Hey everyone, good afternoon and welcome to the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy's webinar on Local Government Workforce Issues. My name is Deborah Horner and I'm a researcher at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. I'd like to ask that we all wait just a couple seconds here just to give everyone who is joining us time to log in and get settled. And in the meantime, please check your speaker volume. Also, I just want to warn you ahead of time that we had some mysterious intermittent network connection problems here on campus in Ann Arbor yesterday. And although we're hoping that they've been solved, if something happens and we should suddenly disappear, it's probably not you, it's us. All right, let's see. Okay, let's go ahead and get started. Again, my name is Deborah and I'm a project manager here at the University of Michigan with the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy or close up. My colleague Natalie Fitzpatrick and I will be sharing with you today findings from a recent survey of Michigan local officials about challenges facing their local government's workforce. First of all, I want to tell you just a little bit about the Survey Research Program, the Michigan Public Policy Survey, where the data will be talking about comes from. Many of you local officials listening are probably familiar since you've probably answered a number of our survey waves in the past. After this quick introduction, I want to review some of our findings from the spring 2017 wave conducted this last April through June that looked at a range of issues related to local government personnel, including, first, some data that was not in the written report that we released last week. It's a look at local leaders assessments of how positively or negatively they think the public views their government's workforce. We'll also look at trends in employee pay and benefits and the size of jurisdictions workforce. Then Natalie will take over to give you an overview of some of the problems Michigan local officials have told us they're experiencing with their personnel, including recruitment and retention, as well as something that wasn't in our main report, whether and how local governments plan for knowledge transition when their employees leave or retire. And finally, if we time this right, we should have 10 minutes or so left for questions and answers. To facilitate Q&A, so we can get it to as many questions as possible, I'm going to ask that you submit your questions in writing. On your screen in the BlueJeans console off to the right, you should see an icon with a person and a little chat bubble. If you mouse over it, it says moderator chat. If you could please submit your questions there whenever they come to you. We have a couple colleagues here in the office with me that will be collecting those and feeding them our way. If we can quickly address a question right during a topic, we will try, but I expect that most questions will answer at the end. Okay, so let's get started. First off, why don't I briefly explain what is the Michigan Public Policy Survey program? Well, the MPPS is a census survey, meaning we reach out to every single county, township, city and village across the state, all 1800 plus of them. The respondents include top elected officials such as county board chairs and mayors and village presidents, as well as top appointed officials like county administrators and city and village managers. Now townships are unique in that there's only a small percentage across the state that have formal manager positions. So we send the MPPS to both township supervisors and township clerks. Respondents mostly participate in the survey by completing it online, as many of you know. But for those who don't have an email address or quality online access, we provide them with a hard copy in the mail, because we want to make sure that we do not leave any Michigan community out. Over the past nine years of conducting the MPPS, we've covered a wide range of topics, including those related to local government administration and policy, and we ask about employee issues almost every spring. But this past spring contained our largest number of questions on local government workforce yet. One of the things that makes the MPPS unique is that census aspect, but also that we receive back responses from more than 70% of local units across the state, which is pretty extraordinary in survey research. We're also dedicated to transparency and you'll find every question we've ever asked along with tables showing how officials answered and pretty much everything we do up on our website. We also don't just sit here in Ann Arbor and make up the questions by ourselves. We seek feedback from expert advisors across the country and here in Michigan, including people at MML, MTA and MAC. Our hope is that we're really asking the right questions, the ones that will help us inform policymakers about the experiences of local governments in every part of the state, large and small. Speaking of which, as you can see from this slide that's coming up last spring wave, we had more than 1300 unique jurisdictions across the state submit surveys, which is approximately 74% of all of them. Responses are pretty evenly distributed by region, and we also receive close to 70% in each of the different population size categories. And I'm telling you this so that you know that no one area of Michigan one type of local government is overly represented. All of that was just to give you some basic background on how we collect the local government officials' opinions and what this data means. And just as a reminder, if you have questions, you can send them to us by using the moderator chat icon.  And if I don't answer them now, we'll try to get to them in Q&A. So now that I've introduced the data, let me turn to the questions we asked of respondents this past spring about employee personnel issues. Let's start with the most basic question. Out of the 1856 jurisdictions in the state, which ones even have employees? Statewide, 91% of Michigan's local governments report having some kind of paid employees, full-time, part-time, seasonal or temporary, while 8% say they have none at all. In this chart, we break down those 91% of jurisdictions represented by the big blue column on the left by what type of employees they have. The most common type are regular part-time employees, which 73% of local government statewide have. Meanwhile, about 50% of half of our local units report that they have full-time staff members. Then 38% report employing seasonal workers and 24% report having temporary or irregular employees. And then over there on the left, there's that 8% of local governments with no employees of any kind. Let's break this down by jurisdiction type. If you look over at the left-hand side of this chart at the two sets of columns on the left, you can see that almost all counties and cities have full-time employees. And then among villages statewide, about 78% of them have full-time employees, while only 4% of villages have no employees at all. But when it comes to townships, only 30% of our 1,200-plus townships in the state have full-time employees, while 10% of townships have no paid employees at all. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I want to share with you a bit of data that wasn't included in the written report we released last week. One thing that we asked at the end of our series of questions on workforce issues was for local officials to rate how they think their citizens view their local government's workers. Looking overall, local leaders have a pretty rosy view of whether the public likes their employees. On this chart, the blue colors indicate that officials think the public's perception of their employees is positive, and the green indicates that they think it's negative. Almost a third, 31% of local government leaders think their citizens have a very positive view of their workforce, and almost half, 46%, think it's at least somewhat positive. Meanwhile, that green piece of pie shows that only 8% say their citizens have a somewhat negative view of local government workers in general, and close to none believe the public has a very negative view. Again, this slide breaks down those opinions by jurisdiction type, with the statewide total on the right, and the four kinds of jurisdictions we survey on the left. Officials from townships, cities, and villages report more pretty similar levels of public approval for their workforce. However, among county officials, only about 7% say that their residents have a very positive view of county workers, and only 1 in 5, 20% believe that the public has a negative view of their county's employees. We could also look at these data by jurisdiction size, and here we can see that officials from larger jurisdictions, those with 30,000 residents, one of those middle bars, are somewhat more likely