Hi, I'm Matthew coast head dating coach and founder of commitment connection calm and today We're going to be talking about the six signs that a guy likes you So if you want to know if a guy likes you here are the signs the first sign is that he'll keep looking at you So if a guy likes a woman He will look at her a lot and he will try to keep looking at her because he likes her if he likes her too much You may you know try to look at her and then when she looks at him. You'll like Try to look away and pretend like he wasn't looking at her. So That's the first sign the second sign is that he will stand close to you and you'll see this Pretty much anywhere really if a guy if a guy likes you at a bar. He'll stand Near you hoping that maybe some type of interaction will happen there or maybe he'll If you're at work or something, he'll he'll try to get close to you like in a meeting or or whatever Guys stand close to women that they like.   He'll ask you about your life. He'll ask you about Everything he'll you know find out as much as he can about you and that's a great sign That shows that a guy is interested in you is he gets really really curious about you So the fifth sign is that he'll talk about the two of you in some kind of future together or he'll make hints at it, so Maybe he'll talk about something that he might want to do with you and and kind of Gauge your reaction to what it is that he says that way he can figure out Whether or not he should ask you out to that thing or not And so if you if you like him and you want him to take you to something and he starts talking about some Thing in the future that he's into, you know be like, oh, yeah, you know, that sounds like it's so much fun I'd love to go and do that, you know, and that'll That'll give him an indication while maybe I should ask her out to this thing or or whatever And then the last reason is that or the last sign is that he will He will seem like he's really happy around you for absolutely. No reason and so This is just something that if a person likes another person They will be happy around that person They will just smile and he might just have a big grin on his face, you know, like what are you smiling about?


While we're doing the top secret make sure you all post your comments over in Discord for the questions, but we're gonna get to this now. So we promised, we said, we would, we are, we did, we're going to. Talk about the clue. That was your clue. It's here. So I've got the clue board prototypes that came in. Actually like almost everything works pretty good. This is the screen. It doesn't have a lot of colors on it because I'm just using it as prototype mode. And I'm working on this new structure called sensor lab to help manage the sensors. But for example, this is a BMP 280 on it and here I'm just measuring the pressure and it's telling me my estimated altitude about, you know, three floors up. It's got those two buttons on the front and on the back all these sensors. So the microphone, biometric pressure, humidity, magnetometer, accelerometer, gyro, that Bluetooth module that I love, the NRF52840, Q-Spy, battery connector, got this debug port, but this won't be on the final version. This is just, I use it because I need it. Reset button, NeoPixel, and then a STEM and QT connector so you can connect other iSquared C sensors. These are all iSquared C and then of course it's got the micro bit compatible plug. And the micro bit foundation was actually really psyched. They're like, yay, more boards that use the same connector so you'll be able to plug it in. Doesn't work with MAKE code yet. MAKE code doesn't have NRF52840 support. I will say that we'll probably add it later in the year, but we don't know when and I don't want to have a date. So maybe, maybe. But for now we have, this is Arduino. So I'm waiting for Arduino code here. This version, oh, in the front, I haven't started on, but it has a APDS color light and proximity sensor. So this is a circuit python. So you see this little blink of there. You have to change the refresh location so it goes up down, not side to side. It'll look better. But yeah, you can, we're in circuit python. What's great is we have, of course, drivers for all these libraries. That's super psyched. So I'm just going through and testing everything and going to do another revision or two and maybe I'll put it in the store. Okay. Well, I'll sort of answer this question. I expect your product invention development roadmap is proprietary, but if not, it would be amazing to see what direction is your thing going. This is what we're doing. This is it. I just showed you. This is the next product. Yeah, guess what? There's nothing secret that we're working on. If we're showing it to you, it might be because we just... This is a prototype. ...sottered one up like yesterday. We sorted this up last Friday. So I worked on this, like, over again. Yeah. This is the thing. We don't really do anything other than this. So if we show it, it's because we're working on it. And there isn't a product I can think of right now that we're working on that we haven't shown on our shows or on Instagram or on Twitter. We even post in Discord all the time. Here's a board we're working on. Yeah. So, yeah, this is what we're doing. It's true. Yeah. OK, so with that is top secret. Back in the vault. Back in Das Vault. OK.


Hello and welcome. My name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Chief Digital Manager of DataVersity. We are proud to produce the webinar series of data governance case studies for the Data Governors Professionals Organization. We'd like to thank you for joining today's DGPL webinar, governing government data, what makes it different. Just a couple of points to get us started. Due to the large number of people that attend these sessions, you will be muted during the webinar. For questions, we will be collecting them by the Q&A section in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. Or if you'd like to tweet, we encourage you to share highlights or questions via Twitter using hashtag DGPO. Then let me turn the webinar over to Ann from the Data Governors Professionals Organization to introduce today's webinar. Ann Speaker. Ann, hello and welcome. Hey, Shannon, and thank you. So before we get started as a reminder, the recording for the webinar today will be posted in the DGPO members-only section of the DGPO website in the next few days. So, and again, before we get started, I also want to take a time to provide you a brief overview of the Data Governors Professionals Organization affectionately referred to as the DGPO. The DGPO is a community of Data Governors Professionals, and our mission is to share the knowledge, content, and best practices of our members to build a community of practice. Towards that goal, a group of individuals have been working on expanding our best practice information for the six areas that you see in this bottom left-hand graphic. So, stewardship, fundamentals, organization, process metrics, and communication. To learn more about the DGPO, please visit our website at dgpo.org. So now, to honor the companies that have advanced their Data Governance programs, the DGPO awarded their first Data Governance Best Practice Award winners this year. The award is given to practitioners within a customer organization in recognition of the business value and technical excellence that they have achieved in the design and implementation of an outstanding Data Governance program. We had 18 submissions this year, and these companies are now being featured in our DGPO webinars throughout the rest of this year. I am thrilled to have the privilege and honor of introducing today's speaker, Christy Lottie Johnson, from Hennepin County. Having had the honor of serving as a judge for this Best Practice Award, I can tell you that the Hennepin County program is absolutely stellar, and I can assure you that you are going to get a lot out of today's session. Christy Lottie Johnson, who out of Hennepin County is Hennepin County Responsible Authority, was appointed as the first Hennepin County Data Governance Officer by the County Board in May of 2014. She leverages her 20-plus year career at Hennepin County, the largest county in Minnesota, in the county attorney's office, human services administration, and the Human Services and Public Health Department, building upon relationships with county leaders and securing ongoing support for a data governance program for all levels of the organization. In just three years' time, she has led a team of six staff to develop and implement an organizational-wide data governance infrastructure. By establishing a philosophy of relaxed awareness, the team has built a culture in which staff view data as an asset while still recognizing the risks that are often associated with data. That philosophy, along with the ingenious creativity, has resulted in awareness and the ownership of data practices' responsibilities at all levels, producing tangible outcomes county-wide in the areas of data practices, records management, and disposal and training and communication. Ms. Lottie Johnson is a certified compliance at ethics professional and holds a master's degree in public affairs and an undergraduate degree in criminal justice. Without any further ado, I mean, it is my privilege to turn this webinar over to Christy and have her share her experience and journey. Thank you, Ann. Hello, everyone, and welcome. Can you guys all see the screen? No, hi. Christy, I was just going to mention we are not seeing you sharing it. Okay. We're working on it. This is technical difficulties because this is our first time ever doing this. Okay. There we go. Okay. You can see it. Excellent. Hello, everyone, and welcome. I'm Christy Lottie Johnson, data governance officer and responsible authority for Hennepin County, Minnesota. Thanks again for attending this webinar, governing government data, what makes the difference. Today I will be sharing how Hennepin County data governance team navigates the unique challenges local governments face in respect to protecting data privacy, ensuring compliance with federal and state regulations, and building a culture in which staff know how to manage data responsibly. To provide you with some context, Hennepin County is located in Minnesota with 1.2 million people, and it has the largest population in the state and the 35th largest in the nation. Hennepin County is great for sports and recreation. In a land of 10,000 lakes, Hennepin County does not disappoint with more than 30 lakes, over 100 miles of bike trails, and a park system ranked number one in the nation. In addition, cities in Hennepin County have recently hosted the U.S. Skulls Open, the NBA All-Star Games, and the X Games. And in 2018, the Super Bowl is just around the corner. Hennepin County is very diverse. There are 45 cities in Hennepin County, ranging from rural communities to an urban core. Minneapolis is the largest city, and it's home to the largest Somali population in the U.S. The Minneapolis Public Schools is the largest school district with over 32,000 students, and 32% of these students speak a language other than English in their homes. In fact, Minneapolis Public Schools indicates that there are over 90 different languages spoken in the schools. And while Hennepin County hosts five of the 10 most wealthy communities in the state, 80% of the kids who attend the Brooklyn Center School District, which is a first-ring suburb to Minneapolis, are eligible for free or reduced lunches. Here are the topics for today's webinar. First of all, I'll describe how data governance in the public sector is different. Then I'll go a little deeper and cover policies that are critical to the leading successful data governance program in the public sector. Third, I'll discuss some approaches for implementing a data governance program in a large and complex agency. And last, I'll discuss overcoming change management challenges while working to get staff on board with new and evolving data governance requirements. My goal today is that this