Okay. Good morning. Welcome everybody to this class VC310 on church and ministry administration. We're going to have two hours today and learn some good things. Let's pray and then we will get started. May I request somebody just to lead us in prayer and then we can start. Anybody can pray? Alright. Go ahead Charles. I think you're going to pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you so much. Again, that you are allowing us to meet, to study your work. We thank you that because you chose us, we can take it for granted that we are doing this. Therefore, Lord, as you promised in Ezekiel, that you are giving us a heart of flesh. Lord, you pray that you will give us a heart that is able to be permeable enough to absorb the information that you want us to study. Pray for our Lechchala that you will bless him, give him the right words and the Holy Spirit's action that you'll be able to deliver what you wanted him to do and that even those that are yet to join that you'll be able to join a prayer for connectivity for internet and everything, batteries and gadgets that they will be charged will be able to study when Jesus name we brand believe. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining the class today. I'm just going to quickly review what we talked about last week as we continue in this journey on learning about church and ministry administration. So what we said in the very beginning is that God is a God of order organization and so we are actually following God and we organize when we do things properly and if we combine the spiritual ministry that we are all called to do with good administration, good organization, then we will be more effective in serving people. We can serve people well. And so with that we began our journey. We started talking last week about the first step which is to form a legal entity for your ministry or a church so that from a civil or a government perspective we should be clear. So it shouldn't be that we are doing things that be legally not entitled to do. So it's always good whenever you're ready when you're about to start your ministry and get things going, whether it's a local church or whether it's some other type of Christian ministry to form a legal entity in your country, give it a name and so then you can do things properly legally and of course the government backs you up when you are a legal entity or you have certain privileges in the country or in the place where you're operating. There were some things I just wanted to finish up from that chapter which we will do now and then move forward from there. So I'm sharing that chapter 3. Now church trust, the word trust actually it's what we call it in India but in other countries you may be using a different word. For example in the US they talk about a non-profit organization or religious non-profit but here we call it trust or religious trust. So either you, it's important to form this legal entity. We talked about it last week and when you form a legal entity you need your initial core group of members, they would be the founding members or the trustees or the office bearers or the board of directors or directors, whatever different places they call it different but you need to select people who are aligned to your vision. The articles of incorporation or what we call as trust deed basically gives what this legal entity is about and what can be done and what cannot be done. And what I suggested was that try to make it as broad in scope as possible because even though initially when you start out you may be starting out with just one area of work and ministry. You should be able to grow in the years to come. You should be able to add many different kinds of ministries to what you're doing. So try to keep it broad so that in the future when you want to start something under that same name or under that same legal entity you should have the freedom to start. Now of course when you form a legal entity we also need to follow the government regulations.  You need to do that. And annually they will usually tell you to file your income report. So all the funds that came in you file it you show where the money came from and how much money came and where it went. And if you are having staff then you would most places you would have to deduct income tax. If you're paying them salaries you pay that tax to the government so you show them that you're doing those regulatory filings. So these kinds of things.  An accounting firm as part of your, you hire them for their service they will take care of all this for you and make sure everything is good. But the point is when you form a legal entity there are obviously regulations, government regulations that we must follow. The last thing I just want to point out is that in addition to the office bearers, the directors the people who are legally named on that entity people on the board you could also have additionally and I'm not saying this is necessary but I'm just giving this as a suggestion you could also have an additional advisory board or a group of people who are advisors they're not legally responsible for the organization because their names are not on the legal entity but they can provide guidance to the people who are responsible. So you call them an advisory board or advisors or board of advisors and so on. So that's something you know it would be nice to have if possible. Now when we started APC for a long time we didn't have an advisory board.  But then later on I think just a couple of years ago a few years ago you know when we kind of were more or less established and there were more people settled as part of the church and intentionally I chose to have people who were from within the church as opposed to from outside the church so you know there are pros and cons to do that some churches or organizations would have an advisory board of people from outside the church and I've heard of very large organizations who would have members in the advisory board who would be from different parts of the world because they're a global organization I mean you have people like that on the advisory board of course they can give you input that is very global in nature but then you need to have access to those kinds of people. So now but what I chose to do a few years ago was to you know once we had some good people settled within the church to pick out a few people from them and invite them to be part of the advisory board just to you know we just go to them on an as needed basis it's not that you know they always have them because they're all busy people it's not that they always have to attend meetings they won't have that kind of time but you go to them as and when needed for some guidance on specific areas so that's the purpose of the advisory board they're there to you know give you input, give you that guidance so there are people who are good in their particular area of expertise so you can benefit from them and what so we have what is called as trustees these are the people who are legally responsible for the entity now what we chose to do here at APC is that the trustees would be pastoral part of the pastoral team now this again a choice we made I'm not saying it should be necessary the reason is the trustees are people who are going to actually you know be a little closer to guiding the organization so we because we are a church we wanted them to give input that is you know spiritual in nature or you know because we are a church so the trustees would hold spiritual, moral and legal responsibility the advisory board again which I mentioned was only done some years ago recently the way we thought of bringing this together is to have about eight people people who come from who have expertise in certain areas legal, accounting, organization development Christian missions or social work technology, operations the creative side, media outside and somebody who is in touch with current trends or from a counseling perspective urban life perspective so we said okay you know here are these eight areas where we definitely from time to time would need different kinds of inputs so if you have these kinds of people around us we could go to them they could give us input and also the other thing was we wanted to balance experience with being in touch with new developments so we wanted some people who are over 45 so they bring experience especially matters that require that kind of experience and we also needed younger people because they would be in touch with what's really happening and so you know this is how we've set up so we don't have like a group meeting all the time but as needed we go to different people for specific inputs so when we need legal we go there so that person would give us legal advice when we need accounting information so these are people available and we go to them for inputs as and when we need as we are progressing they are there to help us and give us inputs and guide us and so on so this is how we structure it you know and I think we can do a lot more here in trustees and advisory board but this is how we have done and you know you in your local church in your Christian ministry you could you know think of what works for you now just to give a side thought there are pros and cons of having people from outside your church or ministry when you have people from outside the advantage is they can bring a very different perspective they can bring in new ideas and thoughts it is that they may not be in touch with what is actually happening and where the church or the ministry is actually going and so sometimes their inputs could be very disconnected from the reality of what's going on or sometimes you know by the time they are able to understand what is happening for them to understand what is happening takes a lot of time and effort so that they are not able to really meaningfully give inputs to what is happening so there are pros and cons in having people from within the church or outside the church there are benefits advantages and disadvantages and so you can decide what works best for you in your given context okay so let me take questions maybe somebody had some questions okay Charles go ahead you have a question I don't know whether I didn't see it but I was looking at the number 8 what happens when it comes to the issue of voting and they are tying they are four and they tie so how is it handled an odd number of help that was my maybe I didn't see the numbering but it was 8 and I was like what yeah good question so remember there is a difference between the trustees or the directors and the advisory board the advisory board serves more to give you input or advice based on their expertise and their knowledge so they are not involved in the voting process or deciding process they would give you input so once they give input then the trustees or that is the legally on the organization the other ones would make the decision based on the input they receive