to say their citizens have a negative view of their employees, but it's not as dramatic a difference as the one for counties alone. Alright, now let's talk about employee pay. I bet that's one of the reasons why you're all here. Over the past six years, Michigan local governments have generally been raising pay rates for their employees, but they tell us they've been doing it only incrementally, that is, in mostly slight increases. Looking at this chart, you can see we've tracked increases in pay rates since 2011, that's the column to the far left, all the way up to 2017, that's the column on the far right. Blue shades inside each column indicate where officials told us they've increased employee wages, either somewhat or greatly, while green colors indicate where they've cut employee pay rates. When the MPPS asked if local employee pay rates had increased, decreased, or remained the same compared with the previous fiscal year, in 2011 just 22% of jurisdictions with employees said they had increased their pay rates. By 2015, for the first time since we started tracking an outright majority, 55% of Michigan's local jurisdictions reported increasing their pay rates, and then last year, 58% reported increased pay rates compared to the previous fiscal year. That's a lot of blue, but keep in mind that it's 57% of jurisdictions that say they're increasing pay somewhat, while only 1% greatly. These don't appear to be huge rates as we're talking about here. In addition, even today, eight years after the end of the Great Recession, there are still 41% of local leaders that continue to say they are not changing employee pay rates at all, so there's also a lot of treading water going on around there. Okay, this next slide's quite busy, but let me briefly break it down for you. Here, we're looking at changes in employee pay by jurisdiction size. You can see the legend there across the top of the chart, where the smallest jurisdictions, those with 1,500 residents or fewer, are represented by the green line, and the largest jurisdictions in the state, those with more than 30,000 in population size are represented by the gold line. Every year, we ask whether, looking ahead, officials anticipate their local government will increase employee pay in the next fiscal year, and you can see that in 2017, the trend toward planned pay increases sees its largest jump among the smaller jurisdictions. Meanwhile, planned employee pay increases among units with more than 5,000 residents has been flat since 2015. And although three quarters, about 75% of leaders from the largest jurisdictions, those with that gold line, predict increased employee pay rates in 2017, this is down from 80% in 2016. Now, the question is, do local officials think what they're paying employees is the right amount? Although we saw in the last two slides, Michigan local governments have been reporting bumping their employee pay upwards in recent years. Assessments of whether pay rates are appropriate remain largely unchanged. Back in 2014, that's the middle column on this chart, 70% of local officials and jurisdictions with employees said pay rates for their current employees were about right, that part colored gray. Whilst 26% said they were too low, the part colored blue, and only 3% said they were too high, that's the part in green. In 2017, nearly identical percentages say that their current pay rates are about right, 71%, too low, 25%, and too high, 3%. So there's been some continuing concerns over low pay among a quarter of local officials, while about the same time there's been a trend of pay rate increases. This may indicate that those small boosts and pay rates aren't keeping pace with the needs in these places. Alright, let's turn next to what local leaders told us about their employee benefits packages. So again, we asked a basic question, who offers benefits? The statewide totals are shown in the first two columns over on your left, and you can see from the lighter blue column that just over half, 53% of jurisdictions statewide that have any employees at all offer their benefits to current employees. You can also see that the number of jurisdictions who currently offer benefits are cutting them for new hires. That's the dark blue column, where fewer than half statewide report that they're providing those same benefits to the new hires. Then moving to the right, you can see if the jurisdictions has no full-time employees, only ones that are either part-time or seasonal, only about 8% of those offer current employees benefits, while among those that have some kind of full employees, 86% of those places offer their current employees benefits. Slightly fewer of those with full-time employees, 79% are offering them to their new hires. Once again, we've been tracking several different questions on benefits over time since 2011. For example, when it comes to employee contributions and possible cost reductions in employee healthcare, the MPPS asks if governments are increasing or decreasing the amount they're asking employees to pay toward their own healthcare. As you can see in this chart, the percentage of jurisdictions over time who've been shifting additional healthcare costs to their employees has shrunk. Cost shifting peaked in 2012 at 51% of jurisdictions, and then it was still substantial, 43% in 2014. But it's decreased to 29% of relevant jurisdictions as of the 2017 MPPS. So as of last year, about a third of Michigan jurisdictions are still, year over year, asking employees to pay more on their healthcare premiums, deductibles, and copays. Again, we can look at differences by jurisdiction size to compare what bigger versus smaller places are doing. Quick reminder, smallest in green, largest in gold. Among those jurisdictions that offer benefits to their employees, larger ones are more likely than smaller ones to say they're continuing to shift healthcare costs to employees. In particular, mid-sized jurisdictions in communities with between about 5,000 and 10,000 residents saw a jump in the percentage who are pursuing more cost shifting. You can look at that orange line and see that while in 2016, 29% of mid-sized jurisdictions said they were increasing employees' share of healthcare contributions. In 2017, 42% said they were more in line with the percentage of what the larger jurisdictions are saying. So what do local leaders generally think of the benefits they are providing? Back in 2011, there was a substantial proportion of local officials who thought their benefits packages were too generous. That's the green section of the column on the left. As governments made their move to shift these costs, that trend that we saw in the last slide, this dropped to about 10% of officials saying too generous in 2014. But uh-oh, there was also an increase in 2014 in the number who thought their benefits package was not generous enough. That's the blue section in the middle column. Now, three years later in 2017, we see a small increase in the percentage of officials who say benefits packages are too generous. And a small decrease in those who are saying not generous enough. And evening out since 2014. So now in 2017, more than three quarters of jurisdictions say they have it about right. Next, let's turn to the question of workforce size. That is, do local units have the workforce they need to provide the services they want to provide? I want to jump out of the MPPS data for just a minute here and take a look at some of the numbers from the US Census. These two charts compare Michigan's local government workforce with the local government workforce across the entire country. The chart on the left looks at full-time employee pay. As the MPPS data told us in Michigan, we've seen a steady but small increase in the average local government employee pay since 2007. However, at the national level, full-time employee pay has increased more rapidly. So whereas in 2007, Michigan local government employees were making about $230 a month less than the national average. In 2016, that difference has become more than $600 per month less for Michigan workers. Then on the right-hand side, you can see the change in local government full-time employment workforce size in general from 2007 to 2016. The Michigan columns are measured in thousands of workers with the census reporting that the Michigan local unit statewide had 125,000 FTE employees in 2007. But that dropped during the Great Recession and it saw only a little growth between 2013 and 2016, standing at about 117,000 in 2016. By contrast, the local government workforce in the nation as a whole has recently bounced back with a similar drop after the Great Recession, but a return to pre-recession numbers in 2016 at over 5 million local government employees nationwide. This represents a decrease in local government workforce size in Michigan of about 7%, compared with 3% nationwide. The data from the MPPS shows that same trend as the census