discussion will be of interest and use not only to those of you out there who are in the public sector, but to those in the private sector as well. Let's get started. In the private sector, data in Hattopin County is an asset, and it is critically important for us to provide services to clients and residents in the county. However, one of the fundamental aspects for governing data that is different for us than in the private sector is the fact that the data we collect and the records we create are governed not only by federal and industry regulations, but by Minnesota statutes as well. There are three primary statutes. Chapter 13, which is the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act, the Official Records Act, which is in Chapter 15, and the Records Management Act, which is in Chapter 17. I'm going to talk with you first about the Official Records Act and the Records Management Act. These two acts outline the government's requirements to make and preserve records and documents and document official activities and provide direction on the disposition of records. All government entities are required to have official retention schedules in place that outline the disposition of their records. These retention schedules define what records need to be maintained permanently, like records related to heinous crimes must be kept forever, and the length of time that other records shall be maintained by the government entity. In some cases, there are statutory requirements for destroying documents within a certain timeframe. For example, adult protection intake files must be destroyed three years after closure. In other cases, the requirements are around the length of time a document may be maintained, so financial records may be destroyed seven years after closure. The Official Records Act and Records Management Act provide direction for just a subset of the data handled by Hennepin County. The Data Practices Act, or Chapter 13, addresses the remainder of the data. Chapter 13 defines government data as all data collected, created, received, maintained, or disseminated by any government entity regardless of physical form, storage media, or conditions of use. So if someone would make a Data Practices Request for all data related to a contracted provider, it means that we would have to review, retrieve, and produce all data related to that provider. In addition to the Official Record, we would also need to check with individuals on whether or not there are personal worker notes taken during a meeting or something like that. So when we talk with staff and train staff, we try to help them understand that it is not just the record that is subject to the Minnesota Data Practices Act, but it is all data that the county has. So many of you are probably familiar with the data classification method for applying a security framework for data. It considers the level of confidentiality, the availability, and the integrity of the data. However, for us, classification of the data starts with the Minnesota Data Practices Act. All government data is classified under one of the six data classifications you can see on the screen. There's data not on individuals, which can be classified as public, non-public, and protected non-public, and then there's data on individuals that can be classified as public, private, or confidential. In Minnesota, all government data are presumed public, except for when it's not. This is stated in the first section of the Data Practices Act. Then it goes on for another 160 pages of the Data Practices Act to identify exceptions to that rule. A couple of years ago, the Minnesota legislature also clarified in a statute that anyone under contract with a government entity is subject to the Data Practices Act for data it collects, creates, receives, maintains, or disseminates as part of that contractual relationship with the government entity. The Data Practices Act also requires that government entities inform an individual asked to supply private data or confidential data of the purpose or intended use of that data. Should we then decide that we would like to use the data for a different purpose, we would need to get that individual's consent to do so. Minnesota Data Practices Act guides much of our work. What sets us apart from the private sector is that we are constantly balancing the public's right to know about what their government is doing, being good stewards of the data, and being in compliance with federal and state laws, especially as it relates to protecting data on individuals that is classified as non-public. Being in a private sector... being in a public sector environment also means sharing data appropriately across jurisdictions. So now I'm going to talk a little bit more about the data governance policies in Hennepin County. State and federal laws drive the adoption of many of our policies and the work that we do. So we have some policies that are required to have under statute. The first is that we are required to have a policy about creating a data inventory on all private and confidential data that we collect on individuals and what our authority is to collect that data. Second, we must have a policy available around access to public data and a policy for data subjects to be able to access data about themselves. Second, we must have compliance in the policy for a data subject to access data about him or herself is that we provide the data within 10 business days. Both of these... access to public data policy and the data subject access policy must be made available to anyone who requests them free of charge. In addition, we have a policy that's called a Safe at Home policy. It's an address protection program that is run by the Minnesota Secretary of State's office. It's available to protect an individual who's the subject of maybe some domestic violence or threatening behavior or stalking or something like that. The intent is to disconnect their address from their name so that they can't be found disease-ally. Across the state, we are required to accept a PO box number for an address as opposed to having people put their address in, but that's for anything. For example, the driver's license would have a PO box number as opposed to a person's address, as well as utility bills, cable bills, bank statements, everything like that. We're allowed to have a PO box number instead of an address. What it does as it relates to the Data Practices Act, though, is it actually allows people to say, that isn't enough protection for me. I need you to also make data that's normally considered public about me, private. So in situations where a marriage license or maybe a birth certificate has somebody's name on it that would normally be considered public data, if the person is in the Safe at Home program and requests that we have to find a way to make that data private, which can be a little bit of a challenge because the systems are set up for the data to actually be considered public all along. We also have data breach response policy, and we have a policy as it relates to the Minnesota Data Practices Act, but then we also have to consider other data breach policies, such as HIPAA, or policies around criminal justice information system breaches, or breaches with PCI data, or something like that. So we have to balance a number of different policies as it relates to data breaches. And then we also have a records retention policy that says that we must have records retention schedules for all of the data that we collect. For the records retention policy, one of the challenges is thinking about the difference between data and records. For example, we can have many different types of data elements that are moved into a data warehouse, and those data elements come from a record. As individual data elements are pulled from different client records with different retention periods, we need to consider that we are faced with a situation in which we are maintaining data on an individual in a data warehouse longer than we're maintaining that individual's case record. And so again, it goes back to striking that balance between the individual's privacy rights and the government's need to use the data to do their work. We also have some policies that are set by leadership that help drive the way the county works with data. Open Data Board Resolution by the county directs the county to more freely and openly share GIS data. We have a number of GIS data sets that are now available on the county GIS page that people use to do crowdsourcing type things and everything like that. In addition, data-driven decision-making requires departments to view data as an asset and freely share data and information about clients and residents consistent with legal requirements. And when sharing that information will lead to better outcomes. In the past, when these decisions and discussions have occurred, it's often been focused more on the provision of services to individual clients. We are now pushing departments to use data to identify trends and transform service delivery models, as well as propose changes when existing laws and requirements challenge our ability to use data to drive toward better outcomes. Open County is a large and complex agency. It has 30 departments and over 8,000 staff. It serves 1.2 million residents, as well as others who commute to work in one of our 45 cities located in the county. The services provided by Hennepin County are multifaceted, ranging across five lines of business, health, human services, public works, public safety, and operations. This means that data is collected on roads and bridges, law enforcement, corrections, energy and environment, licensing, properties, social services, protective services, and libraries, just to name a few. These factors create distinct challenges to implementing a data governance program. When I started my role as data governance officer three years ago, I was a team of one. I have been very fortunate that leaders in the organization recognize the important work being done and have supported the work by providing me with additional resources. I now have an amazing team. But there are still only six of us in an organization of 8,000. We can't do this alone. We need people throughout the organization to understand the value of data that they are collecting and using and be good stewards of that data. The first step was to get buy-in at the executive and management levels of the organization. Shortly after I was hired, the county board signed a resolution appointing me the data governance officer and responsible authority for the county. From there, one of the most effective ways to garner support for data governance was to develop a data governance framework for the county. We looked at a lot of different data governance frameworks and identified those elements that would work best for Hennepin County. The result was the Hennepin County data governance framework. The data governance framework was approved by the county executive team in October of 2014. It is both a top-down and bottom-up approach. Knowing that we need the supportive leadership throughout the organization to keep data governance a priority while recognizing that everyone in the organization has a role in collecting, creating, and handling the data. The data governance strategic council has been a guiding force for moving forward in the data governance realm. We have strategic thinkers from the five county lines of business represented on the strategic council, as well as the responsible authority representatives from our elected officials in the county. The role of the council is to set county-level policies, to promote data governance across the organization, and to think strategically about how the county manages data. When we first formed the strategic council, we said we want you to come and bring the perspective of your line of business, but when you make decisions, you have to help make decisions for the organization as a whole. We adopted the concept of the data steward. We formalized and dispersed responsibilities throughout the