After the cherry blossom is brightening up the ANU campus, with an exhibition of art inspired by Japan currently on display. The exhibition, Seeing Japan, features art by ANU staff, students and alumni who've been inspired by a time spent in the country or interaction with the East Asian nation. Forming part of the Japan Studies Association of Australia 2013 conference, the exhibition has been organised by the ANU Japan Institute. The Japan Institute at the ANU is hosting the national conference for the Japanese Studies Association of Australia this year and we thought it would be a great idea to have an exhibition showcasing some of the relationships between school of art and Japan and more specifically the Kyoto Seiko University. A lot of the artists who are exhibiting in this exhibition are actually people who have been to Japan and have been influenced by people, by culture and by art in Japan. We have a bit of everything, we have visual art, we also have sculptures, we have enormous sculptures, we also have smaller paintings, lithographs, jewellery. There is a fabulous series of cats by Amelia Davies and there is an amazing looking cat in the very middle who looks very unhappy with something and he's my favourite. Former head of sculpture at ANU, Michael LeGrand is one of the artists who's currently on display. He tells us what it was about Japan that inspired his work. The one thing that still remains with me, even though it's not as acutely better as I like to use it, is in the torii, those temple gateways and that horizontal bar across the top is in my work but I don't sort of go and say I see a torii I'm going to make a sculpture about that, it's nothing to do with that, it's about acknowledging that as it reveals itself in the process of making. I was fascinated by the discipline, the attention to detail, the fastidiousness of that and the single-mindedness of it, as distinct from the western everybody have a go, anything is valid, they go through a procedure of measured responses and you don't get an accolade or until you've done your servitude in some way.


I am Regina Mahoney, the city manager at the city of Essex Junction, and this is the Junction City News. And this afternoon, I have Ashley Snellenberger with me. Ashley is the city's communications and strategic initiatives director. So thanks for joining. Thanks for having me. So, Ashley is leading a really exciting project at the city. It is the city's vision and strategic action plan. So we're gonna talk about that. So last Friday, the city launched this project. Can you tell our viewers what the city is doing? Yeah, so now that we are an independent city, the city council really wanted to develop a vision and strategic action plan to direct us for the next five years. This kind of came around with some of the previous projects that we have done in the past. In 2012, we did a really comprehensive community engagement project called Heart and Soul. And this project allowed us to develop really six core values. And the city council, while those are great and wonderful, and probably some of them are still relevant, they wanted to see if that's truly true. So part of this project was to look and see if those six core values were still relevant. It also gives us an opportunity to start developing some of our own priorities that we have. We've had a lot of asked since the city was developed as an independent city. And so now we're trying just to develop what our core values are going to look like through our vision and then develop what our really priorities are for the next five years. So our project is really broken down into two pieces. Like I said, the vision where we want to see what our core values are, address some trends and issues that might be in the community or the state or nationwide. And then imagine what our future of Essex Junction is gonna look like, whether that's the next five years, 10, 20 years. And then the second part is the strategic action plan. And that's really the nuts and bolts that what we're going to be doing in the city. It's also, we want this to be very realistic and we want this to also be achievable and measurable because we want to be able to define what our success is and see if we're actually achieving those objectives that we have set for ourselves. Awesome, that sounds great. And I know I personally have been very excited and looking forward to this project because there is an extensive list of really fantastic things that everybody wants to do. So this will really help us prioritize and figure out how, what are the right things to focus on first. Okay, so feedback is pretty important for this project. Can you tell us about the survey? Yeah, so I'll tell you a little bit about the survey. We started it off on October 6th, so we just launched it. It will go until October 27th. It is an opportunity for people to start giving us really a lot of feedback on the vision, but it's also about the future of Essex Junction and what that looks like. So this is the first opportunity for people to give some feedback. Feedback was something that was very important to the city council and so they wanted to make sure that they were reaching lots of different peoples, especially people who might not have traditionally participated in any of our city government, whether that's the committees or the city council or even just actively being part of the city government. So they really wanted to reach out to those people. They also want everybody to get excited and embrace this. And so they're really asking for lots and lots of community feedback. And so the survey is the first opportunity for them to do that. It is available on our project portal and we'll talk a little bit more about the project portal in a little bit, but it is basically the one-stop shop for everybody to find out information about the strategic plan. It is available through a direct link through our website, which is our sxjunction.org. It's under our news and initiatives section, but you can also find the link to the portal and the link to the survey obviously on the city's website, the city's Facebook page or our front porch forum posts that we're doing. We do have some paper copies that are available at the city office or at Brownell Library and you can pick those up and then if you get done filling them out, you can return them back to the city offices via mail or you can come into the city office and drop them in from eight to 4.30 when we're available or through our drop box. So there's lots of different opportunities to participate in the survey whether you wanna do that electronically or through paper. And then the great thing about this survey is through the project portal, we're giving people the opportunity to see some of that data live. So we'll begin to start bringing that data onto the project portal as we get a little bit closer to the cutoff date. We wanna have a good section of data to start displaying, but it's a way for us to showcase that data, be very transparent in the process and for people who might not have participated in the survey or participated in the process to see kind of what we're the direction that we're really going into. We'll also use that data on our think tank workshop which we'll talk a little bit more about, but this is an opportunity, I think it's one of the easier opportunities cause you can just sit down and fill it out. It takes about 10 to 20 minutes depending on how brief or re-boss you wanna be with your answers on the survey. But it's the initial survey, there'll be other opportunities for surveys for people to give feedback as well later on but we'll talk about that too later. Okay, awesome. And so for folks at home, we have been sort of flashing that survey link directly so you can get to that. And also just to point out, the Essex reporter is back in print edition and so if you've got the October print edition, the survey information is in there too in a half page section that talks about this project. Okay, awesome. So you mentioned the think tank workshop. Can you tell me a bit more about this event? It may not be obvious to folks what that means exactly. Yeah, so the think tank workshop is the first opportunity for us to get together and start talking as a group. So it'll be kind of like a focus group. It'll be broken into two days. The first day is Thursday, November the second. It's from eight to five PM and the second day is Saturday, November 4th and it is from nine AM to noon. It's gonna be at the Champlain Valley Expo, Blue Ribbon Pavilion. So people can have lots of room to spread out and communicate. The first day will be our facilitator, Future IQ, will be working through some of the survey data. We'll be looking at some of the future trends that is going on within the city and the state and nationwide. We'll be looking for some key drivers that those are the things that the cities really, they're standing out amongst the data that we're receiving. And then we'll try to break it down into what that vision is gonna look like. So there'll be opportunities for large group discussion and then small group discussion. And then after that think tank workshop will be doing a report that Future IQ will be producing for us about the information that came out of the think tank workshop. We'll also be having a follow-up survey for those who participated in it. We do have registration is open and available already because that's not too far away. The great thing about it is you can register for one day, you can register for two days. You don't have to attend both days. I know it's a big contribution for three hours of somebody's time to come out. And so we want people to be able to choose to come to both or to just to come to one. The more feedback that we get is what we're really looking for on this. And so we really, they can register, get the registration link on the portal. It is available there. We'll also be doing some more promotional round, the think tank obviously in our website, the Facebook page and front porch forum. And then at the event that you can't register online, I would be happy to register anybody. So you can call the main office and myself or one of the city clerks would be happy to take your information and register for this think tank event. And it should be a really great opportunity for us to just really dive in and start discussing some of those big topic items. Okay, great. Okay, so outside of that, we talked about a survey and we talked about the think tank workshop that will be November 2nd and November 4th. What are some of the