on October 10th. And I'm very pleased to report to the board that a couple of things happened well in the town's favor. First, standard and pours. The credit rating agency rated these bonds AAA. The ninth consecutive time that rated Illington's bonds as AAA. As well, the highest attainable. As well as the bond anticipation noted as an SP1 plus, which also is the highest rate available on a short term note. And I think that's fabulous for the town on a financial and economic basis. Additionally, on the 10th of October, which was the sale date, we were fortunate enough to have eight bidders respond to the sale. And we attained a winning bid of 2.59% well above or below our expectations. We had budgeted for 3.5%, just to cover ourselves conservatively, anticipated anywhere from 3 to 3.25% for winning bids and absolutely had a fabulous result. And I think that's a combination of the good work that the town has done, as well as our being able to look at trends in the municipal bond market and everything just timed out perfectly. So we received an incredible rate of return on that one. So I'm pleased to report that to the board. The also a couple of notes on this, a couple of notations that that are worthy of mentioning part of this overall borrowing includes final permanent financing of the Thompson school project construction of approximately $2.4 million. That's actually $2.426 million. That completes the Thompson school and basically or in effect completes all school construction projects that were planned to date. So it's good news for the town. What's also good about this permanent financing is the Thompson school came in under budget, which is a credit to those people managing that project. But also through the efforts of this board and the town manager and the school committee, we came in under budget with respect to financing because of utilizing the sale of the Crosby school proceeds. So the project came in under budget, our financing came in under budget, and we're looking incredibly well with respect to that. And then I just want to point out that although town meeting voted permanent financing for the architectural plans for the fire station, we did not move forward with permanently borrowing that money. We took advantage of a short term note for one year because of the incredible low interest rate of 45 basis points, which again is incredibly low. And also because by waiting another year and waiting until construction is approved, we're then able to permanently finance that with the construction project over 20 years. It will take advantage of improved cash flow as well as the fact that by doing it then we will maintain lower interest rates because as we all know the short of the term of a note, the higher the interest rate. So we have just performed very well with respect to the results of the bids for these bonds. Thank you, Mr. Gilligan. Mr. Greeley. So Stephen, 45 basis points means 0.45%? Correct. Is that so? Less than a half a percent. Yeah. Yeah. And just thank you. You give a lot of other people credit, but you certainly deserve a lot of credit. Thank you. I appreciate the compliment. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you very much. Mr. Chairman, if I may, Mr. Greeley had asked that I read some of the bond notes in detail. Now all of them. All of them. Mr. Gilligan, I told everyone in back that I wasn't actually going to use the gavel tonight. I was just going to wave my hat when people talk too long, but this is a serious matter. So we should give it the time it deserves. No need to do that.  And I would point out, I must point out to the board in all seriousness. You are expected to sign the tax document of which bond council expects that every member of the board, as well as myself as treasurer, has read that document cover to cover. Trust me, I have read it cover to cover. And the board can rest assured that the information in that tax document is accurate to the nth degree. Motion. I move approval. Second. Any further discussion? Seconded. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? 5-0. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, members of the board. Thank you all. Could you wait till the end of the meeting, though, Mr. Gilligan? I have something for you on a new business. If you insist. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Steve. Next up, request food vendor license moving from 152 Mass Ave to 148 Mass Ave. We have Musfakir Rahman doing business as DAGs. Did I say it right? Pretty close. How should I have said it? Not bad. I'm planning to move from location 152 Mass Ave to 148 Mass Ave. It's going to be like a small convenience store just serving all prepacked food and the coffee and slush. So that's what I'm requesting for the food vendor license for my new place. Move approval. Second. Any questions or comments? My understanding is this is all takeout. Yeah, all takeout. No sit down. Move approval subject to all conditions contained therein. Okay. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good luck. Next up, citizens open forum, except in unusual circumstances, any matter presented for consideration of the board shall neither be acted upon nor a decision made the night of the presentation in accordance with the policy under which the forum was established. It should be noted there's a three minute time limit to present a concern or request. Is there anyone here who's for citizens open forum? I'm not seeing anybody. Okay. We'll move along and we get to traffic rules and orders of the business specifically Punjab New Year's Eve late night event requesting to stay open until 2am on New Year's Eve slash New Year's Day. Hi. You want to introduce yourself? Just Paul Pablo. Sorry. Just Paul Pablo from Punjab. And you are the owner? Yes, sir. Okay. He's a promoter, Mark. I want to be promoting the event that day. All right. You want to tell us about the event and what you're planning? We've read it. Mark, do you want to? Sure. Please. I'll just take a couple of minutes. We're going to do traditional fair starting around 10 o'clock. We're going to have appetizers, 10, 10, 30 until midnight. What we really want to do is introduce, it's going to be a 21 plus event. We're going to introduce some people from Cambridge, Somerville to our fair. And what we'd like to do is we're going to have some traditional music as well as popular music mixed in. DJ, there will be some dancers also performing some traditional song and dance. And we will serve a champagne toast at midnight. We're going to have a cash bar. Food will go on until midnight. And at 1.30, everything will stop. Mrs. Mulan? Just a couple of points. Sure. And I know this was done last year. It's very successful. Good to see you again, fellow bracket parent. I see in here, but I heard something different from the microphone. So I want to get it clear that in one of the cover letters we have received, you have, it's written that you want permission to remain open until 2 a.m. and also sell liquor until that time. I was going to make a request. Usually when I go to establishments at an event like this, there's a shutoff time. That's why. Do you, are you saying 1.15, 1.30? 