organization to engage staff in the roles of business data stewards, those individuals identified in each department that know their data and have the authority to make decisions about their data, and operational data stewards, those employees who handle government data on a day-to-day basis. We also know that we cannot do it alone. In addition to the data governance team providing support to all levels of the organization, we rely on subject matter experts in our county attorney's office as well as staff in our information technology department, such as our security team, our data architects, and our enterprise developers to help ensure that data is accessible and secure at the same time. Just like Hennepin County is complex, the data is complex. Hennepin County staff use many systems with data that may or may not be Hennepin County data. In some cases, such as the child support case management system, we collect and input some of the data into the system that is owned by the state. And then we store the documents in the county document management system. Other data in the child support system come from the IRS in the form of federal taxpayer information, from the Social Security Administration, from the State Department of Employment and Economic Development, and from the State Department of Human Services. Because this data comes from many different sources, there are layers of classifications depending on whether there are other regulatory requirements attached to the data. In the child support system, for example, all of the data is considered government data under the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act. However, federal taxpayer information provided by the IRS has its own set of security and youth requirements that are more restrictive than the Data Practices Act. And the data provided by the Social Security Administration has other requirements. As a result, one of the most important things to get people in our department to think about is the fact that everything isn't just a one-size-fits-all. Rather, we need to consider all privacy and security requirements determining how our data can be accessed and used. Finally, some of the data changes classifications as it moves through a process. Investigative data is one example. Data that is part of an active investigation is considered not public. Even the data subject can't have access to the data. Once the investigation is completed, the data may become private. So if the investigation is a child protection investigation, upon completion, the data subject may have access to some of the data, but it would still not be considered public data. In other cases, if the data is part of an employee investigation, then if the employee is disciplined, the data would be considered public and would be available for anyone who requested it. So the county is trying to take a more holistic approach to providing services to clients and residents. By pulling together data from different data sources to make policy-level decisions. But because of different security requirements placed on different types of data and the restrictions on the use of the data, it is often difficult to get a full picture of our organization or the clients that we serve. Here's our starting point. In all the articles we reviewed, they reminded us the very first step to a strong data governance program is knowing how your data is classified, both under Minnesota and under regulatory requirements. So we have been working over the past two years with every department and their data stewards to identify all of the data in the department and how it is classified. The next challenge is that staff across departments and businesses don't always speak the same language. So what does this mean? For example, the word archive. For some people, the word archive means store it in an off-site location. I'm going to send this data to archive. For others, it means keeping it for a really, really, really long time. We recognize that there are some basic terms used by data, used for data and records management, either based on statutory requirements or industry standards. We created a lexicon of these terms for our data stewards and data practices contracts across the organization to use. Now, when I say we created a lexicon, it sounds like something that we threw together in a couple of days. And that is not true. In fact, one of the reasons we've been able to get people to buy into our lexicon is because we asked for people's input. We met with teams who regularly use the terms. We sent out drafts and asked people for feedback. We made changes. We did more check-ins. And then after all that collaboration, we provided personalized feedback to every single person who made suggestions for changes to the lexicon. Many of the suggestions were valuable and helped to shape the final product. And for those we ended up not using, we provided specific feedback as to why. Sometimes, even when we are speaking the same language, we understand what we hear based on our place in the organization or our history. The county is in the process of implementing a document management system. One of the challenges we face is moving unstructured data into this system. We all agreed we need to provide the organization with metadata standards. But at the first meeting, we discovered that participants had different ideas about what metadata is. We have learned that the best way to tackle these misunderstandings is to seek clarification. My team has gotten very good at asking people, what do you mean? So to assign the role of data governance officer, each department was relatively autonomous in handling and managing its data. As a result, we didn't always know or understand how our decisions from one department would impact another within the organization. Or sometimes with the autonomy, one department would make a decision on how to store data. For example, some type of an employee-related document. One department would say, put the data into a secure network drive. Another would say, no, no, no, you got to print the data up and put it in a paper record and store it in a locked file cabinet. And yet another might say, no, what a supervisor should do is put it on their private network drive. So we had multiple ways of storing the same information. We also had situations where we were storing the same document multiple times. So a higher letter, for example, may be stored in the county employee file in the onboarding area of the county HR department by the department payroll contacts and by the employee supervisor. Once the data governance framework was created we began to push people to view the organization from a different perspective. We began to talk about what data we have in common. What data do we have managed, what data do we want to have managed in the same way regardless of where it is in the organization? What data do we want to be stored only once? And not only who is responsible for that data, but who else needs to be able to see it? The data governance team is leading an effort around data management alignment for data that is common across all departments. We are pushing departments out of their current way of thinking. We are celebrating small steps. If we go back to the higher letter, for example, it has been determined that the official higher letter lives in the employee HR file. Right now the county is in the process of moving our employee HR files to our county document management system. Rather than requiring that others in the county who need access to that higher letter save their own copies, we have pushed for a different approach, allowing system permissions for those that need access to the documents regardless of where they are in the organization. It's a small step, but one that we were actually high-fiving each other about after a meeting, when one of my team members saw the ah-ha look on the faces of the meeting participants about what this approach would mean for the organization as a whole as opposed to creating continued silos. We need to then look at what we've had to do to overcome change management challenges. We are asking people to think differently, and it can be challenging to get them engaged and committed. Here are some things that we have done. First, we've used existing staff resources. Second, we've communicated. And third, we've made it fun. Let's talk a little bit more about each of these change management strategies. First, using existing staff resources. Who are the key players outside of your immediate data governance team? We've already talked about the roles of the county executive team, the strategic council, and supporting departments like the county attorney's office, and the IT department. In addition, we identified roles throughout the organization that do the work, and then we formalized our roles. There are a couple of roles that were required under statute for government entities. The responsible authority and the data practices compliance official. Those were both appointed to me by the county board in 2014. Under statute, each elected official is also considered his or her own responsible authority. So one of my jobs has been to work with other responsible authorities in the county, the sheriff, the county attorney, and the county commissioners, to make sure that we're all on the same page in managing our data. In addition, we have worked to identify individuals in county departments to fulfill the roles within the department. One of the things we discussed with departments initially is that many of these roles have already been filled on an ad hoc basis. So we're simply asking them to formalize these roles. First, the responsible authority does the need. The person in the department for which the buck stops here for accountability with the department's data. These are often the department directors and the assistant directors. Business data stewards. These are people in the department that know their data and have the authority to make decisions about their data. These tend to be mid-level managers, and depending on the size of the department or the diversity in the types of data, departments may have one, two, or even up to 15 data stewards. Finally, we have data practices contacts. These are people who are administrative-level staff who respond to requests for data from the public. Some data requests are small. For example, I'd like to get a copy of an environmental report for some property I'm considering buying. While others can be very large, I'd like all contracts the county has related to the Super Bowl. We continue to look for ways to support these staff in their roles, including answering questions they may have, providing training, and making other resources available to them. Another change management strategy is communication. Talk, talk, talk. Trust me, my team talks a lot. The key attribute for each of my team members is the ability to clearly communicate new and sometimes complex concepts. And we recognize that people have different learning styles, so we know that we need to be strategic and diversified in our approach. We meet with people. Department leadership, data stewards, records managers, pretty much anyone who asks. Sometimes we reach out to people, but often we have people from departments contacting us and asking us to come to talk to them or their teams about what we do. I think it's fair to say that we never turned down an invitation to talk about data. We send out emails. Often our emails are targeted to small or to specific people based on the subject of the email. As all of you know, one of the challenges with email is that we all get a lot of emails. So when we communicate via email, we want to make sure the message is timely and relevant to the recipient. We do presentations. We do data governance, we do a data governance overview at the new employee orientation. This is a significant time commitment of my team, but one that we believe is critical in helping people understand right from the start what their role is in handling county data. We also present to audiences