Right now there's a lot of backlog in immigration applications specifically for spousal sponsorships and specifically for spousal sponsorships in Quebec. The processing times are going up, however IRCC has implemented a policy where spouses can apply for a visitor visa and there could be a fast turnaround time to be approved. It doesn't necessarily mean that the visitor visa will be approved. It really depends on the officer making the decision and the type of applications you will submit but before you start thinking of filing a spousal sponsorship you really want to speak to an immigration lawyer to understand the processing time, understand if you can come to Canada during the processing time. Are you eligible for a visitor visa? Are you eligible to work in Canada? Because if the processing times are going to be one year two years or three years or maybe more for the applicant to the person being sponsored to become a permanent resident you really want to know ahead what's going to happen so that you can make sure you're not separated or make sure that you're both able to work in the same country.


I gain 10 inches in one video What is good good morning? What is good? Look at this if you're looking at the video podcast I'm in a different studio shout out to my boy my main man Leo for hooking me up with this studio while I'm out of town I'm out because of the hurricane hurricanes crawling. It's literally crawling poor Bahamas first things first the Bahamas I'm I'm sorry. I don't know I wish What I'm gonna do on this podcast on this YouTube channel when when I know how to do it when I figure it out Maybe in the next couple days. I'm gonna do some kind of What do you call it donations, but fundraising fundraising whether it's shirts probably not but probably just someplace You can donate so we can use the power of our good energy to help them out over there because this is really bad It's sat on the Bahamas It just sat there and dumped and it's just under water basically and so it's kind of missing Florida So we got really lucky over here, but we got to help where we can so just stay tuned for that Definitely want to help out as much as we can so just get your your $5 ready or the next couple days save up $2 Whatever you can do so we can help out because that is just way too much Other than that. Yeah, I'm off.  I'm like, oh wait I can actually take this step without pain and I was like, oh my god. Here we go progress is In to inch on track. It's been forever. I told myself two weeks. I'm gonna give it of no jumping It's been a week and a it's been a week and a half and it's not easy I'm dying my my diet feels weird I feel like I'm working out well, but I feel like I'm losing balance by the day and it sucks but what I wanted to mention was While the hurricane is going on I can't get groceries that powers out I mean the power might go out so I can't really plan for groceries I Can't really work out my normal workout. So I don't want to eat too much I can't really do as much as much explosive activity because I can't even run. So what I'm doing when I'm taking this time I'm always finding a way to go next level. I'm taking this time to go full detox mode I haven't even had coffee this morning. Can you tell haven't even had coffee? I'm talking this fast What could happens if I take coffee if I take a break from coffee every single day I usually have right before this podcast It's good for sponsors because they see it every single day and it's good for your health Antioxidants different things like that and it gets your blood flow and it's good for the Saciation of your hunger when you're intermittent fasting, which I do every single day But I'm taking a break taking a break from it taking a break from everything I only take two supplements amino acids protein and that's it creatine But I don't even know creatine is anything. I think it helps me hold water which I need By the way, this mic is like dipping down.  So yeah, I'm taking a little detox I might have coffee later today, but I'm trying the podcast without coffee Did I sleep eight friggin hours because the storm is very cozy? Yes Did I dream about jokes and I was on stage and I had a dream that I was in a car dealership with Ocho Cinco yes, and he was complaining that he wanted the car for free even though he's a millionaire and my dream was One bad review of some of like a car dealership and they go downhill And I'm thinking that's just from one person like if they say like yo these people nickel and dime me for everything I did and that next and like and next thing you know like that's what they pride of themselves on this customer service And then next the next person sees that review first. They don't come to me snowball effect They got no customers But imagine if the famous person in my dream I'm thinking this in my sleep I'm thinking of this and I'm thinking of Ocho Cinco like I want this car for free He's like they're like it's worth 20 grand still you still got to pay off 20 grand He said I don't care.  I'm not paying any more for this I'm gonna and it blows up social media. It's like like what do they do give me a free car. What am I talking about? I don't know.  I put it every episode I gained 10 inches in three weeks. Wait. What was it? No three years. I meant to say ready. This is the intro What's it called I gained 10 inches in two years. Let's go That's gonna be the intro or I'll try what wait so what it is is I gained 10 inches I went from 30 to 40. I made a viral video I wanted to go viral so I made one and that's how viral videos work You make them and they go viral when you want them you just have to put the formula out there And that's completely nonsense. I'm just hoping I've never had a viral video yet I think my biggest video is like actually I think it might be like up there. Let's actually check Some of my videos have been pretty big the biggest one is that one of me The Dunking six games six game dunks where I made one is a pretty awful day. I was left right back then I got a I got to get a way better video than that, but so yeah, I've had no real viral videos How do I even check my own videos? So but yesterday I did it for to help build my channel and I think it's really good information because from 30 to 40 My you just watch it But my journey was pretty standard but all I did was mainly jump switch plants a bunch of times get injured a bunch of times and Learned so much. So I'm gonna make a part two. That's more about the details of what I've learned I'm probably gonna make it part two. I say that but it's just like I don't enjoy doing it But if you haven't seen that video yet, check that out It took me a while to make and you can see my whole journey my all my milestones I made from when I started the very first start day even further back when I was five years old and All the way up until when I hit a 40 inch vertical measuring and I explained the whole thing Okay, 332,000 views has that six game dunk video and my how to jump video my first ever vlog 165 that's not bad and then one from not even that long ago 74,000 one month ago So maybe today's let's see what today's is that Almost 5,000 views are ready. Let's go how I increase my vertical 10 inches. What should what should what's a catchy intro for This one ready? So you guys are in on the joke how I increased by 10 inches Oh I got it ready. I increased my vertical by 10 inches in one video Because it's like one video, but it's like a joke. It's a joke. I like jokes. I like jokes. How long is this podcast been ready? What's happening? That's it So, yeah, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do my open mic night tomorrow night because I'm out of town I don't think they're gonna have it because it's supposed to hit Orlando tomorrow Prayers out to everybody who's get stuck in the storm. It's been rough. It's real I was sitting in the park. This is what I ended on some spirituality I was sitting in the park yesterday because if you watch my story if you watch everything like I said All you do how to do is enjoy more. I'm posting on every goddamn social media Should I make an app for my own name so everything's in one place? You let me know. I think I want to do that I Posted on Twitter as friggin Sunshower. I posted on my Instagram. I woke up to our Sunshower It was like super bright and sunny, but it was like raining. It was very weird and then On top of that later in the day, I was about to go outside and get some sun Just walk around get some exercise because the gym was closed. I lose my mind when the gyms close I can't stretch. I don't know. I like going I love going there I could do so many different things and it by going there. It makes me in the mood to work to the sweat So I was like, I'm gonna get out of my house pouring instantly pouring I'm like, okay, great. It's gonna rain for the rest of eternity because it's a hurricane Then all of a sudden like an hour later. It just is done. It's completely sunny So I go for a walk. I'm walking outside and like everything's desolate. Everybody left There's just trees blowing around.  It's like sunny and the trees are just sound I love the sound of trees belong if you can't tell and it's just it feels like the earth is alive I'm just sitting in there. I'm not doing anything. I'm just absorbing it and Actually, maybe I'll put that video. I took a video from that park I'll put it at the end of this podcast and I just sat there absorbing the wind and the energies and then I'm like No, but like there's a hurricane coming like if I was if I had no technology if I had nothing I would think it's just the most beautiful day and just be loving it and then the next day a hurricane could just destroy all these trees And it's just weird. It's weird to think that the earth is just moving and we can't control it and we can't stop hurricanes It's it's nuts and it's just weird also that it's I think it was because I knew the hurricane was coming But like sitting there is almost like an ominous feeling. You're like it's beautiful, but I know danger is coming Anyway date the Hurricanes are nuts because the wind can just pick up at any time it literally could just when the hurricane sears Okay, here comes the strong winds just blows everything. You can't do anything. You can't do it. It's just earth It's just nature and weather.   All right. Oh, yeah on this day in history, baby, let's do it September 3rd. Oh, we go we got a we got a single bit triple digitor 301 San Marino one of the smallest nations in the world in the world's oldest republic still in existence found by St. Marina's Doesn't say what happened today. I guess it just was founded today doesn't even say that though Today in film 1951 TV soap opera search for tomorrow days on debuts on CBS, okay I don't think anybody that listens to this podcast has ever heard that or will ever watch a single minute of that show search For tomorrow speaking of shows Mind hunter has been awesome. It's about the minds of serial killers It's super cool to see them pioneering that whole science shit of how like people's minds were I love that It's a really good show. I suggest it and recommend it. What was the other show I watched? I Can't recall okay today in sport Giuseppe Nino in 1950 for Rena Giuseppe Nino for Rena wins on inaugural Formula one world drivers championship CJ I'm sorry, but I have to say this CJ's into racing heavy. I don't know if he wants me to debut it But here it is dude. I'm excited to see what CJ does with racing. He loves gaming and racing so stay tuned for that and That's for you CJ that update is for you I'm thinking about you when I say that because I think about my friends and I love you guys today in music 1912 Arnold Dude Tell me how this is not Arnold Schwarzenegger says Arnold Schoenberg's Foon Archestruke five pieces of orchestra premieres in London and promenade concert concert You can't have a name. This is Arnold and the next three letters are SCHO or SCH and not be Schwarzenegger. There's only one Arnold show. Okay, and it's not Arnold schnardberg's Schoenberg's Schoenberg's and his friggin orchestra was called foof or Struck and that's how we're gonna end it and that's how we're gonna do it and the dunk lifer of the day is Let's see Let's see Not what's it called? Dld baby, let's go my dude ad Brad whitey I'm pretty sure this is you someone commented on his video that he's the British Steven Selly So I thought that was hilarious now. Let's go to the quick last dunk life for the day See if I see any funny comments on My latest video, which is how I gained 10 inches in one video. Oh, man. I gained 10 inches in one video Maybe that's it. Okay This is this was I got to address this someone said We need a workout program what you did in these videos aren't really helpful everyone keeps stuff like workouts a secret This this there is no secret and that's that Programs are trying to make money and I think they're great and like for me I made a program to help a lot of people I can't reach that need a set program.  