so that the trustees is good for them for that to be an odd number because the other ones are going to make a decision and sometimes you have to vote on something and you have to have people with expertise in different areas who can give you input as and when you need so the advisory board is 8 I just identified 8 areas where we could have we would benefit from having input and we go to these people so that is why it is not necessary for that to be odd number so for example right now we are busy we started this project maybe in 2018 and then of course during the pandemic everything came to a pause now we are back in it looking for land where we want to build mainly for upper bible college campus church hall and all the other facilities so we formed a team from within the church but we also have an external person who advises us so in fact he has been with us throughout the journey and he actually was served with the government for his entire career and he was specially involved in urban development and all this kind of land all those kinds of things with the government so he is our advisor so we go to him and only if he says ok do we go forward so he is our advisor he is helping us in this whole journey we are benefiting from his experience and of course he has access to the government information so he can help us and guide us in this whole process so that is how the advisory board can help the organization as they journey any other questions when is it appropriate to review the advisory board so I would say we give each one a time of two years we ask them for a commitment of two years and after that if they want to step down it is fine and if they want to if they are ok to continue that is also great so usually we keep it like a two year window where if somebody wants to step down they can step down and if somebody wants to continue they can continue so we just kind of leave it flexible but then every two years you get a chance to you know you bring in new people and you replace others so you have the option to do it so two years is a good 10 year is that ok Elisha yes Pasta ok thank you Christopher go ahead yes Pasta I have two questions one is in regards to this the church the spiritual aspect of the way it reaches out to the congregation spiritually and how that sort of balances off with the the way the trustees govern the church and are there any challenges in that and maybe you can talk through your experience and the second one is about the church itself is it considered to be a charity organization and how that is structured around providing financial assistance for example as a charity organization versus trying to build the church in a particular city or across the country good questions so the first question I think it's very important for the trustees that is the office bearers the people who are legally responsible for that Christian church or Christian ministry for them to be spiritually motivated because the local church or the Christian ministry is primarily a spiritual ministry so if the trustees are not aligned spiritually with what the church is supposed to be doing or the Christian ministry is supposed to be doing they can be a real clash and then the trustees could actually become a hindrance to the spiritual ministry that is supposed to happen or if there is conflict among the office bearers the legal directors themselves if there is conflict there it is going to affect the kind of ministry, spiritual ministry that will happen sooner or later it will become visible so that's very important there has to be alignment so that's why what we have done at APC is the pastoral team many of them are also the trustees in fact all our trustees are also involved in the ministry of the church so that way there is a sink there is a connection between any kind of decision which is more administrative, organizational, legal there is a sink with the decisions that are made organizationally and with what has to happen spiritually to serve the people so that's the reason we have intentionally kept it that way and hopefully it will continue that way that all the trustees are also involved in the ministry of the church so of the five trustees three are part of the pastoral team and one is heading up one area of ministry and the other one is part of the church and so on and all of them of course they also need to be organizationally sound that means they all come from a professional background so that's a big blessing that means they are blending both spiritual and the professional, organizational aspect and that's a big blessing but I have seen in organizations where somebody who is on the trust as an office where I was a director who is just a professional in the sense that they are believers but they are not very spiritually inclined then what happens, the decisions that are being made are so disconnected from what the ministry needs to have and is requires what people require and it actually disrupts the ministry and I'm thinking of one huge wonderful ministry that was here in India I saw before my own eyes how the ministry had expanded wonderfully it was under a good leadership, an elderly person, a spiritual person and the ministry had grown all over India he was a little elderly, older so he stepped down and the ministry was handed to somebody else who this person was more interested in I guess his own interests so things went off in a different direction and so then he was forced to step down and then handed it off to somebody who was purely I would say an organization person he had no connect with the needs of the people what the ministry had done and so on and right before my eyes I saw this organization which was at one point was all across India within a matter of one or two years everything was gone so today what was once a beautiful work being done all across India has just come down to almost nothing it's very sad, I don't know how they're going to rebuild or how it's going to come back again but this is what I saw and I heard people tell me from that organization because I knew we used to work I heard them say he doesn't understand, he doesn't know what's happening and he's making decisions that are actually hurting the people so that's the danger there so that's in response to your first question now the second question which is how do you balance charity work with building the organization so that I think will vary from organization to organization depending on what their focus is so for example the local church APC as a local church, so APC as a local church we are a religious organization and we have certain focus areas that is of course planting of churches spiritual equipped people plus our focus would be to equip people for the ministry that happens to the Bible college and our focus would be to support missions work, so these are the focus areas so we are not into feeding the hungry so much, that sort of main area where we are not hungry or giving to what we would consider charitable causes because the focus is here, but we do give so we do, instead of us doing it directly we would give to somebody, some other ministry who is doing that kind of work so we would give to somebody who is an organization that is caring for feeding children or doing rural development or caring for or doing rehab kind of work, so we don't do that directly but what we do is we give to them to help them do the work which they are doing but we stay on our main areas which is to equip people in the word of God and the spirit and church planting and Bible college training and missions, those focus areas another organization may be completely devoted to let's feed the poor or let's help people who are in the slums, so the answer to that question would be what is the organization really focused on? because that's how they will generally use their financial resources so I hope I answered both your questions Any thoughts? Is it okay? Just one really quick follow up question you had mentioned about this number 5 so I think that kind of list back to Charles's question about having a hot number in case of any sort of a vote just also to understand because in some organizations or even councils, I think the UN actually has something like something called a veto power where they can actually stop a particular activity to happen and they have that power to not have some action to take place and I think currently right now I think for example the UN they just have 5 countries that can actually have that veto power, so does that exist in this kind of structure of the trustees and I mean not for APC but for some of the high structures has that always worked well in favor of the senior pastors in that church Interesting, we don't have that at APC like so we don't, no trustee has been given a veto power and I have not heard of such a thing in the Christian ministry circles now generally speaking the senior pastor the main senior pastor's visionary so he would present what he has and hopefully there is a consensus in the decision making and what's going forward, there may be of course discussions like we often have when we have to make important decisions, all the trustees would share their ideas and we try to put everything together and take the best ideas and then go forward with it so that's how it has happened so the vision or the idea may come from the senior pastor and then it goes forward or sometimes from a pastoral side the day to day decisions or the short term which are not of big impact are just driven by the senior pastor and that happens so in that sense the senior pastor is a visionary and he leads and he makes decisions and so on and the trustees hopefully those decisions are more of a consensus or coming together but I have not heard of anyone being given veto power that I think would be very dangerous in a Christian ministry setting it's always better to have checks and balances and even if the senior pastor wants to go and do something especially if it's something huge and it's significant ramifications it's good that the other trustees also are in line with it and otherwise if there's something dangerous they should alert and say don't do it so I think it's good to have those checks and balances Elisha how do you remunerate trustees and advisory board members are completely voluntary so they don't they're not paid they just go to them for advice so that's one thing but if any of the advisory board members are working for the church in some capacity they get paid for the work but just as an advisory board member that's just a voluntary thing they just go to them for example our legal person he's a lawyer so if you're just asking for some advice he'll just share his ideas but then we want him to do some work for us meaning some legal work for us to between the trust and the getting some paper filing and all that we have to pay him or his organization for doing that work so the advisory board role is purely voluntary but