Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering IFS World Conference 2019, brought to you by IFS. We're back in Boston, Massachusetts, IFS World Day One. You're watching theCUBE, Dave Vellante with Paul Gillin. Boss DeVos is here, he's the director of IFS Labs and Bob DeCoe, who's the vice president of AI and RPA at IFS. Gents, welcome, good to see you again. Good morning. You were on last year, talking about innovation, IFS Labs. First of all, tell us about IFS Labs and what you've been up to in the last 12 months. Well, IFS Labs functions as the new technology incubator for IFS, right? So we're continuously looking at opportunities to bring innovation into product and help our customers take advantage of all the new things out there to create better businesses. And one of the things I talked about last year is how we want to be close to our customers. And I think that's what we have been doing over the past year, really be close to our customers. So Bob, you got the cool title, AI, RPA, all the hot, cool topics. Yeah, we'll be good, nice. So help us understand what role you guys play as IFS as a software developer. Are you building AI? Are you building RPA? Are you integrating it? Yes, yes, paint a picture for us. I mean, our value to our customers comes from wrapping up the technology, the AI, the RPA, the IoT, into product in a way that's going to help their business. So it's going to be easy to use. They're not going to need to be a technical specialist to take advantage of it. It's going to be embedded in the product in a way they can take advantage of very easily. That's the key for us as a software developer. We don't want to offer them a platform that they can just go and do their own thing. We want to sort of control it, make it easier for them. So I presume it's not a coincidence that you guys are all together. So this stuff starts in the labs and then your job is to commercialize it, right? So take machine intelligence, for example. I mean, it can be so many things to so many different people. Take us back to sort of the starting point within reason of your work on machine intelligence, what you were thinking at the time, maybe some of the experiments that you did and how it ends up in the product. Well, very good question, right? So I think we started, well, first of all, I think IFS has been using machine learning at various points in our products for many, many years. For example, in our dynamic scheduling engine, we have been using neural networks to optimize field service scheduling for quite some many years. But I think if we go back like two years, what we saw is that there's a real potential in our products that if you would take machine learning algorithms inside of the product to actually help automate certain decisions in there, that it could potentially help our business quite a bit. And the role of IFS labs back in the day is that we just started experimenting, right? So we went out to different customers. We started engaging with them to see, okay, what kind of data do we have? What kind of use cases are there? And basically based on that, we sort of developed a vision around AI. And that vision back in the day was based on three important aspects, human machine interaction, optimization, and automation. And that kind of really landed well with our customer use case. We talked quite a bit about that at the previous world conference. So at that point, we basically decided, okay, you know what, we need to make serious work of this. Experimenting is good, but at a certain point, you have to conclude that the experiments are successful, which we did. And at that point, we decided to look at, okay, how can we make this into a product? And how that normally goes is that we start engaging with them more intensively and starting to hand over. In this case, we decided there was also a good moment to bring somebody on board that actually has even more experience and knowledge in AI than what we already had as IFS labs. But that could basically take over the baton and say, okay, now I am going to run with it and actually start commercializing and productizing that. Still in collaboration with IFS labs, but yeah, taking that next step in the road. And then Bob came on board. Christian Patterson made the point during the keynote this morning that you have to avoid the appeal of technology for technology's sake. You have to have, it has to start with the business use case. You're both very technology, very deep into the technology. How do you keep disciplined to avoid letting the technology lead your activities? Well, may I Bob? Yeah, absolutely. So I think a good example is what we see at this world conference as well. It is staying close to the customer and accepting and realizing that there is no, there's no use in just creating technology for the sake of technology as you say yourself. So what we did here, for example, is that we showcase collaboration projects with customers. So for example, we showcase one with SharePak, which is a manufacturing of spouted pouches down here in Massachusetts, actually. And they wanted to invest in robotics together with us. So what we basically did is actually went into their factory, literally on the factory floor, and start innovating there. So instead of just thinking about, okay, how do robotics and IFS applications or one of our other products work together? We said, let's experiment on the shop floor of a customer instead of inside of the ivory tower, as sometimes our competitors do. Does that answer your question? I think it does. I can pick up a little further. Yeah, I'd love to see some other examples too. Well, so I think the really important thing, and again, Christian touched on it this morning, is not the individual technologies themselves, it's how they work together. We see a lot of the underlying technologies becoming more commoditized. That's not where companies are really starting to differentiate. Algorithms, after a while, become algorithms. There's a good way of doing things. They might evolve slightly over time, but effectively, you can open source a lot of these things, you can take advantage. The value comes from that next layer up, how you take those technologies together, how you can create end-to-end processes. So if we take something like predictive maintenance, we would have an asset, we would have sensors on that asset that would be providing real-time data to an IoT system. We can combine that with historical maintenance data stored within a classic ERP system. We can pull that together, use machine learning on it to make a prediction for when that machine is going to break down. And based on that prediction, we can raise a work order, and if we do that over enough assets, we can then optimize our technicians. So instead of having to wait for it to break down, we can know in advance, we can plan for people to be in the right place. It's that end-to-end process that's where the value is. We have to bring that together in a way that we can offer it to our customers. There's certainly a lot of talk in the press about machines replacing humans. Machines have always replaced humans, but for the first time in history, it's with cognitive functions now. So people get freaked out a little bit about that. I'm hearing a theme of augmentation at this event, but I wonder if you could share your thoughts with regard to things like AI, automation, robotic process automation, how are customers adopting them? Is there sort of concern up front?  But at the same time, it's clear that this could have an effect on people's jobs and lives. What are your thoughts? Sure, do you want to kick off on that? Yeah, I'll know if you can kick off. Yeah, absolutely, that's fine. So I think in terms of the automation, the low-level tasks, as you say, that can free up people to focus on higher-value activities, something like RPA, those bots, they can work 24-7, they can do it error-free. It's often doing work that people don't enjoy anyway. So that tends to actually raise morale, raise productivity, and allow you to do tasks faster. The augmentation, I think, is where it gets very interesting because you often don't want to automate all your decisions. You want people to have the final say, but you want to provide them more information, better, more pertinent ways of making that decision. And so it's very important, if you can do that, that you've got to build the trust with them. If you're going to give them an AI decision that's just out of a black box, just say there's a 70% chance of this happening, what I've found in my career is that people don't tend to believe that or they start questioning it, and that's where you have difficulty. So this is where explainable AI comes in. Either being able to state clearly why that prediction's being made, what are the key drivers going into it, or if that's not possible, at least giving them the confidence to see, well, you're not sure about this prediction, you can play around with it, you can see that I'm right, but I'm going to make you more comfortable, and then hopefully you're going to understand and sort of move with it, and then it starts sort of finding its way more naturally into the workplace. So that's, I think, the key to building up successful augmenting. Is that essentially what it is? It's sort of giving a human the parameters, the probabilities, and saying, okay, now you can make the call as to whether or not you want to place that bet or make a different decision or hold off and get more data, is that right? Yeah, I think a lot of it is about setting, the thresholds and the parameters within which you want to operate. Often, if a model is very confident, either yes or a no, you'd probably be quite happy to let it automate, take that through. It's the borderline decision where it gets interesting. You probably still want someone to look over it, but you want them to do it consistently, you want them to do it using all the information to hand, and so that's what you would do, you present it to them. Yeah, and to add to that, I think we also should not forget, is that a lot of our customers, a lot of companies are actually struggling finding quality stuff, right? I mean, aging of the workforce, right? We're all retiring eventually, right? So aging of the workforce is potentially finding lack of quality stuff. So if I go back to the cheer pack example I was just talking about, and some of the benefits they get out of that robotics project is, of course, they're saving money, right? They're saving about $1.5 million a year on money on that project, but their most important benefit for them is actually the fact that they have been able to move the people from the workflow doing that into higher skilled positions effectively countering their labor shortage. They were limited in their operations, but in fact they had too few quality stuff. And by putting the robots in, they were able to reposition those people, and that's for them the most important benefit. So I think there's always a little bit of a balance, but I also think we eventually need robots, we need automation to also keep up with the work that needs to be done. Maybe you can speak to Bobby, you can speak to software robots. When people think of robots, they tend to think of machines, but in fact software robots are where the real growth is right now, the greatest growth is right now. How pervasive will software robots be in the workplace, do you think, in three to five years? I think the software robots, as they are now within the RPA space, they fulfill a sort of part of the overall automation picture, but they're never going to be the whole thing. I see them very much as bringing different systems together, moving data between systems, allowing them to interact more effectively. But within systems themselves, the bots can only really scratch the surface. They're interacting with software in the same way a human