All the information is on my YouTube. You're looking for a program because you want the secret I'm sorry, bud, but there's no secrets You got a work work work work work ask dunkers what they do and they say work work work work work And then when you're done with that More work and that's it.  We don't need you bro. We were good on our own We got plenty of water much love to the Bahamas and much love to everybody That's gonna donate because I know you guys are gonna help me out with this fundraiser I'm gonna make it sick and we're gonna have a lot of fun with it. I'll find a way to make it funny You know, I just yell at you and give you energy. Let's go Toodaloo. God damn. That was a good outro


Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Ladies and gentlemen, it's my honor to welcome our official party, Secretary of the Navy, the Honorable Kenneth Braithwaite, the Undersecretary of the Navy, the Honorable Mr. Slavonic, and Director of Naval History and Heritage Command, Rear Admiral Retired Sam Cox. Ladies and gentlemen, please stand for the Plain of the National Anthem. Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated. Good afternoon. I'm Pat Burns, the Deputy Director of Naval History and Heritage Command. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the National Museum of the United States Navy Campus Program announcement. This announcement is the first step, public step, towards a realization of a new Smithsonian-class Navy Museum to be built here in Washington, D.C. We look forward to sharing this exciting journey with all of you. At this time, I am honored to introduce the Director of Naval History and Heritage Command, Rear Admiral Sam Cox, U.S. Navy, Retired. His 37 years of service as an intelligence officer culminated in command of the Office of Naval Intelligence and directorship of the National Maritime Intelligence Integration Office. He is the 14th Director of Naval History and Heritage Command and Curator of the Navy since 2014. Ladies and gentlemen, Admiral Cox. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests. It is a great honor for me to be here today. I think I'm going to take a little bit of a risk here and go without. I want to recognize distinguished guests, Secretary of the Navy, the Honorable Kenneth Braith, Undersecretary of the Navy, Honorable Gregory Sabonic, Vice Admiral Yancey Lindsey. And I think if I look around the crowd, I see a Rear Admiral Corka, Rear Admiral Joiner, Rear Admiral Lottie, Rear Admiral Retired, Massel, and not least, my boss, the Director of Navy Staff, Mr. Hypeley. So again, welcome and taking time from your busy schedules to be with us today. On July 2018, the Washington Post expressed, wrote a review of this museum that you're in now, describing it as tough to visit but absolutely jam-packed with fascinating stuff. In the headline read, DC's Secret Museum is amazing if you can figure out how to get in. And therein lays the crux of the problem that we're trying to solve with the new museum. In a democracy, the military services are accountable to the citizens of the United States to show what we have done with our tax dollars and with the lives of their sons and their daughters. And for legitimate security reasons, this museum, as fascinating as it may be, is not meeting the mission of telling the Navy's story to the American people in a compelling and accurate way. If the Navy does not have the support of the American people, then we will not have the support of Congress and we will not have the Navy the nation needs to deal with the challenges and threats in the future. So the National Museum of the United States Navy needs to be a key part of the mission to inform the citizens of the United States Navy why they need a Navy. There are other factors as well. The building you are now in was built as a gun factory. It was never intended to be a museum. In 1961, when Admiral Arleigh Burke came back from a trip to Scandinavia, he was somewhat chagrin that Norway and Sweden had great Navy museums and we had none. So he directed that a new museum be that we have one. After the usual bureaucratic infighting about who should pay and where to go, Admiral Burke went, see that gun factory there, put it there. And he solved that argument. And that was established the Navy History Display Center intended to be a temporary home for fascinating stuff. And here we've been ever since. The environment is actually not conducive to be a museum. So if you go around, you'll see places where we've taken items off of display because they're being inexorably destroyed by the environment, the humidity, the temperature fluctuations, the ultraviolet light. I can't cover those over because they're historic and historic preservation people won't let us. So our mission here at the Naval History and Heritage Command is to preserve and present an accurate history of the United States Navy to the American public, to naval leadership, to the fleet, and our sailors and veterans and their families. Our vision is to enhance the warfighting readiness of the United States Navy by using the power of history and heritage to pass on hard won lessons to foster unit combat cohesion through the inspirational examples and to foster the continuing support of the American people to ensure that we have a strong future Navy. We're also driven by the moral imperative to inspire current and future generations of sailors and to let those who serve today know that their valor and sacrifice will not be forgotten. It will be always remembered, honored, and valued. The new National Museum of the U.S. Navy campus that will inform, engage, inspire, and bring together Americans of all walks of life here in our nation's capital is indispensable to fulfilling our mission. Particularly as we reenter another Arab great power competition, the nation needs access personal and virtual to a world class museum that tells the story of the Navy, its sailors, and its historic importance in establishing and defending the American way of life for over 250 years. I am honored to introduce the 77th Secretary of the Navy, the Honorable Kenneth Braithwaite. Sir. Ladies and gentlemen, the Honorable Kenneth J. Braithwaite was sworn in as the 77th Secretary of the Navy May 29th, 2020. He previously served as a 31st U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Norway. Secretary Braithwaite graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1984 and was commissioned as an ensign in the United States Navy. In 1995, he earned a master's degree in government administration, graduating with honors from the University of Pennsylvania Fells School of Government. After serving as a naval aviator and public affairs officer, Secretary Braithwaite left active duty in 1993, continuing service in the Navy Reserves and retiring as a rear admiral in 2011. In his civilian career, he served as Executive Director and Senior Policy Advisor to the United States Senator Arlen Specter, as an executive for Assession Health, the largest healthcare provider in the nation, and as the Executive Director of Delaware Valley Healthcare Council. Prior to serving as United States Ambassador, he was Chief Executive of VHA, Mid-Atlantic, a hospital group purchasing and performance improvement company, where he helped to lead the merger and acquisition of other companies to become Vizient Health Inc. Mr. Secretary, thank you for being with us today and for your tireless support of naval history and heritage. Ladies and gentlemen, the 77th Secretary of the United States Navy, Kenneth Braithwaite. At this time, I would like to invite the sailors and officers of NHAC to join the Secretary on this stage for the unveiling of the artist's vision of the National Museum of the United States Navy Campus. Mr. Secretary, I'll give you a countdown from five. Five, four, three, two, one. Ladies and gentlemen, the future campus of the National Museum of the United States Navy. Mr. Secretary, the floor is yours. It was an overcast day in October of 1921. Four caskets were lined up on the pier in La Havre, France. Each contained the remains of a brave young American fallen in the battles of World War I, their names known only to God. Sergeant Edward Younger, a wounded and decorated combat veteran, was selected to place a sprig of white flowers on one of the caskets. That was the casket that was lifted on to the deck of USS Olympia, an iconic Navy veteran of the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898 and the flagship of the only ever Admiral of the Navy, George Dewey. The sailors of Olympia stood watch over that fallen American throughout the long journey home. And they transferred him with dignity and honor right here at the Washington Navy Art. His final resting place, a tomb of the unknown soldier. In which he is now joined in Arlington Cemetery by the unknowns from both World War II and Korea, each having sailed home aboard a U.S. Navy warship. Ladies and gentlemen, this is hollowed ground. The stories of these stone walkways are the stories of America, the countless sailors, Marines and civilians who placed service above self to protect our nation through every perilous fight since the War of 1812. We have to tell and retell their stories to remind ourselves of the true price of freedom and prepare for the challenges that are surely to come. We have to tell the story of the original Sloup of War USS Wasp built here in 1806 and many other great ships that set sail from the Washington Navy Art over the last 200 and plus years to place our Navy and our nation upon the world stage. We have to tell the story of the innovations in steam and gunnery nuclear propulsion that were developed right here, securing the critical edge to save our nation and our world. Most of all, on this 245th birthday of our United States Navy, we have to tell the story of the people, the valiant sailors who took to the sea, to the sky beneath the waves and onto the shore to protect our nation and our world from tyranny. Many of them never to return home again, living on only in our memories with gratitude. These sailors sailed upon our earliest warships like the original frigate constellation which spent time at this yard during its storied history. They sailed on her successor, the Sloup of War I visited in Baltimore last week, which carried the flag of our nation from the Civil War through World War II. And they sailed on the mighty supercarrier, Constellation, CV 64, throughout the twilight struggle of the Cold War