other activities that community members can participate in? So we have tried to create a lot of different opportunities because we know people are busy and we want obviously as much feedback as we can possibly get. So the next big one that's not really a big sit down and get conversation is the pumpkin plaza that Essex Junction Recreation and Park is doing on October 28th. We are gonna have a booth there and we'll have some candy for all the trick or treaters that are coming through and for everybody to come and look at the giant pumpkin tower that EJRP is putting on. We're gonna do some quick questions that night, just trying to get some key phrases or some key future ideas for the community there. So that'll be a lot of fun for people to come out for that event and to give us some feedback as well. And we're excited to participate in that event this year. As I mentioned earlier, there's a post think, take workshop that will be for everybody to fill out after that event. Then the next big event starts in December and so we'll have the train hop that EJRP always puts on every year. We will be a train stop on the train conductor list and so we'll also have another opportunity for people to give feedback at that event as well. We don't know what that'll look like for sure yet but it'll be similar to whatever we do for the next workshop, which is the next day December 9th. We have the date scheduled but we don't have times or location yet so that's to be determined. But we wanted to go ahead and get that date out for people to put on your calendar as another big workshop engagement opportunity, another big focus group opportunity. And then the last opportunity, we will have some more focus groups in January and February to conclude our feedback session. Obviously, we have a lot of opportunities and we want to get as much feedback as we possibly can and we're hoping that people can either attend one or more of these activities that we have coming up. Awesome. Okay, so that's really great and awesome, especially for the pumpkin, palooza and train hop because those are pretty great events and it's awesome that we'll be able to sort of go where the people are going anyway to try to get some input there. So that's great. So how will the project conclude if there's anything to add beyond the focus groups? Yeah, so the project is on going now until February 2024 and it will end with our consultant group, Future IQ who's doing this facilitation process for us and working with us on this project. They will provide a strategic action plan to the city council. On top of that, they'll be also doing multiple reports throughout the strategic planning process. So those will be available on our portal for people to view but this will be the grand finale project. So it'll be the project that we are presenting not only to the city council but to staff in the community. We hope that this plan will be a living document. That is the goal of it. It's something that we want to have constantly updated every year, whether it may be multiple times a year that we're producing out to the community and it's gonna be throughout the five years that we'll be constantly updating this document. So it's not a document that once the strategic plan is done we're done with it. This is really our roadmap moving forward and we'll direct the council and staff on projects, initiatives and the budget items for the next five years. And so we hope that this roadmap will be very transparent and allow residents to see really what our priorities are and how we're going to accomplish the priorities over the next five years and how we're gonna use those priorities to develop the budget or develop some of the other actionable items whether that's sidewalks or building and other projects that we have and where are those priorities that are at? So by February 24th, we are February 2024 We will have that plan to provide to everybody and we'll be able to really start moving and start working on the project after that. Awesome, that sounds great. So that was a super helpful description of what this sort of deliverable will be at the end. So just want to make a point for folks who may or may not be familiar. So most municipalities have what's called a comprehensive plan. They're called different things in different places. Sometimes they're called master plans. But those are the plans that are very, very big, broad. They are done every eight years in the state of Vermont. This, as a conjunction's last comprehensive plan was done in 2019 and so we will redo that when that eight year time clock is up. This is intended to be much more sort of actionable on the ground and as Ashley mentioned, really help think through annual work plans for the committees, for the departments and that will help kind of keep everybody prioritized and focused, which is great. Okay, so where can people find more information about the project? So as I mentioned earlier, the project portal is our main go-to area. It is where we want to encourage everybody to go. The project portal will be everything strategic plan. We have an overview of the project on there. We have information on the survey, how to take it. We have an overview of what that looks like in the future. That will be where all the data from the survey will be hosted so people can go on there and review the data that we have from the surveys. It will also be information about the think tank and how to register and then the report from the think tank will be loaded onto that once it's complete. If residents want to get or receive an email about the project, whenever we have updates about things going on, there's a way for them to sign up on the project portal for that project. And then if they just want to learn about all the different variable ways that they can engage with us during this time, it's all going to be on the portal. We do know that some people, that's not their direct way to get information so we will obviously be putting more information out in the Essex Reporter as time comes through. We'll also be putting things on our Facebook page, front porch forum and our website. And then obviously we have some great steering committee members, I didn't mention those. We do have a steering committee for this project and they are very active and involved. It's members from our city council and some of our boards and other committees that we have and then some of our staff members that are on that committee. And they have been working hard and are starting to get out about in the community and really try to get information out about this. So if you have a group or an organization and would like us to come and talk to you about our strategic plan, we'd be happy to do that. We also will have obviously, like I said, things on our website and then I am, like Regina said, the project lead. So if you have any questions or concerns about the project, I am your contact person for the project and I will be the person that everybody will need to contact for that. So. Awesome. Okay, excellent. So there again, that's the project portal website and also Ashley's email address. So that's a bit of a long URL. So again, if you go to EssexJunction.org and under the news and initiatives, there's a link right to that project page and so you really can continue to keep checking in there and find all the information that you need. Okay, is there anything else that you would like to add? I just wanna say that this is an opportunity for really for people to give their feedback. We don't have a lot of, we haven't had it in the past, in the near past I should say, a lot of opportunities for people to provide their feedback. We've had a lot of, so now that we're officially a city, we're trying to kind of develop those projects and priorities and we really want the community to participate in this. So please take the survey and register for the think tank workshop and this project again, we'll be going through now until February 24th or 2024, I keep saying that, February 2024. So please be on the lookout for more information about this project and opportunities for you to participate in many of our engagement opportunities. Awesome, and then just to reiterate the think tank workshop RSVPing is really appreciated, not necessary. If you wanna come, we won't turn you away but RSVPing will be really helpful to make sure we can properly plan for it and that will be Thursday, November 2nd from five to 8 p.m. And then Saturday, November 4th from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the Champlain Valley Expo. Okay, so just a few other things to let folks know about. So we actually talked about this one. The Essex Junction Recreation and Parks will host the Pumpkin Palooza on Saturday, October 28th from four to 8 p.m. There is, as you saw here in the presentation, a really fun jack-o'-lantern stage, campy mist, and a trick-or-treat trail through the Maple Street Park. So it will be awesome and hope folks can join us. Also, the library, Brownell Library is having a costume swap. So now through October 20th, stop by at the used desk anytime and to drop off your costume pieces that you're willing to part with and then you can come back and select a new to you costume which is really awesome. The swap is October 21st from 9 a.m. to 4.30 to pick up your new costume. All right, so I think that's probably it. Again, filling out the survey. We really, really appreciate that. There are both some quick answers that you can answer in the survey as well as longer questions that if you'd like to comment on, you can do that. But if you want to even just go in and do some of the very basic just, they're not quite, multiple choice answers, but pretty quick answers. And there's also a good amount of information that we're asking about folks, where you live in the city, do you rent or own, and do you live or you work in the city? And really what we're just trying to do with those questions is make sure we're getting really good, robust feedback, diverse feedback from a variety of different sections of the city and folks who live or work in the city. All right, anything else? That's it, just take the survey and we are very excited to see what the outcome of this will be. And we're very excited to have a direction moving forward. I think it'll be good not only for staff and the council, but also for the community to kind of get an idea about the direction that we need to go into as a city. And this is your opportunity to tell us what you think. Awesome, perfect. Okay, thanks so much. Thank you. We'll see you next time.