would, on the whole by clicking buttons, going through, et cetera. Beneath the surface, for example, within the IFS product, we have got data understanding how people interact with our products, we can use machine learning on that data to learn, to make recommendations, to do things that a software bot wouldn't be able to see. So I think it's a combination. The software bots are kind of on the outside looking in, but they're very good at bringing things together. And then inside, you've got that sort of deeper automation to take real advantage of the individual pieces of software. This may be a little out there, but you guys are deep into the next generation. I want to talk right now about quantum and how we could see workable quantum computers within the next two to three years. What do you think the outlook is there? How is that going to shake things up? Yeah, let me answer this. We're actually having an active project in IFS Labs currently, looking at quantum computing, right? There's a lot of promise in it. There's also a lot of unfilled, unfulfilled problems in there, right? But if you look at the potential, I think where it really starts playing into benefits is if the larger the optimization problems, the larger the algorithms are that we have to run, the more benefits it actually starts bringing us. So if you ask me for an outlook, I say there is potential, definitely, especially in optimization problems, right? But I also think that the realistic outlook is quite far out. Yes, we're all experimenting it and I think it's our responsibility as IFS or as IFS Labs to also look on what it could potentially mean for applications as we have as IFS. But my personal opinion is the outlook is, yeah. So what comes first? At least five to 10 years out, right? What comes first? Quantum computing are fully autonomous, driverless vehicles. Oh, that's a tricky question. I mean, I would say, in terms of the practical commercial application, it's going to be the latter. I think they're much closer to each other. Okay, so that's quite a ways off. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so. Question back on RPA, what are you guys exactly doing on RPA? Developing your own robotic process automation software? Are you integrating doing both? So within the product, if we think of RPA as this means of interacting with the graphical user interface in a way that a human would, within the product, we're thinking more in terms of automating processes, using the machine learning, as I mentioned, to learn from experience, et cetera, in a way that will take advantage of things like our open APIs that were discussed on the main stage today. RPA is very much our way of interacting with other systems, so allowing other systems to interact with IFS, allowing us to send messages out. So we need to make it as easy as possible for those bots to call us. That can be by making our screens nice and accessible and easy to use, but I think the way that RPA is going, a lot of the major vendors are becoming orchestrators, really. They're creating these studios where you can drag and drop different components in to do OCR, provide cognitive services, and elements that you could drag and drop in would be to, say, take data from a file and load it into IFS and put it in a purchase order, and you could just drag that in. And then it doesn't really matter how it connects to IFS. It can do that via the API, and I think it probably will. So it's creating the ability to talk to IFS that's the most important thing for us. So you're making your products RPA-ready, friendly. Exactly. It sounds like you're using it for your own purposes, but you're not an RPA vendor per se. You're not saying, okay, here's how you do an automation. You're going to integrate that with other RPAs' leadership products. I think we would really take a more of a partner approach there, right? So if a customer, I mean, there's different ways of integrating systems together. RPA is a good one there. There's other ways as well, right? That if a customer actually wants to integrate the systems together using RPA, very good choice, we make sure that our products are as ready as much for that as possible. Of course, we will look at the part of the ecosystem to make sure that we have sufficient and the right partners in there that a customer has a choice in what we recommend. But basically, we say we want to be agnostic to what kind of RPA vendor sits in there. Notwithstanding, there was obviously a lot of geopolitical stuff going on with tariffs and the like. So notwithstanding that, do you feel as though things like automation, RPA, AI will swing the pendulum back to onshore manufacturing, whether it's Europe or US, or is the cost still so dramatically advantageous to, you know, manufacturing China? Will that pendulum swing, in your opinion, as a result of automation? Good question. I'm not sure it will completely swing, but it will definitely be influenced, right? One of the examples I've seen in the RPA spaces, right? Where a company before would actually have an outsourcing project in India where people would just type over the purchase orders, right? Now an RPA bot scans it in, so they don't need the Indian offshore anymore. But it's always a balance between, you know, what's the benefit, what's the cost of developing technology?  One of the discussions I had with my colleagues in Sri Lanka, and maybe completely off topic example, we were talking about car wash, right? So us in the Western world, we have car wash where you drive your car through, right? They don't have them in Sri Lankan, all the car washes are by hand. But the difference is, because labor is cheaper there, that it's actually cheaper to have people washing your car while with us in the U.S., for example, that's more expensive than actually having a machine doing it, right? So it is a macroeconomical sort of question. That's quite interesting to see how that develops over the next couple of years. All right, Chess, well, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Great discussion, really appreciate it. Thank you very much. All right, you're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Dave Vellante, Paul Gellin. We'll be back, IFS World, from Boston. You're watching theCUBE.


The Mughal Empire, an ancient Gherkani empire that was located within the Indian subcontinent.  A wealth of archaeological information, which has offered a glimpse back into our distant past, revealing many things about this ancient people, which for a time was lost in antiquity. However, although extensive archaeological exploration has unraveled many of the Mughal's mysterious existence, there remains a most perplexing enigma. In the 1980s, Smithsonian historian Emily Savage-Smith embarked on a journey to acquire a set of perplexing ancient artifacts, now known as celestial spheres. Plotted upon the underside of a dome or hemispherical screen, the celestial sphere is a practical tool for astronomy even to this day, allowing the observers to plot positions of objects in the sky when distances are unknown or trivial. Most, as one would presume, display a primitive understanding of astronomical arrangements. However, some reluctantly revealed to the academic world and since quietly archived away from inquisitive souls, have stumped all who have attempted to explain them based solely upon modern historical conformities. The majority of celestial spheres acquired can be catalogued into two distinct types, seemed spheres and their more elaborate, thus greatly more problematic counterparts, seamless spheres. Seemed spheres are, or were, made by molding two halves of the sphere separately and then soldering them together. The artisans and astronomers would then collaboratively engrave the surface. Seamless spheres, however, are another thing entirely. Up until Savage-Smith made her discovery, it was thought by virtually all within the academic community, including metallurgists the world over, that all examples of hollow metal celestial spheres were of the seemed type. This owing to the long-held belief that creating seamless hollow metal spheres was impossible, as it turns out, it isn't. The most exquisite surviving example of a hollow seamless celestial sphere is one that is said to have been made by a Mughal metallurgical master named Muhammad Salid Tatawi in 1631. Although conveniently, it is unknown just how he figured out how to make the sphere or indeed fill it accurately with astronomical information we have only recently confirmed is accurate. It makes one wonder just how did he learn such a technique, if, of course, it was he who created it? With no evidence to suggest that the Mughals could have even cast the bronze needed to create the sphere, you have to wonder, just where did they get this information from? Were the ancient Mughals visited by a race of ancient extraterrestrial beings? Could they discover a relic, an artifact, left by a vastly more ancient lost civilization which they claimed as their own? Unfortunately, the subject of seamless celestial spheres is little known within mainstream antiquity, and as such, in the few places they are discussed, the facts are often distorted or even completely made up. They are most certainly out of place artifacts, which some have attempted to brush beneath a rug of convolution. We always perceive this method of concealment to be strong evidence of a conspiracy. Just who could have made the Mughal celestial spheres? And more importantly, how did they make them? Perhaps one day, we will find out the truth. The Nebra Skydisk. Found on the top of Middleburg Mountain in Germany, amongst a horde of Bronze Age relics, mostly dating to around 1600 B.C., however, there is a possibility of this artifact actually being pre-flood. It is the oldest chart of the heavens in the world, but additionally, it displays an astonishing level of skill, creativity, astronomical knowledge, and indeed, accuracy. For a considerable time, reams of, quote, specialists attempted to discredit the Nebra Skydisk as a fake. However, after numerous in-depth examinations of the artifact, it has reluctantly been academically accepted as authentic. It is a bronze disk about 32 cm in diameter, with a diagram of the heavens embossed onto it in gold. It shows representations of the Sun, Moon, Pleiades, and three other crescents, two presumed to be horizontal lines, and the other a possible solar barge. It has been variously proposed that the disk was intended as an astronomical tool, and that through comparison of the skies and a visual display of the extremes of the rising and setting positions of the Sun, it could be used to determine the time of year. In addition, it is proposed that it was used to calculate the difference between the solar and lunar cycles, in the form of adding a 13th lunar month, something which is required every two or three years.  Partially decoded and used by these people, a group of German scholars who studied this archaeological gem released the following assumptive conclusion, quote, the sensation lies in the fact that the bronze age people managed to harmonize the solar and lunar years. We never thought they would have managed that. The functioning of this clock was probably known to a very small group of people, end quote. Also, according to German astronomer Wolfhard Schlosser of the Ruhr University in Bochum, based on the object, the bronze age skygazers somehow already knew what the Babylonians would describe well over a thousand years later. Whether this was a local discovery or whether the knowledge came from afar is still not clear, Schlosser said. Is the Nebra Skydisk an advanced pre-flood relic, with specialists pertaining to such assumptions regarding our history? It is often forgivable to doubt these modern-day attested explanations. Regardless, the Skydisk is clearly an amazing object which thankfully still exists within the public eye.