1.30 shutoff. Okay. And then we'd like to have everyone cleared out by 2 o'clock. All right. I just want someone getting a drink at 5. No. No, and then. Not that you would either. I'm just saying. So we'll amend that. Yes. To what's in here in your application. That's a friendly amendment from you all. And then I just had a very, just a quick explanation on, I understand 18 and 21 will have different color bands. No. It's going to be a. 21 plus no bands. I read the exact same thing you did. And only just now I noticed that one is dated 2008. I think we got. Okay. I think we got the letter from a previous one, but I was going to ask the exact same question. So let's just be real clear. 21 plus. 21 plus. We will be checking all IDs coming in. There will be no one under 21. Okay. I feel great about that. Yeah. All of us as well. I know when you come with a group of five and three 21 and two or 18. And then I'm going to assume that that valet parking. Yes. Yes. Municipal parking lot. Yes. Is that what you're planning on doing? And you have that all worked out with. Yes. We're just waiting until obviously approval to go ahead. But we've already asked about that. And we've been told that we can do that 21 and over shut off at 130 AM event ends at 2 AM valet municipal. Yes. And we'll make sure that everyone is dispersed. Nobody is collecting around the place and everyone is gone. Yes. Kevin and then Joe. Yeah. Thank you. Are you looking for other dancers or is the offset on that? We did hear that you'd like to be. We'll be holding auditions in another week or so. That's after midnight. The 300 guests and when you ought to be down to about 10 by 2 AM. When I'm on mobile approval, subject to conditions are set forth. And I know you've done this other years and wish you the best of luck. Thank you. Mr. Kira. Just just two quick questions on the one, one 30 shut down on the bar. Will you be stopping the music at that point too to try to ease folks along? That's generally how we do it.  We start to get coats. Good. These people out and try to do it so that not everyone is rushing at one time and it's nice and easy and pleasant. And I'm glad I'm also glad to see that you're doing the ballet park and we actually had a brief discussion of that at the previous meeting. So I'll be interested to see how the experience is. That's with it. I'm wondering, do we need to take a separate vote just to, to set aside a parking spot in front of the establishment to, to allow for the ballet parking that night? I think maybe after we voted tonight and it goes to the manager and the police department and officer Rato looks at it. If he suggests that we need that vote, do you think that's the way we should go? Right. Right. But you'll have to give a special dispensation from one to two because they can start taking, well, they start taking it to. What about the spot directly in front of the restaurant? Just to reserve out the spot for ballet. We need to clear that with the police department. Yeah. Yeah. I think that would be good. Very supportive. In other words. I just didn't know if there was any action that we have. A drop staging area. Yes. Let's take a vote on, let's take Mr. President's motion and then we'll take up a second motion and just, I would say we just approve everything and say, and let, turn it over to them. Because I think we're all. Okay. Sounds good. Yes. Do you have anything else? No. Sorry. Just go to Steve. I just have one quick question as well and I'm completely supportive of this. The capacity is generally 225 because I see you're going to sell. The capacity you're actually sitting in is only 150, but we can have up to 300 people. Okay. We decided that. Standing. We decided that 225 gave enough room for people to go to the bar to have. Just to move around. Wanted it to be comfortable. Okay. Thank you. All right. So we have a motion by Mr. Greeley, seconded by Mrs. Mahan. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Five zero. Mr. Curator. Yeah. I would move to. First, you want to move favor action on the special dispensation from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. I would just say I would say I move to prove all necessary measures to allow for a reservation of a parking spot in front of the Punjab during the period of this event for the purposes of valet parking. You know, subject, subject to any conditions and change and release any restrictions on parking in the municipal lot for the purposes of valet. Yes, of course. Okay. We have a motion. Is there a second? Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. And remember, I'll call you. Thank you. Thank you. I just have my wife. My wife works at brackets. So just let her know when the tryouts. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Next up is we have two handicapped parking requests. The first one six a has been withdrawn by the proponent first to have further discussion. So unless anyone has a particular reason to talk about six a, we're going to postpone that one. No, we can just talk about six B, which is two handicapped parking spaces. Park of congregational church. And I don't see that we have anyone in particular to talk about that. But in our packet. We have the commission of disability reviewed at their meeting. The request to handicapped parking. The request is to designate additional handicapped parking near the church's main entrance on wallstone avenue. You're the door to the parish hall. This is the park of congregational church. And I don't see that we have anyone in particular to talk about that. So we have a request to the park of congregational church. The request is to designate additional handicapped parking near the door to the parish hall. This is park of congregational unanimous support of the disability commission. They had no opinion on the two hour parking limit. And there were further conversations about that. So we have a record. So we received a request from Judith Phelps. She asked for parking spaces and a parking change. And so we have recommendations for favorable action on the spaces, but not the time restrictions. Second. We have a motion. We have a second. Second. Seeing none. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Five zero. Okay. So that's six, seven approval issuance of RFP for lease of space at the Parmenter School. Mr. Tenmanager. All right. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So before the board tonight is an amended copy of the RFPs that were presented to the board at the last meeting for leasing the space at the Parmenter School. The changes that were made after the discussions with the board was a shortening of the initial lease term and still the inclusion of an extension. So what's before you tonight would be a five year initial lease term and the option for a five year extension. We would also put language in the RFP and in the lease following that, that we would have to reassess the capital contribution, which would be 50 cents per square foot during the first five year period, reassess that before extending the option to determine if that was enough to cover capital costs going forward. So those were the two main changes the board had looked for. We also changed the title of the chart with the chart A and chart B with the square footages in the corresponding square footages Ms. Mahan had pointed out at the last meeting. So I believe the changes that the board had requested were made and it's here for the board's approval if they so choose tonight. I move approval. Second. Any discussion? Mrs. Mahan. Just so I just want to make sure I'm clear on this just because these numbers challenge me and I'm approving this that the previous ISB International School of Boston 901 is going to be $9.25 per square foot and then the same thing with the 668 for ACC is going to be the $7. Yeah. And those are in the way this works, those are base amounts that just to qualify as a bidder you need to bid that amount. Okay. Should both ISB, ACC and any other potential bidder has bid more than that, that's fine. But these are floors. And the successful bidders, whatever rate that is, being a minimum of the two. Being a minimum of those amounts. That's it for five years. It's not commensurate with inflation. No, there's a 2% inflator included. There is. I'm sorry you could say that. Okay. Thank you. Any further discussion? Just one, sorry, Mr. Chair. Excuse me. When is this actually published? When is this actually offered? So if approved tonight, we would publish it tomorrow and begin the RFP process. Okay. Any lease awarded would actually be taking effect on July 1, 2014. July 1. Okay. Thank you. No problem. I did have just one comment, which is having slept on this, more than once we talked about it. I feel really good about this. I really am happy with the changes we made. So I think we really got a good discussion out of that and a good result. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Five, zero. Thank you. Next up. Correspondent received. We have a stretch code update from Rob Gardy, Arlington Center parking study from Mr. Paul Schlickman and handicapped parking from Jack Jones. So I just want to handle them one by one if it's okay. First one is the stretch code update. I had passed that along to Mr. Chaplain to see if he had any strong opinions about it. And he's, again, why don't you just say what your thoughts. So this is in regards to the board sending a letter urging Governor Patrick to move forward with updating the stretch code. Right. So I did, I talked with building inspector Michael Byrne and he expressed no concern with us moving in that direction. Ultimately it will happen as the building code is updated, the stretch code is updated as well. And since this was received from Rob Gardy, we've received notification from the green communities division that they are starting to turn their wheels on the stretch code update. So it is expected. And I don't think there's any harm in Arlington being a green community, having the board contact the governor to reach out and moving forward with the stretch code. Does the board want us to do that? Or do we just want to move? Okay. We have a motion. Is there a second? Second. Second. Any discussion? Can we just, should we, Mr. Chairman? Can we just boilerplate this letter or should we write a separate one? Boilerplate. Yeah. We can facilitate that. And do we just have the chairman sign or the chairman, all the members of the chairman and Adam? Yeah. Dan? No one toward inclination or implication here, but is there anyone that we should, before we send out the final letter, maybe over in the building department that should look at this? Or are we comfortable with? Yeah. I had a discussion with the building inspector and he didn't express any concerns to me. I mean, the stretch code does put an onus on, on builders and developers to build more energy efficient buildings, which can have a cost ramification. So that's a reality of the stretch code. But when the town adopted the stretch code was three years ago now, that was a commitment that was made. Okay. With that caveat, I'm fine. For the discussion. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Okay. Next up, Mr. Schlickman's email. So the manager informs me that we have a consultant hired at this point who is doing the parking study for us about the center usage and that we should forward this to the consultant. I think that would be a wise idea. Well, actually to the parking study committee. Thank you. I can work with a consultant on that. Right. Could I have a motion to that effect? So moved. Second. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Okay. Last but not least, the commission on disability town of Arlington, I don't, I think we only need to move receipt unless there's something else that someone wanted to do. So moved. Second. We have a motion to second. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Okay. Thank you for letting me go through those. We do not have an executive session scheduled. Is there any new business? There's a competition on Wednesday night. Town day. Sorry? Town day. Thank you. Is that Wednesday night? Okay. Which I cannot attend. You cannot. What time is that? Okay. Thank you for the reminder. That's the sun, right? Excuse me, Adam. Sorry. Adam. A number of quick issues. I wanted to let the board know that we have gone through the search and recruitment process for a new town council. We have made an offer to one final candidate. And we're awaiting the acceptance of that offer most likely tomorrow. So hopefully this week I'll be informing the board of who that candidate is, of their credentials, and then hopefully next week or the week following we'll be able to, or the following meeting, we'll be able to introduce the candidate to the board prior to their start. So excited about that. Very quickly I wanted to show the board the latest accolade for Arlington. We were honored by the state, the Department of Energy Resources, with their leading by example award. It was given out to two large municipalities and two small municipalities, along with a number of state agencies and community colleges and state colleges. It really is a highlight of all the work that Arlington has done in terms of energy efficiency and renewable energy. So the work that was done on Solarize Mass, the Green Communities effort, Green Communities Grant, LED streetlight changeover. You can see our fleet of Priuses parked in front of Town Hall. So we were able to go to the, actually, the state house this morning and they produced this nice graphic for us as well as this award, which we'll display downstairs. I'm very proud of that and wanted to show the board. I learned today that our LED streetlight changeover is saving the equivalent amount of greenhouse gas, equivalent amount of energy, really, as taking 90 cars off the road for a year. So that's a pretty impressive factoid, I thought. So that is that. In this vein, the town also has recently been awarded a $12,500 owner's agent technical assistance grant for us to be able to hire an outside consultant to help us work with a solar developer to begin assessing the possibility of putting solar panels on some of our rooftops of schools in a couple of municipal buildings. Great. So there'll be more on that, hopefully, in the upcoming months. Also wanted to tell the board that working with the recycling committee, we're trying to ramp up our efforts of having businesses recycle more in Arlington. A number of businesses that have commercial haulers have a dumpster out back and don't necessarily have an opportunity to recycle. And that was concerning to the recycling committee, especially that given the fact that state law requires certain items to be out of the waste stream. So what's happening is several members of the recycling committee have reached out to the business groups in the Heights, the Center, and in East Arlington to start to work with them to educate them about the law and the recycling possibilities, while at the same time, Christine Barnjono on the Board of Health, as they reach out to the haulers for a re-licensure this year, are asking about what kind of recycling services they offer and if they offer them to businesses. So we're trying to bring the haulers and the businesses together to increase their awareness of their need to recycle. So you may hear that's happening in the community. So I wanted to let you know that. And finally, we've been contacted by the Secretary of Administration's Office, and we are facilitating the receipt of the microburst reimbursement funding that our state legislative delegation was able to get for us. So we should be hopefully receiving those funds in the next few months. So that's very good news as well. Yeah. And that's my new business. Thank you. Thank you very much. The award is particularly exciting. Kevin. Thanks to Adam and the staff and everybody. Are those cars legally parked, or should they get a ticket for parking on the sidewalk? Can we get an after-the-fact dispensation from the board? Adam, were we considered a smaller community? You were actually a larger community. Arlington and New Bedford were honored as larger communities, and Amherst and Chelmsford are honored as two smaller communities. Wow. I was sure we would have been in the smaller. That's awesome. Yeah. I think 40,000 actually was the cusp. Yeah. 35,000, 40,000. So we're right. Yeah. And just one other thing, Mr. Chairman. This has been brought up to me, whether or not this is to be referred to TAC or the parking study or whatever. Two different businesses in the center have talked to me recently about the issue of we have, you know, one hour, two hour, you know, there's different parking, obviously, and part of the study is, of course, help us coordinate that. But the issue is, it's only up to five o'clock. And the issue raised was, to help businesses, should it be extended to like seven o'clock or so? Mm-hmm. To just to help businesses with more turnover, you know, restaurants or whatever. But any, should I refer that to TAC, or what? I will gladly refer that to the group that's working with the parking consultant to make sure that that's considered. Okay. Mrs. Grip-Elkin. I'm on that parking study committee. We'll be working on that. That's one of the things that's going to be with us. Oh, great. I'm on that. I know you, but just haven't been at that meeting. Yeah, sorry. Oh, thank you. Never mind. I'll take care of that. Never mind. That's good to talk about. Very to me. All right. Kevin, anything else? You want to have a conversation with the plan? I'm done. I'm done with that. Diane, you're out. Okay. Three quick ones. For the town manager, when you think it's an appropriate interval, I've gotten lots of questions and I know various, all the board members have asked you at different times. What is the state of the never-ending construction site down the police station? If we're, I think we're at the point that pulling the bond and perhaps calling it a day and moving on. If you could just give us an update on that, because it seems like, you know, I know we've all gotten many questions about that. That's just been going on and on. And I know the town manager and others have spent a lot of time trying to make this work. And I'm just wondering if there's at some point, we just say, that's it. We're going to take the money under the bond and get moving again. So I can give a brief answer right now. If you don't mind. We have a permanent town building committee meeting tomorrow night where I'll learn the most up-to-date update. But I spoke with the architect on Friday and he believes pretty sincerely that we will be wrapping up the construction by the end of November. So we do think we're making finally some positive progress from that, but I can provide the board a written update prior next week's meeting. And can you just present us with, I'm sorry, after you have that discussion with Permanent Town Building as