So, just let me know. So yeah, I'm going to talk about why I think Python is not easy and why I hope, and I hope this talk will help you think that it is easy when you actually do open source, the same of this talk. So, what do I do? I'm Sadna Srinivasan. I work in AI and ML research at a company called SAMA. SAMA works in optimizing clinical trials using AI and ML. Currently, I'm trying to figure out if neural networks can be forced to follow hard logic. They're famously something that you cannot control, but we're trying to work on that. This talk is based of SIMPAI. It's based of some work that I did for the company using SIMPAI. The idea was to be able to run neural networks on a quantum computer in a nice and intuitive way. We had to use SIMPAI for that, but it was too slow and we had to optimize it. So, this is things that I encountered when I had to work with it. So, why do we say that Python is a really easy language? It's very easy to learn.  You can start building web servers, you can start building apps, and it's very intuitive to use. Once you have some experience, you can also predict how other libraries with all of their awesome functions are going to behave. You know it's going to be as simple as import something, instantiate an object, give the object some data, take a scikit-learn as an example, and then fit it. You can expect that sort of simplicity, and that's why Python is so easy. I say that Python is not easy. Like we saw in the keynote today, Python was not meant to do what it is doing right now, and it's grown in complexity over time. And all of that complexity is still happening behind the scenes where the end user does not really see it. But as an open source first time open source contributor, you're going to have to deal with some of that complexity, and this talk is centered around concepts that you will encounter when you start doing this. So in this talk, I'm going to touch upon inheritance in Python. I'm going to talk about mixing classes, which is a good to know, and it is not a feature of Python. Then we're going to talk about decorators, slots, metaclasses, and then I'm going to talk about just a bit about what SimPy is and how all of this combines in the SimPy code base. So we all know what inheritance is. Let's say you have three classes. You have a class person, which could be inherited by a class royalty, and then you can have the Queen of England who inherits from the class royalty. So this is nice linear inheritance. We know this, but Python allows multiple inheritance, and most other languages don't allow this. And the reason they don't allow this is because if you look at the class E that I have in this diagram, which is an example inheritance flow that you could see in Python, you have class E, which is inheriting from DNC, and DNC in turn have inherited from B and also A. So any property that A has, both DNC are going to have, and when it comes to E, you're not really sure which property to keep. But this obviously works in Python. This is a toy example. So I have parent class one and parent class two. Both have the exact same attribute parent name, and I am instantiating a child class, which inherits from parent class one and two. Now, when I check this particular attribute, it prints out E. Now this is due to Python's dynamic ordering, which has a system for how the attributes of different classes are overridden when we do inheritance. So whenever you do multiple inheritance, if there is a clash, the leftmost class or the first class that you gave into that inheritance is the one whose properties are going to get preserved. So that's all about inheritance. And I'm going to talk about mix and classes. This is not a feature of Python. You will not find this documented anywhere as such. It's just something that you kind of encounter in different code bases. Sympy is one, Django is another. What they essentially mean is it's a nice way of encapsulating behaviors. So let's say you have, for example, taking Sympy as an example. Let's say you have different expressions, polynomials, you have integrals. All of these expressions can be evaluated. So the behavior that something can be evaluated can be put in a separate class. And whichever other class needs that behavior can just take this extra class and mix it in so that behavior gets mixed in. The reason this is done is that it makes the code bases very readable. Once you see a mix and class, you know it's a repeated behavior that occurs in the code base. And when you read really huge code bases, this can be very helpful if it exists in the code base. So now I am going to talk about decorators. So before that, everything in Python is an object. Every single thing in Python is an object. So functions are also objects.  But since functions are objects, you could also do something like this, which is very pointless. I don't think you should do it, but you can do this. Just add an extra attribute to a function. You can do it. But since functions are objects, you can pass functions as input to other functions. And this is the basis of what decorators are. So here you have the decorator function, which takes another function as its input. And this one times the function, so I check the time at the beginning, and I check the time at the end, print the difference. So this way of using functions as decorators is syntactic sugar for saying decorator function of this long process that I've defined. So it will run this long process and print out the amount of time it took. So why would we use decorators? It's repeatable. You have this function that will always time something. So you can just whichever function you want to time, you can just decorate it with this function, and it'll work. So you could also use classes as decorators. Except when you're using a class as a decorator, you'd have to modify the call function. And let's say you have a class error check. So you have to initialize it saying that yes, you're going to get a function as an input. And you're going to tell whatever else you want to happen, you're going to have to do it in call. And here I'm saying, OK, I want to check the parameters. And I want to make sure all of them are of the type, are not string, basically. So I have another function, which is add numbers. And I decorate that with error checks. So the first one will run. If I say add one, two, three, it'll run as expected. But if I try one string, two, and three, that's going to throw up an error. And again, decorators help whenever you want to make things very repeatable. So you can also decorate classes. I don't have an example for that here. But how many of you have used PyTest? All of us. OK, a lot of us. So you could actually reimplement PyTest using decorators. You could say, OK, I have this particular class. I want to test it. And you can encapsulate all of the tests in different classes, decorate each of those classes so that whenever you run test, you can just run each of those functions. So decorators allow you to do this sort of thing. You could also do things like check which functions are used more often.  So you can use decorators in many different ways. You can use them in very creative ways. And these are some things that you will always see. And each, yeah. So I'm going quite fast. So in case someone wants to stop me, please feel free. So now I'm going to talk about slots. This is where classes don't behave like classes anymore. So when you have a normal class in Python, this is a normal class, which is a person. You have a name. You have an age. And I'm saying that by default, everybody is a coder. And I have a normal in it. I have an object. And I try to add an attribute to that object. All of this works. This is behavior that we're all very familiar with for classes. Here I'm just showing all of the attributes of each of these objects. So Bezos is an object. And you have the name, age, and the extra attribute that we just added. I'm also showing you the attributes of the class person, since person is also an object, it will also have an attribute dictionary. So you check that you have your name, age, and coder, which is just here. If coder has a default value, that's already here. So this is how it looks. But it's going to look slightly different with slots. So the way I define it is I'd say I have a class person, which has three different slots. Same in it, there's absolutely no change. Same way we initialize objects, there's no change. I'm printing the attribute dictionary of person before. And then I'm trying to add an attribute to that object. As you see, this will fail. And if you check the attribute of person, you'll see that age becomes a particular member. It's not just something that it's not a placeholder anymore. So what is actually happening? So by default, Python will use a dictionary. And whenever you use a dictionary, it's mutable. You can add attributes. And you can add attributes at runtime. You can change them. But since it is so mutable, it also slows down the whole process. But when you use slots, you're telling Python, hey, look, don't do all this. I know I'm only going to use these three slots, or these four slots. You can go ahead and allocate memory for this. And why do we do this? Because one, the use of RAM becomes much better optimized. Things run much faster. And if you have a really huge code base and you're entirely sure about exactly how the class is supposed to be used, you can prevent accidental misuse of classes. You won't have an obscure part of the code where somebody just does something with some attribute and you don't see it anywhere else. You won't have that. Now, why would we do this? So let's take SimPy. SimPy has symbols. And it has multiple other classes which gets initialized before symbols get initialized. And there are classes in SimPy which, for normal use, will get you to easily 100 different objects that exist at the same time. So slots help optimize all that. You don't want your system crashing. So slots help with that. So now I am actually going to talk about metaclasses, and this is where I slow down. In Python, every class is of type type. Class definitions are objects, and they are objects of type type. And this enables all of the default behavior that we see. We see by default we have init, we have call, we have all of these behaviors that we are used to. This is what enables all of those behaviors. Metaclasses allow programmers to take control of all of these behaviors. So this is just an example. I have an example class, and I check the type of that example class, and it's of type type. This is a bit of syntax. So how do we define a metaclass? Any class that inherits from type is a metaclass. So you inherit from type, and then you change whatever behavior you want to change. You don't want to have to change and define every single behavior every time, so that's why it's done like this. We also have to tell Python that, look, we're not going to inherit from object, we're going to have our own metaclass defined. So this is a class meta. This is, so you have class meta, which inherits from type. And all I'm doing here is that every time an object is initialized, I'm saying I want this attribute to be added. And so I have a class where I'm defining that metaclass. This is how you specify it. There's no other definition there. Initialize an object. And then when I print brown dot coder, voila, you see true. But when you check the type of that object, it's no longer of the usual type object. It's of type main meta. It's dunder main dunder because this metaclass was defined in main. And yeah. So this is another much better example of how metaclasses could be used. This is the same example that I mentioned before in Decorators. We can, sorry. We can use metaclasses to keep track of objects which get initialized in certain classes. And the idea is we want to keep track and we want to know the number of objects and the number of ways in which a different class is being used. So here I have a global variable models and I have a metaclass which will update this global variable every time a new object is initialized. And then I have a class model which inherits this metaclass. And when I initialize it and afterwards I check the global variable, I have that automatically updated. You could also do this with Decorators like I mentioned before, but it's just that I personally find this cleaner and everything that you inherit from model will inherit the same behavior. So I find this a little bit cleaner. So yeah, this could be achieved by a Decorator but that's not as clean. But metaclasses are way more powerful. You can change the, sorry, I think I skipped this slide. You can change the basic structure of a class itself. So this, we just saw that you have, the classes use dictionaries. Suppose we have to process that dictionary and for some reason we don't want it to be a dictionary but we want it to be an ordered dictionary. Metaclasses will allow you to change things like that. Here, again, I'm defining a metaclass and since I'm changing the way the class itself, the objects are going to be, I change prepare and instead of returning a normal dictionary, it's going to return an ordered dictionary in this case. I'm changing you just to print out the list of attributes that are there. There's nothing really going on there and I have a class A. This one has a metaclass, it has a few attributes and if you look at the attributes list, you see that it's all ordered and that was the point of this example and you can change this to anything.  