when any of them are doing an actual work for us they get paid for it based on their actual professional fees the trustees who are staff so out of the five trustees one to yeah only two are also a staff of the church so the two get paid a salary as staff the other three are not paid they are like voluntary because they have their own job outside they're doing their own work outside professional work and their trustees but they're involved voluntarily with the ministry of the church so if any of the trustees are staff that means full time paid staff then they get paid like everybody else otherwise they are voluntary so you can have a combination of the two okay Pesta thank you very much okay all right good enjoy your questions okay so I'm going to proceed to the next chapter if you have any questions at any time feel free to ask so I'm going to go to the next chapter which is building up on what we've done so far so once you've got your legal entity and your trustees that is your office bearers, your advisory board next thing chapter four is to think of an organization structure for your church and ministry now obviously this is going to evolve over time you know it's very rare that you would be able to start off with the structure in place for example at ABC when we started we you know we didn't have any staff that means I was as a pastor the founding pastor in those years I was not paid by the church I was more like a volunteer pastor because I was I was running my own business so my financial finances were coming to me through my business but I was the pastor of the church and everybody really small so 20 people everybody was just you know doing things so there was no staff actual paid people were paid and so on and I was just one person we would just do things but then slowly we added one person and that one person was actually paid by the company and he was handling some of the administrative work of the church actually a few years later so I would say maybe almost three or four years later and I don't exactly remember but I think it's about three or four years later that we actually started bringing or having full time staff in the church so we had like an administrator we had a youth pastor and so on and then a children's church pastor and so on so we started slowly adding people that when we could you know when we had that need and when we found the right people we slowly started having paid staff for the church but that came three or four years later and almost 14, 13, 14 years later from the time we started I joined full time with the church so that whole period I was not a staff of the church I was just serving leading the organization but not a staff and then about in 2014 is when I moved and I became a staff of the church so the point I want to say is this that the structure evolved over time the organization structure in our case now some people may have a lot of money in the very beginning and they may be able to put a structure in place if that happens well and good but in most cases I would imagine that the structure will restart with nothing and then slowly over time you put in an organization structure right so that is more likely the reality that it will happen over time but it is important for us to understand that as the church and as the ministry grows you need to have an organization structure and that's what you want to talk about in this chapter right so by organizational structure organization structure what we mean is you have a clearly defined set of activities that means you can call it functions or roles or responsibilities that you assign to people and a flow information flow which is who makes decision making the process of how things are going to happen so both the activities and the flow of information within the organization should be clearly defined so that you know whatever the organization is supposed to be doing they are able to do it well ok so the organization structure is very very important so what happens generally in Christian ministry is that there is no clearly defined organizational structure sometimes it's just one pastor who does everything and everybody just goes to him for everything and it's like you know they just make it happen from Sunday to Sunday or from meeting to meeting somehow it all comes together and it's like the pastor is the event manager he used everything you know for the organization and that's not a good way to work because the pastor can get worn out very easily and also the dependence on the pastor is too much you know so it's always good to create a structure where things can happen and things can flow like like they say like a well oiled machine think about that now there are different types of organizational structures there could be a structure that's functional in nature that means that is based on various functions example worship team children's church or ministry functions or even administrative type of functions accounting media IT so on so you could have you can create your structure based on these functions or you can have something that's more divisional you know or multi-division so the divisions could be geographic like you could say you divide your country your city your country whatever north south east west and you create you know the northern region team for the southern region so on so forth you could do division like that or you can do division based on department type divisions you know a specific ministry this is a ministry that is geared towards children this is the ministry that's geared towards adults and so on so that those could be divisions or departments in your organization so you could have a structure that's around functions you could have a structure that's around divisions could be different things whether it's demographic or geographic or the kind of service that's being provided the ministry it's being provided or you could have completely flat you know that is everybody's in the same level almost they may be leaders but then more or less it's flat and then you just organize around the work that needs to be done tasks so people are working very fluid or you could have a matrix a matrix is a combination of functional and division so you kind of mix the two that's called a matrix so initially when we started we of course you know began with certain functions like I said it's pastor there was a children's church pastor there was an administrator and then as the functions increased we had more people come in then later on we started doing by division north south east west so now we have more of a matrix structure that has functions and divisions and people kind of also work across that so the matrix structure allows people to kind of move between functions and divisions so example we have a worship team but the worship team is functional but it's also moving across north south east west so on so people move across our division so to speak so it's a matrix structure so there is people moving around but then people the challenge in the matrix structure is people should be very clear whom they report to whom they're going to be answerable to so a worship people in the worship team they are answerable to the worship pastor while but at the same time when they go to a particular location that they go to the north church they're also answerable to the associate pastor at the north church so it's kind of like a dual accountability that means they're ultimately accountable to the worship pastor but when they go and serve at a location that is north they are accountable that in that service they have to flow with the location pastor there right so it's dual accountability but things are very clear who they are finally responsible to right so you can decide and as your ministry as your church is growing you can begin to decide what structure would work best for you and we will get into the details a little later on I will explain it but before we get into the practical side you know I just want to point us to some places in scripture that really inspire us when it comes to organizational structure and design and I've just put a set of passages from the the ministry of King David it's quite amazing how you know David is you know like the Bible says he was a man of God's own heart he was a psalmist, the sweet psalmist of Israel he wrote so many psalms, he was a prophet he spoke concerning the Messiah and of course he was a king and so it's wonderful David was a very deeply spiritual person but yet when it came to administration he was amazing I wanted to actually read some of these scriptures you know if you turn with me to 1 Chronicles 23 we just read the first six verses here then go for a break 1 Chronicles 23 can somebody read 1 Chronicles 26 1 Chronicles 23 1-6 please so when David was old and full of days he made his son Solomon king over Israel and he gathered together all the leaders of Israel with the priests and the Levites now the Levites were numbered from the age of 30 years and above and the number of individual males was 38,000 only 4,000 were to look after the work of the house of the Lord 6,000 were officers and judges 4,000 were gatekeepers and 4,000 praised the Lord with musical instruments which I made said David for giving praise also David divided them into divisions among the sons of Levi Gershon, Kohath and Merari thank you so just think about it now we've just read the first six verses but just think about what David is doing so really he's setting up this this was before Solomon built the temple so at that time there's only a tabernacle which means a tent like structure where people would come to you know worship and sacrifice to God think about what you know how David is organizing this he's got 38,000 38,000 men who are Levites now these are Levites means they're going to serve in the temple they're going to help the priests so he's not talking about the priests he's talking about the Levites they're going to help around with the tabernacle 38,000 men can you imagine 38,000 people serving in a particular local church but that's what's you know that's what's kind of happening here so in this tabernacle in Jerusalem where David is building this thing he's got 38,000 helpers then he actually breaks them down into groups so he's got 24,000 look after the work of the house of the Lord 6,000 were officers and judges more like you would call them as line managers or you know people to make sure things are going fine then he's got gatekeepers 4,000 gatekeepers and then he's got 4,000 musicians so he has organized them 38,000 people he's broken them down into different teams what we would call as teams he says you guys you take care of just all the arrangements in the temple you guys are like the leaders who are going to oversee you guys are the gatekeepers you make sure who's coming in who's going out the flow of traffic take care of that we're going to make sure that there is praise and worship going on in the tabernacle it's quite fascinating this is Old Testament David has not been to any management school he's not got any organizational structure draining nothing like that but he has organized the tabernacle just the administrative side how things should run in the tabernacle let me pause here we will just come back to this after the break think about this we'll go for a quick break we'll come back in 10 minutes and continue thank you