throughout the organization, including those in leadership development programs, communities of practice groups, and pretty much anyone who asks. No matter what we do, we strive to make it fun. When people think of data governance, they think of rules, and most people don't consider rules fun. Also, many of our statutory requirements reinforce with people that data is a risk. Our data breach policy, our privacy policy, our security requirements, it all pushes people to think about the fact that data is one of those things that we need to be super careful with and it's a huge risk if something happens. Because of this, people tend to maybe get a little freaked out every once in a while, and they're fearful of making a mistake. So don't get me wrong, we want people to protect data that needs to be protected, but we also want people to share data whenever possible. We believe that we have been successful because we engage and educate staff in a climate of relaxed awareness as it relates to data. A culture of relaxed awareness lessens the anxiety that is often associated with data governance and opens up to learning and engagement with data. As a result, risks associated with mishandling the data are mitigated and the opportunities to use data effectively are maximized. Here are some fun and creative ways we've created a buzz about data. First of all, data buttons. Creating fun data buttons to spark interest and spread word to advance the data governance framework. Now, I actually got the idea of the data buttons from the DPGO Winter Conference a few years ago. I brought the concept back to my team of three at that point and said, let's get creative. So we now have data buttons, and whenever we meet with new people or do a presentation, our buttons come with us. The point is to give the people the thought about data and get them thinking about it and talking about it, not only with us, but with others in their organization. And to push people to check out our SharePoint page for more information. The second way we've communicated and had some fun with data is our team's SharePoint site. It provides information regarding county-wide data governance roles, policies, projects to support the collaboration and management of data governance activities, and it provides templates for data practices, data practices, contacts to respond to data requests. It provides guidance to people if they have questions about a possible data breach, and it keeps people appraised of what we are working on and where we are devoting our resources. Finally, 60-second explainer videos. I'm sure many of you are familiar with the concept of explainer videos and have had the opportunity to watch at least one. We know explainer videos offer a quick and fun way to engage and educate staff about important data governance topics such as data privacy, email management, and records retention. We also know that people pay more attention if the videos have familiar elements. So we hired a local graphic artist to collaborate with us and create four videos over the course of the last year. The theme of the Hennepin County data minute carries from video to video. The Vikings carry over through all four videos, and the concept of data as an asset to improve the lives of residents, clients, and employees is carried over through all of them. In addition, we used a county employee as a narrator, which tends to make people feel a little more connected. These data minutes have been used in staff meetings throughout the county. They are linked to the IT training page, and we have shared videos with our peers in the other Metro Minnesota counties. As a result, last year, our data governance SharePoint collaboration page actually had more hits than any other collaboration page in the county. Before we move to questions, we are going to share one of the explainer videos with you, and this might take a minute because we have to do a little bit logistically to get it to show. So hang on, people. We don't have any sound. Hang on. Do you have my sound on? On my computer. One more time. Let's see if we can get it to work. It worked earlier. Look at that. The volume turned itself all the way down. Hang on. This is many places. You have your county data in one form or another, and that makes you a data steward. The Hennepin County data is government data. Handle, secured, and disclosed, according to privacy regulations. Data is an asset that helps us make informed decisions to improve the lives of county clients, residents, and employees. All of these steps will be a fatty beta student. To respect privacy, don't talk about private information in public areas or on social media. Share data only is required or allowed by law. Don't use your access figures to look up information on others. To save data, lock your computer from the way of your desk. To allow public data in a secure place is a totally problem. Don't give your password to others. By respecting privacy and safeguarding data, you enable the trust of the public, our partners, and our clients. Our presentation. I think I'm turning it back over to Ann now to moderate questions. You are. And, man, Chrissy, you guys, I told you this program was absolutely awesome, and you have not disappointed it. It is fantastic. I love the videos at the end, by the way. And apparently there's quite a few questions, so I'm going to hit them right away. And, guys, if we run out of time from these questions, we most certainly can follow up for the questions that go unanswered via email later. But I'm going to hit right away. So first of all, do you have any destruction policies other than the minimum amount that they need to retain them so that you aren't keeping, so you're not keeping documents forever? Yes and no. Like I said, we are a really big organization, and so one of the things that we are working on doing is making sure that we get some consistency in how we're setting up our retention schedules. So some of our retention schedules are a little more vague, and it will say may destroy, but then people are like, you don't really have to destroy it. So we're really pushing people that if we've identified that we need to destroy data at a certain point in time, that's our legal authority to do so, and we would like people to destroy data at that time. In part, it's being really good. I mean, to me, it's around being really good stewards of the data, and it's also the fact that, you know, it's not realistic to think that we're never going to be subject to a data breach or something like that. And so part of it is we don't want to be holding data that we shouldn't necessarily be hanging on to simply because we might need it just in case. So we really are trying to be good stewards of the data. Lots of people out there are frustrated with the feeling like they have to keep everything forever, especially in government. Tough, very tough. So I will move on to the next one then. Are your six resources 100% dedicated to data governance activities, or and or are they assigned to certain areas of the county, or do they float based as needed? They are 100% devoted to data governance activities most of the time. How's that for an answer? I have one staff person who also does a respectful workplace and nondiscrimination investigations. I have one staff person who, well, actually I have two staff people who are facilitators and have been asked to do facilitation work for other departments and for other things. And I do have one staff person who staffs employee group. We have the groups that are employee ERGs. I'm not even really sure what that stands for, but they're groups of people that meet around like things. And so the other thing is that my staff do also help manage some compliance things like our reporting hotline for the county and some other compliance requirements. A lot. Very good though. All right. So what method did you use to make data classification so simple and easy? And do you make use of a records file plan? That's really funny because I think anybody on my team would say data classification has not been easy. Especially to my group that's really been working with all of the data stewards. You know, I think it's literally meeting and having conversations. I was really unrealistic initially. I thought, oh, we can put together these, you know, this data inventory and figure out how our data is classified. We can get this done in six months. We'll be done. Two years later, two and a half years later, we're finally like the end is in sight. And so this has spent a lot of work because the data is really complex. And so one of the challenges for our team is that we get how data is classified, but we don't necessarily understand how departments, like what data the departments have or that type of thing. So we have to learn about every department when we go in and start meeting with them. And we have to know enough to ask questions because sometimes what happens is they'll say, oh, it's classified this way. And then we're like, okay, well, wait a minute, let's have another conversation about this. So I think part of it is working with departments who really know that. But then the other part is making sure that we ask questions. And we work really closely with the county attorney's office as well because they have people in the civil division that are assigned to departments to help them kind of figure some of that out. Cool. And in the meantime, while we've been talking, just so you know, Richard Twaddle or Twaddle commented, just so for everybody's knowledge, the ERG, they report to him as employee resource groups, and he's concurring with you that they have them too. So there you go. Thanks. Moving on to another question for you. We're going to, I'm telling you, the questions are coming in like crazy. So let's keep going.  Because many times for the person that has this question and for a lot of us, there's an aha, really good aha, but then they fizzle out to other priorities. I would say that, you know how I said that one of the biggest attributes for our team members is the ability to communicate? I think the other biggest attribute for most of my team members is a quiet persistence in that most people, I don't think hate seeing us come yet, but we have a lot of things where we just keep pushing. And so when my person walked away from that meeting, she immediately got back and she said, all right, so how do we document this? How do we move it forward? And now when's the next meeting and when's the next thing that we're going to do to make this go forward? And so part of it is that we don't own a lot of processes. We really don't. So we have to insert ourselves into the processes and make people understand the value of our role in there. And so this is really like the countywide document management system is being brought up by IT and then they consult with all of the businesses and get their feedback and everything like that. But we need to make sure that IT knows that we need to be at meetings when people are talking about things and making decisions that have an impact across the organization. I think that's great. I love the phrase quiet persistence. I don't know how much we can steal from you, but that's a really good one because I think it really illustrates the importance of staying on top of it because not everybody else has priority. We kind of have to help them make it their priority. So I think that's really cool. And even with that, we've had people that have said, you know, data is not our priority. Our priority is serving clients or our priority is, you know, building bridges or our priority is whatever. And so a lot of times we have to remind people that the data is in a lot of cases what helps make that happen. And so that's another one of our challenges is data isn't always a priority for a lot of areas in the county. Totally get it. All right, so this next one is a bit more tactical and pretty straightforward, but an interesting one nonetheless. Do you use Yammer for your communication within your organization? Not officially. I know some people are on