You can also change the base class. Going back to the initial example that I used with inheritance, you have the class Queen of England which has inherited from royalty and royalty has inherited from person. Now, we obviously do want Queen of England to also identify as person which means we want its base class to also be person. So if you want to manipulate the base class, if you want to manipulate the name of a class, all of that metaclasses allow you to do here in this case, you have to change new. So here you can change what the metaclass is to here for record keeping. So here, instead of returning just the object, I'm saying I want you to define it in this way. I want to change the name to foo and I want to change the base class to int and so I have a base class which has the metaclass, this metaclass and then you have class A which inherits from base class and you have class B which inherits from A. So by default, if you try to check is B a subclass of base class, it won't evaluate true. But here I'm checking A is named foo, B is named foo, the outputs are below and you also try to check is B a subclass of A now that will evaluate to false because basis is empty except for int. And is B a subclass of int? Yes, B is a subclass of int because we've defined it to be that way. A word of caution, metaclasses are really powerful, they're really flexible, but they add a lot of complexity to the code and especially it becomes very hard to read code. You might use a metaclass now and then you inherit five other classes from it and you keep using and then you inherit from those classes. The behavior of the metaclass is propagated but for you to actually figure out that this particular object is behaving weirdly because somebody has changed the metaclass downstream somewhere can get really hard for someone. So use it with a pinch of salt but if you can't find any other solution this is the way to go. So I'm just gonna touch upon what SimPy is. SimPy is symbolic Python. We all have done symbolic mathematics which is the mathematics that we use in school. You have symbols x, y and z and you try to solve for them in some way and you manipulate those symbols without actually knowing what value they carry. So SimPy lets you initialize symbols. So they're the fundamental thing in SimPy. So here I have three variables and I'm solving this particular equation which is sin x minus x and I can even define a domain. I can say, hey, solve this equation within this domain. And you can also do solving of linear equations where you can define those equations say solve for x, y and z. You can get those answers. So this is what SimPy does. SimPy does all sort of symbolic mathematics. It's similar to Wolfram. It's similar to other things that you've seen. So I said I worked with SimPy. This is a bit of SimPy's inheritance tree. SimPy has around 1,200 classes, 1,700 classes, something like that. This is a part of it. This is what I had to work with mostly. So I had to work with around 1,000 symbols at the same time and manipulate all of them. And we wanted to make that asynchronous and we wanted to add some properties to help speed up things further. So that's when we hit upon slots. We realized we can't just add properties and that's when we realized metaclasses also exist and managed properties is not gonna behave like a normal class. And that property starts propagating. You also have evalif mixing, which is the only thing that kind of helped where you have, this is the point where a function gets evaluated and that's inherited by addition, subtraction, multiplication and all of them have this. So you change evalif mixing. Everything works and anything that inherits that is gonna work just like that. So this is mostly what I have to say. We've talked about inheritance. We've talked about a lot of things. We've talked about inheritance, mixing classes, decorators, metaclasses. We've talked about how they could be used and are used in SimPy. And yeah, I think we're open to questions. Do we have questions? Sorry. Do we have questions? Yeah. Someone's saying something, but I can't hear it. Hi. Yeah. Am I audible? Yeah, you are. Yeah, so about the mixing classes, can you elaborate on that? Is it like calling the super function or? No, it's just a convention. I'm gonna take this off. So it's just a convention. It's just something that people do, which makes code bases more maintainable and more readable. It is not a feature of Python. It's not involved with super. It's just a class that you define. Let's say you have, okay, let's say you're doing something in which models all of the people and you're gonna have an object, a class for every person in the world. And there is a property that people can read. Instead, and they can read different things. People can read English. People can read Hindi. There's a lot of different things that reading can do. But you can just keep this, but everybody reads in the same way.  So you isolate that behavior reading as read mix in, maybe. And then whenever you have a class person who can read, you just mix that behavior in. And presumably you'll have languages that they can read, except as attributes which will then be processed. So it's a way to isolate behavior so that the code is really readable. Here, back here in the back. Okay, hi. Hi, hi, sir. Thank you. It was a great talk. So, you wanna have questions? Yeah, over here. First row? Yeah, yeah. I'm getting some interference. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so at the beginning you, when you were talking about SMPI, you had mentioned something about hard logic in neural networks. Could you elaborate on that? Possibly show some references to any research papers you're working on? For the research papers, you just Google neural networks and logic. You're gonna get a lot of them. Symbolic logic in neural networks. Basically what it is, is that neural networks are really hard to control and their behavior becomes undefined beyond certain boundaries. This research is to basically not have that happen and have some control over the way neural network behaves despite the inputs that we get. We can talk about this later. I don't think it's directly related. We can talk about it. Yeah, any questions? Yeah. Yeah, so this is regarding metaprogramming. So I also use a lot of metaclasses in my work. So there is one problem that I have not been able to solve is if let's say you are in the main function and there are functions in that main module that are not part of any class. So can you control those as part of your metaprogramming in any way? Probably, I really don't know. You potentially could, but I would say please don't use that many metaclasses. They're not good for readability. They are good for maintainability. Unless you absolutely have to, please don't. Yeah, okay.


Hello and good afternoon. Welcome to this high webinar is starting a co-op right for you. Thank you for joining us for this session. My name is Petra Morris and I work at Co-operatives UK and I'll say a little bit more about Co-operatives UK and my role there. I'm also being joined today by my colleague at Co-operatives UK, Dame Pollard, who will be speaking about legal forms and how you register your co-operative, but it will essentially be me taking you through this presentation. So they may hopefully everyone has managed to join OK. And I know some people online today are groups looking to understand more about co-operatives and maybe wanting to set one up, but also maybe other organizations that themselves are working with groups or local authorities or support agencies. So everyone's very welcome and I hope after this one hour session, you'll have a better understanding of what co-operatives is, a co-operative is and the support that might be available if you want to find out more. So just in terms of housekeeping before I go any further, this webinar is being recorded. So it will be available as a link and we'll upload it to the websites that's available after this session. And because it's a webinar, your cameras are off and you don't have any audio. So please do use the chat box at the bottom to ask questions as we go along. And then we can pick those questions up at the end of the presentations by myself and Dane, hopefully. So just going moving forward. And so as I said before, I'm Petra Morris and I'll be joined by Dane Pollard. And the reason we're running this high webinar today is that it's part of a series of high webinars that we've been delivering towards the end of last year and beginning of this year. So it's all part of a program called the High Business Support Program, which delivered by Co-operatives UK in partnership with the Co-operative Bank. And we've been delighted to work in partnership with Co-operative Bank for the last six years on this program, and we've supported more than a thousand co-operatives during that time with consultancy support, peer mentoring, training and other resources. And Co-operatives UK, we are the national body that represents co-operatives, there are 7,000 co-operatives across the UK, and as a membership organization, we provide advice services, events, policy work. And once you start your co-operative, we hope you become members of Co-operatives UK. So in this session, I'm hopefully going to cover what a co-operative is and how it's different from other forms of business. And I'll also talk about the different examples of co-operatives and how they're owned by their members. And then as I said before, I'm going to hand over to my colleague, Dane Pollard at Co-operatives UK. We'll take you through the legal structures, and then finally we'll finish off with what support is available if you do want to take things further. And as I say, as I'm going through, please do use the chat to ask any questions. So I'll start by talking about what a co-operative is, and at its most basic co-operatives are a group of people coming together to share common needs and they can form a business a co-operative. The only thing is that that co-operative is then owned by the members and they control how it's run. And those members can be workers, they can be the customers or users of the service. They can be the wider community and the residents or even the suppliers, or they can be a combination of those members, as we call them multi-stakeholder co-operatives. So we have co-operatives of workers that are smaller stream members, and then we have large consumer retail co-operative societies that have millions of members, so they range in size and shape. And membership is very much the heart of every co-operative. They are the foundation of the co-operative and it's why they exist, and it's the very purpose of why co-operatives are set up. It might be that workers come together because they want more control over their work and how they make decisions and they want more equitable work and flat structures. They want to have share profits and are motivated for that reason. And members also are shareholders and owners of the business and they control those decisions. And members can invest in a co-operative, but that shouldn't be the primary purpose and the reason for why they choose to set up the co-operative or invest. And because co-operatives are businesses they aim to make profits, it's just how those profits are distributed is different to traditional and private businesses. And again, members would have a say in how they use those profits and how they're distributed. So membership is key and that democratic ownership is really important, and it's what distinguishes co-operatives from other business models. The other thing that makes co-operatives different from other businesses is that they work to set of values and principles. And these principles are worldwide. So co-operatives all around the world share those same principles and we have an organisation called the International Co-operative Alliance that kind of looks after those principles and makes sure that it's embedded in co-operatives. And so if your co-operative can't