We now have an interesting story from China, but it's going to be told to you by a German who's been employed for some years by this Chinese company. It is called in the short form Wafeng, and Thomas Schmidt is going to tell you a little about the company and his work, which sounds very interesting as director of innovation. Hello. Wafeng is a large textile manufacturer with a reputation of supplying most innovative material to the sport industry. Our customers today are all the major big sport brands like Nike, like Adidas, like Under Armour, Sketchers and many others. We manufacture high quality textiles with a modern state-of-the-art technology, different type of knitting and weaving machines. We do the dyeing process, the digital printing, and also we developed a very new 3D coating technology for textile. We call it Haptic because Haptic allows us to create 3D surfaces on top of a textile where we can have a touch experience. Within that Haptic technology we also want to integrate some smart electronics now and create some special high-tech products. We in ID TechX, years ago I was involved in our first report on e-tech styles. We were looking there mainly at e-fibers. We realised it was a long-term thing, but there was the European project with five countries involved in doing fibers that would have a super-capacitor first layer and a second layer of a dye-sensitised solar cell photovoltaics. So it sounded like magic. Your shirt could not only capture enough energy to charge your phone, it could store it until you needed to. That project I think is probably finished now. It's called PowerWeave, but there are other projects as well now in terms of at the University of Salford in Britain. They're working Professor Suarez who's lectured here at this event. They work on piezoelectric and photovoltaics on a fibre. But again, this sort of thing is long-term. It's nice to think of it on an airship or on to sales of a sailing boat and how that sort of thing might be able to provide electricity from the rain and the wind and the sun. But this is, I think, a fairly distant proposition. So I think your interest is on what sort of timescale at Wafeanian. What timescale are you trying to find these for? Actually, I mean China is well known for being a manufacturing place and a quick-to-production place. However, we have set up a very modern innovation department and also a modern innovation strategy. So we work on different timescales. We have teams working on the close-to-market innovations within half a year, one-year seasonal changes of the products. But we also have a long-term strategic research where we look into three years, five years time span and where we try to identify new technologies and bring them to China wherever we find them in the world. We also develop new technologies in China for sure. Then we try to put it together within an innovation network where we have partners, government-funded projects, innovative partner companies. And we try to put the system together and then offer it to our customers. The people watching this video, we would hope our gang to approach you with any ideas they have, you welcome ideas and inventions, as long as they're not extremely speculative and very long-term. More than fibres, presumably, because fibres is probably beyond the five-year span, isn't it, in terms of any clever fibres, other than just conducted ones. For you, it's ways of putting laminate on textiles, is it? And is it exclusively apparel? Actually, we have lots of different products and we start actually by manufacturing our own fibres. So we have our own yarn factories in China, but we also do the knitting and the weaving process. So we make the fabric as well and we do the finishing process as well, where we can also add some cautics on top of the fabric. So we are very versatile actually. What application? The application, we serve both industries, the footwear and the apparel industry and mainly for the sport industry. So we are very much focused on sporting goods, sport sneakers and sport apparel, mainly made out of synthetic fibres, polyester nylon, spandex for stretchable fabrics and absolutely sure we are looking for specialized fibres as well, conductive fibres, infrared-absorbing fibres, keep you warm, keep you cold, functionality. Moisture management plays a very important role and the moisture management can be achieved by the fibre itself, but also by chemical treatments after the fabric manufacturing. And also we do some coatings like the haptic 3D coatings where we add some value into the fabric or on top of the fabric. And we also supply finished components to the footwear factories. For the haptic, for example, we not only produce a roll of fabric, but we cut it in small pieces. We do the 3D coating and we supply ready-to-assemble components to factories. Human beings are something incredible, like 95% of your living time, you're in contact with textiles. And so they're pretty central to human race, aren't they? So from your point of view, that's inorganics, it's organics, it's composites, it's anything that may do a good job, but it has to be washable, does it? Yes, washability is very important for textiles because we all sweat, we all get dirty. So integrating electronics into fabric is not that easy because of the waterproof properties. We also need to consider chemical safety, actually. Our customers and the consumer markets are very sensitive to toxicity and chemicals or heavy metals or whatever is used in electronic industry might not be suitable for consumer products in the textile markets. So we have to be very careful in developing environmentally friendly products, products which can be easily recycled, where we can at least take out the electronics and bring it to another disposal stream later on, if necessary, or some really non-toxic electronics that would be our dream. Yes, we are very concerned in ID TechEx. That's why at this event, for the first time, we have this award for the Toxicant Replacement Hero. So it's a company or person who's been involved in finding a good alternative for these things that have the toxicants in. It's not just whether the substance is toxic in its use, they usually are not, but it's when it's toxic, when it is disposed of, or something is abused, if it is overheated, it's in a fire or anything like that. And we're quite disturbed that we were able to do a roadmap of the next 10 years, and every year there are several things coming out with either lead or cadmium or heavy metals, bismuth, or breaking down to form cyanide and so on. And it's particularly true of some sectors like photovoltaics, but there are versions that are totally non-toxic, that are not exact replacements, but I think a very good job is done of finding various organisations have data sources so that if a manufacturer like you today wanted to find an alternative to some battery that was non-toxic or something, there are databases for that. But what we've tried to do is look forward because you're quickly getting buried in the new things. And the new things, you don't know what they're going to have, what poisons they're going to have in unless you have very close attention, and certainly you don't know what alternatives are being developed that you should really prefer your investment towards, put it towards, because it reduces your risk. And obviously it's an ethical thing too, I think, that worry is that like textiles, we've had other things like smart windows, they're going to be used in huge amounts, most of them, and so it may be something that doesn't seem much of a toxicity risk, but then it is because it's going to have uncontrolled disposal and be out there in very large numbers, and we all have a responsibility on that, I guess. So you're concerned about the emission of gases if it's abused or if it is when it is disposed of, that sort of thing, I guess. I mean the end of life disposal is important to control it and to have the right type of recycling ways to bring it back into the circular economy, but also during the use it is very important that there's no migration of toxic chemicals to the skin. We talk about skin contact materials with clothing, and also during manufacturing, also our workers need to be safer using these chemicals. So chemical safety is a big, big topic in these consumer markets, and I mean we serve the reporting industry, people who prefer a healthy lifestyle, people who go outdoor to enjoy the nature, and for these products we need to make sure it matches the expectation of the consumers that everything is safe and healthy, and we try very hard and whenever we start a new innovation project we evaluate the environmental performance and we direct our innovation into a direction where we feel it is safe to use. The surface irritant, there are other names for it, but the blue asbestos sort of story where we don't have blue asbestos anymore, but that's not wasn't chemically reactive. The fact was that the fibers went through your body and caused all manner of pathologies along the way, so that wasn't a chemical toxicant, but it was very serious. So people talk of carbon nanotubes if they were free in the air being a bit of a problem, possibly the longer ones are a bit of a problem, but on the other hand from what we saw the far more serious things were these very nasty chemicals that have chemical action. Do you look at both of those or do you feel that the chemicals action is the main thing you have to look out for? No, actually both of them are important and I mean carbon nanotubes you mentioned them, we feel it is too unsafe for using consumer products right now, we just don't know enough about it. We feel much better for graphene, but all the graphene needs to be evaluated carefully on human toxicity and the chemical safety, chemical toxicity by let's say heavy metals or some kind of treatment chemicals we put on inside the yarns or on top of the chemical coatings, dye stuff of yarns that need to be well controlled and there are non-toxic dye stuff available and there are some old style adso dye stuff available which may be cheaper but not really good for health that need to be very closely monitored and controlled and we do it ourselves, also our customers, the sport brands do a great job in changing the supply chain, taking care about wastewater treatment and that all the suppliers comply to these standards of engagement. We've read some scientific reports which expressed concern that sometimes you may feel you have