Yammer, but it isn't an officially sanctioned means of communication. Okay, good to know. Next one is focused on metadata. How would you describe or what are your metadata standards? I would describe our metadata standards as a work in progress at this point. It's one of those things that, like, our county document management system has developed some metadata standards. Our SharePoint area has some, but, you know, as we start talking about creating and doing collaboration and SharePoint and then moving the documents into filenets, we need to figure out a way that the metadata standards can be consistent across, and they're not quite there yet. I will say we probably have the best metadata tied to our paper records, because we have inventoried all of our paper records and we have certain data that we use for those paper records that's metadata. When was it created? What type of record? How long, you know, how long does it need to be maintained? Who created it? All that stuff. And so that to us is actually, we know that paper records aren't the direction things are going, but we are starting with those and saying, that's a starting point for us as we start thinking about our business metadata. Now we also know that there's technology metadata as well, and so I have a person on our team who's working with the technology area to make sure that we work together to create these metadata standards. Awesome. Awesome. I don't think I've heard anybody say our metadata is done. You know, it's always work in progress. That's tough stuff right there. All right. So we've got a lot of questions around this one, and I'm sure it's no surprise. The buttons and the videos. There's a couple of questions around this. I'm going to kind of group them here. What was your budget for them? And then also how did you organize the communication plan around them to be able to distribute them and design them for that? So did you have a good budget for it? For both? We can talk about them separately and then the communication plan for them. So when I started in this position, the budget for the data governance area was my salary, and that was it. And my role is actually, our team is in the audit compliance and investigation department of the county. And so I was one of the first people that was a non-auditor coming into this department. And I have to tell you that I think I pushed my department director out of her comfort zone almost daily because I would come in and say, I got this really great idea. I think we should do blah, blah, blah. And she'd be like, oh, well, the county's never really done that before. I'm not really sure how we can do that. And so when I came to her with the data buttons, I'm like, okay, I've got these data buttons as ideas. And she's like, okay, we don't have any money. And I'm like, okay, I'll find out how much it costs. And we've made the data buttons for $700. I mean, we had the internal people do the design and everything like that. We literally had to pay for the printing or whatever you do with data buttons, the printing and putting them on to PIMS, right? It was kind of the same thing with the explainer videos. So I went into her and I said, oh, I got this really good idea. We want to do this. And she's like, okay, we don't really have a budget. And I said, but we can do it. And it'll be super awesome. And so we negotiated the contract with this outside graphic artist who hasn't really done explainer videos before. And so this was an opportunity for him to get his foot in the door. And we said, yeah, you can use it for advertising your services and trying to get other clients and everything like that. So I think we created all four explainer videos for, I think, $16,000 or something like that. It was really inexpensive in the scheme of things. That's great. Why do you use your resources there? Smart planning. Or somebody's resources because they haven't been mine. Right. Because that kind of stuff can get pretty hefty on the price tag. So good job. Thank you. All right. We're going to switch gears on this one for you. And I will add a caveat this because it may fall outside of the scope. And if it does, feel free to share that as well. But someone has asked, what is your retention period for emails? And how do you dispose of emails? And of course it does fall under the data purview, but interested if it falls directly under your responsibility. That's been a real hot button in Minnesota this past probably two years. And it was something that was actually tackled by the Minnesota legislature and then kind of died on the vine at the end of the legislative session. We do have email standards. The challenge is that email is a format. It's not an actual record. And so our records retention schedule is around records, not necessarily around data and not around formats. So to say we save all emails doesn't make sense because not all emails fall within a record. So what we've done is we've set standards and requirements. So our requirement is if you get an email that's part of an official record, you move it to that official record out of your email. And then the standard is that emails that are in our inbasket are automatically deleted after 180 days. And emails that are moved to a folder in the email system are maintained for three years and then they auto-delete. But the biggest thing is we are requiring staff to know if something they receive is a record and move it out of the system because email is not a place to be storing official records. Great. Okay. I think we have time for one more. I have like 12 more that are really there, but we'll figure that out afterwards. But I'm asking them in the order they came in. So do you think that it is very important that I have a data quality tool in order to implement a data governance program? You know, you might be asking the wrong person this question. Mainly because I think data quality is one of those things that I have the hardest time wrapping my head around. So I'm a rule follower. I love rules. Absolutely. Give me a rule.  Data quality is one of those things that we actually have had a data quality group. And when we pull them together, I was like, I cannot share this group. I can't even think data quality in the same way. And then when we start talking about it, one of the challenges is the fact that we have data from many different sources. So if we're starting to talk about like having standardization around, for example, an address, right? Well, we can say the county, when the county creates addresses, we have standard address format. But then we get data from the Department of Human Services. They have a different address format. We get data from the IRS. They have a different data address format. So the challenge is that we could spend so much of our time trying to figure out the whole data quality thing. And so one of the really smart people that I work with that actually is more of a data analyst and stuff, has talked more about the fact that we need to have ways, we need to have some type of a tool in place that helps us to standardize the data, but we can't really require that standardization in all of our systems. And so we don't really have that in place right now. And it's something we're still thinking about and noodling on how we make it happen. Gotcha. Totally get it. All right. We are right at the top of the hour. So I'm going to let Shannon close it out. I do have several other questions that people have asked, and I will work with you offline on those. So if you guys are in the last bundle of questions here, do know that Christy and I will figure out how we're going to address that and get it through Shannon or however the distribution method is. Thank you so much. Awesome. Thank you so much. Great presentation. Thanks, Christy and Anne. Just a reminder, the DGPO will be publishing the recording and the slides to the members only section of the DGPO website at dgpo.org. You can check it out there. And thanks as always to our attendees for being so engaged in everything we do. We just love all the questions coming in. And hope everyone has a fabulous, great day. Thanks all.


Hey guys, welcome back today. I will be showing you guys how I make lavender essential oil from scratch I'm so excited to be sharing this video today like oh So keen because I've been wanting to make my own essential oils for so so so long now It's been like just too long. I think so I'm finally getting around to doing it I actually started out by growing some lavender which has just shot up. It's so big now like look at that It's absolutely massive This was the lavender that I planted in my DIY garden bed video Which I showed you guys a while back and it's absolutely skyrocketed. Don't mind hurry She often just wanders through the garden trampling my plants and you this is lavender So I am going to start picking these lavender stems Just like this one I'm gonna start picking them as you can see there's so many so I'm gonna have a whole bunch of lavender I'm going to dry out and then just like let it dry for a few weeks and then from there I'll make these essential oils. So thought I'll show you guys me just Clipping away and picking the lavender from my garden So I got my trusty scissors and I'm ready to Here is my bunch of lavender now. I'm going to go and dry this out, which I'll show you guys how I did that now my little lavender plants been leaf-flowered but like Not an insectuary. It sounded really wrong I wanted to keep some on there though because lavender is really good for bees I'm trying to encourage love bees in our area Just to help with bee populations and things like that. I always like try and help it out So I left a lot of flowers on there. So the bees can use it. I'm going to go and tie this bundle up And I'll show you guys how I do that now. Oh I feel like an old grandma All right, so I got my little bunch of lavender I tried to get on like the more kind of side I want to have a lot of lavender to use to make lots of essential oil with now They said to cut and dry enough lavender to make at least one ounce of lavender essential oil with So I'm guesstimating this is how much I'll be needing probably around this just a bunch of lavender now They said to dry them out.  They even them out to the nuts or sticking up so high Smells so good. I love lavender. I swear. It's like my favorite scent and out of all the essential oils lavender would be my top favorite That'll do so to dry it out.  