data. When it comes to the size of Michigan's local government workforce, during the Great Recession many officials tried to avoid outright firings and layoffs, but reductions were still fairly common. Again, our chart legend tells you that this lighter blue color indicates places that somewhat increased their number of employees over time, while the green indicates those who have decreased their overall number of employees from year to year, either somewhat or greatly. As Michigan's economy recovered over the past few years, the percentage of local jurisdictions reporting continuing staff cuts year over year has decreased steadily from 24% in 2011 to 5% in 2017. Meanwhile, the percentage of the report somewhat increasing their workforce compared to the previous year has grown from 2% in 2011 to 13% in 2017. Note that the vast majority are holding steady, those column sections in gray, and no one is reporting increasing their workforce size greatly. Let's compare jurisdictions of different sizes again. That previous slide showed us the year over year trend in changes. Now in this slide, we can see net change overall. The survey question was, how does the overall size of your jurisdictions workforce today compare to its size before the Great Recession? That left-hand column displays the assessment statewide of the change in workforce size since the Great Recession. In 2017, officials from 27% of jurisdictions across Michigan report a net decline in the size of their workforce, those shades of green, from before the Great Recession to now. Meanwhile, just 8% report an increase that blue, which indicates workforce is somewhat larger. In most local jurisdictions, 59%, officials reported there had been no significant change, although there are important differences by jurisdiction size. Among the state's largest local jurisdictions, look over there at that column on the far right. A full 70% report that their workforce is smaller now than before the Great Recession. Additionally, 56% of jurisdictions with a population of 10,000 to 30,000 people report that their workforce is smaller today, and 24% of those say significantly smaller. By contrast, only 14% of Michigan's smallest jurisdictions, those with fewer than 1,500 residents, say their workforce is smaller today. But of course, they started out with a smaller workforce to begin with. Now, whether or not a jurisdiction's workforce is now larger or smaller, one thing we really care about is whether it gets the job done. The Spring 2017 MPPS asked local leaders whether or not the current size of their workforce is adequate to provide the desired level of services. Since many local jurisdictions don't provide certain kinds of services, only some service areas were applicable to any particular jurisdiction. But we accumulated them all together by who offers what service, and in each of the four service areas we asked about, most local officials say their workforce size is adequate today. For example, 85% say that their workforce is adequate for the administrative management services required to run the local government.  Somewhat fewer local leaders say their workforce size is adequate to provide police services, about 69%, and other public works and services, 69%. The unfortunate news is that over a quarter of local leaders statewide in units that provide police or public works say they have inadequate workforce size. So although most local leaders say they have adequate workforce in each service area, these reports of inadequacies in public safety services are somewhat concerning, giving the nature of those services. The chart on your left illustrates that among jurisdictions providing fire services, 21% of cities and 19% of townships say their workforce size is inadequate for their fire service needs. And in the right chart, you can see that inadequate police workforce size is reported by a whopping 47% of counties, 31% of cities and villages, and 22% of townships. Since almost half of all Michigan cities, townships and villages, report that they do not provide or contract for police services themselves, but simply rely on the county sheriff or the state police to respond when called, that county level concern may have implications for levels of policing communities throughout the state. And when we combine the four service areas we looked at, local officials from 35% of all Michigan local units say their workforce size is inadequate to provide a desired level of service for at least one service area. Okay, now let me turn the mic over to my colleague, Natalie Fitzpatrick. She's going to review a bit more of our findings, focusing on what local officials tell us about specific personnel problems they're facing. Give us just a second to switch the headphones. Thank you, Deborah. Beyond the issues of pay, benefits and workforce size, we also asked local officials about specific types of personnel problems that their jurisdictions face with their workforce. Let's start by looking at the issue of employee recruitment. Recruitment of employees with the necessary skills is by far the most common personnel problem that our respondents reported for their local government. Looking at this chart, green shades represent jurisdictions that say that recruitment is a problem, while blue shades represent jurisdictions that say that recruitment is not a problem. As shown on the left, almost half, 48% of local governments with employees say that recruiting employees with the needed skills is a problem for their workforce. On the right, you can see this is an even more common problem for cities and counties where more than two thirds of officials said this was a problem for their jurisdiction. It was also common in villages where 60% said it was a problem. In contrast, township officials were much less likely to say recruitment was a problem, as shown in the farthest right column. This may be due to the fact that many townships in our sample are smaller and may have a smaller workforce to start with and don't hire very often. Now, let's look at employee recruitment by jurisdiction size. You can see this is a very common problem for Michigan's largest jurisdictions, those with more than 30,000 residents. Almost three quarters of those jurisdictions say that recruitment is a problem. However, as this shows, recruiting employees is a problem for jurisdictions of all sizes, including almost half of the smallest jurisdictions. Another personnel issue we ask about is employee retention. While recruitment is a widespread problem in Michigan, retention is a much less common problem for Michigan's local governments, as you can tell by how much more blue there is on this slide. On the left, you can see that a much smaller percentage of jurisdictions statewide say retaining current employees is a problem than said recruitment is a problem. Just 17% say the retention is a problem. However, looking by jurisdiction size, as you can see on the right, it is more than twice as common a problem for the largest jurisdictions as it is statewide. Now let's look at what officials tell us about the causes of local government's problems with recruiting employees with the necessary skills and or retaining current employees. We asked officials about what factors contribute to their jurisdictions problems recruiting and or retaining employees and gave a list of four possible factors. Officials could select more than one contributing factor. As you can see, the most commonly cited factor was a shortage of qualified candidates. 70% of local leaders said this contributed to their problems recruiting or retaining employees. Additionally, almost half 46% believe they don't offer competitive compensation packages. This of course could be partly to blame for a lack of qualified candidates applying for the positions. Fewer local officials attribute their problems to losing current employees to other employers just under one quarter say that and just 8% believe their workforce atmosphere causes problems with recruitment or retention. Of course, recruitment and retention aren't the only workforce problems facing local governments across Michigan. While recruitment was the most common problem indicated by a respondents local governments across Michigan and in particular the largest jurisdictions face additional problems with their workforce. This chart shows both the overall frequency of workforce problems statewide, the left column in each of the four sections and their frequency among Michigan's largest jurisdictions, the right column in each of the four sections. You can see the difference by looking at the amount of green for each of the four sections of the chart, which shows the percentage of officials who say that each issue is a problem for their jurisdiction. The four issues shown here are adequate skill sets among current employees, employee morale, turnover due to retirements and transfer of knowledge from departing employees. In