very little of something like carbon nanotubes or refined particles, carbon particles and you have very little of some chemical poison but sometimes there's some of the research seems to indicate that they can leverage each other and that was they can have a multiplier effect so you you mustn't relax even if it's small quantities particularly if you have a surface irritant as well as a chemical reactant I don't do you can counter that or anything I don't know I mean there's so much that's not known that's the point isn't it really? It's really a big unknown area on toxicity that's why we have to be double careful and really only use the safe materials and this is somehow a conflict when moving now into the sensors and the electronic business where electronic industry is just operating in a different way and using different materials not that close to the consumer and to the consumer's skin they usually they're encapsulated in some machines and in computers and so you don't touch them directly having these chemicals on the textile is something different and we need to watch out to use safe sensors, safe electronics, safe connecting wiring and I think it can be done there are lots of options available but but selecting the right options and working with the right partners is getting more and more important. Very large one I gather how big is it now? Yes actually the company was founded about 20 years ago out of nothing and it's a really amazing Chinese growth story. Today we have about 4,500 employees and we are still growing rapidly and we have a plan within two to three years we want to reach 10,000 employees and we are growing in all different segments on our knitting capacity on our weaving capacity we have set up a brand new modern dyehouse now with the state of the art wastewater treatment system that we apply to the strictest water regulations and we set up photovoltaic solar cells all on our roofs cover this solar panels we have wind power for our dyeing house so we also get very engaged in sustainable energy and try to change the supply chain of textile manufacturing. Thank you very much for your time we have to keep in contact with you and you have a wonderful job a fascinating job but obviously a very responsible one good luck thank you


When working with transparency, it's important to distinguish between so-called straight alpha and pre-multiplied alpha. In straight, or post-multiplied alpha, the true color values we're ultimately going to see are the RGB components multiplied by the alpha. But with pre-multiplied values, the RGB components as stored have already been multiplied by the alpha. So here, for example, our straight RDA value of <IP_ADDRESS>, its pre-multiplied equivalent is 0.5, 0.25, 0.35, and 0.5. Notice the alpha itself is the same. While straight alpha is the more obvious representation, pre-multiplied alpha, as we'll see shortly, has some advantages. What's generally called alpha blending is the process of compositing one color value on top of another. The RGBA value on top is called the source, and the RGBA value below is called the destination. And what we want to compute are the blended component values, the RGB and A. First, consider the formula for just blending the alpha itself. We take the source alpha and add it to the destination alpha, multiplied with 1 minus the source alpha. To understand the logic behind this, imagine we're layering two transparencies, both of which are filtering out some amount of light that passes through them both. Well, let's say that the top transparency of the source filters out 60% of the light. In alpha terms, that would be 0.6. So only 40% of the light that hits our source transparency passes through it. Now let's say that the destination alpha only lets 3 quarters of the light through, which in alpha terms is 0.75. Well, if our source transparency has already filtered out 40% of the light, if we filter out another 75%, 75% of 40 is 10%, and so only 10% of the original light is getting through both transparencies. And so in our formula here, that would be 0.6 plus 0.3, getting this 0.9 alpha, meaning it is 90% opaque and only 10% of the light gets through. Now, notes if either the source or the destination have an alpha of 1, meaning fully opaque, then the result is going to always be 1. Because say if our source alpha is 1, then 1 minus source alpha is 0, multiply that with the destination alpha and then you're just left with 1, the source alpha. Or conversely, if the destination alpha is 1, but then source alpha is let's say 0.2, well then we'd have 0.2 plus 1 times 0.8, and so 0.2 plus 8 gets us again 1. So the formula correctly gets us a result of 1 if both or either alphas are 1. Also note that the formula is commutative. If we swap the source and destination alphas, we still get the same result. For the sake of computing the alpha at least, it doesn't matter which we treat as the source in which the destination. As for the color components, the formula is not commutative and also the formula is different if we're dealing with straight alpha versus pre-multiplied alpha. Both formulas however get us a pre-multiplied result and so if you want the straight result, you have to compute the blended alpha and then divide the blended color by the blended alpha. Anyway though, to understand the logic of these formulas, consider first the top formula for straight alpha. The source color component is multiplied by the source alpha and the destination color component is multiplied by the destination alpha which makes sense because the color's transparency in the sense is diminishing its intensity. If we had a 0.5 alpha for our red value, the intensity of the red value we perceive should get cut in half. We don't however simply sum up the two color values multiplied by their alpha. Because the destination is behind the source, its intensity is also diminished by how much light makes it through the top layer through the source and that amount of light is again 1 minus source alpha so that gets multiplied on the destination before we sum. For example, if my source alpha is 0.6, if you imagine a light shining through our top layer through our source layer and our source layer has an alpha of 0.6 then it's only letting in 40% of the light through while then it makes sense that we multiply the destination color value by 0.4. Only 40% of that color intensity underneath is shining through the top layer through the source. So that's the logic of this formula and then in the case for pre-multiplied values, well we don't need to multiply in the alphas because they've already been multiplied in. By default in OpenGL, the output from our fragment shaders simply overwrites whatever might already be in the frame buffer for that pixel. But if we enable blending, then what's already in the frame buffer, the destination pixel, is combined with the source pixel according to a formula that's hardwired into a special part of the GPU called the ROPs, which depending on whom you ask means raster operations processor, render output unit, raster operations pipeline, no one seems to agree but they're called ROPs. And though this logic is hardwired, we have some options about precisely what the operation is. We can select among five options what OpenGL calls the blending equations. In the first three equations, the source and destination are each multiplied with a respective factor. There's a factor for the source and a factor for the destination and we have a dozen or so options about what precisely these factors may be. So that's configurable too. And as you can see in the first equation on the top, the products are then combined by adding them together. In the second equation, we subtract the destination from the source and in the third equation we swap that, we subtract the source from the destination. The last two equation options don't multiply the source and destination by factors. They simply give us either the min between source and destination or the max between source and destination. And be clear this is per component. So say for min, it looks at both red components and whichever is lesser, that is the output red component. To play around with all the possibilities, there's a really neat web page by Anders Wiggelsen that using WebGL is demonstrating, compositing of an image on top of another using different blending equations and blending factors. Here for the blend equation, I can pick any of the five equations. Funk add is the default but here I'll change it to subtract and now you can see the result. And then this top hold down lets us select the source factor. Right now it's just GL1. So you can see here that red, green, blue and alpha of the source are all just being multiplied by one. Meanwhile for the destination, the components are all being multiplied by one minus the source alpha. But we have a dozen other options including say GLDestColor. So now the source components are being multiplied by the respective destination components, which gets us an odd effect but this is something we can do. Now in code to configure the source and destination factors, we call GLBlendFunk but there's also GLBlendFunkSeparate which lets us independently configure what happens with the alpha. And so here for example if I select one, notice now the source alpha is being multiplied by one whereas the other source components are being multiplied still by the destination color. So FunkSeparate is useful when you want to treat alpha in a different way. And likewise we normally set the equation with GLEquationFunk but if we use GLBlendEquationSeparate we can set the equation independently for the alpha. So now for the alpha it's using the min equation rather than subtracting destination from source. And you can see how we would set these options in code down here. Also note this checkbox pre-multiply. With it unchecked both of the input images are straight alpha but if I check it now they're both pre-multiply which in this case doesn't have much of an apparent effect for these particular options but in other cases it will make a noticeable difference. Let me refresh here so we can set it back to the defaults. Notice that there are some options for the factors where it involves a constant color. Like here I'll select for the source 1 minus constant color. And this constant color is set by another function, BLENDCOLOR, which here in the tool we can configure under this tab. But this is what it looks like in code. And so now the factor you can see is 1 minus these RGBA values. Now the question is what blending options do we want for compositing transparent images? Well in the case other color values are straight alpha rather than pre-multiply what we normally want is the default addition equation so we don't need to configure that. But then for the blend func we want source alpha and 1 minus source alpha. And as long as the destination alpha is 1, which is normally going to be the case we're going