Good afternoon. We will be talking about building the new financial system from the ground up. My name is Sunna Amaz. For those of you who don't know, I'm co-founder of Token Daily, a community platform and newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on the latest in cryptocurrency and blockchain projects. Today, I'm joined by Elizabeth Stark and Elizabeth. How about you introduce yourself to everybody? Thanks, Sunna. Hey everybody. I'm Elizabeth Stark, CEO and co-founder of Lighting Labs. This is my third year here back at Slush, which is awesome. I'm really excited to be back. I will say it's the warmest year so far, so I'm really happy about that. But no, Slush has been amazing and in fact, I was just thinking about 2016, I was here. I actually gave a talk about the technology my company is building at Lighting. Back then, a lot of it was just really kind of the theory and what we'd been envisioning and what we were working on. Last year, 2017, was the height of a lot of the madness in the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. There was a lot of hype. Then this year has really been focused on building, which is exactly what I love and what I'm really passionate about. I'm super excited to be back. As Sunna mentioned, my company, Lighting Labs, are building technology to make Bitcoin faster and more scalable. I've always been really passionate about open-source decentralized technologies. I've previously taught at Stanford and Yale University and have just always been an internet geek. Really excited to be here. You're in good company. Roomful of internet geeks. I was wondering, before we start jumping into Lighting Labs and talking about the tech you and your team are building, how did you start on your journey into crypto and what took you down the crypto rabbit hole? As mentioned, open-source technology was something that I've always really been excited about and passionate about. I think the reason why was because I saw that the internet opened up so many opportunities to people around the world. It didn't matter where you were, who you were. When I first learned about Bitcoin, I was teaching at Stanford actually, a TA for the course that I was teaching. It said this article. It was 2010. The article is about open-source money. I remember thinking, open-source money, that sounds really cool, but will it ever work? Of course, I should have spent my life saving some Bitcoin with an academic at the time. Instead, I just said, okay, this is something interesting. Let's see what happens. Several months later, it started getting more in the media. It started reading the white paper, learning about it.  It's like a vortex.  In those eight years, what are major shifts and trends that you've observed over time? One really significant thing that happened this past year, 2018, was it was the 10th anniversary of the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper. On Halloween of 2008, the pseudonymous individual named Satoshi Nakamoto released his white paper to the world. Back then, nobody really cared. It wasn't this big ordeal. It didn't kind of go viral. A few people on a mailing list saw it. Some people thought it was cool. In fact, somebody named Hal Finney, who sadly passed away, who was key in this community, immediately saw the potential, spoke to Satoshi and got involved. That was really kind of the earliest days. The internet has been around for decades now. We think of the World Wide Web, but the internet predated the World Wide Web substantially. I think we've really seen the first decade of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, but it's early. I like to analogize this to say the command line days of the internet. This was pre-graphical browser. It's kind of like when you had to type in text into the command line, and you didn't yet have the World Wide Web or all of the good usable apps that we have today. There were a lot of ups and downs throughout this first 10 years. The peak of the craziness was the end of 2017. But now we're really at the point where I think the focus is on building real technology with real use cases, and that's what I'm really passionate about right now. Before we jump into lightning and talking about those specific use cases, I like that you bring up the internet analogy. When we look back at USA Today shows from the early 90s, early 80s, we see people discussing the at sign, and they don't know what to make of it. They don't know how to think of it. They call it the A with the ring around it because they've never been exposed to email or it wasn't normalized. We see this happening today as well. People have a difficulty thinking about how to think about cryptocurrencies. Do we evaluate it in a tech framework? Do we evaluate it in a financial framework? Is it going to replace fiat entirely or will it be a parallel currency? Where do you see Bitcoin headed to 10 to 20 year time span? I think one of the most fascinating things about this technology is it encompasses so many different areas. It's not just technology. It involves apply cryptography and breakthroughs in computer science, but Bitcoin also involves game theory, incentive structures. Obviously, there are economic elements. There are sociological elements, cultural elements, legal elements. So I think it's really a fascinating area to study and one that I'm really passionate about. In fact, I don't teach anymore at universities, but it would be a perfect subject to teach a course on in a multidisciplinary manner. From my perspective, what's so significant about this technology is it touches so many areas of our society. In the global landscape, financial inclusion, there are so many different implications. I think it's very easy to dismiss. One thing that we've seen is, say, there are a lot of people from the broader financial community that have said something like, Bitcoin is a scam. We're like, this will never take off. Again, let's remember the early days of the internet. When people thought that that would never take off, that there was no potential there, that it was crazy. In fact, I've heard stories that people got angry when people were sending emails. They said, no, no, no, you can't do this in the 70s or something. Similarly, I think a lot of people still think, oh, this could never take off. It's a scam. This is easy to dismiss. But in fact, there's something really significant here. Let's separate that from, there was a lot of hype, especially in the last year. I've been a very open skeptic of ICOs of people raising far too much money at far too high of a valuation. It's like Silicon Valley, the TV show, if anyone's seen that one. But Bitcoin itself, Satoshi, we still have no idea who Satoshi is. I think Satoshi should remain anonymous for however long he or she desires, which is fascinating. It's like one of the modern mysteries. We still do not know who created this. Satoshi did not pre-mine any Bitcoin. Anybody could mine it. It's really a powerful community of people around the world that are passionate about this technology. It's an open-source community, so lots of developers volunteer their time to contribute. It's something really special and something that I think we haven't really seen since the early days of the Internet. That's what I think is what's so powerful about it. Completely agree. I want to continue tugging on that thread of hype cycles and run-ups. It's no secret that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general are pretty volatile. We saw a spike, and now it's no secret that Bitcoin's dropped a little bit in its price. How do you as an operator continue sticking to your guns in bear markets and keeping T-Moral up? What did Lightning Labs office look like during a bear market? For our company, we started working on it in 2015, and then we actually officially created it in 2016. That was the real Bitcoin winter back then. The price of Bitcoin was about $200. If you ask me, $4,000 Bitcoin price is still pretty okay, all things considered, but we're builders. Our perspective on this industry is we believe in the long-term. We believe in the five- and ten-year horizon and longer. The short-term price cycles don't really affect us in our mentality. Of course, at the end of last year, we got a lot of press, there was a lot of hype coming in, and there was a lot of frenzy, but to be frank, that was distracting. As our goal to build this Layer 2 technology to scale Bitcoin, it's better if things are calmer and if we can focus and really build out the technology to get things done. Our office, in fact, is not any different whatsoever.  One of the things about these quote-unquote bear markets that I think is valuable is to actually saw this at the end of 1999, we had the hold.com bubble and then crash. After those crashes happen, I think that's a real time to focus and to build out and to ignore that. My co-founder has a saying, ignore the hype and keep on building. Ignore the noise as well. That's kind of in our mentality internally, and I think it's paid off thus far. Absolutely. I actually want to take a quick step back. You mentioned Layer 2, and I'd like to give you the opportunity to actually describe what Lightning is about in layman's terms. What are you guys actually building? Yeah, so Lightning is a transaction network and technology for Bitcoin. It turns out because Bitcoin and other related blockchains are decentralized, they're not terribly efficient, they're not terribly fast. So for example, with Bitcoin, you have to wait 10 minutes per transaction. You can only have about 5 to 10 transactions per second, and then you have fees that can spike and go up and down, and the fees are actually a fee market. People pay for priority for fees, and then you actually would have to say, if the fees go up, you have to pay higher fee to then get into the fee market and get your transaction through sooner. So that can be somewhat unpredictable. If there's more traffic, people will pay more fees. So with Lightning, we created this technology and protocol on top of Bitcoin that uses the underlying blockchain for security, where you can have instant high volume transactions at low fees without trust. So it's a peer-to-peer decentralized protocol and technology.  