and through the global war on terror. Every generation of our Navy forges another link in the chain of our American story, culture, heritage and pride and service above self, our critical elements of our Navy combat capability. Our course forward can often be discovered in the lessons of our wake. Our future success depends on leveraging the stories of those who sailed into harm's way to teach and inspire the service of those who wear the uniform today. That's why I chose the name Constellation for our newest class of frigates last week. And I intend to continue using my ship naming privilege to highlight the past in order to inform the fleet of the future. So today I have two more announcements of ship naming. The first honors a great leader and innovative thinker, a naval aviator and lifelong gentleman who has done so much to strengthen our fleet, particularly through his service as the 65th Secretary of the Navy. He led the efforts to win the Cold War by building our Navy to 600 ships. So to remind us of the constant need for maritime strength and global vigilance, it is my honor to announce that DDG-137 will be named USS John F. Layman. The second name honors the undersea warriors who endured great hardships and dangers to secure victory during World War II. One of these storied vessels was USS Barr, SSN-220, which sank 17 enemy vessels, including aircraft carrier, and even landed troops to blow up a train on the Imperial Japanese homeland. She was honored with both a presidential unit citation from President Franklin Roosevelt and a Congressional Medal of Honor was awarded to her commanding officer, Commander Eugene Fluckey. And so today in grateful memory of the silent service sailors of World War II and what the record of this great ship meant to the entire Navy, I am announcing that the next attack submarine, SSN-804, will be named USS Barr. As these vessels take our history to the world, we need to ensure that our culture and heritage is alive right here at home as well. The most important word in the title of our nation is United, the United States of America. And one of the things that unites the American people is the story of their Navy as a national institution, whether or not they've had any personal connection through service or through family. It is vital that the American public understand the importance of a strong and viable naval force. As a maritime nation, our future depends upon it, but it goes even deeper. The Navy's story is the story of America. When young girls in school consider a future in computing, I want them to think of Admiral Grace Hopper. When Americans speak out for racial justice, I want them to remember the service of Dory Miller, Jesse Brown, and the Golden Thirteen. When they sing the Star-Spangled Banner, I want them to think of our sailors who doled the British Royal Navy on the waters of the nearby Chesapeake. I want to make the Navy a part of the daily consciousness of our American people. And I want that to start here at the Washington Navy yard. When the American people walk past these walls, I want them to think about Mordechry Booth, rescuing the powder that would help slow the advance of the British forces as they moved on Washington in 1814. I want them to see five of the original six frigates laid up in ordinary anchor right here behind us on the Anacostia River. And when they go to a ballgame at Nationals Park, I want them to think of the Hall of Famers, Bob Feller, and Ted Williams, who put their professional baseball careers on hold to serve in the Navy and the Marine Corps. It is our duty to make the history of the Navy come alive for them all. As we hear at Admiral Cox State, for generations, the National Museum of our United States Navy has done exactly that, honoring our history and heritage as we continue to look to the future. But that story has mostly been hidden here behind the walls of this storied Navy yard, out of reach to the majority of Americans. So today, we will begin the process of reaching beyond these walls to take the story of our Navy to the people that we serve, to illustrate the glory that they achieved, to remind all of us of the service and sacrifice our sailors have made for 245 years. On behalf of the United States Navy, with gratitude to Mayor Bowser, Congresswoman Holmes Norton, and every one of our great partners, it is my honor to announce plans for this new campus, for the National Museum of the United States Navy. The new museum campus will serve as an educational, inspirational, cultural, and ceremonial center for those who have served and are serving in the Navy today. The exhibits in this advanced museum will demonstrate the critical role the Navy has played in the defense of our nation. Exhibits will bring to life the human experience of serving on a U.S. Navy ship. They will deliver leading edge engagement to amplify Navy priorities and operations. They will showcase the history and heritage of all Navy communities, and they will create a memorial to the service and sacrifice of all American sailors. Our intent is to complete this project in time for the 250th birthday of the United States Navy, and to become an integral part of the neighborhood that bears the Navy's name and the nation that stands as its proudest legacy. I'd like to thank those who have stepped forward to make this day possible, especially Admiral Fallon, Admiral Cox, Admiral Masso, and our Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Gilday. And I thank all who will continue to work to build this great museum campus as a testament to the service and sacrifice of all who have served in the United States Navy. And finally, to every sailor afloat and ashore around the world today, to every Navy family that serves at their side, and everyone who has ever worn the Navy uniform or supported our mission, happy birthday. And may God continue to bless our Navy and our nation, long into the future. Thank you all very much. Mr. Secretary, Mr. Secretary, at this time, I would like to have a photo with the official party and then a photo with the sailors and officers for the 245th birthday. And then finally, a third photo with the flag and SES and stakeholders.


All right, welcome back to the SuperCloud 6, AI innovators segment here. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. This episode of SuperCloud is really focused on the innovators in AI. People making it happen, the newsmakers, the builders, the creators, the practitioners. And this segment, Alyssa Visnick, co-founder and CEO of Y Labs, ylabs.ai is featured. Doing some very innovative things around our favorite topic, observability for AI, governance for AI, how do you scale AI? And well-funded company, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much for having me, John, really excited to be here. Alyssa, you guys are doing some really cool work. I want to go over real quickly what you guys do, but the ML ops market is becoming AI ops. You guys are in the middle of the Gen AI wave. Right on that growth curve, we covered the news of Lankit was released in 2023, open source project you guys released. Really kind of creating that momentum. You're former Amazonian on the ML team back in the day. So, you know, your roots are there. So as you come into this next wave, the Gen AI opens up massive growth as the applications are starting to come out. You're starting to see a lot more activity around setting up infrastructure, standing up applications, starting to people see some point use cases now out there, some point solutions. And everyone's going there, but now you got to stand up and run stuff on it. So you have to build the infrastructure and have the operations. So here we go again. Another operational challenge, yet a huge opportunity. You guys are in the middle of it. Take us through what your vision is for AI and what YLabs does. Yeah, it's indeed very, very exciting time for the entire industry and community with the excitement around Gen AI and its potential transformative nature for every enterprise, the operations and you know, getting value out of this amazing technologies up of mind for every enterprise. So to talk about how, you know the operations are transforming, I want to start with a big picture. And if we think about the enterprise AI stack and what happened in the last year with the introduction of LLMs, we can see how the AI stack is very rapidly evolving. There are a few things that are happening. The model building has completely changed. Previously, there will be a lot of resources needed to build a model. There were data science teams that were created around each particular task for civilization, marketing, et cetera. Now with foundation models and how they're becoming more and more common across different use cases, there's less building and more tuning. And the power of creating AI applications is now in the hands of any developer. It's no longer kind of closed in and within your data science or ML team. So it's becoming a lot more accessible to build AI powered LLM powered applications. Now the deployment part became easier over the past few quarters I would say because the big cloud companies and kind of infrastructure providers invested an immense amount of money into making deployment as easy as possible. And there are new tools that have launched like lane chain that makes the entire application building much, much easier. However, the resulting application is incredibly complex and really hard to operate and no longer has the visibility that we want to see when we're talking about observability for traditional applications, non-LM non-AI applications. So it's easier to build AI. The resulting applications are a lot more complex and a lot less transparent. That's where we're kind of stuck right now. And the role of Y-Labs here is to simplify the operation part. We believe that the main kind of blocker in wide enterprise AI adoption is an ability to standardize operations starting with observability and then go in into security which enables GarGrayl and then go in into and simplifying debugging and gathering more data for optimizing and improving the model. So Y-Labs kind of brings all of those activities around operating which starts with observability together and we were the release of Lankit last year which has gotten amazing traction we're doing around 30,000 downloads a month and major Fortune 500s are using Lankit in their LM applications for enabling transparency. Lankit is the starting point for that. And this year we've been expanding rapidly introducing new products like GarGrayls, tracing of the complex LM applications to further improve that observability and control. So I would say it's super exciting time. Enterprises, every Fortune 500 has some kind of OKR to launch a Gen AI powered application on their roadmap this year or multiple. Operations are still hard but with the products that we're putting forward we believe they'll become increasingly easier and the community is all kind of gathered together around making sure that LLMs can be adopted rapidly and safely which I think is on everybody's mind. It's one of those things where the CEO or the execs we need to get into that business immediately we're going to be left out of the cold we're going to be in the wrong side of history so it's a little bit of hype there, I love that hype however the hype is matching with reality starting to see benefits. So the question I have for you is I'm just curious, are you guys more like developer focused with the open source growing it up, bottoms up, getting in with the developer teams or are you targeting much more of an enterprise ops team because with, or both because obviously with the LAN kit the data dogs of the worlds come in start from the developer