each of these areas, a much higher percentage of the largest jurisdictions say that issue is a problem compared to the statewide percentage. Looking at the farthest right pair of columns, you can see that transfer of knowledge from departing employees is a more common problem than the other three shown here for jurisdictions of all sizes. It's the second most common problem facing jurisdictions statewide after employee recruitment about one third of officials from all jurisdictions with employees statewide report that this is a problem, and this rises to more than half among officials from the largest jurisdictions. Next, we'll look at how some of jurisdictions are addressing this problem. One way jurisdictions can address problems with transfer of knowledge from departing employees is through a formal succession planning process. Local governments may develop such a plan to address problems due to current employee turnover or in anticipation of an upcoming wave of retirements. We asked local officials about the status of formal succession planning in their jurisdiction, whether they had a plan, were developing a plan, expected to develop a plan in the next five years, or did not expect to develop a formal plan in that time period. The dark blue on this chart shows that jurisdictions have already enacted a formal succession planning process, and the light blue shows jurisdictions that are currently developing a formal process. As you can see, this is a fairly small percent of Michigan's local governments. About a quarter of local governments shown in gray say they are likely to develop such a process in the next five years. However, the green section shows that more than one third of local governments are unlikely to develop a succession planning process. Among cities, formal succession planning is much more common than it is for other jurisdiction types. Cities are shown in the fourth column on this chart, and you can see that they are much more likely to already have such a process and also much more likely to be currently developing a formal succession planning process. Only 20% of city officials say their jurisdiction is unlikely to develop a formal succession plan in the next five years, compared to 38% overall. Now, let's look at why some jurisdictions are not doing any formal succession planning. We asked officials about the reasons why their jurisdiction is unlikely to develop a formal succession planning process and gave a list of five possible reasons. Officials could select more than one reason. The most commonly selected reason was simply that the jurisdiction did not need a formal plan at this time, followed by a sense that developing such a plan was not a priority for the jurisdiction's leadership. Fewer officials said that their local government lacked necessary resources, including staff time, financial resources, and internal expertise about succession planning. So, in case Deborah or I were talking too fast or you were checking your phone at a particular moment, let me just give you some of the highlights of our findings. More than half of jurisdictions with employees report increasing pay rates in 2017 and a similar percent predict increasing pay rates in the next year. However, these increases are reported to be modest. A quarter of local officials say pay rates in their jurisdiction are too low. Cost shifting of employee healthcare benefits has slowed since 2014. Most officials say their current workforce is large enough to deliver services, but about one-third say the recruitment size is inadequate for at least one service area. Recruitment of qualified employees is a problem for almost half of local jurisdictions. Officials say that a shortage of qualified candidates and a lack of competitive compensation contribute. So, I'll turn it back over to Deborah and our colleague Tom Ivaco, who will answer all the great questions you've been submitting. Hello, everybody. This is Tom Ivaco. I'm associate director of close-up and oversee the MPPS program. Deborah and I are going to try to address the questions that have come in. We have just a few. If you have any more questions to ask again, you can do that off to the right of the blue jeans window with that little icon with a person and a little chat bubble. Put your mouse over it. It should say moderator chat and you can just type a question in there. The first question that we have is a little bit complicated. This may take just a second to respond to. The question is just how strong is the connection between pay rates being too low and jurisdictions having problems recruiting qualified employees? So, it's hard for us to answer for sure. I think what we'd say is there appears to be a fairly strong connection between low pay and recruiting challenges, but it's most likely not the only thing going on. We did find that jurisdictions that say pay is too low for new hires are more likely to report problems recruiting compared to jurisdictions that say their pay rates are okay. I think it was something in a range of 70% of jurisdictions that say pay is too low have trouble recruiting and somewhere in the 40% who say pay is about right. So that's a pretty big difference. Still, the 40% of jurisdictions that say their pay is okay and yet they still struggle to recruit employees, I think, tells us that the challenge isn't just about pay. And in fact, this is one of the stranger things I think we found in the MPPS. This is in the report. We found that jurisdictions who said their pay rates are actually too high are slightly more likely than those who say pay rates are about right to have problems recruiting. That doesn't make a whole lot of intuitive sense. And so we're not really sure what's going on there. And so all of this I think makes us wonder what else could be going on and presumably there are a few things. Most likely these challenges are not unique to Michigan. We know for instance we've seen reports from across the country about challenges recruiting and retaining police officers in particular. And in other reports we've seen that's related to a number of reasons, things like low pay, but also not enough candidates for a variety of reasons, whether it's disqualifying behavior, drug use by candidates or lack of physical fitness and so on. And in addition, I think these problems are not just in the public sector. We saw recently that about 150,000 job openings are available in Michigan currently across the public and private sector. And it sounds like in many cases, there are just not enough qualified candidates out there. So overall, we do see a correlation between pay rates being too low and jurisdictions struggling to hire employees but there probably are numerous issues going on beyond just the pay rates. Should I take the next one? Yeah, that would be great. This is Deborah again. So someone asked, do you see any regional differences in your data? Seems like we have a different set of conditions up here in the UP with recruitment and brain drain and such. So we do see a few difference regionally. We do break down the data regionally as well and some of those differences are from the UP and some are found in other places. So when it comes to assessments of whether benefits are too high or too low or pay, officials from both the UP and Southeast Michigan are more likely than other regions to say their pay rates for new hires are too low. But on the other hand that fringe benefits for current employees are too high. So there's some regional differences we've seen there. I don't think there's actually much difference for the UP when it comes to local officials reporting problems with recruitment or retention. That's actually a pretty statewide phenomenon except in the Southeast, which tends to be hires on those issues. But I think it's because they contain more of our larger jurisdictions, which we mentioned in the presentation had particular problems with recruitment and retention. So I think it's more of a size issue than it is a region issue from what we've seen from what officials have reported to us. Officials in the UP do tend to be a little more likely to worry the public has a somewhat or negative view of their workers. But again, it's pretty muted. So I don't think it's necessarily as important. That's why we didn't in the report show as many regional differences because they weren't there as much as you might suspect they would be at least according to the officials in the survey. Yeah, actually, we have a couple questions here. I'll try to get to quickly. The first question is, was there any discussion of OPEB retiree health care funding in relation to the new legislation and the impact on recruiting of employees? Quick answer is no. The survey did not cover the new legislation and its impact on OPEB. We did see, although, you know, as I think it was Natalie had pointed out that we see some evidence of compensation pay and benefits being a challenge in