So the way that Lightning works is you can put your funds onto Bitcoin, effectively transfer them onto Lightning. Once you've waited, say, your one 10-minute confirmation or a few to get onto Lightning, then you can transact instantly at high volume. So for example, you can send potentially, you know, right now we can already do many thousands, but we're looking at, say, potentially 100,000 transactions per second, or more. Visa, for example, can do about 40 to 60,000 transactions per second at its peak. In almost all cases, it's going to be instant, and then the fees can be very, very low of fractions of ascent. So this past year was really an important year for this protocol and this technology. So not only is Lightning a scalability and speed solution for Bitcoin, it's also an application development platform. And I think a lot of people didn't really realize this. They thought, okay, this can solve scalability. But you don't want to build on the Bitcoin blockchain at its base layer because you don't, who wants to wait 10 minutes to send a payment that's not very efficient if you're using an app that doesn't necessarily make sense. So this past year, on March 15th, we Lightning Labs released the first beta of a Lightning network implementation. Ours is called LND. And what that meant was, previously people were using our software with fake Bitcoin, we call it TestNet Bitcoin. With the beta, people were using it finally with real Bitcoin. So they were actually sending Bitcoin instantly at a high volume with very low fees. And a lot of it was early testers and developers and people that were passionate about it. But what we've seen happen in the past, say, seven or eight months is this explosion of developers and people just building interesting cool applications on top of it. And it's been super exciting. I actually want to continue on that thread. You guys launched beta. That was exciting. But what other milestones and what other developments have you guys seen in the past year? So especially on the heels of the run up. So I think the passion and excitement is palpable. And I was talking to somebody about Lightning two weeks ago. And the person, I was explaining the developer community, we have a Slack community, by the way, any testers, developers or enthusiasts in the room join our developer Slack at dev.lightning.community. So we have this community of people and they love it. They love Bitcoin. They love Lightning. And somebody said to me, this is a movement. And I said, you're right. This is a movement. There are people in our community that love this technology so much and want to build with it that every day test our software and find bugs which has been really incredible and amazing to see grow. And then right now, every day, I wake up and I get a message about a new application that somebody has built with Lightning which has been really incredible to see. And my take is, you know, we don't even, people say, okay, what is the killer app? I don't think we even yet know what the use cases are going to be. It's like, imagine if somebody had told you like there would be an encyclopedia that anybody in the world can edit, you know, in 1950. Nobody would have believed that that was even possible. And now we have Wikipedia and many of us use it every day of our lives. I think we'll see something similar with Lightning. So, for example, some of the applications that we've seen are micro payments for articles, podcasts, videos, kind of a micro worksite like Mechanical Turk, in-game payments, a Unity plugin for that. People love vending machines. Arcade games just last week in New York City. This dad and his son, this was awesome, built a maker pac-man game with a whole arcade and they cut out the wood and bought the joystick and installed it all that accepted Lightning and they brought it to the meetup and you could actually just pay with Lightning and pay this arcade game using a Raspberry Pi and a micro controller and all of that. So, there's just been a myriad of, oh, SMS. You can actually pay with Lightning and send an SMS in the variety of API type technologies people have built. In Iran, developers built a vending machine where there was a cool video, there was speaking Farsi, you could pay with Lightning with real Bitcoin by a juice in the vending machine. So, just all sorts of weird crazy things that we've seen emerge. It's been really exciting to see. You briefly alluded to it and like we clearly see it here, but Lightning has one of the strongest developer communities in the crypto space and I'm curious, what factors do you think contribute to that enthusiasm and that love to just build? So, one really interesting thing is the Lightning developer community is really not that old. In fact, the protocol developers have been around, you know, for a few years now and the protocol world is smaller and they're building kind of like, you know, the applied cryptography base layer aspect of the blockchain, but the application community is only a little bit over a year old and we've seen that emerge and I've actually had people, you know, come to us and say, oh, Lightning is what got me interested in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency because I finally saw that they're, you know, this could be usable. For example, it's a much better user experience. UX is something I'm really passionate about to send, you know, instantly and not have to wait for 10 minutes or to, you know, have fees that are more predictable and also not have this like transaction limit that can, you know, be a downside if you're trying to send a lot of payments. So, I think seeing that these people have found Lightning and that's bringing them to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency has been really exciting, bringing designers into the community. There have been some really great user experience designers that have gotten involved and are really excited about this technology. There have been these incredible hack days. In fact, I would love to see one here and Helsinki was just chatting with my buddy Jasmine about the cryptocurrency association here potentially doing something like that. In Berlin, there have been like many hack days with hundreds of developers. There was just one in New York City recently. So, to me, the creativity is what I'm really, I love. And that's what this year has been about. People are building, people are, one interesting thing the other way about Lightning apps that are different from say like typical quote unquote dApps or Ethereum dApps is, with Ethereum dApps, you have a variety of the application decentralized and I think that can make for a much harder user experience. With Lightning, you would have a typical website or an app and then Lightning is the payment element of it. So, you'd use your wallet or your app and a QR code to pay or then say a browser plug and it can happen automatically with some of the things that we're building out, but you don't have to then go to the block, I mean the whole point of Lightning is you're off chain, right? You have the scalability where you don't have to go to the blockchain. So, I think these applications can be a lot easier to use than some of the other technologies that are out there. Absolutely. Are we still calling them laps by the way? Lightning apps or did we do a little bit? Lightning apps or laps, yeah, depends. What, from your viewpoint, what are the biggest misconceptions people have about Lightning or the Bitcoin space at large that you continuously get asked or continuously see and you just wish you could correct in real time? So, a lot of people, in this community, of the cryptocurrency community more broadly, I do feel like people love spreading thought as we call it, fear, uncertainty and doubt. So, some folks that say Lightning is centralized and it's going to ruin everything and in fact one thing that I've loved over the past year is to see the map of Lightning. So, the way that Lightning works is you have payment channels and then you have various nodes that are connected to each other and it's much like the map of the internet. In fact, there's this really cool map of the internet circa 1969 right when it launched and there were like three or four different nodes on the internet and someone tweeted that earlier this year and they said, it's 1969 for the Lightning network. Do not underestimate what happens next and I love that tweet. But people say, oh, it's going to be centralized and it'll just be three mega nodes or five or ten and in fact, we've already seen this map of thousands of nodes on the network which is, I think it's been really significant. There's a website called 1ml.com and it's a Lightning network search engine. So, in fact, in the past two weeks, somebody added a whole lot of Bitcoin to Lightning. So, as mentioned, you have decentralized savings account, you transfer funds to the decentralized checking account that is Lightning. So, previously there were about 130 Bitcoin on Lightning. In fact, we intentionally didn't want people to put too much money on Lightning while it was in beta because we believe in security, we are passionate about that this is beta software. We said, don't put more money in there than you're willing to lose because it's early software. So, somebody came along and put an additional 320 Bitcoin on there. So, now we have 450 Bitcoin current value around 2 million US dollars onto Lightning, which is a big deal. So, it's grown dramatically over the past few weeks even. And apparently, the person who did this just wants to make money off of his money because the way the Lightning works is once you put funds in there, if you are routing, you can actually charge fees to route and those are the fees that you pay on the Lightning network. You pay the on-chain fees to get on and off of Lightning. Once you're on Lightning, you pay fees to route. So, we've also seen the growth of nodes. There's this really great company called CASA and they're selling a CASA Lightning node. They're running our LND Lightning software and I believe they've, I think they've sold over a thousand and various people in the Bitcoin community have bought those and then they can run their own routing nodes so they can get fees for that. But you don't need to run an always-on node to use Lightning. In fact, one of our biggest goals for the next few months is the mobile experience on Lightning. There are some early mobile applications, but we really want to make it seamless so we have this technology called Neutrino and it's a more privacy-preserving what we call Light Client. It means you don't have to download the full Bitcoin blockchain on your phone or on your laptop because it's actually really large and that doesn't make any sense. So, we are about to release a mobile application and a desktop app where you just, you sync to the blockchain quickly and then you can send and receive on iOS and then after that Android. And I think really, as mentioned, improving the usability of this technology is going to be one of our big focuses over the next year. And really, we want to make it so it just works, but building infrastructure takes time. You know, we had 10 years of Bitcoin, but again, the internet was not built in 10 years. So, we're really still in the early days. The mid-90s, I think we're still there. You know, we're not even yet in the OOs for that matter. And as mentioned, they're going to be ups and downs and I guess when it comes to the price standpoint, maybe we've already hit like 1998-99, but I'm happy for the relative com. Well, in like 20 or 30 years, how do you foresee lightning having changed the financial system as it exists today? Yeah, so I think that gets back to the name of the session and I remember talking to Katya and the Slush folks about it. And I really see this as building a new financial infrastructure from the ground up. You know, why in the U.S., our system is particularly bad. It takes me three days or more to send people money. That's crazy. Like, I actually just had to mail a paper check. Like, what are we doing? It's almost 2019 and in the U.S., I'm mailing paper checks to send value and money across the world. So, I see lightning as a means to send value instantly, you know, at a high volume across the internet and to have this value layer of the internet. And to me, that's kind of only the beginning. Once we have this decentralized financial infrastructure that's global that, you know, anybody can tap into, and in fact, one of the key elements of this is it's programmable. It's global and it's programmable, so anybody can build on top of it. You know, right now, if you want to build on top of a bank's API, good luck, because I don't think they're really giving you access to be able to do that. And this is why I really believe Bitcoin is the Internet of Money. Andreas Antonopoulos has written a book called That Really Great Guy. You Should Check Out His Work. He was here last year. And that's super significant because once we can program that, there are all sorts of interesting applications and I think financial inclusion is going to be huge. And there are going to be a lot of things that we really haven't thought of today. So, to me, I don't know what's going to happen in 10 to 20 years because I really believe it will be this world where we have all sorts of new applications and have improved people's lives all over the world and we haven't even imagined how that was possible yet. Absolutely. All right, we're all out of time and that's a wrap. Thank you so much, Elizabeth.