well as the architect and project manager, that we get something that there is a cutoff date, only because we've heard it three times, definitely going to be done by, definitely going to be done by, as well as if it's November 16th, once that date comes that you say on November 23rd, this is what's going to happen. Or whatever you all think is appropriate. I just, you know. For us, with the Permanent Town Building Committee and myself, I think we feel it's less about an actual cutoff date and more about a commitment to progress by the contractor. And if we see that evaporate, I think that's when we are ready to pull. As long as you have something in your mind that, you know what? This is the time. They said they'd be out by November 3rd. It's November 10th. That's it. Can I ask a question on that? That's just exterior we're talking about, right? That's... Okay. All right. Okay. Yep. Knocked it down. But anyways, and then the other thing is, I anticipate everybody's watching the pre-Red Sox talk right now, but I know people do play it back over Tuesday and Wednesday. This Wednesday night, we're hosting the Middlesex League Qualifying Competition that I just found out a week ago, which was really exciting. We're also hosting GBL Greater Boston League. So there'll be 19 teams from 19 cities and towns that will be coming. Doors open at 6.30. Competition starts at 7. We only host this once in every 11 years because there are 12 people in the Middlesex League. So this is our time to shine. It's only $5 per ticket used to adult and seniors. Really great event. You're inside and you're not really cold. As well, I just want to let the board know, because I know you all on the edge of your seats about this. And thank you for your indulgence on this. Just want to report that the Pop Warner Cheerleading A squad and C squad, which is the youth cheerleading program, eighth is middle school. C is between first and seventh grade. Both competed at the Songus Arena. Both came in second, top two, obtained a bid to go on to regionals, which is November 16th in Springfield. Hoping that one and or both of the teams will be successful in Springfield, which means they go to nationals in December. We have two really good teams. I'm really excited about that. And if one and or both move on, I'm happy to work with the board. And I know that the chairman is going to talk about this event. I sure will. Well, I mean, I don't want to. I'll be happy to talk about it. If you miss anything, I'll be happy. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'll keep it brief. I don't want to be called for interference as people are making their way to home. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. First of all, I think we should note. I think we have one of our middle school students is actually operating the cameras tonight for everybody who's watching us. This evening are in the replay. So we want to welcome miles, I think. Yeah. Could we don't you think we should ask him to come up and just. Introduce. Can you come up? Yeah. Just come up to introduce. It's a look of excitement. This is a lot up to this microphone right here. Right here. Can you pull it down just a little? Yeah. Hello. How'd you get this job? Well, I don't know. I've just kind of like doing things with movies and me and my dad, I was in house at ACMI at the building and then there was all these programs that we could sign up for and I originally signed up for the animation class but not enough people signed up and then I saw this and I thought this would be fun so we came here. Thank you. Can I ask is it miles? It's Milo. Milo. So you've been operating the camera back there. Yeah. Which one of us, which one looks best on television? I don't know. That's hard. You'll be sitting over here. Yes. Milo, thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you. Okay. This is I think the third time now center parking issues come up but I know it's like a broken record but got a report that this weekend during the Lincoln International Film Festival both machines were broken and people were ticketed. The patrons and the volunteers were ticketed and I'm feeling really frustrated about this and I'm hearing the frustration coming out of the center so I don't know what the timetable is for the parking the center parking study committee but if it's not imminent I'm gonna recommend that we put this specific issue on our agenda and look at what the revenue is from those machines, what the costs are maintaining them, and what the track record is of appeals and adjudications because that's gonna be a lot of angry people coming in when they're ticketed when the machines are out when both machines are out. That's a report I got. Maybe that's not accurate. I do know that the report that came back to me was that we realized they were down on Saturday to suspend any enforcement based on the tickets being down machines being down so they may have been ticketing Friday night but I know Saturday and the remainder of the weekend it was another case. It's frustrating because we've gotten obviously some of the businesses have complained the past and we had to make the special dispensation for the farmers market so it's starting to burn a lot of cycles so I put that out there and I may be coming back for an agenda request. Joe, I am totally with you and I've run up and down this hill a few different times but I also, so I think what we need more than anything else is creativity because I don't know what this is I mean, this parking study is the best result that I could have obtained when I was working on it and I'm open to other ideas. Well if we're losing money on them and I don't know it probably aren't but I'd love to see the data if we're losing money on them and we'll have to find a solution to the operation until we have that better solution in the end but that's maybe a conversation, a longer conversation for another night but yeah, that's kind of oh, okay okay yeah, cause this thing it's killing me and just the last thing I wanted to note is anyone who has children 10 years and younger, the Chamber of Commerce and our three business districts a Halloween you're treating it, participating businesses from three to five children 10 or under on Halloween and I think even a couple of our town departments might be participating, I'm not sure I thought I saw that on the, I might be wrong I might be wrong on that so look for the blue ones outside the business but all of the districts are participating thank you, thank you Joe yeah, very quickly as