to first composite transparencies onto something that's fully opaque and then potentially composite further transparencies on top of that all back to front and so every time a blend is performed the destination alpha will always be 1 and so we will get the correct color but the blended alpha will be incorrect. This however will not matter because looking at the formula it doesn't involve the destination alpha we just always assume it to be 1 and in the final output that we're going to render on screen the alpha is disregarded anyway and the blended color values from this formula are pre-multiplied. So long story short this formula is correct for calculating the color value but applying the same formula to the alpha channel is erroneously squaring the source alpha and the blended alpha value is incorrect but that's okay because it's just going to get ignored. Now in the case that we're working with pre-multiplied alpha now we want the source components to just be multiplied by 1 not by source alpha and now we should get the correct alpha value regardless of what the destination alpha is. In the event that our output is not going straight to screen but perhaps is being written to a frame buffer and is going to get composited with some other image down the road well then we're going to want to have correct alphas in the output so in that case this is the proper solution. So for this reason among others generally we prefer using pre-multiplied alpha. In the niche circumstance however where you're dealing with straight alpha and you're compositing back to front where the initial background image has an alpha of 1 in the special case you can use gl blendfunk separate to get both the correct color and the correct alpha all the alphas will be 1 because now here for the source alpha instead of multiplying it by source alpha it is just being multiplied by 1 giving us the correct result. Again though generally the best thing to do for the sake of blending and for other reasons too generally the best thing is to just use pre-multiplied alpha. Looking now at example 3.2 blending sort what's happening here is that well first we're rendering the floor then we're rendering these solid boxes the gray boxes and then we have these five windows with a transparent texture and for those those get rendered last and we make sure to sort them back to front when we render them so that we render the back ones first. Because alpha blended is not commutative the order matters and we want the rearmost transparency blended onto an opaque destination onto an opaque background and then working back to front we render the remaining transparencies. Now the sorting here is done on a per object basis it's done using the objects view space coordinates and as long as these objects don't possibly intersect at all if their bounds don't interlap at all then the sorting works correctly but for two models that intersect into each other's bounds it could be that some polygons of the first are in front of the other but then vice versa some polygons of the second are in front of the first so you can't really fully sort on a whole object basis but even if we sort on a per polygon basis there's still the problem of two polygons, two triangles that might intersect. This is why when we draw we use the Z-buffer because the only way to determine what should go on top of what has to be done on a per pixel basis. The ultimate solution for sorting transparencies then is that after rendering all the opaque objects we need to render all the transparencies but not have overlapping pixels override each other instead they all get preserved and then once we've done all the rendering then for each pixel we sort all the color values and blend them back to front. So it is possible to correctly render an arbitrary number of transparent objects stacked on top of each other but the details of that get a little complicated so we won't cover that here. Anyway, looking at this example's code first thing we need to make sure we've enabled blending and set up the proper blending function our textures here are straight alpha so the blending formula we want is source alpha and one minus source alpha and then for our windows we have this list of window positions which in the rendering loop we're going to put into a map of floats for the distance to that position from the camera and the positions for the values. Once we have this map we can do a reverse sorting with this Arbegin method here to get an iterator that goes backwards through the keys of the map from the most distant to the closest and then we render a window at that position so the windows are rendered in order of furthest away to closest based on their object position for example 3.1 blending discard what's happening here is that we're rendering these textures onto flat quads, these grass textures which have some pixels with alpha values that are zero and in the fragment shader we are discarding those pixels with alpha values under a certain threshold so in fact you'll notice here in the C++ code we have an enabled blending, we're not using blending at all in this example, instead in the fragment shader you see here that when the alpha of our texture color is less than 0.1 we just use the discard statement which is like a special return from your fragment shader that tells the shader not to write any fragment value now the reason we want to make this less than some threshold is simply equal to 0 well if I rebuild now and run it again you'll see we get these annoying little white tips what's happening there is that looking at the texture loading code we're using bilinear filtering and so you sample from the texture it does an interpolation in average in most cases of 1 pixel with its immediate neighbors and so on the edges of the blades of the grass where we go from non-zero alpha to zero alpha some pixels that shouldn't get rendered the interpolation is mixing in from nearby non-zero alpha pixels some degree of non-zero alpha and so these pixels we don't want to see are still getting rendered because they're passing the test they effectively have non-zero alpha thanks to the bilinear filtering you'll also notice here that when working with transparent textures we want to set the texture wrapping to clamp to edge rather than repeat because again thanks to interpolation at the edge we would erroneously have some non-zero alpha through interpolation bleed into the zero alpha parts the parts we don't want to see and so in this case for some pixels we would strangely see sort of an outline of the border which I'll demonstrate here by just making this repeat and we'll set the fragment shader back to use the threshold rebuild run it again and as you can see we're getting this really ugly looking artifact at the edge of the texture parts that should be discarded because of interpolation and wrapping on the texture those pixels at the top are being blended with pixels at the bottom of the texture and so the alphas up there are actually passing our threshold of 0.1 they actually end up not discarded so for transparent textures like this generally you want to clamp to edge


The United Nations has condemned the practice of child marriage in Zimbabwe. This is following the death of a 14-year-old girl after she gave birth at a church shrine. This incident caused outrage among citizens and white activists. The case has brought to the fore the practice of child marriage within Zimbabwe's apostolic churches, which also allow polygamy. The government has traditionally turned the blind eye to the practice of child marriage. Zimbabwe has two sets of marriage laws, the Marriage Act and the Customary Marriages Act. The law gives a minimum age for marriage consent, while the customary law allows for polygamy.


I want to remind everybody that in order to participate, please raise your hand from Zoom or press star nine. You can also use the Q&A function at the bottom of your Zoom screen to put your questions in. So I want to welcome Amherstown clerk, Shavina Martin to our chat today, as well as your town manager, Paul Bachman. Shavina is in the Throws of Election, but also is the co-chair for the Amherst Complete Count Committee with myself and doing a lot of work around that. So before we launch into Q&A, I'm going to give Paul the chance to offer any updates he might have. Sure. Thanks, Brianna. So there are two things that we're really focused on this week. One is the FY21 budget, which is going through the finance committee at this point. The finance committee will have about three times on the budget this week alone. Their goal is to make a recommendation to the town council so the town council can consider the budget on Monday, July 20th. A lot of interest in this budget more than I've ever seen and a lot of comments and public comments, which has been very engaging. And so it's really presented a lot of food for thought for the council as they start to consider it. So, and then the second thing has been the welcoming back the students from the university and the colleges. And I just was on a call with representatives from all five colleges as they start to work through their plans and trying to make sure that everybody is coordinated and that the five colleges are communicating together, which they always do. And talking about the impacts on the town, both through the business community and through the general public and the public health for the town. So those are the big focuses that we've been spending a lot of time on the last week since we since we last talked. All right, thanks for the update Paul, I am going to give Shavina a quick chance to just give an update with all of the things happening in her department right now and then we're going to launch into Q&A so take it away Shavina. Good afternoon, everyone. So here in the town clerk's office have a lot of new and exciting things to report to everyone. As of July 1, we were able to launch our payments. So now you're able to request the vital records, which are birth, death and marriage certificates right online pay form and then it'll come to us electronically and we'll mail it out to you the next day. And also you can now renew your dog license right online as well. Same process, you can go right up to the details right from the town page. And so we're excited about that many residents have already been utilizing it so I'd like to encourage everyone to continue that. And then we are moving into our election season. And without holding up a lot of time. I just want to notify everyone that as of yesterday the Secretary of State began, well, they began mailing out 2020 vote by mail applications. So anyone who would like to vote by mail can do so. No reason is required. And all you have to do is fill out the application and send it back. It's pre-postage to be addressed right here at the town hall. And then if you have any questions surrounding it, you can always do a call with me here Monday