Calling the Human Rights Commission meeting order at 637 in pursuit to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021 this meeting will be conducted via remote means. Members of the public who wish to access this meetings may do so via zoom or by telephone. No in person attendance of meetings of the public will be permitted but every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time via technological means. And then I will do a roll call so I will start off with Erica. Here. Cedric. Here. Liz. Present here. And then I myself fill up there here and then with two absentees. Then. Next, it looks like we have public comment. Anybody from the public in the waiting room. Wanting to speak. Now is your time. Yeah, looks like she doesn't want to speak today. Okay. So we'll go on to any Human Rights Commission members reports. I don't think said usually does a housing report, but I don't know if anybody else has anything. And I'll just say when he does that it's always on the agenda below. Yeah, you want to kick off actions. So the first item on our actions and discussion is support letter process. So that came about when I asked the group if they wanted to create a letter or statement in regards to supporting Ukraine. And Sid had said in the past when he'd asked about support meant for other countries will say that were black or brown skinned that he was told no. And so that was probably before my time but I wanted to have this group just have a set process so that that doesn't happen because we can't just support some without supporting all right. So I just wanted the group to kind of take a vote maybe and and agree or disagree to support all. Right. I'm totally in favor for definitely supporting all and not just picking and choosing what countries. Anybody else. I second that. And we if that's can we make the motion a little more together and let's state that it's a motion and so the way that process is going to work is, you're going to call the motion or someone will call the motion someone will second. It'll open up for discussion. If there's no discussion, then we take that final vote on it and it passes. Then I will motion that the Amherst Human Rights Commission will support any country in need that will. I don't know how to wear that that just any country that needs help or needs recognition in a time of their crisis. HRC will support any country in need of support. There we go. I second that. And so I have a question. What exactly does that mean we'll write in a statement about it we're going to try to raise funds for them. And what are the parameters that we would say wait a minute we need to rethink this. Not that I'm not in favor of Ukraine. Yeah, I think that's a good point. I would say definitely starting out with a letter of support. Like having an acknowledgement that we kind of see what's going on. I don't know. Good. I don't know the ins and outs of city. Funds would there be a way Jen that maybe it could be. Funds being risen for. I think that if that's how you wanted to. That you could do things like that or hold different kinds of fundraisers as the commission but I can, I will check in to confirm that and send you guys an email tomorrow. But I think it's a valid point and I would so maybe we could, because the motion hasn't been voted on we could say HRC will support any country in need. Of support by a letter of support to start. I don't know. That's a lot of support right there. Well we could also say that the HRC is. I just said, well acknowledge any country in need of. Oh, can I have I had it in my head will do written support, make a verbal written statement in support of any country that may be in crisis, or something like that. Do we want to say country I mean I guess, like, we did one for George Floyd, and that was the country here us. I mean are you looking at it. So when you say country. Country, person, state, individual. So how about HRC will acknowledge any crisis that is part of the human rights right. Any crisis humanitarian, any humanitarian crisis that occurs, regardless of. I think you can just say that any. I think it should be written acknowledgement. HRC will create a written acknowledgement for any humanitarian crisis worldwide. Sounds better to me. No, I'll be thinking something different to say and bring it back up next time. Toes. Okay, I can go up did anybody have anything else to add in while we were talking. I saw something on my screen that came up. So, Liz, do you want to state that again. Okay, what did you write. I'll share my screen. So you can see it. Yes, please. Scroll up. I highlighted it in yellow. Create a written acknowledgement for any humanitarian crisis worldwide. I like what it says I just don't like the wording. I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't like it at all for me, but we can leave it there for now. And work on it. But we just want to make sure that we acknowledge. When. Humanitarian. Areas come up that are. Not good. I guess. You could say HRC. Will support worldwide humanitarian crisis. I don't know. We said support twice. Yeah. HRC will create a written acknowledgement of support for any humanitarian crisis worldwide. So acknowledge. HRC will create a written acknowledgement for support. For supporting any, for supporting any humanitarian crises worldwide. That make that says. You don't have to have capital acknowledgement either. I know. Well, that started off as a capital sentence. I mean, that's the beginning of the sentence at one point. That makes sense. That makes more sense to me. Right now anyway. Okay, so we need someone to second it. I'll second it. And then Philip, you need to open it up for comments. Okay. Open it up for any other comments on this motion. No comments. Then we will go to a vote. So we'll just go on the order of my screen, Erica. I agree. What was, how do you say that? I support it. I second. I hear you hear you. Yes. Just say yes or no. Yes. Cedric. Yes. Liz. Yes. And I myself, and yes. Two absentees. I didn't go first. Just about that wrong. I'm going to stop share now. So. Do you guys want to create that letter now? Or it will, you had a statement, Philip. That you had sent me a while ago. That was a while ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what I put in that statement now. Let's see if I can find it. Here, Jen. I just found it. I forwarded it to you. I'm on my phone. So let me pull it up. Even if you. Um, the statement of support the Amherst human rights commission acknowledges the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yep. As a human rights issue. I'll share. I'm all locked in. Does that sound good for folks? Yes. I think that's excellent. Alright. That's excellent. Good job. Good job. High five. Well, thank you. So then would I put that. To vote. Jen. Or that. It's a decision. Okay. Let me get back to my minutes here. Right. Well, then I will motion. The statement. And then we will need a second. Second. Then opening up for discussion. Well, no, I think your motion needs to say a little bit, like what it is to use the letter of support. Okay. All right. Then I will motion to use the letter of support for Ukraine from Ukraine drafted or written by written by me. I always felt so weird saying Philip and talking myself in the third person and seconded idea and open for discussion. No discussion. Oh, I do have a discussion question. So when we draft these letters of support, where exactly do they go? Do they go on our official record? Do they go to the town council so that the town council knows that we're in support? They go on the web page, HRC web page, and I will send it out on the Facebook page. So then I would say further discussion. Any further discussion? And it looks like we will take it to a vote. Erica. Yes. Cedric. Yes. Liz. Yes. And yes, for me and with two absentees. All right. Oh, I got that stuff done. I'll work on that tomorrow for everyone. All right. And next we have the HRC collaboration with Julius Ford slash Harriet Tubman, healthy living community. Yeah. So the. Julius Ford, Harriet Tubman, healthy living community, which is actually Sid's sister is a member, came to me and asked for, you know, if we could kind of if I could kind of help them. And I thought that this would be a really good thing for the HRC to collaborate with. So I included the age. So the HRC is now collaborating with them. And really what's going to happen is on May 7th, they are having a event at Mill River with taking over the whole court. And it's really just to celebrate their Julius Ford. They will also recognize any seniors. And I thought it would be a good time to have the youth hero awards. So if folks would like to have the youth hero awards, I mean, I think May 7th would be best instead of us trying to do one thing and then try to have them at another event. And the Julius Ford Foundation is fine with that. So does everybody know who Julius Ford is or was? Acknowledge that I do not.  And he was an integral part of the community as far as young men. He and another group of young men were workers at the Men's Resource Center, took on the ABC boys and some other young men under their tutelage in order for them to be better African American, Black, Latino, BIPOC. Men in the community. He did a lot of things going towards healthy lifestyle, you know, a lot of hikes, a lot of nature walks, things like that. And unfortunately, when his son, Phoenix, who is now a senior at Amherst Regional and he's got a son. Why am I blanking on his name? Onyx. Onyx at the time was six weeks. Phoenix was six years, almost six years old when Julius had a heart attack and died. So from that, Deborah and the group of people that he was with still continue to do healthy living activities with the students and people in the community. And. Yeah, Sid probably could tell you a little more. But yeah, this is. And this is specifically geared to BIPOC community members. And they really institutionized within their group the community lifestyle where the kids all kind of grew up together because they attended these. The different meetings and events that this group had.  And it's really one of those things where people lean on each other in a time of need. So you're right, Sid could probably do a better job and thank you, Liz, because sometimes they just assume everybody knows what I'm talking about. So thank you for taking that time out to explain that. Yes, thank you, Liz. And so. Thought this would be a great place for the HRC. So they were coming to asking for me to help support them in different ways. And it just seems like it would be better for the HRC to support it. And, you know, we just helped by that happening, the kind of waived some of the fees that are associated with the different things that they're trying to do. And we also just it kind of just gives me the ability to take on the stuff so that they don't have to deal with the town so much, which gets, you know, can be confusing when you're not in the municipal world. So. And then I wanted to know if folks thought that that was a good time to have the Youth Hero Awards because the Julius Ford community said that they would be OK with that. They're doing an award ceremony for their seniors and they have one individual who's receiving their doctorate and they wanted to acknowledge them. And it's also the day before Mother's Day. So they would do an acknowledgement for Mother's Day. You know, the folks from the young versus old basketball team are involved. So it's really coming together as like a larger community event. There'll be food for purchase and they'll have activities for the kids. So exactly what is it that they want in our support, just to help out with programming or they want us to help out with food? Do they want us to help out with awards? I mean, if we're doing our awards on that night that day and which I will not be there, unfortunately. What is it that they need specifically from us? Yeah, it's going to be just a huge collaboration. We're going to do our part. They're going to do their part and we're going to be bonding together to do things together. Yes. And at this point, I asked they don't have it mapped out exactly who's doing what because they're still at the brainstorming. Part and so they when I asked that question, the response was they're not sure how they want the HRC members to support, you know, at the event necessarily quite yet or for the event. So so if we are going to do our youth awards, we need to get on the stick because it's middle of March. We have five weeks. So what I was saying is that, you know, with everyone's OK, I will send out and update the letter that we typically use year to year or no, we have a new letter that we use last year, but update it and then send that out to the schools and the folks at the Julius Ford, Harriet Tubman, Healthy Living Community and local churches to see who nominates. And and have that wrapped up. And then as per usual, I'll go get the gifts and create nice little certificates and stuff like that. So I'm good. OK, to me. So the HRC I was going to say, let me know what you need to since I won't be there that day. You know, I do all kinds of behind the scenes stuff. So if you need me to help go shopping and pick up stuff and order food and all of that, please let me know. Is the hero event the thing we did at no river? Yeah. Yeah. And so I know for food that they're going to have, they're