demonstrate those principles, then essentially you probably are not co-operatives. I'm just going to go through each of these very briefly just to explain what those principles are as they are important. And later on, when you hear from Dane, he'll be talking about the different legal structures that are available to co-operatives, but these principles really are at the heart of every co-operative. So as a member, membership is voluntary and open. So many of you may use your local convenience food store co-operative and you can buy food there, even if you haven't taken out the membership card and not earning your dividends. So it is voluntary and open. And democratic member control is really important, as I said before, because co-operatives are set up to meet the needs of their members and those members have a say in how co-operatives run and that's quite powerful and quite different to lots of other businesses. Member economic participation, this is again about the transaction that happens with the members, the benefits that they can receive, whether that's a share of dividends or a share of the profits or other benefits in terms of the services they may have access to. And because co-operatives are there to serve their members, primarily they need to be independent organizations and have autonomy, even if they may be funded by various organizations. So it's important for members to make good decisions and to have that control over their co-operatives, they need to have the education and training and the skills to do that. So education has always been a big part of co-operatives and we tend to spend a lot of time making sure that co-operatives are trained and that's one of the things that co-operatives UK does is provide lots of training sessions. The next one, co-operation among co-operatives, this is again about we call this principle six and as it suggests it's the idea that co-operatives support one another and they promote co-operatives and being part of a large co-operative movement is really powerful and there's lots of co-operatives ready to support you. And finally but not least is the idea that co-operatives are there to support their community and lots of the larger retail co-operative societies and particularly in this last couple of years through the pandemic have supported their communities, they support lots of charities. And co-operatives, you know, that's very much key to their principles that they have ethics and values and they do have a concern for their community and that's come through very strongly in the last couple of years through the pandemic. So as I said, these principles have been around for a very long time, over 175 years they go back to the first co-operative that was set up in 1844 and they still thrive today and are embedded in a co-operative. And we've seen that co-operatives are owned by their members, we see that they operate with particular values and principles and all of these things help to make co-operatives successful. And one of the things we know for instance is that co-operatives start up survival rates are much higher than traditional businesses, almost twice as high. There's lots of reasons for that. I think the fact that people have a stake in the business, they have control of the business, they're much more motivated and there's more innovation, there's more productivity. And it's really powerful thing to think that, you know, this co-operative is serving our needs and the needs of our community. And that leads to kind of long term resilience and productivity and innovation. And co-operatives are generally people based businesses are focused on people, they're generally more trusted and they're doing things for the right reasons, whether that's about the environment or social impact. And so all of these things and the fact that they've been around for more than 175 years demonstrates that the co-operative model works. And just to take that resilience further what we've seen particularly in the last couple of years with the pandemic is that co-operatives have been more resilient than traditional businesses, they've certainly been less likely to cease trading four times less likely. And again, it goes back to, I think, the ownership model and how they're governed and, you know, they're there for their members so it's, they can be more flexible and pivot. And when I talk about some co-operative examples, hopefully that will come to the fore a little bit more, but certainly co-operatives have been resilient and they've been more ambitious and continue to want to grow through this difficult period. And so I mentioned before that co-operatives come in all shapes and sizes and they operate in all sectors of the economy and all this slide is showing is that we have co-operatives that are food growers, co-operatives in arts and culture and digital energy, every sector and all 12 there are 7000 different properties, all different sizes and they contribute nearly 40 billion pound to the UK economy and year on year generally are growing in size. So co-operatives continue to be relevant, whether it was the 1840s when the first cooperative shop was set up by the mill workers and the Rothschild pioneers through the 70s when there was high unemployment and lots of worker cuts were set up and currently. And again, lots of co-operatives have sprung up in the wake of the pandemic to kind of solve the problems of whether it's freelancers coming together or other issues. So co-operatives meet there are a way of meeting people's needs and are continue to be relevant. And this next slide just talks about that a little bit more. So all the things that are important to us in society, whether that's access to decent quality housing, whether we care about climate impact and climate change. And for the customer, the gig economy and the fact that click of a button we can order our taxis order our food, we can order our holidays really quickly is great but there is a downside to that in terms of the gig economy and those working in those sectors tech sectors often don't get such a good deal. So co-operatives have been springing up and growing in to address all of those areas and some for a long time so we have hundreds of housing co-operatives that are developing housing, not for profit but to be sustainable and provide decent affordable housing. We also have hundreds of community energy groups that are setting up projects around renewable energy, whether that's hydro or solar or retrofitting or just simply reducing our carbon footprint. And again they're all owned by their members or the community. And more recently we have a program called unfound, and that's trying to I suppose disrupt that tech industry, a little bit by having alternative models of platform co-operatives, digital platform co-operatives, which are owned by people who care most about them and that's the workers and the people receiving the benefits and I'll say a little bit more about that in the case studies. So co-operatives have always found solutions to things that affect us most, whether that's food, housing, energy or the way that we work. So I said before that co-operatives are owned by their members and those members can be the customers, they can be the workers, they can be the community large or a combination of those. So these next few slides I'm going to give some examples of co-operatives and how they're owned and how that makes a difference to how they run their business. We have thousands of co-operatives to choose from so these next case studies are just a snapshot of those. I mentioned before that most people they think of co-operatives are very familiar with their convenience corner food shop. And indeed those are what we call consumer societies and retail societies which are owned by the customers. So when you do buy your one pound membership card, you're then a member of that co-operative in a food store. There's a lot of different diff dens on your purchases and you also get to go to the AGMs and have some voting rights and you can join local councils so you're very much part of that governance as a member. And here we have a co-operative called Scott Mid in Scotland, the largest independent co-operative retail society. They have 280 stores and like many retail stores of that size, they do lots of good things within their community and support them and more so in the pandemic. They celebrated 150 years back in 2009 so they've been going a very long time, but it isn't just convenience stores and food that represent co-operatives and the wine society is an example where their members are the purchases of wine. They're essentially a wine society based in Stevenage, they source wine from all over the world and sell it to their members and their members get all kinds of benefits like discounts and events and wine tasting. And they've been going for 130 years and have 90,000 members so it's just a different kind of co-operative and a different way of running it. So the next examples of co-operatives I'm talking about are worker co-operatives so as it suggests the members are the workers themselves. And there's lots of reasons for workers coming together but generally the idea is they're much more motivated, they're in control, they make those decisions collectively, there's tends to be less hierarchy. And obviously if they make profits that's distributed among the workers. So we have hundreds of small worker co-operatives and here's a couple of examples. Lupine Adventure are a co-operative, a small co-operative up in Leeds as the picture there shows they provide outdoor recreation opportunities and they also help young people through Duke of Edinburgh awards. And they've just come together as a co-operative to have a little bit more control over that work and have a stake in that and it makes them more successful at what they're doing. And in London we have a co-operative that we supported through the Hive called Infact Digital. They have four members they're quite small and they provide digital web services. And they really came out of the idea of tech for good. We have an organisation called Kotec that have lots of members all doing different digital products and services, and they're all trying to use tech for good. And essentially, in fact we're working collectively already informally as a co-operative and through the Hive we were able to support them to formalise that co-operative.  So I mentioned before about unfound and platform digital co-operatives and more ethical ways of running those kinds of businesses. And here we have a couple of examples of co-operatives that are their members are both the beneficiaries and users of the service, but also the workers and caregivers providing those services. So Signalize is a co-operative for the deaf community, and their members are users of that service and also the deaf interpreters. And so collectively they can make sure they're providing the kinds of services that work for both parties. Often deaf interpreters work through agencies and traditionally private market, and they're not very well served by them and similarly the deaf community don't get access to the deaf interpreters that they need. So this is a new way of doing that service through a co-operative. And again, we were delighted the Hive was able to set them up back in 2019 and they're going from strength to strength based in Merseyside and has just started winning contracts for their work. Equal care co-operative has been around again, not that long, about four years. This is again an innovative way of doing a co-operative. We all know that social care doesn't always work. So this co-operative has at its members the beneficiaries of the care services and also the caregivers. And so collectively they can run their co-operative more efficiently, but they're also using platforms or digital solutions to kind of provide a matchmaking service online to make that more efficient and effective. And I've heard before that co-operatives are great solutions for things that matter to us and access to good housing is really important. And so I'm really excited by this co-operative called Latch, again based in Leeds and so I'll see a hotbed for co-operatives and Latch basically take derelict properties and they convert them to make them decent housing, particularly for people, vulnerable who don't have access to good housing and not only do they convert those buildings and residences, they also provide training opportunities and work for the people in those houses and they work in their community. And recently they did something called a community share offer and raised £550,000 from their members in order to buy even more properties and convert them. So we'll talk a little bit more about community shares as we go along. And here we have an