and go up. We also believe that developers will dictate the standards so that's important. So the question is are you guys doing both or more leaning into the open source just kind of seed the base and organically grow the market? So we're doing both and the reason for that is that first of all, you know the developers are dictating what gets adopted and it's very important to have open source tools to give developers the power to evaluate and decide and assess whether the tool fits their needs. However, it's equally as important to have an enterprise motion in place because when it comes to enabling observability for AI applications, the deployment involves touching companies most proprietary, most confidential data which is the data that goes through the model inference through the AI inference. And in order for that process to go smoothly and we want to make sure that as we're introducing safety and control into our applications we're not taking safety out from, you know the overall kind of IT teams policies. So in order for that to go smoothly we have to engage very closely with the security team. So that becomes an enterprise motion. Essentially we're helping align all of the stakeholders from hands on keyboard developers who need to evaluate the tools all the way to CISOs because, you know, security is a super top of mind topic for everyone. And now with LLEM, CISOs get involved in the purchasing decision as well. Though in a way it's a very top job, lots of stakeholders but then this is the state of where we're at right now and I think things are evolving pretty rapidly. I do think that eventually the way the space is going to evolve is very similar to how Datadog took observability to market which is through bottoms up through standards created by practitioners and through the tools adopted first by practitioners. What's interesting about what you just mentioned which I think is notable is that the highlighting that both the organic and the pre-existing assets that you have to touch being proprietary and probably sensitive data but also strategic data, pre-existing apps because Generai brings a home of the level of scale and benefit to that. So it's not like, hey go build an app and we'll roll it out and test it out. This is a, bring this in main streets you got to kind of do both you got to get the developers comfortable with the technology but also how do you build it? So I think that speaks to the opportunity clearly. That's why Generai is going to be huge. The question I have for you is do you see this becoming a whole new infrastructure? Does AI have its own operational operating system? Is it going to be another abstraction layer? We hear neural nets, we see graph databases you're starting to see a lot more LLMs interacting with other small language models some call them proprietary sovereign models whatever you want to call them you now have model integration happening. So you're starting to see this wave of hmm, it may look differently. So the question is, do you see that happening? And then if you do, how do you run observability on an infrastructure that's not yet defined or is being retooled in real time? Ooh, this is a tough question and I think it's tough not just for me but for our entire community to answer. You're introducing it kind of a very or you're bubbling up a very important topic which is the infrastructure is evolving rapidly and it hasn't finished evolving. So it's going to be evolving this year and next year and probably a few years from now. So how do you adopt to that? I think the first thing is it's too early to tell whether there's going to be, you know a completely separate kind of AI IT organization that will come to exist. I'm not sure if it's smart to separate those two concerns because at the end of the day it's all software. So my bet would be that essentially the IT organization is going to evolve and everybody is going to get very AI smart. So every IT practitioner would be as comfortable using and operating the AI side of the technology stack as they are operating containerized deployments or microservices, you know or as we've been evolving through like what software means we started with software being something that's pretty static on your box under your desk to something that software is ever evolving which is like what you experience with an LLM application and we have adapted through all of the cycles of like moving to the cloud, moving to a container as deployment and IT got caught up and expanded their capabilities. So I don't think AI is going to introduce anything more kind of revolutionary that what have been going through the IT organization evolution so far. But I do think that the needs to adapt for the IT organization at enterprise they need to become very comfortable with both the tools that the AI technology is bringing into the IT infrastructure world as well as getting comfortable with the AI technology as a whole. How do you operate? What are some gotchas? How is observability for AI applications different from observability for application performance monitoring, for example getting smart about that I think is the most important thing and something that everybody should start doing yesterday. Allison, you know, your point about the software is key because I think that's the end game, right? It's all software. So AI will bring on new capabilities in here. So you're going to have a probability some adaptive, some smart AI so people will be operating with humans and AI working together. And that's been discussed a lot. So I think it's still an open question we're going to keep monitoring but I think that's the question is what does the infrastructure look like? Now that was a lead into the next question which is observability because generative AI is generating new things. You see that today with current LLMs whether it's a hallucination or the answer is different every time. How do you log that? The good answers in. So let's just say you got prompting with responses, which we see today and then you got reasoning which is inference based, kind of kind of. So you got response from prompts and more prompts and then you got reasoning a little bit a little deeper thinking. As those things come together that's going to be an observability challenge. Let's call that down the road. How do companies today start taking baby steps to start figuring out what is their observability posture? Is it gettable? Are they in position? What's your vision on the roadmap of observability knowing that if something pops out a good answer you want to save it or log it and then did it happen again? So this is like an open question because like I can see a lot of complexity there. Yes, and this is exactly the type of challenge that we're tackling. So first I'm going to talk a little bit more abstractly from what organizations are doing today when it comes to getting smart about observability for a lot of applications and AI, gen AI applications in general. So there are kind of two angles to it. There's the quality angle, right? The user sends a prompt the application comes back with a response. Is this a good response or not? How do you decide that? Is this a response that you can even return back to the user? Because if we're talking about highly regulated industries for example, your chatbot cannot return an answer to the question about any kind of legal advice, medical advice, marriage advice, you don't want to get into any kind of legal gray area there. So how do you control what your LLM can respond? What kind of questions can the LLM respond to and how do you control the quality? That's like one area of operations that I think enterprises are grappling with. The second area is security. So LLMs and gen AI applications open up a whole new set of security challenges that we haven't solved before. And how do you, those include kind of how do you identify prompt injections, jail breaks or any kind of adversarial engagement from the user side with your LLM application? And there I would say the all last top 10 for a large language model has been kind of leading the way with the recommendations of what can be tracked. So given these two areas, what do organizations practically do today? I would say the focus right now is figuring out what to measure and how to measure it consistently. So if we're talking about quality and the performance of the LLMs oftentimes enterprises want to measure the chance of hallucinations, the relevance of the responses to the prompts, particular topics that are discussed within both the prompts and the responses from LLMs measuring that and tracking that over time. So with Y Labs, one of the things we do is we have what's called a guardrail which allows organizations to define policies and then track prompts and responses with respect to those defined policies. Practically what it does, I'll give you kind of a very, very simple example. If there's a given a prompt, let's say we're talking about topics. Given a prompt, we would extract the types of topics that are covered in the prompt. So the interesting topics could be like a legal conversation for example or health advice conversation or discount conversation which is top of mind for airlines lately. So we would extract that information that would essentially decorate or label the prompt with these tags, policy tags and we'll do the same thing for responses. So now our users have a set of prompts, basically blobs of text and responses blobs of text which are a lot more consumable by observability analytics because they're labeled with tags that describe whether they contain information that is prohibited by the policies or contain the information that the operational team wants to watch. And that turns them into essentially a really big database that you can then mine for tags and do various types of alerts and analytics and then use that information to further improve your customer experience. That's the focus that we have today at YLabs with some of the new tools that we're bringing to market. Well, I really appreciate your time. I know you're busy running a company, building a company. The industry needs a platform, agnostic AI monitoring solution that can run across multiple clouds, Edge, no matter where the models are and I think that's going to be key but also models start to work with each other and I really appreciate you taking the time. The last minute we have put a plug in for the company. What are you guys doing now?  Absolutely. So YLabs is growing continuously. One of the big focus hiring focus areas is go-to-market team. We're always looking for amazing solutions, architects and sales people. If you have experience with AI that's an extra gold star on our side. And most importantly, we are a open source for a standard creating company. So the feedback from the community on the standards that we have for YLabs being the standard for traditional predictive ML and lane kit being the standard for generative applications. Having feedback on that, having community engagement on that is the way we grow and bring further benefits not just to the enterprises that are buying YLabs but to the entire community. So we'd love community engagement on that and discussions on how we take the operations and observability to the next level, the one that has a lot of generative AI applications. Alyssa, thank you for being part of theCUBE's AI innovators show. We appreciate the work that you do and it's going to be evolving fast. So we need to get that observability and then this generative AI market is going to be hot. So thanks for taking the time. Excellent. Thank you so much. Okay, we'll be back with more SuperCloud 6 coverage here in Palo Alto. I'm John for your host state with us. We'll be right back.