recruiting employees. And so I think we would expect that health care changes, shifting of health care costs to employees in order to, you know, try to deal with OPEB debt may be a negative factor in trying to recruit employees. Another question. Let's see. The question is, I think one of your slides said police services in particular is an area of concern about not having enough employees, the workforce being inadequate to deliver police services. The question is how big of a problem is that really? I think we're not really sure. I've got senses that it's not a crisis that we're dealing with. One reason that we can't be more sure is unfortunately, this question on the survey, we didn't ask about levels of adequacy, which we often do on MPPS surveys will ask questions about variety of change, whether it's a significant change or somewhat of a change. On this question, we did not ask about levels of adequacy. We just asked is the workforce adequate to provide police services or is it inadequate? So this is a bit of a blunt force question. One reason I'd say I think we're probably not in a crisis situation on police services is that back a couple years ago, I think it was the fall 2015 MPPS survey. We had a lot of content on public safety services, including police services. And I don't have the specific percentages here, but we found pretty high levels of satisfaction among local leaders with the police services in their communities. In terms of overall satisfaction, but also there were some pockets of concern. I think we saw something like a quarter 25% of jurisdictions said that crime is a problem in their jurisdictions. And I think it was roughly about the same percentage said they felt like they didn't have enough funding to deliver police services. But overall, most jurisdictions were pretty satisfied with public safety in their communities. And so, even though we see here some level of concern that their workforce is inadequate, our gut sense is it's not a crisis situation in most places. Cool. So I knew we would get a question like this. What should local governments do if we're having problems finding good workers. So, well, we are not HR pros. So the first thing I'd suggest to do is talk with HR pros and others in that field. Beyond that, since increasing pay and benefits probably are not real options at this point, unless you're already doing that. I think I'd be looking for some solutions like maybe bringing in interns to build connections with young people, looking at things like flexible scheduling if possible or job sharing. So you can broaden that pool of people who might be interested in a job, maybe looking for ways to develop a work atmosphere that will be appealing. We saw that work morale was an issue in some locations in the survey. Providing training and career growth opportunities, you know, empowerment and other morale issues I think are often important for new hires nowadays. And then maybe evaluating if you can restructure certain operations to be more efficient. Of course, we did a whole series of surveys about intergovernmental cooperation and service sharing with neighboring jurisdictions. So we can go back and look at that data, but obviously a lot of places are either through EVIP have been incentivized to do more intergovernmental cooperation or you're just doing it on your own because it means it makes sense in terms of trying to find more workforce size and economy of scale for joint service delivery. But again, those are just some brainstorming ideas. I would definitely talk with the HR pros as a first step about recruitment issues if that's one of the problems that you're struggling with. Another question, was there any weight given to quote unquote a sense of place ideals for regions I think this is asking whether places that are doing place making maybe having more luck in recruiting employees and so on. That's a great question we did not ask that in this particular survey, but we have covered place making a couple of different times on MPPS surveys, including in some depth. And so, although we scramble here to kind of keep new reports coming out. This is the type of thing that we can go back. We have we have all these data from previous surveys and we could go back and kind of merge that data in from the previous survey and see if places that are doing place making may have fewer challenges recruiting employees. That's an interesting question. Yeah, I think we should definitely try to do that. That's really good. All right, how are we doing for time let's let's do one of the things that they came up somebody said did you showed some data that wasn't in the report why don't you put everything in your reports. And as Tom said, sometimes we can't finish the report because we have collected so much information, not just over the years but in each individual wave we're very fortunate, lots of of our local official respondents are willing to spend a lot of time on these surveys and answer all our questions. So in the reporting we try to strike that balance between covering all the important points without being so long that no one will read it. However, one way people can see the responses to every single question we ask is to go on our website. So let me see if we can switch over quickly and show you what we've got there to can you show it on your screen Tom or do I have to quit. If you can't I can try to do it. Yes, no, maybe, maybe not. Okay. Yes, I think I think we do see hopefully you folks out there can see our website this is the homepage of the close up website. And off on the left is the main navigation menu. We have a section for the Michigan public policy survey. As Debra had said at the beginning of this we post just about everything related to the survey program out of the website, all the questionnaires experts that we talked to to get advice on questions to ask. All of the questions that we have asked including results which we do hear through pre run data tables. And so if you click on that section. There's a table here that has data for each individual survey, and you can see the spring 2017 survey if you go to the data tables there. This is a list of all of the questions and quick responses broken down in a number of ways. So, the first question about whether jurisdiction has any employees at all. If you click on that. You see it's broken down by jurisdiction type. This is the present that say they have no paid employees. So no county said that 10% of townships 1% of cities 4% of villages, a total of 8% overall. We also break the data down by population size of communities, as you saw in many of the charts throughout this presentation, and we break the data down by the region within Michigan. So, all of the data whether or not we can get it into an individual report is available on our website. And I think we would just before we wrap this up, we would say if you have any questions about about anything that we presented here or other aspects of the survey. We're happy to take any questions that you have. You can call us here at the office or send questions in by by email to close up at umich.edu. Also, yeah, also a recording of this webinar will be posted online soon on that website. So in case you'd like to share a link to it with neighbors or friends or strange people walking down the street you're welcome to do that that link will be up online. And then finally here at close up we often go around the state making presentations on our survey findings and we'd be happy to give a customized presentation in your community so find a way in which the data works best for you, keeping in mind that we protect the confidentiality of any individual or single jurisdiction in the survey, but we can target the data by all jurisdictions in a county or in a region or help you look at other peer communities, just let us know. Once again, thank you so much for joining us and have a great day.


Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything One Piece. To date, we are going to be taking a look at the series from the perspective of the unsung heroes that are our medical professionals. One Piece being a series that focuses primarily on combat in extraordinarily dangerous environments, presents an incredible demand for skilled healers to keep our adventurers alive. And given their importance, I think it's an absolute shame that they don't receive more focus, but that's what we here at the Grand Line Review are going to rectify today. The criteria for this list is as follows. A doctor in this context will be defined as a medical practitioner. So if there were any ideas about people like Vega-Punk or Caesar Clown appearing on this list, let's quash those right now. Completely different kind of doctors there. I mean, in theory, you can become a doctor of anything. In fact, one of my university lecturers had a doctorate in drawing. And well, as a result, he will not be appearing on this list. Furthermore, all doctors appearing here today must be canon, because just think about it. Would you really place your life in the hands of a filler doctor? That's right, I didn't think so. But with that out of the way, let's begin. Welcome to the top five dependable doctors in one piece. Number five. Dr. Kureha. We'll be commencing this list with incredibly high standards because Dr. Kureha is one of the finest medical minds in the world as we know it. In fact, this genius of healing possesses knowledge so advanced that she appears to have been able to keep herself alive and well far beyond what a regular human should be capable of, currently sitting at the youthful age of 141. To further demonstrate her skill, Kureha is able to perform simple tasks such as taking someone's temperature without the aid of any medical equipment whatsoever and proceed to produce extremely accurate results. So with all of this in mind, you'd expect that Kureha would easily be at the pinnacle of this list. But the main thing holding her back is her bedside manner. A doctor's attitude towards a patient can be extraordinarily important in the healing process. And well, let's just say that Kureha has been known to get a bit violent with patients that don't follow her instructions. The treatment process can also be quite eccentric in general, not unlike an episode of House Really. And Kureha also demands quite a high price for her services, often leaving patients on the verge of financial ruin. But once again, her skill simply cannot be denied, and these days she has even formed her own medical academy on Drum Island, taking the Ishii 20 and turning them into the Ishii 100. So she certainly is one hell of a dependable doctor, but only if you can afford her fee. Number 4 Aladdin. Next up we have the Merman Doctor of the Sun pirates, famed for the exploits of their captain, Fisher Tiger. As the Doctor of a pirate crew that often got into incredibly violent conflicts, Aladdin's skill as a healer is top notch. In fact, his skill was such that he would have been able to save the life of his captain, Fisher Tiger, should he have agreed to it. The problem came in the fact that at the time the Sun Pirates only had access to human blood for a transfusion, and Fisher Tiger simply could not stomach the idea of living with that in his veins. Choosing death instead. However, Aladdin remained with the Sun Pirates and continued to work his healing magic, most notably tending to the wounds of Saint Mosgar, a world noble who became fishwrecked Fishwrecked. A world noble who became shipwrecked on Fishman Island, as well as the Queen of the Riga Kingdom, Otohime, who used her own body as a shield to prevent Mosgar from being shot. As for modern day patients, we need look no further than Whole Cake Island. As the Sun Pirates let in the interim by Aladdin, oversaw the recovery of Pekoms after his betrayal at the hands of Capone Gangbeige.  Number 3 Trafalgar Law With an epithet like Surgeon of Death, it's completely reasonable to wonder why Trafalgar Law makes this list at all. In reality, Law isn't such a scary guy after all. In fact, not only was he born into a family of doctors, but his father happened to be the best doctor in all of Levant's, so his medical career was on the fast track from the very beginning. But during his childhood, he also acquired a phenomenal devil fruit known as the Op-e-Ope-No-Me. And this fruit took Law's medical abilities to an entirely new level and allows him to perform even the most complex of surgery with ease. I mean, just to demonstrate, Law is a man who can literally remove a person's heart without killing them, so this fruit isn't to be underestimated, and neither is Law to be fair. It's only through combination with his hard-earned expertise that this ability is allowed to thrive. But that said, Law has never really shown a keen desire to pursue the field of medicine, it's just an extra skill that he possesses, which makes achieving his own personal goals significantly easier at times. Honestly, I'd go so far as to say that Law is the greatest surgeon in the one-piece world, however, there is a bit more to being a dependable doctor than that. Tony Tony Chopper Now here's one we were all expecting to appear, and having been trained by the No. 5 contender, Dr. Kureha, it's no surprise that this half- reindeer half-human is in a very rare class when it comes to the field of medicine, capable of administering advanced surgery and resuscitation. However, Chopper has a far, far greater asset, which comes in his knowledge of pharmacology, having studied extensively on Drum Island as well as in the vast library of the Torino Kingdom in South Blue. Furthermore, as a result of Chopper's time in the Torino Kingdom, he has gained access to herbs and remedies completely unknown to the rest of the world. But arguably, Chopper's greatest asset as a medical professional is his drive to help people regardless of circumstance. Chopper has no interest in reward or the world of academia, he simply wants to heal and even possesses a dream of one day curing all disease. Plus, Chopper has the exceptionally difficult task of healing Luffy, Zoro and Sanji, all three of whom managed to accumulate potentially life-threatening injuries on a regular basis. In fact, there is no doubt in my mind that one day Chopper will become the greatest doctor this world has ever seen, but as for right now, we still need to examine. 1. Crocus Moving into the realm of more legendary figures, we have none other than the Doctor of the Roger Pirates. Crocus was recruited as an integral member of the crew in order to keep Roger, who had contracted a terminal disease, alive long enough to complete his final journey. And alive he was kept thanks to Sir Crocus, who managed to stabilize the pirate king for three years. And in fact, the former first mate of the Roger Pirates, Silver's Rayleigh, has even stated that he was the only one in the world capable of performing such a feat. Following the disbandment of the Roger Pirates, Crocus returned to his home at Twin Capes to put his skills to use healing the whale Laboon, who had become self-harming after distress and longing for the Rambar Pirates. And here Crocus demonstrated what I would certainly call an unconventional level of medicine by building an elaborate system of tunnels inside of Laboon in order to treat him as he had grown far too big for regular medicine to be applied from the outside. Crocus has gone above and beyond in every aspect of being a doctor, possessing world-class medical knowledge and even greater ability to apply it and an unwavering commitment to the health of his patients. This man is a legend not simply for his exploits as one of the Roger Pirates, but as one of the finest healers in the entire series. And that pretty much does it for the top five dependable doctors in One Piece. If you enjoyed this video and the content this channel produces in general, then please do consider donating to the Grand Line View Patreon because the support of all of your amazing people is what continues to make this channel possible. Also I've recently launched a Teespring store if you're interested in shirts, hoodies and other miscellaneous items, with proceeds going directly to support the channel as well. And if you'd like to join the fun then please do head over to my Discord server where a wide array of shenanigan retakes place on a daily basis. And finally please do comment with your own favorite doctors in the series. This has been the Grand Line Review and I'll see you next time.


My name is Kate Stewart. I'm working at the Linux Foundation and I'm trying to focus on what do we need to do to make sure that embedded open source is dependable. And one of the key features of open source in general and systems is Linux kernel. And Daniel German, professor at UVic and down you want us to introduce yourself across the street from Seattle and Canada, British Columbia. And so I've been doing research for open source for a little bit more than 20 years. So one of my main goals in research is to understand how open source is developed. And then trying to identify interesting aspects of the development, interesting practices that then can be documented and promoted. For example, one of the, my team was one of the first to identify that code reviews don't, don't in the way that you are a very effective way of the code reviews. And so we were the first to have a paper related to that. And now they are common and used everywhere. And so that's a little bit about who I am. I do a little bit of open source here and there. I maintain my own projects. And I also contribute most of the time tried by contributions to open source and as much as possible I try to use open source in my own, in my own life. So big proponent and a big user of open source also. Thank you. Yeah, back to you. So, one of the tools we've been using is a project called Craig