Oh, it's right. It's under my phone We're going to grab two elastic bands like so and you're going to put one just under the head of the flowers So I'll show you guys Whoa, I can get it on Stretching it. Oh Gosh, it's not easy. Oh Okay, I don't want to break the stems Got it There we go So you have one just under the heads of the flowers just like that and then you're going to put one at the base So the bottom of the stems so I'm going to put it around here because this the stems are very uneven So I'm a longer than others. So I'm just going to put it there effect like so Voila, voila. Voila. There we go And basically what we're going to do from here is we're going to find a dry dark warm spot for the flowers You just hang upside down So you're going to just tie them or like hang them upside down in a dry dark warm spot for at least two to four weeks Or just until the lavender flowers actually dry out now Keep in mind you want to actually protect them from sunlight to help them retain the best color I guess like the purple color in them and also you want to make sure to put a Sheet or cloth beneath the lavender bundle that you're drying out just to help catch any buds or blooms That might fall during that time while it's drying out. So like I said, it takes around two to four weeks Oh, you know how long mine takes to dry out. I'm sure I'll probably be around that time But you want to make sure you're checking every so often just to see when the lavender is dry So just go in there every day a few days or so and just see how they're going You'll know it's finished drying out when you brush the flowers and the flower petals I guess fall easily from the stem now of you to use them in sachets like little flower Popa reef sachets or things like that or in baking you could actually brush the flower stem like flower bits off or Lead them on to use it for those for baking and things like that Anyway, I'm gonna go hang mine up in my dry dark warm spot out of the sunlight. I'll show you where I'm gonna put it All right, I found my string. So I'm going to tie the bundle up in my garage just there I just hang it over here Looks so good Hanging perfectly. Alrighty I'm gonna let that dry there and I'm just gonna put a little blanket under it Hey guys, so it's been about four or five weeks Maybe it's been a little longer than I actually needed to leave before I kind of forgot about it My bad when I was doing other things like over these four weeks and I remembered this week I was like, oh, it'll be ready by now. So I have my lavender already to go Let me show you so I have two bunches now because I picked some more recently because I was like my garden's just getting really really big So I have a little bit more lavender to use and this was the original bunch the really neat bunch the one that I took a Lot of time to make and this is just the one that I super rushed so you can see like they're pretty Perfectly done and then boom happens when I'm lazy. So they're ready to go I'm gonna bring them down now and turn them into lavender essential oil So as you can see, it's like a lot drier than it was naturally because it's been drying for weeks You know, but it's like crunching underneath my hand, which is it which is exactly what you want when you're drying out lavender So that's perfect and ready to go now same with this one. You can hear so crunchy So they perfect all ready to go. Oh, but I forgot to mention I'll be making two types of lavender essential oil today one is going to be with coconut oil And the other one is with an alcohol-based base So you can decide between which of the which of the two that you'd like to make yourself or you can make both like I am I just thought I'd make one and then the other and then see which one works out the best So when in future when I go to make it, I know which one I prefer or I could just make both again the future Just cuz I can so I decide make both today and share that with you guys But feel free to just make one or the other or both as well And do let me know which one's your favorite at the end as well I'll share my favorite with you with you guys at the end when I found my favorite or I don't have a favorite I'll just say that as well But anyway, let's get making this essential oil So once you've finished harvesting and drying out your lavender grab your dried lavender and add it to a clean glass jar Just the flowers though. You can compost the stems. This is what I did I just composted the stems after I trimmed off all the different flowers and the flower buds and put them into the glass jar So once you've added the lavender buds to the glass jar You can pour 10 ounces of liquid coconut oil over the lavender in the glass jar until the lavender is completely covered Then you want to secure the lid tightly onto the jar and shake well I just gently shook from side to side the lavender oil just to make sure that it was all completely covered Then you store the jar near a window but not in direct sunlight again because the light can impact the properties of the lavender oil Just to let it infuse the 7 to 10 days shake every day Also to make sure that the lavender is completely covered by the oil I'm making the lavender essential oil with alcohol You're going to use a mortar and pestle or just a spoon and bowl like I used and you want to gently crush the dried lavender flowers to Release the oil before combining it with vodka Keep in mind though You're just bruising the flowers with the back of the spoon or pestle not making oatmeal too much Agitation will result in lavender soup, which is not what you want Next you want to transfer the crushed lavender into a mason jar or any type of glass jar Just avoid plastic jars so the plastic doesn't seep into the liquid now You're going to pour vodka over the lavender you want to make sure to fully submerge the lavender and vodka Then you're going to tightly secure the jar with a lid and shake well again Store the jar near a window but again not in direct sunlight to infuse for 7 to 10 days and gently shake every day or so Okay, so it has been about Actually like four weeks rather than the week that you only need to let it sit for because I was actually waiting for my bottles my little and the Apothecary bottles to arrive. I ordered them on Amazon. I'll link below where I found them as well So I needed more of these because I had none at home I've used all mine in other DIY products that I've made so I've been waiting on these to arrive And because I didn't pay for express postage because I'm like nah They took longer to get here So it's just like a little drop of bottle that I was waiting for a to arrive because I want to keep mine in a Amber bottle because it's dark and it helps to protect the oil from Light damaging the properties in the oil. So this is the coconut oil. This is four weeks later You only need to live for one week for both of the oils Just loop for one week don't need to do four so this is the coconut oil version It doesn't look too much different to when I started soaking the lavender in it except that the lavender is just more I guess Soaked you can see without the label in the way so That's pretty much what it looks like four weeks later and then the one that I used with vodka is a different color now, so it's actually Changed color. It's now more I guess amber brownie golden color and it actually smells strongly of alcohol So this has turned into lavender vodka that I wouldn't recommend drinking it So you could it actually is a tincture kind of recipe so you can like take really many doses of it for health Benefits and things like that, but you really need to research how much of the Tincture that you should have and also don't have it one that's been sitting there and fermenting for four weeks just have one that's been there for a week because it can absorb other properties in the Lavender that you may not want necessarily want for yourself like it can be toxic So just leave it for one week if you're making the tincture I'll show in a future recipe how to use that Lavender tincture for health benefits and also how to make it properly So this is just a lavender oil version that I'll be using as a substitute for essential oil So instead of using lavender essential oil, I'm going to be using my different lavender oils here This one doesn't smell too Too different. Oh, it does have a strong smell of lavender Oh, that smells really nice Not as strong as you say your lavender essential oil, but this one just smells really strongly of Lavender and of vodka Oof smells almost like those Christmas puddings that you get So I'm going to now just see it out the lavender pieces and I'm just gonna pop them in a compost Don't mind Ari. She's just barking. There's a storm approaching So I think she's barking at the storm and then I'm also going to sieve out this lavender and put it into the compost as well I'm gonna put it into my little apothecary bottles and it's ready to use for future DIYs that I want to make things with so I'm going to be using it as like a few drops in say my my baths for like a more Relaxing feel because lavender is really great for calming and soothing and relaxing fantastic if you have anxiety or depression So I'm really using I'm using it for my anxiety about it very helpful to smell of lavender just instantly calming I was gonna use it as like a few drops of my pillow and things at night to help me sleep better Because I've been struggling to sleep at night. It's my mind is constantly racing So it's a good way to sort of wind down for the night There's a few other different things you can use lavender oil for which I'll link the description below my blog post on that where I share So many different ways you can use them to oil. I also use it in other DIYs. So like my bath bomb recipe He's in like lip balm in What else do I use it can use it in deodorant making a natural deodorant if you want yourself to smell like lavender Honestly, love it with my favorite scent There's just so many different things you lose of use it for you can also use lavender in bug spray because it has some bug Propelling properties in it as well and also as like an after-sun spray You can use lavender oil and that when you feel like your skin has just had a little bit too much sun You know, it's not quite burnt, but when it feels just like Dried out and almost like burnt, but not you can use an after spray with lavender in that and that really helps to soothe With a bit of aloe vera so many different things So you do check out the blog post below for a few days a few ideas on what to use a little for if you're struggling to find ways to Use it, but I'm going to now just drain these out and put them into my bottles When it comes to the lavender vodka oil, it's a bit different to the coconut oil So when straining it out just simply pour it through a mesh fine mesh strainer Into a glass container or we can use the plastic one just to pour with and then with the flower buds You can just compost them, which is what I did After you've strained it out pour it into a glass jar and cover with a cheesecloth or coffee filter and allow it to sit Undisturbed for about one week This will allow the alcohol to evaporate from the jar leaving essential oil as the result There may be some sediment at the bottom, which is totally fine But if it bothers you for instance if you're giving it as a gift Just strain it out again with a clean coffee filter or another fine mesh strainer into a littered storage jar I like to store the oil in dark colored glass jars like dark opaque apothecary jars Just to protect the actives in the oil Then you can store it in your pantry or in a linen closet out of direct sunlight That's ready to use for whenever you need it now for the coconut oil one once it's finished and fusing you again Can strain it out using a fine mesh strainer or a cheesecloth Just pour the mixture through the strainer into a clean glass jar or into a little plastic pouring container Just to make it easier to pour into the bottles later on Then store the oil in a cool dark place in those nice dark apothecary jars and it will keep for up to one year There we have it and one is coconut oil You can't really tell when they're in the bottle because they both look the same But one is coconut oil and one is with vodka and I must say if you were to make one I would probably refer the vodka one Just don't leave it for as long because our lavender smell and actually smells a lot stronger Then the coconut oil the coconut oil one is just very faint. So if you really want that lavender smell Yeah, go with the vodka one But if you're just using it for like skin ailments and things like that or like just to use it on skin Or as like a soothing thing and we just apply it onto your body You can use the coconut oil one because it needs to be so strong because you're absorbing it into your body But if you want the aromatherapy version like aspect of it You may want to use the vodka version because it actually is a bit stronger the lavender smell in that Yeah, it's just my tip if you want to make it yourself Now this isn't true essential oil because if you read my blog post I do go into further detail Essential oils are made by diffusing Like a diffusing method you need like the special diffusing equipment where it like separates the Like the water so like the lavender water or lavender Yeah, like kind of a huge rose as you get rose water and things like that so it separates the water So lavender water from the oil So you have like the water part and then you have the oil on top if you see like on YouTube There's some videos that show how to do it and the lavender oil or whatever plant you're using the oil will sit on top And that's