example, again, of housing for students. Student co-operative homes is a federal body, and they can purchase housing and then lease it to students, often students are in the hands of private landlords and rents are put up and they don't have much control over that. And this is a different solution to help students and also gives them good experience in running a co-operative and learn those skills. So a couple of examples there around housing, but also about I suppose supporting their local communities. And so this final slide about case studies is two cooperatives that operate really to benefit their community and provide services within their community. So Flows, the place in the park is down in Oxford. And this is a lovely new co-operative came out of Oxford County Council's Children's Centre, which was going to be closed down. So the community came together to operate this wonderful building in the park in Oxford. And this centre provides a nursery, provides a cafe, a refill shop, and lots of services to the local community. And they decided to form themselves as a co-operative so that they're serving their members. And one of the things that they were able also to do is raise funds from a community share offer from their members and to invest in the centre and provide services that they wanted to do. And finally, this example of Friends of Stratford Public Hall, that's one that's very dear to me. When I'm not working at Cocters UK, I'm a volunteer director at Friends of Stratford Public Hall, which is just outside of Manchester. This is a beautiful grade two listed building, which has been around since the 1800s. And has always been a sort of multi-use building in one shape or another. It's been in the past a library, a swimming pool, and it's been a theatre. And when the council were going to sell the building, potentially to private investors, private developers, in 2015, the community were able to come together and do an asset transfer. And it's now owned by the community. And we were able to do a community share offer in 2017, and we raised £250,000 from our investor members. And today the building is used by lots of people who come in for events, for wellbeing, for yoga, for exhibitions, music, weddings and everything else. So it's really exciting to see how that building has developed. So I've mentioned a few times here that one of the things that members can do is invest in the things that they care about, whether that's energy, housing or community assets and buildings such as these two here. So I'm just going to touch on what community shares are. This could be a whole workshop and session on its own. But I'm just going to very quickly describe what community shares are and why that's so powerful, particularly for communities that want to take on services and assets that are meaningful and benefit. And to give its official name, community shares is actually withdrawable share capital. And it's a way that members can invest.  So you can attend the AGMs, you can join the board or committee of that cooperative. And you have a say in how the cooperative is run. These shares, the only thing you can do with them is withdraw them or occasionally an interest on them so you can't it's not really about making money out of them is quite different. To date, hundreds of communities around the country in the last 10 years have raised actually it's more than 180 million pound now since we did this slide from over 100,000 investors. There are lots of examples of communities where that's swimming pools, hugs, farms, listed buildings, you name it that have used community shares to develop their services and their buildings. It's a really powerful way that cooperatives have of supporting their communities. So I'm going to take breath there I think, and just just to summarize that we know that cooperatives are businesses. They operate to a set of principles. And there's lots of different types of cooperatives that are defined by their principles but also how they're owned by their members. I'm just very quickly, just mindful of the time just quickly going to touch on the fact that there will be support available. And when you're thinking about setting up your cooperative it's much the same as any other business you're either responding to an opportunity or a need. You need to test that need and check the feasibility, and you need to have the right people behind you. And unlike setting up maybe as a sole trader, you do need to have a group of people who are motivated and share your same values and principles and vision. So I think that collective collective vision is really important. And that vision will also determine what the purpose of the cooperative is and will help you to start thinking about what kind of cooperative you should be who your members would be. And what impact you want to create. Luckily for you one of the things that we have on our website is the step by step guide. And it literally does as it says it takes you through each of the steps of setting up your business from testing your idea and feasibility to checking whether actually cooperative is right for what you're trying to do, how to finance your startup business planning. So we have a whole section around legal structures. And finally, once you've done all of those steps and you're ready to register your cooperative you can do that through our online digital service, and which again has been subsidised through the high business support program and the cooperative bank. So I'm going to draw breath there and finish, and thanks very much for bearing with me on learning that introduction to corporates. I'm now going to hand over if I may to my colleague Dan Pollard corporates UK. I've talked a lot about the different types of properties and they will now take you through the legal options and how you register your cooperative. So I'm going to be changing the slides for him so he will let me know when they need to move on. So over to Dane. Thanks very much. Thanks, Petra. Thanks for all that. Yeah, just a quick introduction. I'm Dane working the advice team here at coach UK. We are a relatively small team but cover a wide range of skills and experience in governance and HR advice. Our role primarily is to assist new organizations with their incorporation, and that can involve discussions around different legal forms and different structures at the start of people's journeys. First slide please Petra. Thank you. Just to remind everyone that you can post any questions or comments in the chat and we will get to them at the end and we'll try and get through as many as possible. That first slide there is talking about incorporation. So should you incorporate? Most cooperatives do incorporate but there are circumstances where remaining unincorporated is actually most appropriate. What does incorporation mean? It means creating a legal identity for that organization. Sorry somebody was calling me on the other phone there. Creating a legal identity for the organization that is distinct from its members, which means it then becomes a corporate body. As the slide says, incorporation then limits the personal liability of your members and directors, and it's the legal entity which is then a person in the eyes of the law that takes on that risk. If you remain unincorporated, your organization is more informal, which means the law sees you, sees the cooperative as a collection of people, which the directors and members are not the legal entity in its own right. The organization itself can't enter into any contracts, and it's more difficult to give members the authority to enter into contracts as well on the organization's behalf. The liability to the directors is what's known as joint and several and is unlimited. And that means these liabilities may not be shared equally among the members. And it's often those who have the ability to pay are the ones that have pursued more for any payment of debts. It's worth saying here as well that contractual liability will ultimately rest with those who have authorized the contract. And so for committee members to enter into a contract, and the contract was authorized by an imaginary committee, each committee member would be held liable under the terms of the contract should something go wrong. If a committee member acts on their own without the authorization of the committee, then they can be held personally liable. Obviously incorporation will create a limited liability, but a director can still be held liable if they act outside of the authority of the board. When you do incorporate it means your business will have specific rights and duties to follow so you legal so you register as a legal entity under a particular act of legislation with a particular regulatory body such as the companies act 2006, which is regulated by the company's house. And what this means is you will have startup fees, you'll have to keep and file records with the appropriate registrar, and you'll have to make certain details public such as you registered address and board and director names. So when should you incorporate. Well if you plan to own property and or enter into significant contracts such as employment contracts. If you undertake significant trade, or you want to own significant assets. If you want to just limit the personal liability of your members as well. The legal entity then takes on that risk. Being unincorporated might suit your cohort better if you have a more informal setup and your exposure to those risks are minimal. And obviously the advantages of remaining incorporated are there's no very limited startup or annual costs, you don't need to declare any details with public registers and there's very little admin officially. If you want to explore more about that aspect of incorporation or not we have a publication called simply legal, and you can download that from step five in our step by step guide that Petra showed you. It's important to say that you shouldn't rush into incorporation if there is no particular need to at that moment in time. Some businesses can start off informally tickle on quite nicely. Without the need for any contracts or employees, or anything that would incur that sort of risk. And then once they're ready to sort of move forward and grow, you can then look to incorporation, and usually by then they'll have a better idea of what the business is going to look like. But when the time is right you want to make that change. Thank you Petra. And you're ready to incorporate so once you've made that decision. You're going to need to go through these these points here so you've got to decide your cooperative structure. Do you know who your members are going to be, and do you know what their relationship will be with the co-op. So why should they be members in the first place. So it's important to think about the different types of co-op that you can have. And it's also worth remembering that every single co-op is different, even within the same particular type and structure. So it's important to think about what's going to suit you and your business and your members best. You need to have a business model and a business plan, because as Petra said the court needs to have a business behind it, and you want that business to be successful as well.  Will you be reliant on trading income or grants loans, especially at the start up, what do you need to get things off the ground, including any registration costs. So if you have a business model on legal form that suits your needs or preferences, and do have a look at all the different ones. We'll touch on this at the end of my section, because there are some differences and some similarities between them. But you've got to pick one that suits you again and what your needs are. So Petra mentioned withdrawal shares, for example, they're only available if you register as a society.  