my colleagues know, last week the board lost one of its biggest fans in my grandfather, Donald Byrne and I just want to quickly thank everyone, town employees everyone throughout town for the outpouring of support my family and I received the support, the kind words and prayers have been overwhelming and we're very fortunate to have everyone once in high school someone told me that joy shared is multiplied while grief shared is divided and that certainly has reined true over the past week so thank you and that is, that's it for me we're all very excited to hear thank you I have only one item and that is large and orange actually in my case extra large and so we had our meeting, we had a special meeting and we approved a race which was the Trick or Trot, our new AD has organized some fundraising, joint fundraising for multiple teams and this was the inaugural Halloween road race that ran this weekend and evidently we got swag from it so I think I would look for I think it's going to be an interesting event to keep track of and I would definitely support the efforts she's doing, excuse me for fundraising anything else we have a motion to adjourn all those in favor please say aye go Red Sox


So the state's adoption of intrusive technology and threats to democracy, it's a really daunting kind of a mouthful, it's a long sentence, and what's scary is that how true each and every bit of it is. Among the saddest stories of last year, there've been plenty of bad stories that came our way in 2021, but one really sad story has been the sharp decline in democratic values in India, and as kind of actually calculated by people on the outside watching in, you have Freedom House, which declared India as partly free. We had VDEM, the respected Swedish Institute, which called India an electoral autocracy now. So they even did away with the word democracy. International idea of which India is a founding member ranked India's freedoms currently at the same level like which they were in 1975, which is when a formal emergency was in place. But amidst all this bad news, one kind of creeping news, which really did not make it as much as it should have, was the fact that there was another index which said very clearly that India, the world's largest democracy, is also among the biggest surveillance states. The country ranks behind only Russia and China when it comes to surveilling its citizens. And this was something that you don't normally kind of expect because a lot of us kind of go by the open, raucous, vibrant democracy, phasers that are used so insistently, casually and warmly. But it actually conceals a great kind of a surveillance that's going on now, which is really important to get a grip on. So my hypothesis is really to look at this whole creeping up surveillance, particularly through various kinds of technologies and laws that India is using in three different categories. So I wish to kind of talk about first, what I term as big fish surveillance, number two, the small fish surveillance, and number three, the real dark hole. So it just kind of, I think, teases out the big S-word of surveillance. And I hope to be able to make some sense of this in my session today. As far as big fish surveillance goes, you have to just look as far as the results of a global wide investigation, the Pegasus Project that spoke of the use, the pervasive, invasive use of Pegasus and Israeli cyber weapon. It's a weapon, it's a cyber weapon, spyware, which is sold only to governments and India figures high in the list of its application according to this international investigation. We must always remember that the Indian government has never denied using Pegasus. There are no investigations it has ever put in place ever since this issue came to light in 2019. So effectively, they never said, no, we're not using Pegasus or it's wrong to use Pegasus. So the first of my three issues, the big fish surveillance and its impact on democracy has to do with how Pegasus has been used. There's a wide cast of characters over whom this cyber weapon has been deployed. It consists of election commissioners, a Supreme Court judge, top heads of political parties, an election strategist, enforcement director, officials, CBI heads, journalists, NGOs, doctors, epidemiologists, lawyers, you name it. A whole cast of characters. The first thing where surveillance, I think damages democracy and we need to pay attention to this is political players. It transpired that through Pegasus, political players, the foremost opponent of the BJP, the Congress Party's former president, MP, Raul Gandhi, two of his phones and phones of five others in a social circle who are not in public life were on the snoop list. A leading election opposition strategist Prashant Keshore was there in Karnataka phones used by senior members of the Janta Dal S and the Congress government and their aides were likely hacked by a head of the BJP ending up toppling the government. In Assam, two important political figures opposed to the controversial citizenship amendment act had their numbers on the list for possible use. So what does that do when important political players or participants in democracy are being ostensibly surveilled and their phones have been hacked by this weapons grade spyware? Well, it destroys the level playing field which is the basis of democracy. It gives the ruling party a symmetric amount of information and direct intelligence on its political rivals. So there is no sense of equality between people who are going to polls which destroys a basic premise of liberal democracy. Let's look at the second cast of characters Pegasus decided to be deployed on and these are independent institutions. What is a democracy but for independent autonomous institutions which kind of are the bulwarks of it all which make the system work. We had the story of an election commissioner who at that time was of course to be the next chief of the election commissioner of India and he found that he was on the Pegasus snoop list. He was the only one of the three in the commission at the time in 2019 who found certain statements by the prime minister during the 2019 general election campaign as violative of the model code of conduct. He was under Pegasus, the journalist who reported on the commissioner's objections and made this information public was on the snoop list as was a member of civil society, a prominent election watchdog who is known to not take things lying down. So these three kind of characters who intimately had to do with the business of running