looking for BIPOC, BIPOC businesses to come and sell food. And they're just trying to do things. You know, it's always really hard when you try to do free food because with free food, it tends to go really quick. And then people who come in the later part aren't. There's no food for them. So they will be selling food. All activities will be free otherwise, though. And that way we're supporting our businesses. It was a little hard to ask the businesses who are recovering from COVID to donate food. So they would like it to be sold. And then my guess is there'll be a few businesses that say, you know, we don't really have the staffing for it, but we will donate. And then that feels a little bit different because it's not us asking their volunteering to do that in a way to be productive. So I will get on that tomorrow. Is it since they don't have everything all laid out, is it is somebody going to be attending meetings with them so that we can so you will. All right, I just let me know if you need me to accompany you. I'm not used to anybody saying like I'll help, but. I said I would help. No, I'm joking, Erica. This is probably the group that is volunteers to do actual the most. Boots on the ground work out of the commissions, so it's really nice. And thank you. I appreciate that. Liz, yes, I will ask. All you have to do is ask and we'll like help you. You just got to tell us what you need help with, because otherwise we're just sitting here and hanging out. I'm always volunteering. I just say whatever you need me to do, call me. You know, I come to your office and we say, OK, we got to do this. I'm not going to be able to be doing that this day because I have track or whatever, but I will do this. So I'm willing to go to meetings. I'm willing to help you with any food runs or whatever. OK, thank you. And I, you know, we will meet, I think, again next week. So I'll ask if they want folks from the HRC to attend. They meet at nine in the morning, so I know that's hard for some folks. OK, hello, the retired lady. I know I said some folks, right? That's why I said some folks. But I also, you know, keep them abreast. So they're creating a flyer at this point, I think, like a save the date. Interesting. And so tomorrow I will send that letter to everyone just to make sure everybody's OK with it. So if you could respond to it as soon as possible, that would be greatly appreciated. And that's really does anybody else have anything else about the Youth Hero Awards? The agenda of the Youth Hero Awards was up next, but it seems like we covered that. We have HRC event calendar. Yeah, so I'm going to share my calendar, my my screen again. And I have a list of events that are coming up in April and May. And so what I really need to know is which one of these do we want to just kind of have an acknowledgement that goes on Facebook similar to International Women's Day or which ones you guys want to try and craft an event for and each year it can change like next year. Some of the ones that we did, we can not do next year or do the following year, the ones that we didn't do this year. So we've got Community Service Month. And that seems like it's something we might want to just make an acknowledgement for. Yeah, acknowledge it. And Earth Month. So I will say that the Community Participation Officers are hosting a town-wide clean-up day on April, no, yep, April 30th. So it'd be great to see some folks out there. It'll be from about 10 to noon. That would be interesting.  And why is we give out gloves? We give out gloves and the what are those long like reach things, reach things where you can pick up trash from. Oh, yeah. OK. Yeah. And also gloves, garbage bags and the long reach things and water. OK. If they're doing an event that day, then I think we should probably just acknowledge it and put on our Facebook kind of their event, just highlight. Absolutely. That sounds good to me. Autism Awareness Month. I know that the kids at the high school do a little a lot of stuff around that. So I'm wondering if we could make a presence at least be present at some of their events. And then what we can do to help support their events. Yeah, I would. Get a hold of Kathy Olson. And this is at the high school. Yeah, let me try to get a hold of her tomorrow and get back to you. I have a meeting with the leadership team at the high school tomorrow and I try to touch base with her then. I'm going to text Jonathan right now in the top door. If you want to, you don't have to worry about it. OK, OK. Sure. Look at that, folks working together. That's what I like. What about Arab American Heritage Month? I think that that one would be a lot very interesting. But I don't know that this year we have enough time to pull that off because I don't even know where to start with making connections with folks unless someone else has a little bit of has a, you know, a connect. Have any connections? Is that another acknowledgement for this year? Yeah, I think that's a good one. What's the last one? Celebrate Diversity Day. I think we could try and do something for that. What day is that? It's it's I got to stop share because you don't want to see my crazy as calendars. Hey, I got a I got a question while we're doing. Yeah. Oh, my. This isn't on the thing on the agenda. But did we think of anything? Figure out anything about Facebook, the Facebook. How do like one of us can post it and take over that? Yeah, so they do not. Want multiple people from out of the town posting on it. So I will be posting on it. Good, because I didn't want to do anything extra anyways. OK, it's a month. So it's Celebrate Diversity Month. It's also the Tartan Scottish American Heritage Month. But another interesting one that we might want to look at, it's also Youth Homeless Matters Day and Youth Homeless Matters Day Acknowledge so we could do an acknowledgement for Youth Homelessness Matters Day. April 7th is also International Day of Reflection on the Genocide in Rwanda. So you guys want me to you guys want to do acknowledgement for those. So what I'm going to ask is for once we get through this list that people kind of pick because I'll post whatever you guys give me. I just need someone you guys to help out with creating the actual post. It's also National Day of Silence on the 24th. I don't really know what that one means, but you know, basically be quiet. And then so it says March 25th is International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery in the Translantic Slave Trade. You said March 25th. March 25th. Yeah. I can do a quick post for that one if you guys want to acknowledge it. I think we should definitely acknowledge it. Say March through May. So three twenty.  I can't type this all out at the moment. World Autism. We're going to the schools. International Day of Reflection on Genocide in Rwanda. That looks like it's April 7th. And then the Youth Homeless Matters Days on the 20th. So let me go back here. Now I can share. OK, I will create the post for the Intern. International, the Remembrance of Slavery. And then April 7th on Genocide. So does anybody want to create a post for International Day of Reflection on the genocide in Rwanda? Would anybody know what that might look like? It could just be words like the Human Rights Commission just wants to acknowledge and support. So it doesn't necessarily have to be like a full blown out picture of something. But and then the 20th. So four twenty. The Youth Homelessness Matters Day. Does someone want to create a post for that? I can work on that. Since the Celebrate Diversity is a month long event, we could do something towards the end of April. If that if people, you know, want to do that, I'm not sure what you want to do for something like that. Are people interested in doing an event? Sorry, I wasn't listening because I was trying to do an email to Kathy Olsen. What was the question? Are people interested in doing an event for Celebrate Diversity Month, which is in April towards the end of April? You didn't respond and just put yourself on mute, Erica. Well, because I wasn't I wanted to process before responding. Like, what were you thinking about doing? I guess I don't know. I guess that's kind of on the table right now. I guess the first thing that comes to my mind as far as diversity. I'm a big food advocate. I don't know what town stuff is happening, but maybe we can have some type of pop. But the event. That's just spitballing, spitballing an idea that does not have to stick. I would say if we do that, let's do it at one of the pavilions that may be graph because it's easily accessible. And then I have to check in. So one of the things that I've been finding out with the events is all all this inspections through the inspections department. But it turns out if I just get surf safe or safe surf, then I can be considered the event planner and then everything can fall underneath the event. And then we can avoid all that. But it helps the process. You already are. And that is very helpful even for. The events are the Julius Ford Harriet Tubman collaboration. So that is fantastic. I know celebrate diversity. This is food and dance and music. Right, like a party. Yeah, we could do something at graph. Thoughts. Liz, Sadi. When? Well, we can determine the date now. Well, because my weekends are done because of tracks. So that's why I'm asking. Are we thinking like an event where it's kind of like the the heroes event? How are we? How are we blasting this out to the town? Uh huh. Or I think that's or I think maybe that's after we say yes to this, we can start thinking about that. Yeah, I mean, then for upcoming future for sure. Yeah, I think so, we know the cleanup day is. The 30th, which and so, you know, where it gets a little bit hard in April is that the week of the 18th through the 22nd is school vacation week. So then I'm inclined to say the weekend of the 9th, but that's super early. So since we have an event on the 7th, should we want to make an acknowledgement and work on it for next year? Where we can plan it out better. I agree with that plan. That might be a better plan. I agree. I really do like I do like the food and dance though. Like I think for real, like I think this is a cool event.  So I like it. I just, yeah, time-wise, I don't want to rush something. But I do want to execute on that. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Is there anything else later on in the year that kind of has a similar type of tone? Well, I've capped us pretty much at May because I, you know, Juneteenth is coming. So that's a whole other beast. And we are planning in this year, Juneteenth is on a Sunday, which means we're trying to celebrate Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Sunday will be the Jubilee on the Common, and then I can't really disclose too much about Friday and Saturday yet. OK. So in May is National Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which I definitely think there should be some kind of event for that. And we can put it in the middle of May so that we have next month to do some heavy planning for it. Yeah, I agree with that. So I got a question because is it May Mental Health Awareness Month, too? Listen, there is Asian Heritage Month, Indian Heritage Month, Jewish American Heritage Month, Mental Health Month, South Asian Heritage Month, Personal History Awareness Month, Speech and Hearing Awareness and Older Americans. So can we you want to try to collaborate and do something around mental health and how it affects people of color? You get what I'm trying to get at and like, hey, let's do like an awareness of pliers or some sort of educational thing around mental health in these communities. Because let's see if they have a theme. It says it's their theme. This advancing leaders through collaboration, advancing leaders in the federal and D.C. governments do what this one says, advancing leaders through collaboration. That's what their theme is. I mean, Erica, we could just try if if we're going to do one at the beginning of the month, we can do one towards mental health awareness towards the end of the month. And that might be even better because by then, Adama and Y set will be fully functioning and up and running. Does that work? One seems like I was just trying to throw out like an idea. No, I appreciate that. And it was a good idea. But so one seems a little more. Well, if we're using their theme, then I I don't know. What do you guys want to do? It's really not up to me, my bad. I think we should definitely acknowledge mental health. And then to your point, if Y set is going to be kind of running, their focus is for people of color, right? Youth of color. So that kind of does tie in with what Erica was saying. So maybe we just highlight. What they're the work they're doing or find an event possibly with them, maybe. It's Adama. African Geosophore Mental Health Association. Y set is the case management, but they work hand in hand. So, yeah, it doesn't really there's a lot of things to acknowledge here. And we can just take two and have events towards two where we can just merge them into one. Everybody needs mental health. So I do kind of like the idea of merging them into one. I lean towards that and highlighting the need for mental health. The BIPOC people. Some of others feel I don't know if you can see my thumbs up, but I give a thumbs up to that. And so are we just going to acknowledge the other ones, which is Asian Heritage Month, Indian Heritage Month, Jewish American Heritage Month, South Asian Heritage Month, Personal History Awareness, Speech and Hearing, Hearing and Older Americans Month. I wonder if older Americans of the senior services will do something. And if there's one, I said one would hope.  