So if you're governing document sorted, you've got to think again about what your co-op needs to be successful. And to help you with that governing document, cooperative UK has many different model constitutions that will suit all different legal forms, including unincorporated if you want to stay that way. And you can review the majority of those at step 5.5 of our guide. So we did say it was helpful. So if there's something that you want that you can't find on there, feel free to give us an email at advice at UK.coop and we'll have a look for you. So once you've done all that, you're ready to make your application, you've got to go to an relevant registrar and depending on what legal form you'll have will be a different process for that registration. Cooperative UK also has a registration service that is currently being subsidized by the court bank. And as part of that service, we will help you draft the constitution, we'll help you prepare the application form, liaise with the registrar on your behalf, until the co-op is registered. And once it's registered, we'll even throw in membership to Court UK at no extra cost should you wish to join us. And you can find more details about that at step 6 of the guide. Okay, moving on. Thank you, Petra. Previous slide and legal forms. And the first point to make is that a co-op can be any legal form. So in the UK there is no particular legislation just for cooperatives. So again, do research, look at the options and decide what fits you best. There will be some reasons to incorporate that demand a certain legal form, but in some cases it can simply be personal choice or preference. The main legal forms we see used commonly are the standard ones that you're probably more aware of, which is a company limited by guarantee or a company limited by shares. And the other legal forms we see are the cooperative society, community benefit society, and there is a charitable version of community benefit society as well. Other legal forms, you can have community interest companies, which are known as kicks, and they can be limited by guarantee or by shares. CIOs are charitable incorporated organizations, LLP's limited liability partnerships and public limited companies. There can all be co-ops, and you can write the constitution to have cooperative values and principles throughout. But we see these a bit less than the others. So things to think about when you choose that legal form are what type of business you're going to carry out, who are the members going to be their interaction, how will you fund the co-op, especially at the start up stage, and what the co-op will do with profits that it makes any surplus. And finally, what's the co-op going to do with its assets when it winds up. Next slide, please, Petra. So if we look through them in a bit more detail, I appreciate this looks a bit of a complicated slide. So don't worry too much, it's just an overview and illustration of how the legal forms are interlinked and how they differ. So, for example, at the top there, you can see the legislation for the particular legal forms are registered under. So we have the Companies Act on the left, which is probably the most familiar. And then the Cooperative and Community Benefits Societies Act 2014 on the right. And then finally the Limited Liability Partnership at the end. So if we start with the companies on the left, they're registered under that Act and they can be limited by guarantee or by shares. A private company limited by guarantee means that all the members will guarantee a certain amount of money, which is usually a pound in the events of the company being wound up and still having outstanding debts. One pound from each member is probably not going to cover all the outstanding debts, but the point is it's limited to that one pound and it's a commitment. The private company limited by shares means that the liability of the shareholders is the capital that they've originally invested. So the nominal value of the shares and any premium paid in return for the issue of those shares by the company. So all the shareholding would be at risk in the case of winding up with debts. The public limited by company, sorry, the public limited company as well is on there and they can issue shares to the public. They're generally used by the large capital based ventures. We don't really see cooperatives registering as PLCs because they're on the stock exchange, it'll have to be, but it can be and they'll have to follow the different listing rules as well as on stock exchange. So again, we just don't really see many cuts do that. So moving from left to right there we can look at societies next and they are corporate bodies in exactly the same way as companies are, which a lot of people don't quite understand in the wider world. And they're registered under the cooperative and community benefit societies act 2014 and they are administered by the financial conduct authority, whereas companies go to companies house. Societies can be registered as cooperative society or a community benefit society. The co-op society legal form is used by all types of cops to meet the conditions for registration. The SCA state that the society must be an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned enterprise, which if you remember earlier, we mentioned the ICA social cooperative alliance that is their statement as well. So the the SCA are just picking up on that statement and making sure that anyone who applies as a cooperative loosely meets that definition. The community benefit society legal form is more common with the community owned businesses and the other forms of voluntary and community activity, where the emphasis is to benefit the wider community rather than society specific membership. The community's benefit society or CBS as they're known has the option of adding what's called a statutory asset lock as well. And the asset lock is designed to ensure that all the assets of the organization, which includes any profits or the services generated by activities are used for the benefit of the community and the wider community. So on any winding up or dissolution, any remaining assets must be given to another asset loss organization, usually with similar objectives as well. So what it just means is the intention of your society, you keep in those assets there, you know, in perpetuity really. Once you put an asset lock, a statutory asset lock into a constitution, it can't be removed either. So new businesses should really think about the advantages and disadvantages of doing that, before they include it. So, also on this slide, we have LLPs. Sorry, I had to stay on that one. Thank you. And they are subject to the limited liability partnership act. Additionally, this legal form provides a limited liability for its members in the same way, but it's a flexible structure and it has tax advantages for being partnerships, and they usually more profit making activities. The kick is on there as well, but that's in the, the company's act and the company's thing and the kick is looking at the wider community benefit as well in a similar way that the CBS is our. It's often formed when companies are not quite charitable, but they still want to do things for the wider good for the community. And there are two key features that distinguish the community interests company from other companies. And it is that the asset lock is in a kick as well but it's compulsory. And it's in the CBS where you can choose the asset lock is compulsory there. And to register a kick, the community interest test must be passed, which means kicks are registered with companies house but also the kick regulator is the one who decides on whether or not the organization passes that particular test. And the CIOs are on there as well and they are. There's a Scottish CIO as well, and that is more charitable organizations which again we see less of when they're being co-ops to be honest with you. So finally just really going to quickly touch on the little circles there on the right hand side and that is the withdrawal shares that Petra mentioned earlier, and they're only available on the society model. And as Petra said they are power value, it's not creating some kind of exchange where you can buy and sell shares that you invest shares and you can withdraw shares, you can transfer shares if it's specified in in your constitution. But again, we don't often see people with transferable withdrawal shares. And as Petra said we could spend a long time talking about withdrawal shares, but it is optional in societies is where the be specifically mentioned in the rules as well as to what you can do and to how many shares you can have. There's no requirement to specify an amount share capital when you register you can just say it's an option. You can do share offers where you can raise as much money as you need to societies have exemptions from the financial services and market markets act 2000, which includes exemptions for covering financial promotions basically, which can reduce the cost of share issues. It's still risk capital though, and despite the exemptions the SCA will expect the society to provide appropriate information regarding this risk to investors so you share off your document needs to to clearly spell that out. You can pay interest on those shares however the interest will payable has to be set at a rate that is what the SCA deemed necessary to obtain and retain enough capital to run the business. So it means you can't see it as an investment opportunity for example those people investing should do it for socially motivated or philanthropic reasons rather than the prospects of financial return. And the SCA do look very closely at that so when people register and they want to do share offers, they will often look at social media or websites just to see how the society are actually talking about those share offers. Okay final slide please pleasure thank you so just quickly going to end this section for for my part today looking at the pros and cons with two main legal forms that I've spoken about, and this is a really quick overview with some examples here. And there may be more on each side of these tables and if you ask different people they may tell you different ones as well but these are sort of more obvious ones. So with a company, it's a bit quicker to register. But there is a bit more admin ongoing. So with a company you can often get registered within two to three days, which is really great with a society, it takes a minimum of three weeks for the SCA to get back to you so you're looking at maybe four to six weeks sometimes for that one. The companies are more recognized legal form. You know if you go to banks and insurance companies and things like that they will know a company because they're familiar with it. But they don't really understand societies as much so that can be a bit of a challenge for for cooperatives and something that we are continually, continually lobbying for and to try and make it a level playing field. The society model as we just discussed has withdrawable share capital which company doesn't company can be limited by shares of course but they are subject to the different restrictions and the legislation around those shares. But the companies that really is designed for your standard for profit businesses, or as a society a society seem more as a, you know, wider community benefiting organization, even if it's a co-op this the concern for the community is still in the values of principles that principle seven so it's sort of seen as a different perspective from some people. The company has more prescriptive legislation, which can be a pro and it can be a con because obviously it tells you more about what you can cannot do. Whereas a society the the act is relatively small in comparison so a lot of things are left out of that and seen as that for the members to sort of govern themselves. In any sort of cases where legal intervention is needed, they will always default with the company's act or case law if if it can't be found that way so it's not that you can sort of you know skirt around the law a bit more with a society you very much have to do the same sort of thing but it's more for you to manage that way. That's a bit from me on that section. I'll hand back to Petra but I think we're going to look to any questions as well. And I can see one in there we can answer Petra so yeah I'm happy to answer that whenever you want. And I think for me always with this legal section is the flexibility of the cooperative model as Dana said is that you can essentially be any legal form and still be a cooperative it's the principles that make you a you do have these model and governing document documents templates and that you can adopt and I'm just putting this slide up again just to remind you that you can go through the step by step and all of this is available including registering your cooperative. So just before we go to questions I'm just going to touch on the fact that there is more support available if anyone wants to take this further. And the high business support program as I said before we're delighted that we've been partnering with the cooperative bank, the cooperative bank themselves and follow values and principles and ethical bank and are keen to see the cooperative economy grow. And so people can apply for support to the high bits open all year round for applications and can get up to 10 days of bespoke support mentoring or training. And the advice team at Carpeter's UK again have lots of resources and support that they can give you in terms of your journey as a cooperative and we also run lots of training and I know Dan is doing a training session tomorrow for directors