autonomous elections were on the Pegasus list. But wait, we found that one Supreme Court judges or sitting Supreme Court judge is number was on that list. A former chief justice of India was plagued by charges of sexual harassment and the Supreme Court staffer who level those objections people connected to her 11 numbers of people connected to her were on the surveillance list and lo and behold, by a very, very deep coincidence, after the sexual harassment case was put away under somewhat strange circumstances, the chief justice went on to give decisions that seem to be all pro-executive. It just happens that they were. It was the Ayodhya judgment, the fate of election laws relating to electoral bonds, the Raphael fighter jet deal and Kashmir's habeas corpus cases. And then after four months, this chief justice of India becomes a nominated Rajesh Saba MP. There were others on this list, which consisted of top honchos of the CBI. There was a war in the CBI going on at that time, a kind of interagency war which had political connotations, an enforcement directorate official who was looking at very sensitive cases. A whole list of police officers who were manning controversial and political cases were on this Pegasus list. What does that do? What that does, if the first of going after political players hacks into the level playing field, this of course does that, but it also provides government with masses amount of private information, a lot of private personal information about these people that exists, which they can use to blackmail, bully and target those who are heading the independent institutions. I mean, just as an example, one of the people being surveilled a fairly independent minded, supposedly at that time an enforcement directorate official has just taken VRS. In fact, his whole family was under surveillance, but he's just taken VRS and he's said to be contemplating, contesting on a BJP ticket in the forthcoming new people and enforcement directorate official and licks on the most high file cases, most high profile cases. The third is of independent journalists, academics, NGOs and other civil society agents under surveillance. This is not very simple at all because what is a democracy, but for NGOs, independent people who come, who are not possibly parts of formal structures or pillars of democracy, but they are part of very important voices and conveyor belts. They are people who convey information from bottom up, who keep vital feedback loops in a democracy alive. And once they are under surveillance, if Bhagat Deep Kang is under surveillance, if independent journalists, editors independent portals, other journalists making important points and who are dissenters who do not necessarily just take a pro-government line. If they are under surveillance, what do you do? You push the chilling effect or comes in, creeps in. And number two, again, information gathered about their personal lives, about their private lives can be used in ways in which they can be compromised, they can be bullied and blackmailed. I'll just give you one example about a Moroccan historian called Mati Munjib. He was targeted using Pegasus. This has also been unveiled by the same international consortium which called Project Pegasus. What agencies in Morocco did was gathered enough evidence about his private life over a year. And then armed intelligence agents raided his home at 9 a.m. one morning and found him and a female friend in the bedroom together. They stripped him naked, arrested him for adultery, which is a crime in Morocco and he spent 10 months in a Casablanca prison. So what you do is you're able to render private personal information and in such a way use it to completely render important vital players of democracy voiceless. So in this sort of big fish surveillance that this government has never denied the undertaking on all these people renders the level playing field inactive. What it does is compromise or have the capacity to compromise independent institutions which make which are really the nuts and bolts of a functioning democracy. They render them inoperational. And number three, absolutely shall we say throttles independent voices and gets people who are important civil society participants, activists, doctors, et cetera silences them either by scaring them as you know that they're being surveilled or finds out so much about them that you're able to choke their voices and fundamentally compromise democracy. That's your big fish surveillance field. A second thing which this government has been doing has been the small fish surveillance.  This is who I vote for. How does it matter if it gets anonymized and used? Well, we know what surveillance Big Tech has been up to. With surveys and snoops on ordinary citizens it gathers all kinds of data on its users their views, location, political and sexual orientation their weaknesses, strengths massive data is at their command. So while I think I'm nothing to hide taken together the summation of all this information from anonymous people from just ordinary, you know voter citizen of India that Big Tech gathers it has huge potential to allow them to put out personalised political ads to essentially divide the electorate to divide them and therefore subvert democracy because you polarise people by personalising things you destroy the basics of democracy. There's a lot that has been written on this and it's clearly a well established fact that Big Tech is able to do that. But where does the Indian government come into all this? Well, what the Indian government has done is contrary to what governments in Europe are doing even in the USA what governments are doing there's no clear relationship of accountability that has been demanded of Big Tech. There is a very neat carrot and stick sort of a passive aggressive relationship with Big Tech. So you kind of have the IT rules where you are mounting this that there is all this pressure on Big Tech to conform but what you also do is make clear that you'll be okay if you know maybe data is shared with these are unknown backroom deals that governments may be having with Big Tech because of this policy. And I say this not because I charge a big conspiracy of the central government being in cahoots with Big Tech but the Wall Street Journal and number of reports have come in which speak of how particularly Facebook the behemoth among Big Tech has been quite kind on the BJP and on the ruling party and has allowed a lot of their posts even if they violate a lot of things that Facebook follows