it. And this is looking at the gate commit history in the Linux kernel over the years. Craig it.linux-source.org anyone can go to and explore who's made which contributions what's going on there and so forth. But Daniel's been able to summarize the information behind and we've been sort of exploring this data set as a way of understanding what's happening from a trend perspective. There are over 21,000 unique contributors we've identified and there's 33,000 emails associated with those 21,000 contributors. So it's a rather large data set. We've also done a little bit of work using the gender computer to try to map people's names to their gender. So we can start to look at some of the trends from a diversity perspective. We have been since 2018 we've been doing manual verification as we knew people joined the community. And some of the people some of the names are very hard to classify. If you guys have questions, since we're a small group, I'd like to make this as interactive as possible. But you got questions. You know, feel free to just sort of raise your hands. But that's what we've what the background is behind the numbers you'll be seeing and the data. So one of the key things is the tokens and the evidence in the criminal process, every release is built on the prior releases. One way or the other. And actually we can actually still find tokens in the source code repository from that very first release last back in 1991. Currently, if you look at the whole size of the tokens for the kernel, there's 119 million tokens that make up the kernel today as a 514. And, you know, the portions obviously, these are done by year rather than by release. We've got everything sort of segmented by year base, and we get commits by year. But, you know, the bulk of the new work is, you know, last few years have shown that. So when you start looking, you know, there's a lot of contributions in the last couple of years and this year isn't over yet so it'll probably be more by the time it ends. But as you can sort of see, all of these together make up what we're using today as a kernel. And so that's what we're using as a basis for the analysis. Now, the tokens do get replaced over time. When we first did some of this analysis last year, there was the night there was, you know, 2964 tokens. They were from those first that first commits back in 1991. It's gone down a bit. Some of the things are like, you know, people clean up section, people refactor code, things like that, and that sort of adjusts and changes things. Oops, that was interesting. But as you can see, it doesn't really register on the percentage, but it's still there. There's still traces of it and it could be, you know, semicolons, brackets, variable names, a couple of things like that. Some of the work that's going on in real time is actually touching some of this older code. Some of the things like that and then other parts where people are cleaning up the print structures and things like that. That's all very much of the impacts that we're seeing. But when you start looking, you know, last year when we measure 2020, it was done again about the same time. And then we added by the end of the year, there was over 12,000, sorry, 12 million more tokens added into that 514 kernel. And so we're at about the same point again here. So these percentages are the ones you saw on that prior depth chart. But, you know, we can trace back exactly where these pieces are. For people's quick show, do you know guys on the way when I say token? Raise your hands or do you want me to explain that? Okay, I got, thank you for the feedback. So if you have a line of code and you parse it into, you know, the compiler takes it, translates your code into machine language. The process of transforming from a line of C source file into machine language, it looks at every little element, syntactic element, be it a variable, be it punctuation, like brackets, commas, things like that. Each of those things is considered to be a token. And that is probably the lowest common denominator. So what this analysis has done with Kregat is basically look at working the analysis at the lowest syntactic element. You're doing get blame on the token level effectively. Because lines change, whitespace changes, things like that, the tokens are actually a more immutable concept for getting more precision on the analysis. So if you look at this by release, what's been happening in the last year is, and you look at back, you know, all the way back, in this last release, we actually did see a record number of contributors on one of the releases. And there were so various articles in other UN and other places about some of the analysis that was done.  So we sort of got curious about, okay, well, what's been happening across the space? And the part that I'm also interested in is what's been happening to women across this space? What's been happening to the diversity? Because you can sort of see here, this line at the bottom is the women. And this is sort of, as you can see, it's been very slowly growing. And we were starting to see a bit of acceleration towards the end of 2019. But it was sort of looking like, hmm, you know, I don't know if we could, I don't know if we're statistically significant or not, but nonetheless, it was sort of like, you know, is it keeping up or not? So this was the question we started exploring with the data to try to understand really what's going on. Overall, though, you can see that last year was, you know, by year, it was, you know, probably the highest number of contributors that participated in the kernel. And in terms of the commits, got the highest number of commits when you start looking at it by year. So this data, it's indicating that the kernel is doing quite well. And given the fact that most of the community is virtual, and everyone's sort of working, can we work remotely? I think that's been a large part of the success of, you know, the kernel's been community to grow. However, there are some interesting factors there. So Daniel, you want to take it over from here and just tell me when to switch the slides. So one of the things that fascinates me about the kernel is just the number of the sheer size of the project, the age of the project, and how it just keeps growing over time. And so as a system, it's a very complex, very interesting. And so as a researcher, I'm very curious about how it keeps working. And so as we were discussing before, so there's a very interesting trend in terms of the growth of number of contributors. Now, what's interesting here is that this is just the number of people. This doesn't take into consideration how much each one of them contributes. It just basically means that as time passes by, then the kernel keeps bringing more and more and more people and who contribute. And in here, by contribution, we mean they are either the author or the committer of a commit. And we know that the kernel is a complex system, so it's not only the people who write the code, but the focus that we have at this point is of the people who are responsible for whatever is in their source code repository. We also know, so we have done a little bit work before, that the kernel is not only this source code that exists in Linux Torval's repository. There are many other repositories that exist around the world and that might never synchronize fully with the rest of the repositories. So think for example of Android, so the people at Google probably have a repository of Android that is heavily based on the original one of the Linux kernel, but it lives on its own and it has its own entity and it probably never fully synchronized again back. So this is the view that we have is a relatively restricted one in that sense. But this is the core of the development team and without these people, we would not have a kernel. Everybody's necessary, but these are fundamental for the success of the project. The number of contributors also correlates with the increase on the commits per year. So we can see that the two plots are relatively the same and so as time passes by, the number of commits also keeps growing. So the kernels grow in terms of the number of files, the number of lines of code, the number of contributors, the number of commits that get into it. And so from the outside, you could assert that the kernel looks like a healthy environment. Now, one of the things we wanted to talk about was the impact of time and especially because we have been in very interesting times for the last year and a half. So we wanted to see whether there was anything that looked significantly different from the way the development was. Personally, my hypothesis was that COVID would have relatively little impact on the development of the kernel. Why? Because fundamentally the kernel is a distributed software development project. People rarely meet face-to-face. Most of the communication is done online. Yes, there are