OK, so who wants to help me with the collaboration of that? I think that's Erica. That was her vision, right? Did she leave because she's not unmuting? Oh, what am I like? What am I doing? You and I are going to plan to the event for National Asian American and Pacific Island Heritage Month and Mental Health Month. OK, and that's in May, right? Uh huh. All right. So I think we should we'll talk first and then we'll kind of solidify a date when maybe everyone can attend. Sounds like a plan. And again, I'm thinking food, so I don't know. You know, I'm always on food. I'm I'm thinking food needs to be part of it. So we will and may hopefully it'll be nice stuff we can eat outside. We don't have another version of not Omicron, but. And so just to throw out there for June. So there's a World Day for cultural diversity for dialogue and development. I mean, that could serve. That's on the 21st, though. That's not. Oh, that's in May. International Day of Biological Diversity. So June is Pride Month, which the town council will do a flag raising proclamation, most likely on June 1st. And the. June 12th is Loving Day National Dengeness People's Day. This in June, French American Heritage Month. We can't hear you, Liz. So that's a lot of things to acknowledge all at the same time.  Oh, Lord. Well, right, it is. But I think, I mean, I kind of feel like so when I when. When I did the goal is to have this go on the town community website, which so anybody who's linked to it will get notified. And then our Facebook. So our Facebook amount of people are more geared to human rights. In general, because that's something that they're they're into. But when it goes on the community calendar, even if it's not an event, that is going out to a whole different population, not completely different population, but a wider, broader population of folks. And so there's some, you know, honestly, these things could be as easy as so the Jewish American Heritage Month and just a paragraph about what that means and and what that is. So you can do that by speaking with someone from the JCA, perhaps, or if, you know, you know, someone who's Jewish American or you could just use Wikipedia, right? So we can find those things and it doesn't have to be long. Just needs to be enough so that people understand what it is. And for the sake of April. I can take on the Community Service Month and Earth Month is already kind of taken care of, but we can still put something out on Facebook. So Arab American Heritage Month. I can do and divert and celebrate diversity. That one sounds really fun, too. So then I have Cedric for four seven and Philip for four twenty, right? So let's divvy up May. That makes sense, right? And that gives everybody a little bit of time. Who wants to take so the National Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and Mental Health Month? Eric and I will do who wants to take care of who would like to create a post for a Haitian Heritage Month that you could grab pictures of food. I mean, there's all kinds of things like if you Google how the Haitian community celebrates their heritage month, then you could just grab photos of, you know, if they use food and dance. Is that you, Cedric? Are you saying yes? Yes. No, I thought you said Asian. So I thought I was like, well, aren't you doing that? But you say Haitian Haitian. OK, yeah, yeah, I'll do it. All right. That's what I'd like to hear. Indian Heritage Month. I love Indian food. I don't like. So somebody might would like to connect with councillor Shalini Balmene to see if they are going to host an event last year in the fall. It was a little late, but they did a Pakistani and Indian. What was it? Independence Day celebration out in town and the feedback that we got from the Pakistani and Indian communities was that they were really excited to have something from their heritage and culture celebrated. At the town level, I could take on Indian Heritage Month. Jewish American Heritage Month. Can we nominate members that aren't here? I can do it, too. If it's just said post. Cedric. All right, yeah. And I think, you know, with Eric and I doing the two combined, they still need to be acknowledged and opposed separately. So Eric and I can work on that. South Asian Heritage Month.  Yeah. Listen, I'm not a Facebook type of person. I'm more hands on type of person. So if we're doing something like in person, then I'd like to help out with those type of things when it's just writing letters and putting stuff on Facebook or putting it on a webpage. That's not me. Well, you don't have to do that. I do that. What? You just have to create it and then I do it. Huh? I'm not good at that. I have to know. You have to know your limitations of what you're good at. So Liz, I'm putting you up here with Eric and myself. Well, what? For creating an event for National Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month and Mental Health Awareness Month. OK, no problem. All right. So that looks like it might be said. I don't have a full understanding, personal history, Awareness Month, speech and hearing, Awareness Month and Older Americans Month. So I could do personal history, Awareness Month. Imagine that has to do with something like Ancestry type of stuff, right? So looking up. I was kind of thinking about just knowing your own personal self and your history of yourself. So I thought that was kind of a neat one too. Speech and Hearing Awareness Month. That's going to sit. An Older Americans Month. I can just do that one to make it easier. Because I'm just going to work with the senior center there. All right. So whatever posts, you know, Cedric, you have one for April 7th. So if you can get it to me, you know, by the 5th or 6th, so I can post it because I can pre-post. Otherwise, I'm going to say they probably the ones that are the full month length, I guess I would post it. Like. So that's my question is, am I giving this? I mean, I've given it to you at the beginning of the month because they're both May. So I'll definitely give it to you before that. My question is, are you wanting to post it? I mean, I just answered myself, but I'll give it to you at the beginning of the month. You can post it whenever you want to. What date you want to post it on? Yeah, so I'm going to want to post everything on the first, right? And so the way that it's going to look on the town website one is it's just going to be like a cultural heritage. And then when you click on it, it'll have snippets of all the different months stuff in it. And I'll leave that up for the entire month, right? The Facebook one, I think what will end up happening is I think I'll have to post like the first and then I'll try for the middle and then I'll try for the end of the month, but I'll post each thing individually, maybe. For the Jewish, you said the Jewish month? Or just Facebook, you said. So all three, you're going to post individually on Facebook? Well, everything for the month of May, like I was just using May as an example, I'll post those separately on Facebook at different times throughout the month, I think, right? And I don't know if I can pre-post on Facebook. Does anybody know that? You can. You can? Well, that'll be helpful too. So once I have them, I can just set it for different dates consistently so that they just repost throughout the month. Sound good? Yeah. Go back to June and see if there's anything else, like, big that I'm missing. I saw somewhere that said World Refugee Day, I think it was June 20th. I don't have that one. I do have Race Unity Day, Race Unity Day, which there is a group of folks, but that's Race Amity Day. And what did you say the 20th was? I'll put that in my calendar. World Refugee Day. Yeah, and I think, honestly, right now, we got to just test out how April and May goes before we get too farther and farther. And then during the May meeting, we can talk about the summer months, if that works for folks. OK. What's next on the agenda? Next on the agenda. So I'm going to pull it up again. We have a AHTF update. That's the Amherst Housing Affordable Trust. And Sid's not here to give that update. And I don't have one. All right, then we have the AHRA, DEI, and Cress Update. Yeah, so AHRA is the African Heritage Reparations Assembly. And they are working on a black census. And they are also going to, I think they would like to do a town-wide survey for community engagement to kind of gauge where people in the community feel about reparations or what they know about reparations. And then they will send it out more specifically to the African-American community of Amherst, a separate one afterwards. So that's pretty exciting. Diversity, equity, inclusion. I think they're getting ready to interview the director for DEI. So that's exciting. And the Cress Director for Community Responders for Equity, Safety, and Service will start on Monday. And I will try to see if he can come to our May meeting just to introduce himself. And you guys can be acquainted with him. Those of you who are in school, Ann Liz, this is being connected with Cress and Wyset and Adama are really good for the families that you know that are in need. And so there is a referral program, which I'll send out the referral that you can refer people to either three of those resources if you feel need and Philip, right? And so I know that the Cress Director is going to go down to the ASC too. So I think four we can skip because we just kind of, I haven't twice. Yeah, then it says other topics. Anybody else want to bring anything up? Yes. When are we going to start meeting in person?   Yes, I think this is this is how we're rolling until April or June. I can't remember. I think it's April and then it can be descended. The other thing that I wanted to talk about is that next, so I think April and then maybe we can have our retreat. So we need to be able to have our retreat at a time where we can be together and if we can't be together in a meeting, I guess we can have a retreat. That makes no sense. Because why is it that I want to mandate to schools but they don't lift a mandate for four or five people to come into a meeting? Okay, seven, but you know. Well, so there's a couple of things about the meeting. That is a different order from the governor that allowed folks to do it this, to have meetings. So I will talk to Paul and see if we can meet in person now that the mask mandate and everything has been lifted a bit because I know council half of them meet in person and half of them do the Zoom. They do a hybrid meeting. I don't know that we could, the benefit for this is we've had a lot more people attend different meetings than we did when they were in person. So there's pros and cons to meeting online versus in person and the hybrid would be the best way to go but I know that that's a little bit unrealistic for the manpower that it requires for all of the board and committees and there's only one room structured and set up to be able to do that and that's the town room. And as we're having this meeting the planning department has a meeting or the zoning board of appeals has one of them have a meeting, you know and so there's just consistent meetings on what, you know every day of the week. So it's hard to get them all to be able to do hybrid. So I will check in with Paul and I will send that in the email tomorrow. Okay, second. New members, aren't we down too? Yes. Including a student? So Ben said, sent an email and said that he was gonna follow back up with the same individuals that he had sent something out to. I think he reached out to Talib and another individual. Okay. I would say maybe you guys in Erica or Liz knows like another adult that's connected with the student population a little more that could suggest a name or two in person meetings. And there was something else I needed to follow up on. You want me to shoot them like admin and email regarding hey, do you have any students that you would want to see in a role of the Human Rights Commission with the Human Rights Commission? Yeah, that'll be good. So next month also too, I'm gonna do a report on complaints. So we've had a couple that have come in for various different things. None of them turn out to actually end up being human. A lot of them turn out to be more like I didn't like that rule, right? But I will give a full listing and report on the Human Rights Complaints next month. I didn't add it, I unfortunately did not add it to this agenda and I think it's too big to talk about under items not discussed. So. Okay. All right, any other items? And then it looks like we are going to adjourn at 748. I make a motion we adjourn today's meeting at 748 p.m. I'll second that. That's the one thing you don't have to make a motion for. Well, we're gonna do it anyways. I know it's a great feeling, right? Sometimes I'd be at non-town meetings, like my hand is raised so high to make any motion or to second it because I never get to do that. There's like power in that, right? I second. Okay guys, that's about it. On my end, have a good night, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, have a good night.