online which it says it follows in other countries and certainly in the USA but they've allowed them to be on so they've been kinder to the BJP even by the looks of it by open available data would suggest that and we have no idea about what the backroom deal is at the back of all this is it to allow Big Tech to make money while they are kind of just dealt with in this with the help of IT rules and so the government is able to combine all the data that it gets from Big Tech along with new rules it has now put in place which is a linking Aadhar with your voter ID and a personal data protection bill which only protects governments and not the average citizen it just allows government to be immune from all regulation on how personal data is collected so by gathering masses of bytes of data of the small fish it is able to actually make sense of the electorate in the way it wants to and slice and dice it and potentially be a threat to democracy in ways that we cannot even imagine now if it has the entire data set from Big Tech and from its own recently really prohibitive and narrowing rules such as tying up election Aadhar with the voter ID then you have a case of surveillance which completely just it's almost as if the hatch is just closing in on you so though small people, small people think that their data doesn't matter but all of this put together gives people who are collecting this, surveilling this an enormous amount of control and a hold on who they are governing and there is no question of a level playing field it distorts democracy beyond comprehension the third what I'd like to believe the third way in which government is going around using surveillance to damage is probably the most sort of is probably the scariest and it's half proven but you just have to look at whatever is available in public domain and how it's being handled to get very scared and very worried about it this is what I call the dark mode way the third way in which surveillance is being used to kind of distort democracy the Bhima Kori Gao case, the BKC case the BK16 as they were called and then the BK15 after the 87 year old Jesuit priest died, there are BK15 this is almost like the canary in the coal mine of India's democracy and we should really care about how that canary is doing the canary in the coal mine is often the canary in the coal mine which if it starts feeling ill earlier people would go and pump in more oxygen to improve the quality of oxygen in the shaft that was the idea that you use the canary in the coal mine to tell you about the health and the wholesomeness of the mine and we should really worry about BKC about lawyers, academics, priests, dissenters, authors being in jail for more than two years two years in a lot of cases without the trial even starting but what to, so this is just another case but what do several of them and their lawyers have in common? Well, they were surveilled via Pegasus before their arrest at that time when their names came forward when some of their lawyers names came forward they were just ordinary lawyers in small towns but it's so transpires now that Pegasus was on their phones before they were arrested and the darker side which is what really makes this kind of surveillance dark mode is what the Washington Post reported in February this year the 10 letters had been deposited on the laptop by clearly a powerful hacker on the laptop of Rona Wilson a daily base rights activist and then another 22 sets of documents were loaded on his laptop it was established by Arsenal a digital forensics firm which is based in Massachusetts USA a respectable firm it has actually looked at two reports and it has concluded that files were planted on the laptop of Rona Wilson and it is on the basis of those very files planted it would appear that Rona Wilson is serving a jail sentence and under the most stringent laws of India so we don't really know because the matter is still to be heard in the Mumbai High Court and they've been to appease I think there's not been a substantive hearing of the matter but to think that it's not just surveillance but somebody, some very powerful hacker has been able to deposit 32 files on the laptop of Rona Wilson and there he is behind bars and for a long time and under the most stringent kind of laws so other than losing this time we've lost Rona Wilson we've lost 14 of these people as being symbols of people who comment on democracy who take positions on democracy who are articulate who can see things who are not known to be supporters of government being put out of action so that's one way in which surveillance can go in and directly attack democratic rights of people their rights but beyond BK15 this speaks for all of us for 1.4 billion for whose rights these people have stood for so I think the kind of scenario that in India we worry about now about surveillance and how states surveillance through use of intrusive technology is kind of marriage with laws and its own data collection its treatment of big tech poses a severe challenge to India so while you have the sort of Turkish business what Turkey does with its internet we have Russia doing its own little it has its own little room and how it functions we have China, the Chinese firewall is discussed but I think India is very sophisticated and very dark surveillance scenario should leave us all worried because it's all happening in the name of democracy in the happening of laws that are clearing parliament and it damages democracy in ways that we can no longer say that how does it matter as apparently the Google founder Eric Schmidt once sort of almost mocking at people who worry about privacy said that if you don't want people to find out you need not be you know you shouldn't be doing something or worse to that effect well as somebody said that most people who say things like it doesn't matter what I do is all in the open why should I care but then the same people get very worried when I ask them to take all their clothes off so I think to not recognize what is private what is personal would be to ignore one of the biggest perils on India's democracy it's a long shadow and we need to really be vigilant and the first step towards being vigilant about it and being able to roll it back is to be really to really understand how it's not just someone else's phone that's being hacked it's not just Facebook some random information that's going out all of this added together the surveillance of big fish surveillance of small fish and dark mode surveillance ought to concern us a lot