the essential oils so you need a special machine for that But if you don't have that this is your own DIY version of making lavender oil or lavender essential oil But not quite essential oil like more lavender oil Yeah, I feel like I just rambled on that that whole time by the way if I I got a new shirt from vegan vibes It's not sponsored by the way It's just me sharing my awesome new purchase because I never get anything new but I saw this my sister linked me to their site I just love this T-shirt it's like a vegan style t-shirt I just loved it because they had the polar bears on it and it goes acts for arctic So I'm such a big like Conservationists actually want to do marine conservation next year. So exciting news I'm going to study up near Byron Bay next year for marine conservation like doing study up there That's like a whole nother topic that I can talk in another video But I just love like a big advocate for like, you know helping with climate change and stopping Like the arctic ice melting because that actually reflects a lot of the sunlight that we get and other reflects it back into The atmosphere or into space Preventing the earth from heating up so much But when that ice goes a lot of the heat is stays in like in our planet like and is absorbed by the seas and that heats up The water in turn melting more of the ice and it's just like a vicious cycle And it's really sad to see when the polar bears and other arctic animals that are affected by it I got another shirt, but I'll show that in a different video. Yeah, that's basically my video tutorial on how to make lavender oil I hope you guys enjoyed it. I am so much fun making it It does take a little bit longer to make so you do need to leave a weaker side just to let it kind of Infuse but once that's finished you guys have already to make lavender oil to use in awesome DIY recipes or just For on your skin and things like that to help with sunburn Skin conditions help with just calming and soothing help with sleep so many different things So I hope you guys enjoyed today's video I hope to see you guys in my future videos and do please share with me If you guys enjoyed today's video or if you have made lavender oil or other oils yourself And how you did that because I would love to try out whatever oils you guys made too Yeah, if you guys enjoyed today's video, thank you so much for sticking this out this video to the end I know it can be long sometimes and I tend to ramble don't mind my rambling But I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope to see you guys in my future videos. Bye


Good morning and happy new year to everybody at the start of this new calendar year. Welcome to this week's weekly market update with me Michael Houston Friday the 12th of January as we look back at the price action of the last few days and the week ahead of the 15th of January 2024. Since the end of last year and the strong gains leading up to the end of last month, markets have struggled essentially. I think we haven't seen any of the same enthusiasm to carry the momentum higher that we saw in November and December. Trading activity has been relatively subdued and ultimately we've seen a fairly negative bias so far year to date and you know you sort of have to ask yourself why that would be why we've started to see a little bit of caution come into the market. Risk sentiment has been slightly tempered. We can certainly see that in the way all of the major markets have behaved since the opening days of January. FTSE 100 has slipped back. One of the reasons for the FTSE 100 sliding back has been the weakness that we've seen in oil and gas prices which actually is a good thing. Take some of the pressure off consumers. We've also seen some fairly decent retail updates from the likes of Marks and Spencer's, Tesco's, Sainsbury's and next. JD Sports issued a profits warning as has Burberry. So it's been a bit of a mixed bag and obviously the misses or the disappointment over some of the numbers so far year to date has seen fairly sizable moves towards the downside and even some of the decent numbers have prompted a response of the meh variety. People aren't particularly overly impressed and as I say it's hard to assign a singular reason for the lack of enthusiasm and obviously there's uncertainty around the prospects for the global economy but I think it's more to do with the fact of the timeline for central bank rate cuts. In December obviously we saw Fed Chair Jay Powell perform a rather extraordinary pivot when it comes to the prospect of when we can expect to see a loosening of monetary policy from the Federal Reserve. We actually opened to the door to the prospect of rate cuts and it was a sharp reversal from the tone that we saw at the beginning of December nonetheless equity markets liked it and bond markets liked it as well because we saw yields fall back quite sharply. Now we have seen a bit of a rebound in the US 10 year since the end of last year. I think largely on the back of the fact that some of the data out of the US has been reasonably positive certainly on the labor side of things the payrolls report was fairly positive a much better number than expected for December. The unemployment rate continues to remain at fairly low levels of 3.7 percent although I'm struggling a little bit with the fact that the participation rate fell modestly from 62.8 percent to 62.5 so that was a bit of a head scratcher but weekly jobless claims are around about 200,000 and the CPI report this week was slightly firmer than expected so the idea that we could see rate cuts from the Federal Reserve by March took a little bit of a knock and to be quite honest it's the idea that the Fed's going to start cutting rates in March it's not an argument that I can really get behind. The US economy saw 4.9% GDP growth in Q3 in Q4 was still likely to see a fairly decent quarter. The unemployment rate job the labor market still looks fairly resilient we're certainly not seeing any significant signs of stress as far as the US economy is concerned even as we look ahead to the first quarter of this year and we could well see earnings guidance because we're heading into earnings season now Q4 earnings season we've got US banks starting today with JP Morgan a city group the Wells Fargo and Bank of America it'd be interesting to see the market reaction to those numbers today I think it could be instructive when it comes to the overall direction of travel when it comes to US equity markets what we saw yesterday with respect to the inflation numbers and we've got PPI numbers US PPI numbers later today so it'll be interesting to see whether we see a pickup in inflation on the PPI measure which has you know which has been consistently coming down from most of the last 12 months on a core basis be interesting to see whether that continues to come lower or whether we start to see a little bit of a rebound there US two-year yields are back at the lows of last month be interested to see whether or not that trend of weaker yields continues in the wake of the PPI numbers but the idea that we're going to see a March rate cut I think took a knock this week and ultimately I don't expect the Fed to start cutting rates until well into the second quarter of this year so we're not talking you know we're talking June potentially May I still struggle with the idea that we could get a rate cut in May you know if you don't hear the ECB talking about rate cuts and these and the euro the euro area economy is on its knees and yet we've got people talking about the Fed cutting rates and not the ECB if anyone needs to cut rates it's the ECB not the Federal Reserve but this is the you know this is this is the world that we're operating at the moment you know can the Fed afford to cut rates I would argue that they need to see more data I think we need to see more evidence with inflation at 3.4 percent the inflation is returning to target yes commodity prices are lower but that doesn't mean given the geopolitics that are that are that are a bay at the moment that are a play at the moment that that will continue obviously we've seen oil prices react to this morning's retaliation on the part of the UK and US militaries to hooty attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea so it'll be very interesting to see how that escalates over the course of the next few days certainly the response as far as oil prices is concerned the seen oil prices rebound to one week highs back to the levels that were at the end of last year but overall oil prices have been weaker over the course of the last few days we've seen a rebound we've seen a sell-off back towards the December lows you know for me I think oil prices are likely to remain reasonably well supported with these key support levels all the way through here at around about 71 dollars a barrel for Brent why because ultimately I think any dips are going to be bought into the US still needs to refill its strategic petroleum reserve so that should support the downside when it comes to WTI and therefore Ergo should also support the downside when it comes to Brent crude as well so certainly I think there's limited downside even as we are seeing lower highs it'll be interesting to see whether or not the current squeeze that we're seeing higher is able to take out the peaks that we saw around about boxing day towards the end of last year so that'll be something I'll be paying particularly close attention to over the course of the next few days firstly 100 finding a little bit of support at the 100 day moving average but we've also got to remember that we've got a nice little trend line coming in here from the lows back in October as well as the 50 day moving average as well so a little bit of weakness but ultimately I think it's within the broader confines of the wider uptrend similarly with the DAX here we've got a little bit of support in and around 16400 there are there abouts very notable that it also coincides with a series of peaks through here so that you know and we've got the 50 and 200 day moving averages also pointing higher as well so it'll be interesting to see how the DAX reacts if we're able to break above whoops through that completely wrong let's try that again there we go so let's draw that through there nice little piece so we've got a little bit of a channel forming a short-term trading channel forming on the DAX be interested to see whether or not we're able to take out this peak start here around about 16900 or the 17000 level on the DAX looking at the S&P 500 4800 or the previous peaks or this 4800 level is proving to be a bit of a barrier so it'll be interesting to see whether or not we're able to take that previous peak the peak the peaks from January last year sorry January two years ago even um January 2022 whether or not we're able to take those peaks out from two years ago nest deck 100 pushing higher seen a bit of a reversal saw a bit of a reversal last week but we've seen a strong rebound this week so we're now back to flat um flat on the year more or less when it comes to uh the sort of flat on the year um well yeah I mean basically with the end of last year we finished a little bit a little bit a little bit on the on the on the back foot but ultimately um we've rebounded haven't taken out the previous highs yet so be interested to see whether or not there's any more traction on that certainly lower yields help in that regard we've seen 34 year highs on the part of the Nikkei 225 that continues to push higher above 35 000 could we go through the 36 while dolly yen uh continues to head back to what was 146 and 150 then the likelihood is that um we'll see dolly yen continue to push higher I don't know why I closed my watch list there that's quickly go there we go so so looking looking looking at the week ahead um momentum it's a little bit sideways at the moment an awful lot of indecision I think the key themes for 2024 are going to be not so much when we get rate not not so much as to whether we get rate cuts I think we will get rate cuts it's really about the timing um the initial