hey guys welcome back to my channel as you guys can see I have something very new to share with you I have actually just cut my hair so it was actually really long before I've been growing it out for two two long years and I finally decided to get cut the other day because all the ends of it were starting to become more split and dead kind of so it was all kind of I guess ratty at the bottom I just needed to have a nice good cut so I cut a lot of it off and it's so healthy now I love it I am growing it out again though that is something that I really want to do but I've decided not to be so lazy with cutting my hair so I'm going to cut it every six months to ensure that the ends don't become dead again because I thought my my logic behind it was that if I don't cut my hair it'll just keep getting longer and longer but apparently fun fact I didn't know this the ends will just keep breaking off so at the bottom you'll just end up counting keeping the same length because as it ends split they break off it keeps it shorter and shorter and just makes it look more dead and not well cared for so that is why I cut my hair and I'm going to continue cutting my hair but just like trimming it so it still grows long but healthy at the bottom so that is anyway my little update just to share with you all probably will like don't really ask but thanks anyway you are welcome so we're gonna get straight into today's video you guys will know what it's about I am making a healing balm so basically a healing cream for scars for sores for any sort of I guess small little abrasion or injury that you get on your skin to help heal that up nice and fast you guys can look refer to my previous video on the healing calendula cream that works amazingly well I use it so much and I find it works amazing even for like sore joints and things because it's an anti inflammatory I find it's really helpful for that but today I thought I'd share with you a different healing cream specifically targeting things like scars and like and things like that so I'm terrible I constantly pop pimples I'm just like as soon as I find one I like honing or not like just pop up and it's really just not good for my skin I will get away with it for a while but I've decided I'm just not going to do it anymore it causes scars and it's just a terrible habit to be in so I'm just like trying to sort of stop that habit but I've found if you guys can see very flattering angle if you guys can see I get um I have little scars here they've been there for a while through like for some time I was just getting all these pimples in this one spot and me being me not being able to resist I would pop them and it's really just a terrible habit to get into but it's just left a few marks so I'm going to use this healing cream to heal those up I have been putting my calendula cream on it but I thought I'd try something different just to see if it works a little faster to see how it goes anywho back to what I was talking about so I'm making this healing cream just to help heal that up a little bit more this also has calendula oil in it so it has that healing herb in it as well but it has a few other ingredients as well but it's really fantastic for scars the blog I got it off was live simply it's a great blog I will link it in the description below for you guys as well as the recipe that I will be sharing today so when I found it she was saying that she uses it specifically for scars because when she cooks a lot she gets scars and she said it helps so much with that so enough of my talking let's get started into making this recipe so what we're going to do first is make a little double broiler a broiler or a boiler a boiler I keep doing that um so what we're going to do first is make a double boiler on our stove top with a bowl and I just put it with a saucepan and I'm going to add in the coconut oil and the olive oil and then I put my bowl on top and that's my double broiler boiler I think I'm doing that so then add in the coconut oil and then the olive oil so you just want to let the coconut oil melt and then you're going to mix it together with a spoon and then once that's done we're going to add in our herbs I also keep my stove just on very low heat you don't need to be on high just keep it on low heat because you want all the oils to infuse together as we start adding in the other ingredients so this has finished melting you can start to hear it bubbling underneath so I'm just going to turn that down a little bit more and I'm just going to mix this through so that the coconut oil and the olive oil are well combined and now if you have dried herbs you're going to add in dried calendula flowers and dried lavender flowers and you're going to let that infuse for 30 minutes but because I already have the calendula oil as is and I just have my lavender essential oil I'm just going to use that so I'm just going to pour in my calendula oil and just let that kind of infuse for five minutes doesn't need to be as long as it would if it was dried herbs so this is a third of a cup of calendula oil and I'm just going to stir that together just quickly again and then I'm just going to let that sit for five minutes but if you had the herbs in there you'd let it sit for 30 minutes I just quickly took mine off the heat just to let it actually like infuse off heat because I thought that heating it might actually take some of the properties of the healing oils away so I'm just going to let it infuse for five minutes off heat and then I'm going to pull it back on to add all the other ingredients so it's up to you guys can choose to leave it on I'm just going to leave it off because it's already quite warm so it will still infuse while the heat's still in the bottom of the pan so it's been the five minutes so I'm going to add in my other ingredients now if you used dried herbs you're going to actually take it off heat strain it out through just a fine mesh sieve and then pull it back into the double boiler and then add the rest of the ingredients but we don't need to do that because I just use oils today so I'm going to add in the beeswax herbs and I'm just going to stir that until they're melted and when you put it back on heat if you guys have used a strainer to strain out the herbs you need to keep it on low heat so the whole time we're doing this keep the temperature to a low heat all righty so as you can see the beeswax pellets are almost completely melted and I'm just going to add in the honey now and I'm going to stir that for a minute this is also an optional ingredient so you don't actually have to use the honey I just find that it comes with many healing properties so I'm going to use it but if you guys don't want to use honey that's totally fine as well let's mix that around you basically just want it to be fully dissolved before you add in the other ingredients that'll do so now we're going to take it off heat and add in the essential oils and because essential oils are quite strong I'm just going to add in 20 drops of lavender I'm going to add in the tea chew oil if you'd use the dried lavender herbs you would just add in five drops of lavender oil all ready so I'm just going to stir that through and now I'm going to add it into my glass jars so you can either add it into one large glass jar or two small glass jars I'm going to add into a few different ones because I have a few jars of all shapes and sizes so I'll be adding mine into one like this just a tiny little jar and then the other one will be this nice big one here just because it's so small I'm going to funnel it in as you can see wax just almost hardens right away so it's kind of a little messy when you're pouring it in so that's one glass and we'll add the rest into a big one so once you've poured the mixture into your glass jars they'll begin to immediately solidify so if you've used honey like me you're going to stir it every two minutes just to prevent it from settling at the bottom of the jar it will take around 12 to 15 minutes to completely solidify and then it will keep at room temperature for about 12 months which is like yes you have a year's worth of cream to use on any cuts abrasions and things like that and then we have it our cream and you put it on oh it smells amazing like that lavender and it's really so moisturizing super soothing on your skin so I'm just going to store these on my little bathroom bench and I can use them whenever I need to heal up my little scars and things on my skin put some on now you only need a tiny bit too because it's quite oily so you need to smother your skin with it because it will take a while to soak in so it's setting your skin heals it right on up today's huge shout out goes to mostly Nadia thank you so much for commenting on my all your hair shampoo recipes video I'm so glad you liked it thank you everyone for watching and commenting on my videos it means so much to me and your love just honestly means so much like when I see your beautiful comments it really brightens my day I just get so overjoyed and so excited to see you guys have a root and written and to see you guys enjoy my videos it just means the absolute world to me so thank you so much I hope to see you guys in my future videos and I hope you enjoyed today's video and enjoy the rest of your day bye