Hey Chuck Schumann with Oxmore Toyota doing a quick little how-to on how to use the middle information display on your Toyota Now we're in a high-lander, but this applies mostly to every Toyota that we sell so real quick I want to show you this map here. There's a picture of me looking skinny The middle information display only shows one thing on the screen, but it has all this information contained So there's a driver information, which is this symbol you'll have a compass navigation audio information Safety your lane departure dynamic radar cruise control and then alerts from the car low fuel low oil Low tire pressure maintenance needed etc And then all your settings are over here. You got the universal, you know gear So this little map if you wanted to take a screenshot of this helps you navigate through this Now the way to navigate the middle information display between the speedometer there Is this these buttons here on your steering wheel now this is directional So this goes across the headings and this goes down into the different headings for the different settings This is your back button if you get stuck Usually in the settings area and this is your home button So for example if you're all the way over here on your safety information and you want to go back to see You know what your fuel Distance to empty is you can hit the back button go down a few times and you'll be at the fuel reset Again, your home button is always going to take you to Driver info the first page And then you've got your safety buttons here as well. So in this mid if you look at the screen here I'm going to navigate through so we're on driver information You can see by the eye And so this is your fuel range when we got 13 miles to go before empty This is our fuel efficiency. This is your eco indicator And then over here on the right, we've got the compass if you have navigation going You can get your next turn on the second page of this by hitting down your audio information. You can actually select Audio source and a preset right there from your mid Turn off my morning jacket And then your settings here This is all your safety information. This is how you adjust the speed If you want it to be kilometers instead of mileage, etc All your safety settings are there This is where you get your warnings and on certain things will be other tabs as well This one's the auto stop start that's available on certain highlanders Hope you found this helpful. If you need anything at all come and see us at oxmortoyota


Coming up, bad news for savers as even those with high interest savings accounts are seeing their money disappear thanks to inflation. But first, we'll detail every possible thing you could die from. He's a rational investor, dividend, digestor, save some of his paycheck just like all his ancestors. Him looking for high yields, that's never the case. He's seeking 6% returns, slow and steady wins the race. When he checks his accounts just to see what they're fielding, it's like driving in Maryland, ain't nobody yielding. What is he to do? He shouldn't be in a drought, so he visits his advisor just to sort it all out. Inflation's higher than your bond rate, that's what I was fearing.  That's not very funny. What would you like me to do?  We're all out of fiat. Can you take trillions of these and go and make a zero? We'd pay our debts in our currency that might be unfurled if it's no longer the reserve currency of the world. Confidence in the dollar is permanent. Just ask any scholar.


Hello everyone, my name is Lorraine Smith and I'm a researcher in the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Sydney and today I'll be talking to you about the different levels of consent that we can obtain from our participants of our in-depth qualitative research studies that we conduct for our website Health Talk Australia and how we can ensure that people have a level of choice about the extent to which they would like their data as well as their identity shared with the public. So I'll be taking people through just a quick tour of the Health Talk Australia website and explaining how our research is just a very standard qualitative research, the usual rigorous and systematic methods and how we use the analyses of these data to populate our website and it provides so it provides evidence-based information and support to the general public as well as healthcare professionals I might add and so and then I'll be moving on to the the different levels of consent around copyright of the video and audio recorded interviews that we conduct.


This is our special called budget workshop led by deputy city manager Mark McDaniel, and I will turn things over to him Thank you, mayor. I'm gonna turn over to Christiane just a moment, but I wanted to say some introductory remarks So We talked to you all about having some many budget work sessions Early on in the process as opposed to waiting until the proposed budget comes out And so that's that's what this is all about this first one though is going to really talk more about How we put the budget together so that everybody starting from the same point and how we do this So we're going to get a little bit into the weeds about our process And then we're also going to take you through a an example of a department that we're putting through the party based budgeting right now environmental services Future workshops in the one hour that we'll try to schedule. We'll do a deeper dive on individual other individual departments But you're going to get see just kind of how the You know sausage is made a little bit in terms of how we put the budget together We have three of these already scheduled. We will schedule more But we only have those three schedules so far so stay tuned on the additional Budget sessions and also if there's particular departments that you want to go, you know deeper in in terms of understanding Let us know what those departments are We make sure that we schedule them because we've got 26 departments And I think it's going to be hard to fit all of those in but we were sure want to fit those in that you all want to see the Most so with that I'll turn over to Christian Christian Thank You mark and it's Christian's getting started just a reminder. This is something new We're doing this year out of response for Management is doing out of response to our comments after last budget. So use these wisely I know that we all get tired at meetings But use the hour and then also provide them feedback as mark just asked for because of these will only be as good as we make them Christian. Thank you. Yes, you took the words right out of my mouth both of you So we know I want to acknowledge. I know it's been a long day Especially for some people who have been here since the EMS meeting this morning, but we hope this can be helpful Speaking on behalf of the lab We are really excited for your excitement in engaging more robustly and earlier in the process And so these work sessions are a response to that and like the mayor said They can evolve and develop as needed in order to make them most helpful to you Today's agenda is fairly light and consumable and mark headed on the head You've recently seen fiscal health information as part of the council retreat. So we're not necessarily starting from there But because we're starting to share earlier with you and we're still very early in the budget process today's agenda is a hybrid of like practical foundational knowledge and Then sort of the peak at something newer with regard to PBB, which those are, you know newer initiatives. So with that I'm gonna quickly go over the budget calendar, which I think we're only taking it through June here But I want to share some of the work that's been done so far So we'll talk a little bit in a few minutes about what prior your commitments are some of you already familiar with that term But the departments have been working on prior your commitments since January and some even before And that's a foundational part of the budget process that again will all define in just a few minutes But ongoing works been happening since January and February and then on the priority-based budgeting side We did a kickoff earlier than our typical budget kickoff because there's a lot of again foundational work That has to be done with that new initiative and so then last month we began to load budget information into Cuesta, which is our budgeting system and continued the PBB work and Also last month, which is just kind of a funny thing as far as being in the weeds about what budgets doing We did a budget kickoff like usual and we introduced this new thing that was fun called the budget fair and so in the budget fair We did a science fair theme because that's how cheesy we are in the lab And we wore lab coats and so this the fair the event was sort of meant to respond to the varying levels of information That departments need when they're kicking off budget So some people really need a deep dive into certain subjects and some kind of have their fiscal staff and their stuff together And so people could spend as much time as they wanted sort of learning about Revenue or allocations or prior your commitments. We also included the other parts of the lab So we had comp plan there like some of the planning initiatives So anyway, I just wanted to share a few pictures because the staff really had fun with the with the budget fair And then David did his inspiring normal kickoff comments, too So now we're in April. Yeah, it was I'll take my $20 So then in April now we are officially budget developing So right now a budget, you know departments are are entering budgets into questica And so the analysts are working hard to review that work as it's happening And then on the PBB side, we're in the middle of peer review Which we'll talk about later in the presentation and so over the next couple of months We only go through June on this calendar and we'll continue to roll forward with our with our work sessions as we go But budgets are due from the departments in May Here remember the exact same but soon in May And then we'll begin to figure out how to overlay We're starting we're already figuring it out. We'll begin overlaying a priority-based budgeting Scoring into sort of the existing budget system. And then in June we have a budget blitz Which is sort of like a three-day marathon of hearing about the department budget requests and Start to talk about decision packages. So Not like in years past. We'll be visiting with you throughout this process instead of starting to visit with you in August So you'll see earlier previews of a lot of this through these work sessions Christiane before you move from that slide if I can ask a question I know in the past this council has expressed some concern about making sure that we get community input Prior to any finalization of those budget considerations. Is that incorporated in this chart that we're looking at? So, I know it's not specifically called out But we do we are doing earlier engagement this year and maybe maybe at the end of today We can talk a little bit about the fiscal year 25 budget engagement schedule. That'd be okay. I'm looking at amethyst and Michelle Yes, they say okay. Is that all right? Can we talk about engagement? Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, as long as it's flushed out later Yeah, great Okay So development of target budgets So that the city has traditionally engaged in target-based budgeting and we're still doing that So providing departments of framework in which to build their budget is a structured and reasonable way to start the process and it ensures that any additions to the budget are made through a transparent process in this city We use decision packages. So People meet their target budget and then if they want to exceed that target. They have to explain why right? So in order to build the target we start from This is okay. I want to shout out to one of my budget analysts for thinking of this cake analogy that you're gonna see I really like it A target budget is predetermined from the prior year budget So fiscal year 25 budget is built from the fiscal year 24 adopted budget And then there are several stages of adjustment that happens and this just occurred in March So these are the targets that that departments are working from now So stage one is the adopted budget Fiscal year 24 budget and we'll look at it in a second, but that's the starting point for every operating department Next one-time costs one-time costs are Expenses that were incurred in the year, but we can take them out. They don't require any more funding So typically this happens when people get decision packages that maybe have startup costs Start up capital computers cars and then sometimes we I'm looking at some more examples In fiscal year 24, you know, we had an extra fire trainee class like that's been backed out So things like that that are one time and then can be reduced and so from fiscal year 24 to 25 There were about is almost 10 million 10 million dollars in one-time expenses that we backed out between the adopted budget stage and Then this one-time cost stage Okay The third stage is prior your commitments, which I mentioned on the budget calendar So these are budget items that impact a fiscal year budget because of things we've agreed to in the past The best example of these are police and fire contracts So when there are scheduled salary increases, those are built in as prior your commitments You also think you see things like CPI increases for the zoo or for the you know for botanic gardens or solid waste like things that are CPI increases that we know are coming those then get added back in so adopted budget less one-time costs plus prior your commitments And I think I don't know if this was the first year, but it was certainly the first year in a while That we solicited prior your commitments from departments instead of just we have our own list But we also solicited from departments to ensure that we weren't missing anything It didn't get surprised later in the process because one of the things that's happened in the past is we've seen decision packages from Departments saying like hey, this was supposed to be a prior your commitment and you guys missed it So we tried to be a little more collaborative up front I believe prior your commitments for FY 25 Or they totaled forty five million dollars in the general fund the big drivers of those are police meet and confer The CBA and pay for performance. Those are a couple of the top drivers there And then we go into cost allocations Where we allocate costs out to the departments to identify, you know, sort of the total cost of services There are various internal departments who allocate their costs like IT property management and we do an admin cost allocation And so in the general fund we typically hold departments harmless for those kinds of allocations unless they can be directly responsible for them And so this year allocations to the general fund seven point two million addition to the target and then Finally the cake topper salary and benefit projections So this is when we we solicit HR for any upcoming potential increases like health insurance sort of the drivers pay for performance Retirement so for instance this year's budget has a five percent sort of placeholder in the target for health insurance And a four percent placeholder for a pay for performance. So those are already added into departments target budgets And that's what makes the cake. So Adopted budget less one-time cost plus prior your commitments allocations that we're holding people harmless for and salary and benefit placeholder projections And this is how it looks currently. So fiscal year 24 adopted budget. This is general fund This is the billion 13 number at the bottom fiscal year 25 target as of right now and again, we're sharing early and sometimes the hazard of sharing early is you know, there could be a couple of tweaks here and there but The fiscal year 25 target budget is a billion 48 sounds a billion 49 so a three and a half percent increase across the board And if you're wondering what you might be why neighborhood services is going down I also wondered the same thing when I pulled this data and it's a mistake. So I'll fix it What happened that the priority repair program that we increased last year was loaded as a one-time One-time increase and I don't think it was intended to be one time. So we will fix that So I don't want you to be alarmed But I found that at the last minute and everything else you can kind of see there many questions about drivers We can talk about those but this is where we sit as of right now in April general fund budget development How we when we walk through the cake, this is where we've landed Okay, as part of building the target. We also build the preliminary pay go matrix So as you know pay go financing uses cash for a capital Saves us from paying interest on debt lowers debt. We've talked about pay go extensively I don't think you need a an education there. This is a reminder that pay go seven cents of the fiscal year 24 tax rate allocation In our models now We're assuming four percent growth And these are some of the things that are funded in pay go you've seen these buckets before not every single thing Is listed here, but these are some of the bigger bigger buckets And so in fiscal year 25, we actually have a good forecast here, but this counts for four percent growth But in fiscal year 25, you'll see that the pay go total is Almost 78 million and sort of how it's preliminarily breaking out among the big The big buckets there big departments And we can deep dive any of the capital or pay go stuff in a future work session. I'm sure it's of interest But just wanted to show you how it's how it's loaded in the budget system as we stand today Questions okay, okay, so priority based budgeting. This is the newer preview and Environmental services. Cody has been generous in giving some of his time today to help turn I think turn a concept into something more practical because even for me until lately it's been more conceptual than practical in my brain So priority based budgeting is something that we want to use to augment our traditional You know target based budgeting line item budgeting that I just walked through I think with Target based budgeting like any any budget framework, you know, it has some limitations And one of their primary challenges is that it heavily focuses on inputs and expenditures And growing a base like an already existing base Rather than you know outcomes and results and optimizing resource allocation And so we're trying to knowing that we still need to do some, you know Target based budgeting and line item budgeting, especially from an accounting perspective But trying to um provide a different vantage point or a different lens upon which you can look and make decisions without maybe digging into Line item detail, although you certainly can But really understanding the programs within the city and what it costs to run those programs and how well aligned they are to your priorities So we have nine participating departments this year. We moved from three last year to nine And last year we really only applied priority based budgeting to the decision packages from those three departments But this year we are doing a much more robust work With the nine departments. And so I want to show you a bit of that Yeah, of course Is there a reason why we're only doing nine and not all? Yeah, I mean just truly learning how to implement I think we went from three to nine and we have a pretty good system now And we were still using resource X as a consultant to help with that The goal is to then do a bigger chunk each year for like the next two years. Okay. Thank you Um, so quickly before um lay a little bit of foundation before Cody comes up uh or before he comes over here The uh the first step of priority based budgeting and sort of the biggest push of the rollout Is the design of the program inventory Um a pbb. I'm gonna keep saying pbb pbb program is a new and can be a separate concept from A department's like normal operations or divisions. So what I mean is A department has existing operational programs right and Divisions, but those might not be a one-for-one match to like a pbb program So for example, like a program is what you do. It has to answer the question of what you do. So Let me let me think of an example. That's someone who's not participating finance. Hey, reggie. I'm gonna use finance Um, so finance might have an accounting division or like a treasury division But when you say like treasury like what what is that like? What does it do? So you might say, okay Um a program pbb to measure alignment from like treasury might be payroll processing Like that's the program and so there are many programs within accounting or treasury and that's the way you align them Um, so that's all I mean to say is it's not always like a one-for-one in the way. We're already, you know, organizationally structured um so Actually, I think the challenge was with pbb and program inventory at the beginning is helping departments accurately size their programs And there is a brochure that we use at the budget fair that uses the analogy of pizza And I kind of want to grab it because it's really good Because you guys y'all aren't hungry you already ate so it's fine for me to talk about pizza. Um, so And I'm gonna give you guys this because I really like these brochures that we made. Um So pb program, what do you do? If we're asking the question, how much pizza do we have then how would you answer you would probably say like we have x number of slices You wouldn't say well, we have this many pizza boxes Like that's too big of a baseline of an analysis, right? Like that's too big And you wouldn't say that we have this many pepperonis like that's too small And so programs in pbb represent the slices like what do we do? How many do we have? And so we've been calibrating with departments saying, okay, that's too big Like it's too big to say the courthouse or accounting It's too small to say like oh we file paperwork or we answer the phone or whatever So it's just right to say things like payroll processing or court reporting or you know So it's some of that calibration that's happened have enough front and that's the biggest push I think of pbb implementation. It's it's the hardest upfront Cody will talk a little bit more about what this is practically looked like But once people have a program inventory Then we cost those programs so that we know both the personnel and non personnel Costs for each and then the part we're in the middle of now is program scoring And the departments first score their programs based on a number of criteria And then we go through a peer review and I think at this point I'm gonna let coat I'm gonna let cody talk first to give some Alignment and then I'm gonna go back because I think it'll be more helpful So without further ado, I'm switching to cody's example of what this looks like in application All right. Thank you christian So we wanted to take this approach of this new priority-based budgeting and give you some some Symbols or some understanding of what this looks like from our department's perspective And I will tell you as a department director I was a little hesitant to try this new path forward initially But over time through conversations with the four lab. It's it's been easier to digest So when you look at our department, it's basically three separate funds You've got the environment protection fund at 16.2 million for f y 24 You got the solid waste fund at just over 82 million And you have the general fund at 4.5 And you can see that that's covering consumer health also note to mosquitoes if you see mosquitoes Please reference over to us And we'll you can see the different programs that these different funds take into account But we wanted to take through the priority-based budgeting concept To strategize a different way to sort these and to bring these forward So what we were able to do through that priority of inventory We were able to take our program divisions or our cost centers and try to go one level deeper and identify the 23 Key programs or or structures that we would like to bring forward at this time All of these as an external facing department fall in that community category I'm certainly not going to go through all 23 of these But I picked a couple just to show you an example of how we're looking at each unit as kind of an independent business unit Rather