through Friday. Okay. Thank you, Shavina. So we've got some questions here that we have on deck that involve just town clerk operations, election information, as well as census. And just want to remind everybody who's joining us live to use the Q&A function to put your question to the room. Although we would prefer if you raise your hand and came into the room and asked your question live, we'd love to hear from you. So that's always an option as well. So the first question I have kind of relates to some of the things Shavina just said. We've gotten this question a couple times a week. I can attest to. I want to get married. How do I get that done now with town hall closed? So right now with town hall being closed, completing a marriage intention is a multi step process. It requires both parties to be present. And there's a lot of documents that you have to fill out. And so right now we are not processing marriage intentions. And the reason we're not doing it is just to minimize the exposure to possible contaminants of the virus. And the thing to know that I would like everyone to know is that in the state of Massachusetts, you can complete the marriage intention with any community because you're getting married in the state. So you don't have to file your intention in the town where you're going to have your marriage ceremony. I didn't know that. My marriage license from the town of Amherst. So I have fond memories of that. Now we've a question from the room. Sarah asks, you may receive thousands of ballots by mail. Will you need additional volunteers to handle these? That's an awesome question. We will. And we do have, we've always had our, our election worker job hosting up on the town's website. Anyone who is interested and anyone who is healthy. I am encouraging to go on and fill out the application and then those get sent right over to me and we will begin reviewing all of those. We've had about eight people already apply and the Secretary of State is also doing. So if you are interested, please apply. It is that application on our career portal. It is. Okay. And that web addresses Amherst MA dot gov slash jobs where you can find that and all of our other current job postings as well. I have a question here. Is it too late to answer my census? The, the quick and easy answer, I guess I'll take, I'll take that one is no, it's not too late. You can still answer online by mail or by phone, several different options there. It's not too late. However, for those who have not responded, there will be census workers and new graders coming out in the community, following safety protocols with masks and whatnot starting August 11th. So if you'd prefer not to have a visitor at your door. So all they are going to be practicing safe protocols. It's probably a good, good time to answer if you haven't yet so that you can not show up on that list of non response. And that's going to start here in August 11th. So, so you'll start seeing people with identification, they will have census badges. They will not ask to enter your home, they will not ask any of those types of questions about social security numbers or anything like that they're going to be simply asking the questions that are on the questionnaire. So, please don't give out any of that information if you have concerns about that you can you can definitely let us know. And we have another question that kind of was a follow up to that. And this has been a big, a big topic of conversation for us. I'm a student and got sent home due to COVID. Where do I count do my parents count me. That's a question we get we get a lot. Parents should not count you if you live in Amherst for the majority of the year. And if you split your time equally it's where you live on April 1. However, this year that's a little different and the census clarified that you should be counted where you live when you're at school. And for those students who lived on campus, you have been counted by your university. And for those who lived, who live or lived off campus or coming back into off campus housing, you should be counted where you live. When you live at school, if that's Amherst, then you would get counted here in Amherst. Alright, so I've got another question. If we served as election workers in the past, do we need to reapply for this fall. Yeah, we will begin. The everyone here in the office we're going to start reviewing all of our election workers next week. Many have already notified us if they are available if they're unavailable, but if you worked last year, or if you worked for the March 3 presidential primary, then you're already considered on our activists, and so you'll get a notification. Alright, thank you. I've got this question to hear that I have probably gotten at least 20 times since the building's been closed to the public. So this person needs to get something notarized, but everywhere seems closed. Does the clerk's office do this during this time or is there a recommendation of where they can get this done. I've been performing our notary service, and I do know that the banks have been doing it. So any of our community banks in the area in town have been doing them and some attorneys offices have been doing them as well. We get that question a lot as well because anyone who has to remove their business certificate this year, it requires a notary seal. Okay, thank you. This question kind of references the mailing that you mentioned a little bit earlier. Is everyone getting mailed a ballot now? Do I still need to ask for an absentee ballot separately? So just to clarify, it's not a ballot that everyone is going to receive. It's a request for an absentee or early voting ballot that every registered voter in the state will receive, and so you won't get a ballot unless you return that form requesting a ballot. And you can fill that form out for the whole year, or if you want just the ballot for the September vote primary, you can indicate that on the form. If you want one just for the November 3rd election, you can indicate that as well. Also, if you are an independent or what we call in the state of Massachusetts an unenrolled voter, there will be directions on how to choose which ballot you want because you have to choose it. Hey, Shavina, what's the difference between early voting and absentee voting? And how would I know which one I want to use? Well, okay, so that's a great question.   Early voting just allows you the ability to catch your vote in advance of election day. This year when the legislation that Governor Baker passed and signed on July 6th, you need no reason. And the ballot actually says both. So the ballot says absentee and early voting. So this year, it's kind of the same. Typically, you would need a reason. In the past, if someone was admitted in the hospital, right before I think 48 hours or 75 days before the election, we could have a relative bring a ballot to the hospital if they're admitted. And those laws have been relaxed this year. And these are temporary changes, sorry. So, so if I wanted, if I get this thing in the mail, and I want to vote and not have to go to the polls. I just say, yes, give me something, give me either one. It doesn't really matter and you'll send them the same. It'll be whether I asked for absentee or early voting, I'll get the same packet from you. Yes. So how you'll do it's going to be, it'll be pre populated. The application is going to be pre populated with your name, your address. And if you have a mailing address. If it's us, then you're mailing address and you can indicate where you'd like to have your ballot and mail. And then it'll have your birth date.  So, like, for me, it'll have 1979 and then you just sign it and mail it back. So, then the, and can at the same time, I think you said that maybe I wasn't listening clearly. Clearly, I can ask for both the September primary and the November general election at the same time. I'm not going to get a second mailing. Great. That's correct. Good. It's really important to clarify those things. I think there's been a lot of confusion and in the media and even locally that people would be just automatically getting getting a ballot. So, right. It's not ballot you're getting an invitation to ask for a ballot. Correct. That's good to understand that. All right, now I've got a, another question coming in, I'm moving to Amherst in two weeks. How do I update my voting address do I have to come into town hall. Well, there's a number of ways you can do it. You can do it right online on the second case website and that comes over to us electronically, or you can contact our office and we can mail you out a hard copy form in order for there to be any changes to anyone's voter profile your signature. And what's the deadline for the next election in order to be registered to vote or to update your registration. The legislation changed that. So originally it was going to be August, which is why we were going to collaborate and do a big thing with census, which, you know, we know since this day with the August 11, that's now been moved to August 22nd, which is a stat. August 22nd to two, so he said. Mm hmm. Okay. Yep. So 82 to 2020. For to read last day to register to vote for the primary. Yep, September 1. Okay. Another, another census question here is that that's a Saturday right. It is a Saturday. That's also the first day of early voting in person. Oh my gosh. Town clerk's office never sleeps. Oh my God, you guys. It's going to be a long time. Send them lots of love and coffee. I'm going to pivot real quick to another census question and I've actually got this a bunch of times and I just got clarification on this. From them a couple of days ago so someone asks, I made a mistake and I didn't count my youngest child on my census what do I do. And that's a really good question. So I did get clarity on that at least for a solution for people who respond online was to go right back into the the 2020 whoops this way 2020 census. And start another questionnaire with your with your address and your information and they will knock out your other response and take the newer response. So if you failed to count a newborn, for example, or one of your younger children, which actually happens. Quite frequently it's a huge concern nationally but also an Amherst has been designated as being at a high to very high risk for under counting our youngest children. So, if you did answer and you forgot, you can go back in. If you haven't answered yet be sure to count everybody in your household even if it's. If you're not the parent of the child but they're living there predominantly with you, they still count. They're doing a lot of programming as the complete count committee targeting families with young children starting Friday and for the rest of the summer the Amherst Complete Count Committee is sponsoring additional meals on Fridays through the schools in collaboration with the school's meal distribution. So