so I think that's booked up now. And we also have the community shares unit at Carpeter's UK which manages that work around community shares and we have a program called community shares booster program, which again groups can apply to if they're ready to do their share offer and get development support, or even equity match funding so reach pound they raise from their community and that's much through the community shares booster equity funding. So all of these, I think we've put links to these in our chat, and we'll follow up with this with the link to the recording of this webinar, and also we have the offer there if you would like to speak to myself, and you can book an appointment with me if you want to talk through your idea and whether you should apply for support. And so let's look at questions I think there have been questions as we've gone along. There's been a couple. Yeah, we can start with if you've got any questions pop them in quick and we'll try and answer them before we finish but Amanda said, can you change who the members of the co-op are as the co-op develops and she said for example the workers be the members initially, and then a later date for customers to be invited to become members. So, the answer to that is yes of course co-op grow and change, you know organically as things move on and they hopefully thrive and become successful. I think it's important to think about, certainly at the beginning, what do you see your co-op is doing long term. The reason I say that is because it's easier to add extra member categories in your constitution at the beginning, but maybe not have anyone in them at that point. It's not difficult, but it's harder to change it because you have to go to the registrar to register a change of constitution if you're adding more members in a future date. But if you don't know, for example, that you want customers to be members until later down the line then absolutely you'll have a process laid out in your constitution that tells you what you need to make changes. And effectively that will be called in a general meeting and members will vote on adding these new categories in, they will be added in, you'll register it with the registrar and then you'll have a new constitution moving forward for those members. So yeah, the easy answer is yes. It can get more complicated and difficult depending on the, you know, the situations, but you've got to do what's best for you at whatever time you're doing it. Christina then said what legal structures do platform co-optives most frequently use. I've got a great answer Christina, but any and all of them. So, as I've sort of said that it doesn't matter what legal form you choose as to what co-op you are it's about what you need from your legal structure. So, we have platform co-ops that use societies. We have platform co-ops that use companies. It has to be said that the main legal funds we do our company limited by guarantee and the cooperative society and the cooperative. Sorry, the community benefit society. So, most of them fall within those brackets we have companies by shares as well. And it then literally comes down to what's going to suit the co-op best. So again, it's just doing your research. And it's not to say you can't change either again if you start as a company for example, because it's easier and it's quicker and it just suits your needs at that time. And then two years down the line you think actually we want to look into withdrawal shares now and involve the community or the wider stakeholders a bit more than you can convert. Every single legal form. So obviously, do take advice on what you want to do. But we also help with that as the advice team as well. So yeah, any is the answer. And Kim has said if the business is already incorporated, can this be developed into a co-op? Yeah, absolutely. Again, it's any legal form can be a co-op at any time. So if there's sometimes cooperative buyouts, which Petra might first tell you more about if we've supported through the hive, but you convert to a co-op. It usually means you just change your constitution.  Of course, if you want to be a co-op, you need to get other people to want to be a co-op as well. So you couldn't decide that you want your business to be a co-op and then force your employees to be members, for example. Open and voluntary membership is paramount on that one. Petra, I don't know if you want to say this one, but can you advise on the optimum number of people who should be involved at startup? I can tell you that there is a minimum number of three for a society, and we would even minimum of two for a company. But would you say there was an optimum number Petra? I would, I guess it depends on the type of cooperative you're setting up and how representative maybe you want it to be and also some of the skills that you might need at that startup. So yeah, there isn't a figure that we would recommend, but it would obviously depend on the nature of the business and who your members are and how representative it is and we actually have the capacity and skills and people to do that. So it will vary in terms of my own experience of being a board member at Stratford Public Hall, I think our board, we have a maximum of 12 on our board, but we have currently 10, so we have two vacancies at the moment. And, but yeah, it varies from each cooperative, and it depends on the nature of the cooperative as well. So yeah, can't give you a definitive answer on that one, I'm afraid. But as as Dane said, for societies, particularly if you're setting up maybe a worker cooperative, the minimum is three people, so that's something to consider if that's what you want to do. I think there was an early, I don't know if it was a question or an observation but I think someone said that they particularly wanted to set something up around a publishing business. I don't know if that's publishing as in books or what kind of publishing, and we do have a few co-operatives that operate in kind of newspapers and in publishing.  Whenever you start having a multi stakeholder co-operative and different members, you've got to keep all those different stakeholders happy, and you've got to put aside often your own needs, perhaps to ensure that you're buying into the whole vision of the co-operative and what the purpose of the co-operative is. So keeping everybody happy is always a challenge if you're going to have different types of users and different types of members. But obviously, if you know any business where you've got customers and people who are going to purchase from you, having them as members is probably quite useful. Is that a fair response, Dane? I think she was introducing herself in the beginning, yeah, but she just commented that it was Kim again, and she's going to be in books and working with young writers and creatives. No, that's brilliant. We're seeing lots of interest from the creative industries and technical looking at co-operatives as a model, and particularly where people maybe who work as freelancers and independence can be quite a lonely job and there's not much support. So a co-operative model and having that umbrella and that support around you, but still having that independence and freedom is a really good way for co-operatives to come together. So we're seeing quite a lot of interest in that. And in fact, one of the earlier webinars we did was around freelancers and work carts and that is still available on our websites. Take a look at that if that's of interest. Petra, so Tim's just asked are there any online or platform based language teaching co-operatives? I don't know if you know any off the top of your head, but just before you answer, we do have a directory on our website. If you go to our website at the very top, I think it says find a co-op and you can search by sectors as well as regions and co-op types and things like that. So that might be helpful to those looking to see what else is out there. But Petra, do you know any online language ones? I have one that we just supported through our unfound accelerator program called Red Brick Language. I think that's more for teachers of English as a foreign language. We have something called Michael class, which is fairly new, which is providing teaching online to internationally, not just in the UK. So again, if you Google Michael class or Red Brick Language School, I think we have some case studies on that one on our website. But yeah, we've seen a lot of interest in online teaching, not least because of what's happened in the pandemic in the last couple of years. And a co-operative model is a great solution for that as well. Getting lots of questions in now, we may not be up to. Yeah, no, Christina was just saying that the Accelerated Program, Red Brick, I think is what you talk about Petra there. I think they won one of the unfound things, didn't they? They did, yeah. And they are featured as a case study on our website. So I don't know. I think we've covered the questions there. So unless anyone's got any quick ones. Yeah, there's plenty of links on there. So hopefully you've managed to click on a few of them as well. And yes, so that kind of ends our, we've kept time on the webinar when we said it would be an hour. Thank you again to Dane for excellent contribution. Our advice team are always on hand, you know, if you do need some guidance on legal form and let's say our step by step guide takes you through that process. And we will send out emails after this, this webinar with the link to the recording and the offer is there for me to have a conversation with me as well if you want to just get a bit more guidance before you may be applying to the Hive Business Support Program. So thanks again for joining us. We'll close there. And I hope you found that useful and look forward to hearing from you maybe soon in future. Thanks very much everyone. Thanks. Bye bye.


Christmas was always a huge, huge event in our family and it was really, really heartwarming to see our older brother being as loving as he was. We were sitting where we're sitting right now, watching the sunrise and we were reflecting on how proud we were of Jordan. You do get a bit nervous and anxious on the way there.  How am I going to tell these people that their lives have changed forever? As I rounded that last set of stairs and I saw those two full-on officers through that glass door, my heart sank and my knees gave way and I knew, I knew that there was something drastically wrong. You sort of try and work through it in your head and you try and work out how can I soften this message but the message can't be softened. And they just said to us, there was an accident on the M1 last night and we believe your son Jordan Hayes McGinnis has been fatally injured. Five young lives taken in one hit. It just, it straight away did not make sense that somewhere from the text last night to this morning he was dead. And of course at that time we had no idea what he'd done. Five Logan friends were travelling south when their car broke down. They pulled into a safety lane to wait for help. Jordan had been at his work Christmas party. He had quite a few beers I believe and he smoked some cannabis. The reasons that we still don't know and we'll never know, he chose to drive home that night. A red possum came tearing off the road. A 18 year old driver didn't survive the impact. To the collision one of the vehicles has caught fire. It's hard, it's hard and it never gets easier. But then you deal with the after effects of that. That has a rippling effect on family, friends, loved ones and partners. It's never the same for them. Every birthday, Christmas, Easter, it's never going to be the same. Your father, he knows how to do more than that. He will visit every day, every year. And I think about it every night when I go to sleep. It really is a new normal and you're not what you were. We don't seek sympathy for this. The sympathy belongs with Jordan's victims. The choices that Jordan made pre-Christmas in 2012 will affect his victims' families for generations. This is real, this is real, raw incidents. These things happen and just because it hasn't happened to you it doesn't mean it's not going to happen to you or a loved one that you know. I think it's really important to put aside the idea that bad driving is bad luck. You're responsible, you're accountable for your own choices. Given that Christmas is about love and about family, if you really love your family then you'll very, very carefully consider your choices. You think about your family or your loved ones. You drive knowing that you have your hands on a dangerous weapon because that's what a car is. It is a lethal weapon and so easily, so easily that car can become your coffin. I want people to be patient on the roads. Just get home safely.