than doing a deep dive So one example is the southeast landfill fill as as just one program Of course, it's critical to our overall community and a place for us to dispose of our waste You can see in the little table below That there's a department rating. We've been able to complete that and as christian mentioned We're working with other stakeholders across the city to evaluate this and that will continue But you can also look at cost drivers of revenue and expenses for each of these different business units Another good example is the one we just talked about earlier with the supplemental highway litter abatement program There's about 442,000 being invested this fiscal year We have to talk about priorities and budget overall as we move into fy 25 To determine how much we want to invest in a program such as this Again, those priorities are being considered and continued with the forward lab So just some quick perspectives We have seen this priorities based budget concept as a useful framework to underscore program value Again, it doesn't dictate if a program is going to stay or go or increase or decrease in funding But it also continues to build that data with all of the priorities and goals that have been set by city council It encourages an active policy conversation and by utilizing vantage points from other departments We're able to really have a deeper conversation to us to our to our department and to our staff These programs are the most important and the most beneficial to the city But when you bring in other perspectives, you start to look at that across the entire organization Of course, it also helps to forecast our future needs and identify opportunities to opt to optimize our resources So our next steps as a department We're going to continue to work with the forward lab to score the rest of our programs across the board And then of course, we'll be back with that fy 25 draft budget in a few months Thank you So i'm going to go back now that you have a department example um so Peer review is something that we didn't get to last year in our pilot program of pbb Peer review adds legitimacy and credibility to process by helping calibrate the way departments score their own importance and their own programs across the organization And so kody talked a little bit about us being in the middle of implementing peer review We're about 15 done with that peer review process. We are reviewing 323 programs across the nine departments and so that's a lot and then when you think about reviewing each program against each council priority depending on What type of program it is whether it has an external customer base or an internal customer base The review is different, but there's four to five for each program. So 323 times four or five I have the math in my notes, but you can do the math in your head. Um So that it's like no, I can 1500 1400 something like that. Yeah, it's a lot So um, so an example like kody said, um, his programs are mostly community, which means they have an external customer base I think they're actually all community. Um in environmental. They all have an external customer base And so if you think about taking one program in kody's group and evaluating it, you'd say, okay This is an external customer base. So it's a community program Um, and so we'll evaluate it against the council priority of responsible growth, which is one, you know, one of the the five um So the goals under responsible growth are there enhancing connectivity prioritizing preservation of parks Proactively planning for growth and then depending on the level of alignment of his program with each of those goals that leads to the score So perhaps you know What the highway litter abatement does does it enhance connectivity for communities? Maybe not. I don't know. Um Prioritizing preservation of open space and parks how aligned is it for that? And then are we proactively planning for growth through the highway litter abatement program? So maybe it's not well aligned or maybe it's somewhat aligned with responsible growth But then you do that process for every other council priority and that's how you get to a score So there's some, you know, objectivity there. So kody's group on their own does that And then they do it in front of the peers that are also participating in pbb And so that's when you start to calibrate, you know Oh, I ranked all my programs as extreme alignment with every council priority or or not, right? And we haven't seen anybody that did that ever trying to people are trying to be objective But it helps to have to defend your score, you know to your peers We we thought about doing it just with the lab But we thought well that doesn't really add a lot of credibility and legitimacy like we're we're one body But so we've had all nine departments that are participating in pbb Um participate in the peer review the 15 percent we've done so far And the cooler part is that we also opened it up to the non participating department So they could start to get a preview and we didn't really know if anyone would come But we have had people come we had water fire code some others Um, so that's been a fms was there So they've come and sat in and so now they when they you know to council rex point when we Uh implement with other departments They have a huge head start because they can see how people have calibrated their programs and then how they're Aligned with council priorities So it's been a neat process So the results um is that the the programs each have a quartile ranking ranking least to most align And then we'll have a scoring outcome from the department scores and the peer review And then that's something we're still conceptualizing like how do we then share it with city management? And how do we share it with you and how do we overlay you know The people who are participating and the people who aren't and sort of give you like a good package where you're seeing more levels of detail and um different data from a couple different groups, and so um We'll start I think I'm hopeful that in a future work session We can maybe show you some examples of what it could look like and you can weigh in and say yes This is helpful. Um, we also started our one-on-ones with you We've met with council member crane council member beck and we have other scheduled for the week and next week Um mark and I will we'll talk with you too about you know, what's helpful Okay Thank you again, kody. So here's the participating nine uh in pbb So we have code environmental development services hr and it library municipal court police and tpw Hr police and tpw were our three pilot departments last year and so they did scoring of their decision packages again, it was uh, I would say like I think I would say we're on like phase 1.5 because it was like kind of 0.5 last year Um, but we're really really implementing heavily this year. And so we're excited Um, I think it's I've been watching it click for a lot of the participating departments It certainly clicked with the lab staff after a couple of peer review sessions and we've gotten a lot more efficient Um, reviewing, you know, 1400 different criteria Okay, um, let's talk about doesn't make questions about any of that No, okay. Um, I'd like to talk about engagement So maybe I'll invite michelle and or amethyst to come up and talk a little bit about our engagement plans and how they might be different than You know what we've done before and how we're trying part of what the lab's doing is trying to streamline engagement opportunities around You know, we have the comp plan going on and we have budget ramping up. And so we're really trying to be strategic about that So one of the things we really want to do with engagement and amethyst and I have been having these conversations for Probably a couple months is we want to be sure we mirror our digital engagement with our in-person engagement So that we know we're reaching different audiences with both of those ways So what we've been talking about is what are the tools that she could use online To get input and how can we kind of mimic those at our public meetings? So, um I'll talk about some of the things that we have in the engagement office And then she can talk about some of the tools they're going to use From the lab. So we have a new portal. It's called connect fort worth And it will eventually house all of our engagement opportunities for the entire city So any project or program that we want to get input on we will have A link on this portal for people to provide input So we're going to create a page for the budget and we'll have a lot of the engagement opportunities linked to that page Um, we're also going to do again the steer the budget where we ask people to do the pictures with molly To tell us about things that they want us to address in the budget We thought that was a good way to kind of get people engaged and excited and it gave us some good pictures to use after that We're having spring open houses. Those are all on your calendar We're doing five of those and it will have Ways for people to engage with the budget, but it will also have opportunities for most city departments to um provide input and information on different programs that they have And like I said at the open house, we will have interactive activities that mimic What amethyst and the fort worth lab team are doing with some of their digital tools And then we'll follow that up after the proposed budget comes out We'll do another round of open houses and meetings to let people know about the proposed budget and um Get their input or their comments and answer questions about it One of the things we really want to do with the open house, you know, if we say we're having a budget meeting We don't get a huge number of people like knocking on the door to come to the meeting So what we want to do with these open houses is we want to Weave in the budget input with fun activities that people can do will have activities for children We'll also have activities for adults So hopefully we'll get a good crowd to come out and they'll be very engaged, but they won't really feel like they're they're Sitting through a budget meeting. So If you want to add some more stuff, sure amethyst lone strategy and performance manager for worth lab So i'm pretty excited about a lot of things michelle just talked about So for worth connect is going to be a game changer for us It's that one stop shop no matter what we're asking for Input on resident wise everything will be there So we'll have that one page that everything you can do The meetings will be listed all of the online activities that you can do will all be in one place really easy to find So some of the online activities We're really thinking about the budget in those two phases phase one being kind of made through the recommended budget And we're really we want to be explicit about asking folks to help us develop the budget So those activities are going to centralize around your council priorities There'll be an activity where they we ask them to rank the priorities We'll have a little bit of information demographics where they live So we can provide you as council members in that specific information about your district So in my district of all five council priorities, these are how they rack Rank in that area to help me make decisions Then we're going to use the thought exchange tool to ask specifically about your thoughts concerns or ideas for the budget So that's where we'll get those very specific like more money for homelessness activities litter cleanup, etc And again, we'll have information data demographics to be able to give you that information on a regular basis by council district And the mapping activity that michelle talked about will also be on that website So you can put a little pin a little green pin for something that you love and would like to see more of in that place Or something that needs to be fixed or there's a need so we'll have you know a variety of different ways to interact During the subsequent budget work sessions we have with you and outside We're going to give you pings on that information probably two or three times Between now and the end of july before you get the recommended budget So that you have a summarization of what the asks wants