they'll be getting additional meals to go home for over the weekend and the meals will have stickers and information similar to what you can see behind my head. In different languages and those will be affixed to the meals to just prompt and remind and give the web address for people to answer. And we have other programming also coming out tailored at families with young children and hopefully off campus students as well. I have looks like I have another question here in the room. Another voting question so if there is in per if there is in person early voting, where will that happen. That information will be revealed in the week. And for working on that. We will have that pretty prominently on our homepage. Also, there's a voting page Amherst m a dot gov slash vote where we'll have everything that you do need to know we'll put that out there once we have the details. And then in context I think it's a complex question that has been managing with our talking to public health public safety folks in terms of whether it can be inside has whether it's going to be intense outside. Where's a good location to manage traffic so multiple locations are being examined but we will be settling on that pretty soon. And the people who might have just joined us. Please feel free to put your questions in the q amp a raise your hand via zoom or star nine for those of you who are calling in. We'd love to hear your voice. I'm tired of hearing my voice so please pop in. Otherwise, while we wait for another question to come in. I've got some more here. I'm kind of hopefully we've touched on but I'm living in another state now but I need access to my birth records how can I do this. Okay, so you can do it a number of ways you can use our e pay online when people are out of when you're an out of state resident I always ask you to call us first just to ensure we have your record. You can use our online and you just request it and you pay for it. It's a multi step process to refund your money if we don't have your record so give us a call first, so we can locate your record. And then you can request it either by mail or through the e pay system. And the same goes for death records and copies of marriage certificates as well as should be all by the word. We have the all up there and online. slash payments or if you hit our homepage there's a big button that says e payments. And we've been steadily adding different categories to that with more to come. So, feel free to check that out. And that's been a really great initiative that Brianna really led and and with the pandemic actually drove us say we got to move on this right now and make it easier for people to access our services electronically. So great work on that. Absolutely and I think that one of the first times I met Sheveena and we talked she said let's get all this stuff online. And of course things take a little longer and I'm glad we got it done but she came in with wanting that to be to improve her services for the community so I have to have to say that. Okay I've got a question here that's directed towards Paul. Paul does the university seem responsive to the concerns you outlined in your letter. I've not heard a response back from the university at this point in time. I think they this the concerns that were expressed in that letter shared by lots of people in the community. And they take them very seriously I know, and I think they're trying to figure out how to address them. I think that they're talking about that the, you know, thousands of students in terms of testing and protocols is is pretty gigantic, but they have a lot of resources at their disposal as well so I expect that they will be addressing them at some point in the future. And will when when they do get addressed is that something that we will make available. It depends how they want it you know they, you know, we've asked for a number of things actions on their part and even just a meeting basically and. And so it's at a fairly high level. And so that's what we're waiting to do to hear from. And you mentioned this but I will echo the fact that there has been a lot of activity and conversation through our multiple different channels from the community members expressing opinions and concerns about that so we hope to keep everybody. So I think that's in mind and to keep the information flowing but feel free to reach out to us if there's anything. One thing we should all expect is with when when the university in the college is open that there will be an increase in COVID-19 cases because they will be doing a lot of testing they really I think their intent, at least for on campus students is to test twice a week. So we'll be doing a lot of testing we know a lot of young people are asymptomatic, and those cases will be recorded so people should expect to see an increase in cases in Amherst. We need to sort of gauge what should what's the expected increase what that should look like, so we can inform the public to say, Yeah, this has been within the norms of what we expect. The other thing we have that's really good is that are their public health officials and in a lot of ways UMass is its own entity in terms of handling cases they they manage their cases cases on campus are managed by the university. And then the cases in Amherst are managed by the Amherst public health department. So but there's a lot of communication between the two healthy health department so that's a really good thing for us. Absolutely. I'm going to ask one more census question that I've gotten. I can't even count how many times but basically is my data safe are my responses safe. And I think we come at this from a couple of different lenses in our community primarily have a mistrust of government or the administration and don't feel comfortable sharing their information or are concerned about an immigration or a citizenship status. On the other hand that we have many off campus students who may have more than four people living in a unit so there's concern about that. So in law the Census Bureau cannot release any of identifiable information about you your home your business, even even to law enforcement agencies. They certainly can't release that to the to the town, and we wouldn't be looking for that so in the case for students living off campus, they should feel confident to answer. We are five people living in your unit, even though that is not technically allowed in our town, due to due to zoning information, we will not be seeking that information we will not get that information so we encourage people to answer as accurately as possible and make sure everybody is counted. And that that's protected under title 13 in federal law so it's not something we're seeking to do and even if we were we wouldn't be able to access that. That might not alleviate everybody's concerns about privacy and data but it is certainly something to mention that it's very protected information. It helps some people feel better about answering and we've spoken a lot about, you know, we want to get a complete count and we need we need this but it's really we didn't talk so much about why we need it and I'll just say quickly, as far as Amherst is concerned. We're talking about representation in our in our House of Representatives making sure we're adequately represented we did lose a seat in Massachusetts, based off of the census response in 2010. So we don't want that to happen of course, and it really is about funding for almost everything in our community schools roads. For programs, federal funding it's, it's going to impact us for the next 10 years and we will we will feel it if we're, we're under counted. So that's my spiel on that one. We are coming up close to our time so I'm going to say one more time to the room to please pop in if you have a question or a comment. You can use q amp a raise your hand or start nine from the phone. We'll give people another chance. Are there any things should be enough that you wanted to share that you didn't get asked directly today. There will be, we will be putting out a lot of information that'll be forthcoming and the weeks to come surrounding election so I just like to encourage everyone to, you know, stay tuned. We're going to, we're going to put it in all the news media outlets up on our website and things like that. And it's one of my desires is to keep all of our residents well informed. And that way you all can have confident conversations and be well informed and make good decisions. And I'll mention to that we just put up on our social media channels on Facebook and Twitter and we'll add it to our YouTube channel but Shavina did a great informational video about voting in the 2020 election with Dr. Demetria Shabazz. So that video is out there so feel free to check that out if you wanted to get some additional info and resources. I don't see any other questions from the room. Paul, did you have any last pieces you wanted to share before we close up. I think we're good to go on this. Thank you. All right, thank you everybody. We'll see you next week. And if you have follow up questions, please email us at info at Amherst MA dot gov and we will get you the information that you need. Thank you, Shavina. Yeah, thanks. Bye guys. Thank you.


Governor Khaled Monfang has met with heads of security agencies in Plateau State over the recent conflict that has affected some parts of the state. The Commissioner of Police in Plateau Onyeka, Batilomio, while addressing newsmen after the meeting said security meeting was mapped out, solution to end the negative security situation in the state. I've been centred mostly on issues that have been happening here on the Plateau. Also, who came up with solutions as to what to do, towards ameliorating some of the problems of the people who lost their wants in that very act. Right from the day of the inauguration, the governor from his speech, from his actions, you would have all known that he's a man of the people and I believe the people up there now must have been waiting to see him. So he really is interested, very much disturbed that he wants to go and see his people in this condition right now.


We want to make this channel succeed So we got a really really good guy running it arcade pixels He's running the show right now, and he's taking submissions. He's looking for directors other things I should talk about before I forget we are promoting it on our central channel as well So if you get involved you post a video up there. Yeah, we're gonna be sending people to the channel from our big channel So in the end guys, we're trying to help you get more subs, and we're always looking for new ways to do it Indie games is just one of many we got a lot more coming. Please go to the channel subscribe Get involved make a video submit it Fill out the form whatever you've got to do get that going we'll promote it. Let's do this This is your boy Bixie checking out go to the link below Cheers