timing was priced for March April May given the data that we've seen thus far in terms of inflation I think that's unlikely in the UK we've got CPI coming out on the 17th of January for December we've also got wages data as well for the three months to November and both of those I think both of those sets of numbers will be very key in the context of when to expect rate cuts from the Bank of England and I think that will play for me into a slightly stronger sterling theme because I think at the moment the market is fixated on the idea that the UK economy will need the Bank of England to start cutting rates sooner than everybody else I think that's unlikely and there are a number of reasons around that assumption or not assumption presumption on my part first and foremost the GDP numbers that we saw for November this morning were slightly better than expected we can see that in these numbers here UK GDP for November came at 0.3 percent reversing the 0.3 percent contraction in October index of services provided a 0.4 percent of that rebound and certainly I think if you look at the PMIs the services PMIs that we've seen at the end of last year they've actually been fairly strong retail sales in November was 1.1 percent now obviously we've got retail sales for December coming out next week as well so they will be instructive we've seen some reasonably positive trading updates from the likes of next Mark's and Spencer's Tesco's and Sainsbury's and potentially a bunch of other retailers yeah there have been some weak spots Burberry luxury obviously but Burberry most of that decline was in the US market we saw a 15% declining in same-store sales so most of the decline in Burberry's business was overseas so I think the data for the UK would appear to suggest that after a week start to Q4 we saw a fairly decent rebound in November and December which should mean which should mean that the UK economy perhaps avoids a recession a technical recession having said that there were a number of downward revisions to previous months GDP numbers which might mean that perhaps Q3 saw a deeper contraction from the minus 0.1 percent that we saw in the previous quarterly numbers but ultimately I think Q4 should be better than expected and should signal much better economic performance in Q4 and that is likely to stay the Bank of England's hand and let's not forget that three people voted for a rate hike in December so it's tall order for me to then expect them to start voting for rate cuts you know I think at the next meeting in February we're likely to see those three hikers if you like start to perhaps temper their expectations and signal a pause and obviously the wages data that is coming out over the course of the next few days is going to come in it's still above seven percent you know we're talking UK wages that are rising at over seven percent and that is going to give the Bank of England I think significant pause for thought when it comes to thinking about rate cuts we are expecting a modest decline to six point seven percent from seven point two percent that seven point three percent that excludes bonuses but ultimately that's still over three times higher than the Bank of England's inflation target headline CPI for December is expected to fall modestly from three point nine percent to three point eight percent but let's not forget services CPI is trending at six point three percent year on year so I will also be paying particular attention to that and core CPI was five point one percent in November so rate cuts from the Bank of England in Q1 not a chance we might see them towards the end of Q2 depending on how quickly we see inflation slow from the current levels a number of investment banks have suggested that it could fall to two percent by April well if it does we're not going to know that until May so because the April numbers come out in May so we've still got a need for another four months for inflationary pressures to show evidence of a continued downward path now you can argue that obviously China is already in deflation and that deflationary impulse will ripple out through the rest of the global economy and that could well be true but given the fact that China is already in deflation and is the only economy that is there obviously is a significant lag effect taking effect here and ultimately that is going to make even even accounting for that it's going to be it's going to make central bankers extremely cautious having been slow to tighten on the way in they could well be similarly cautious on the way out so that for me suggests that we could we'll see a break through 128 and up to 130 as it becomes increasingly apparent that the Bank of England isn't any isn't in any hurry to reduce rates significantly now that's not to say they're not going to cut rates by 25 basis points you know basically just tweak them slightly but I would be very surprised if we see the sort of rate cuts that are currently being priced by the markets over the course of the next three to six months but who knows but based on this current direction of travel I would hope to see cable continue to push higher towards 130 over the course of the next two to three months similarly euro dollar I think is has a decent prospect of pushing higher again here it's in it's very much in a range but once again we are in an uptrend the lows are getting higher and I think as long as we stay above the lows that we saw last Friday around about 10875 10850 and these two moving averages here then we could we'll see a revisit of 110 and move through 110 and a gradual move higher towards 112 over the course of the next few sessions I think the dollar will continue to get a little bit weaker not because the Fed is going to be delaying the prospects of rate cuts but because I think that ultimately that they will come it's just that the markets direction of travel is probably a little too expect expectations market expectations of the direction of travel are shall we say a little bit optimistic when it comes to the timing of such rate cuts if anything the ECB is probably going to be forced to cut significantly sooner and that could mean that euro sterling could see further weakness over the course of the next few sessions certainly I'm not expecting great things from euro sterling we are very much in a range here with the top of the range around about the November highs of 87 8770 fairly decent support around about 80 or 90 so continue to play that range it's pretty uninteresting dolly in bit of a bit of a top at 146 at the moment and the 50 day moving average this cloud resistance should as it should act as a decent cap would expect dolly in to start um or should start to potentially roll over as long as we stay below this area of resistance through here we did try and move through 146 earlier this week we weren't able to sustain it and as long as as long as this ishimoku cloud which generally tends to be reasonably reliable when it comes to dolly in while this area of resistant caps then I think we could start to trade 141 46 over the course of the next few sessions in terms of the earnings numbers it's a fairly lightweight week next week we've got delivery reporting their latest fourth quarter numbers 2023 certainly we've seen a fairly decent performance from the delivery share price over the course of the past 12 months the bigger question is whether or not continue the momentum that we've seen over the course of the past year or so come off the highs back in November heading back to support in and around the 200 day moving average we could draw in a fairly decent trend line here but certainly I think the various deals that Deliveroo has signed with various retailers are helping the business to continue to push higher and ultimately start to show signs of profitability back in October Bank of America targeted 151 share price target we've pretty much got there already the big question is whether we can sustain the momentum that we've seen over the course of the past 12 months and that'll be I think that will be a key test for when when the numbers get released next week Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley Q4 bank earnings next week big big resistance on Goldman Sachs share price over the course of the past 12 months I'm not expecting great things from bank earnings if I'm honest I'm earlier this week's city group reported that they were taking billions of dollars in write downs on their Argentina and Russia business obviously the currency depreciation has hurt the business there but also they warned about volatility a lack of volatility in investment banking could see a hit to their Q4 numbers as did Barclays Barclays also warned of a significant impact on Q4 numbers so it'd be very interesting to see whether or not this week's earnings season starts to see a little bit of a reversal of the the rally that we've seen off the lows back in October Goldman Sachs has got big big resistance at 390 that for me is a key barrier to further gains going forward so I think to summarize we've got UK wages and UK CPI for December on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week we've got retail sales from the UK on the 19th on Friday as I say we saw a big rebound in consumer spending in November we could well see a little bit of a flat month for December big gains in food and drink but one of the things that was notable in the recent retail numbers was that while we saw fairly strong growth in grocery sales um general merchandise like clothing and home and what have you and big ticket items saw a significant slowdown so you could see a little bit of a mixed picture when it comes to December retail sales we've got US retail sales for December on the 17th the US consumer has proven to be reasonably resilient when it comes to consumer spending um expect that to be continue to be the case in December expecting a rise of 0.4 percent for US retail sales for December up from 0.3 in November and we've also got quarter China GDP um and December retail sales on the 17th as well now expecting a slightly slower rate of growth from the 1.3 percent that we saw in Q3 um I'm always skeptical about China GDP numbers because ultimately I think they make them up as they go along if you look at the industrial production numbers if you look at the retail sales numbers um they've actually been stronger in Q4 for China than they were in Q3 and yet the estimates for China Q4 GDP are actually lower than they were in Q3 expecting around about 0.9 percent rise in fourth quarter GDP in China the Chinese economy is struggling with the problems posed by Evergrande country garden and now laterally is Zhongji so I think after a slow start to Q4 um there was a modest improvement in retail sales in November we saw a decent uptick in retail sales to 10.1 percent this was still below expectations despite the number including Chinese singles day sales on weak comparatives given that a lot of China still hadn't come out of lockdown measures in November 2022 so for December 2022 two retail sales we're likely to see a sizable skew because in December 2022 the Chinese economy reopened um from its COVID lockdown slumber so we need to be aware of the comparatives of China retail sales when they are released um so um as I say they are due on the 17th of um January anyway so that's pretty much it for um this week's opening um opening video for 2024 as I say for me the the key takeaways this week are how will the data that we see over the course of the next few weeks impact the timing or the timeline of um central bank rate cuts for me I think they're going to come later rather than sooner and if they do come later that could exert downward pressure on equity markets going forward and make it much more difficult to return to the highs that we saw earlier at the end at the end of last year that said we still are in the overall uptrend that we've been in since the October lows so you know bear that in mind as we look ahead to the next few weeks that's it thank you very much for listening this is Michael Houston talking to you from CMC Markets