needs likes For the city overall are but also for your respective districts So you have that information at hand as you go out and talk to your constituents about their thoughts about the budget You'll have what we're receiving on our end as well Um, and then again, we will be at each of those open houses um at other meetings, etc As we go to deploy those same activities both in an in-person format and also Um online We're also going to work with michelle and her team to see what we can do for interactive activities and package Those is kind of a meeting in a box So folks can deploy that at a with a church group or a school group or anywhere else So that where it's not necessarily easy enough They don't have to rely on staff to facilitate but we can still get that extra input Um I have a question here I don't uh, I mean I support the open house format. I think it draws a lot of people out and You know helps accommodate their own individual schedules. That's all great support that What I'd like to know in my district is that um, and I'm sure other council members will too How many of these open houses will be in our own individual districts? and Aside from At-large resident outreach. Are we going to be making specific outreach to the registered neighborhood organizations as well? right now we have five, um open houses scheduled in for the spring and We've tried to geographically spread those around the city and also hit areas that we Aren't currently having comp plan meetings scheduled. So we tried to spread all of those out It was 12 meetings total that we were Scheduling and we tried to you know, take it take a look at the map the planning Sectors and the districts and find a geographic spread that was hitting most of the community When we do the five in the fall We will look at the locations that the council districts and planning sectors that did not have an open house in the spring And scheduled those for the fall. So that's the plan right now just because of resources and staffing that's involved with the open houses And on the connect fort worth right now, we're building that website The the portal we're adding projects right now It has the comp plan page But we're building others on the back end And then we're doing kind of a soft launch with the comp plan But we'll have a bigger launch once we have most of the projects in the budget page up if you want to visit it It's www.connectfw.com Any other questions www Dot connect fw.com I would just like to make a comment on the meeting locations as we're going through the meeting locations for the comprehensive plan noticed Some places in my district The closest place to attend a meeting for that particular topic was over a 30 minute drive for residents each way So let's let's please take in mind total travel time anywhere in the city to be able to attend these and Not end up in a situation like that again. Okay. Thank you So My opinion is that no one wants to come to a public meeting anymore And you get the same people that come Yes And it's just a reality of where people are we're such much more of an on-demand culture And furthermore, I think the folks I talked to would rather react to our ideas or what we're proposing and say Yes, or no, or maybe I'm in the middle rather than have to proactively say this is what I want in the budget And so really thinking through probably utilizing social media in a different way It's almost like the survey of these are our top priorities is the things we're funding this year These are the continual items that are going to come from fy 24 to 25. What do you think? Rather than just tell us and I I I know some other cities are grappling with this because everybody has the same struggle. So we're not unique But it's it's really time that we completely revolutionize the way we do this because I'm sure it's very frustrating for city staff too that go to Dozens of public meetings and the same 25 people come to those meetings And it's it's a huge waste of your time and so Well, I don't have an answer to our solution today, but just acknowledging that's a problem and that how can we all also pitch in To help meet that differently Because I know we've all talked about that Michael Yeah, I'll uh reiterate something I said the other day at the council meeting at the Fort Worth Food and Wine Festival Eric Flatterger's group was out there with the 2050 comprehensive plan So I don't know if they were out at main streets this week or whatever But I think we need to look at big events. We know people are already going to go to And get the reactions and they're having fun at those events and they're willing to spend five minutes I couldn't agree more Yeah, rather than that way your staff doesn't get burned out or frustrated so often And having to beat all those. Yeah, we've been working with the um team doing the comp plan and um identifying Places where people are already meeting and going to them and not expecting people to come to us When amethyst and I were putting together the plan We know that um, we're getting different Generations at our public meetings versus, you know, if we had things more digital and we want to hear from everybody But you're right. The public meetings are a lot more time intensive. It takes a lot more staff And um, sometimes the attendance is low. And so we want to try and Have multiple opportunities and ways for people to give us the input and um, and then bring that together and present it to you Also to bring this back to priority based budgeting once we have all departments on that system I think we're going to be amazed at the different ways that we can explain the budget What's important in the budget and the decisions that we're actually making through that lens Then we can right now with line in a budget So I think that's going to be a game changer and you might see a third phase And that approach to the budget and kind of what do you want? Here's what we think the major decisions are going to be and then here's what the recommended is So I can see pvb really leading us in that direction In a much stronger way that that anybody could explain to someone that maybe maybe the average staff member couldn't explain a line Out of them way to the public too. Michelle might know this or Renee What's our number of individuals that have signed up for city news right now in the city of Fort Worth? I want to say it's Around 30,000. Yeah, I mean that just gives you an idea You know if city of almost a million people well And the other thing we did at the public meeting is we started asking people How did you find out about the meeting so we can see which of our tools is having the most impact and getting people there and So we're using that information to kind of Change the way we get the word out about the different meetings We can keep working on it. Thank you all very much for your hard work. We appreciate it. Thanks I have one correction to make On this slide I put the codes participating and they are not we swapped them with neighborhood services So please don't think that they are and I apologize to neighborhood services too Thank you to my many staff who emailed me during this meeting and told me that Okay, so um It looks like we might give you like 10 minutes of your life back But um, I just want to I'm hoping that that little bit of a dive into foundation I think normally at this time of year You wouldn't really even know where the general fund is sitting with regard to a target budget So I'm hoping that's helpful and we can dive into any of that that you would like And we're planning to meet again in two weeks knowing from my sharing of the budget calendar That department still will not have fully submitted their budgets at that time. I'm wondering What would be helpful if you have preliminary ideas as to Either pbb departments or non participating departments that you'd like some early preliminary dives into That will help you as you you know start to think about the fiscal year 25 budget Or any other subjects that you're interested in because we want these to be useful to you Any comments on that? Any comments or questions? I see no go ahead. This may not be the right venue and it may be a very unpopular request That's okay. Um the street maintenance fee. Um as we're walking I know where we have a task force set up and we're working, you know on that I would love to sit down and better understand If we don't go down that path the street maintenance fee How can we find those dollars or do some scenario planning right now? And so we can have those conversations and have a better understanding fiscally where we stand Um with that piece and that that I don't have anybody else agrees But I'm really not in board with the street maintenance fee right now So I think having a better understanding of where we are budgeting for 2025 would be helpful Thank you And I think you you stated that our growth estimate right now is we're operating off of 4% assumption. Is that correct? That's correct. And you're looking right now at a 3.5 percent budget increase. That's correct So just based on that. I know it's not There yet, but let's think about maybe next session talking about tax rate And what our goals are around that it doesn't mean we stick to it But operating on the assumption if things continue where they are Are we going to be at no new revenue? Yes or no if we because there's no reason to do this last minute anymore There's no reason to have a fight on the dais and out of the budget vote, right? So we can work through some of this Um as much as we can and I think we all know that right now More than any other time I've worked in city government people are very focused on the economy inflation cost of living property taxes is a big piece of that So let's just meet people where they are and importantly when we make the tax rate decision in the budget decision We can defend it Um, especially this body being more involved in that decision-making process Yeah, I was just gonna say the the the four percent comes from the three and a half percent basic cap Plus a half percent growth, which is very conservative. And that's where we start with the pay go And so to your point when you look at that The well, we we heard already from the chief appraiser about what he's already seen He and his team were already seen in terms of appraisals So it's not going to be a year like we've seen the last two years. It's going to be a tighter year At the same time, you know, we need to address this ems issue that you all are, you know working very hard on um, and then The street issue the street maintenance issue and this is our last year for recapture also, isn't it? Yeah, yes. So another thing to think about right right. We have an increment too So what we can do is play out some scenarios Not really knowing what the final number is going to be and then have to have that discussion like you said So that it's not all at the last minute. I think that's helpful Jean Mayor and and council members. I just had a light bulb idea We had one of the plan 2050 meetings in my district last week And I was yeah, you all know I very seldom think about compliments for outreach But in this case, well, you know, I was everybody knows that But we had a real good turnout And mayor as you know, I was dead social media. So I couldn't do my usual I didn't do a robo call but whatever Tactics Michelle and her team pulled off it worked But it dawned on me when we talk about people not wanting to come to a meeting Most of these attendees were probably 50 and older And so you will want to be mindful of who what demographic we're reaching out to And we did have several people from woodhaven who are new to district 5 and excited about being there And so but I wanted to give them kudos But when you think about who was there, it was an older demographic So I think we might even have ways to just Get people at these trails and marches and whatever So that we can meet them where they are But it's they did a good job for these people who turned out and and and I had a protester there who did not Step on the property. He was he was out front But uh, it was it was well attended. So just just fyi Any other questions or comments? Thank y'all very much. This was helpful With that council, I think Meeting adjourned