events that bring people together, but in general the kernel is being developed by people in their own computers. So whether they did it in an office or they did it at home will probably have relatively little impact. The other thing that I have observed is that there's a lot of development that is sponsored by an employer. So if the employer said you have to keep developing from home or from the office, then it probably makes a little difference. There's probably an impact in terms of those that they are volunteers, the ones that give their time on their free evolution to the kernel. And there might be a little bit of a difference in terms of newcomers to the kernel. We might see a little bit of that later. But overall, as you can see here, the number of contributors varies a lot from month to month. Well, not a lot. And we're talking about maybe a difference of 100 developers from one month to the next. Each one of these points in this plot is a month. So as you can see here, we have around 1,000 people, 1,500 people, 1,600 people contributors in a given month. And here I thought that the number of them who we have identified as women, there's also a little bit of viability, but because there are fewer people, the peaks of the valleys are smaller. But it's also interesting to see that this is essentially a growing trend and it will take a long, long time before it becomes 50% at this rate, but it's a healthy increase over time. And so we're seeing around 7%, 8% of contributors who are women participating in the development of the kernel. One of the things that Daniel pointed out that I found fascinating, and it's obvious when you think about it is, August and December, there's pretty much always a drop in the contributors. Yeah, so I wanted to zoom in into the plot that I showed before. And so here is just the last three years, actually. So this line here is generally this line here is generally this line here is generally. And, and there, there's some ability that basically you will expect. And there is always a deep around December. So December people, sorry, in December people do a little bit less. And, sorry, let me rephrase that. Some people do not contribute in December. And they, and then some more people come back in January, September, October, September, October, November, and we see a little bit of an update. And we also see a little bit of a dip in terms of the summer. So the summer months, some people actually leave, but in the big scope of things, the curve remains relatively straight. So those, those variations are small and which I guess that if a lot of people are being employed, then they will work most of the year and then only take few weeks of vacation most of the time. So that's what we probably have this stability around 1100 people. Women kind of have so few of them to really see any kind of seasonal variation. There is still a little bit of a dip around December, but not that much. And there's nothing really to make a strong conclusion with respect to this. So these numbers are both contributors. So these are a number of people who at any given month, they have contributed to the current. And that this is commits and commits are a little bit of a tricky measure because I know that commits are created equal. We might have a huge commit that has a lot of work that took a lot of time to be developed. Or we might have just a small change to which was just change a comment because the comment had incorrect grammar. We see both cases of commits and so each one of them individually is different. What is interesting is the overall trend more than the specific peaks and valleys. And as you can see here again, so there's a healthy growth in terms of that. And then there's sonality, but it's kind of harder to see because the variance is so big between one month of the other. And we can see also here with women, there's a lot of variability. And that's going to be from one month to the next. And I guess, if I'm a developer and I'm tasked to do a job. This month might require one commit the next month in my report three and and the one commit might actually require more hours than three commits so it's always a tricky metric to to use. And this is again, zooming in just to actually see what is what is going on. And as I said before, just a lot of variability so not very useful to try to make a strong assertion of what's going on. And this are the COVID bonds as you can see here in terms of commits is relatively flat. And from 2018 19 and then in 2020 we have way more ups and downs. So there is a peak going up right at the beginning of the pandemic keeps going on and then it starts to actually vary a lot from one month to the other. So, again, so very hard to make any strong assertion about what is going on. One of the hypotheses that we have and and it's high points because we have not tested is that perhaps the moment that COVID hit, we had more people who failed that they had free time to be able to contribute to the current. And we'll come back to that in other slides. And so that might explain why suddenly a job in terms of the number of commits and contributors during those months. Just tell me next Daniel. No, go ahead Kate. Okay, so I'll continue. So the other thing that we have been very curious about is this notion of sustainability. At the lives plumber session last week, it's obvious that the age of the typical Linux scale developer keeps increasing. And there are people like me that their middle age or even older, who have been contributed to the kernel for a long time. Those are the people who have the reins of the project. There's a lot of young people too. But from an outsider point of view, it's clear that the other people are the ones who are in charge of the project. We can see that in the age of Linus Torvales, Greg, and many of the of the main maintainers. And so this actually plots the median months of experience. So let me try to explain this a little bit. So at any given month. So let's say January of 2010. This basically says that 50% of the developers have contributed less than 16 months and 50% of the developers have contributed for more than 16 months. So the median essentially divides a population into two chunks, the ones who are above and the ones who are below. At this point, for example, here, this will be March of 2015. And this will mean that 50% of the developers have 16 months of experience and 50% of them will have less than that. So as you can see here, the months of experience keeps increasing. Now, this is not bad. And because you expect that in any company, you will expect that you want to keep experience within team. You don't want to have a lot of people leaving and joining your team. And so in general, do you want this to have an up trajectory? The challenge becomes when you have much more experienced people than new people coming into the team. And at which point this starts to become an issue. It might be interesting, for example, to start to think in terms of in how many years do general developers expect to retire. And so then a lot of these heavy months of, sorry, many of these people with lots of months of experience will suddenly cease to be part of the kernel. And then this curve will start to go down. So this curve goes up because people keep contributing for a long time and it goes down because we have new contributors. This is a more fine grained view of that data. And this requires a little bit of an explanation. So for every month, we divide the developers into three sets. So let me see if I can do that. So we have three sets. We have the ones who are, let me actually start with the ones that are one month old. So this is this line here. The one that is a thin line. So the one month contributors are the people who only contribute for one month and never come back. Those are the people who are maybe for the glory. They are here because they expect to get some brownie points, be able to maybe put in the resume, maybe because they want to test the waters. And to try to see whether they can contribute to the kernel. This is an interesting set for the following reasons. One of them is that these people have already committed to learn enough of the development process to contribute. They learn how to use the tools. They are willing to go through the stress of submitting patches to the kernel or have survived the review process. So these people have a level of skill that is sufficient to be able to start contributing. Yet they don't stay. And I find this to be an interesting set because we need to understand better what the motivations are. They don't stay because that was their intention from the beginning where they drive by contributors who expected just to do one contribution and never come back again. Perhaps that's actually the case. So in many cases, that's what they wanted to do only one. In other cases, they might have come do the work and say, you know what, this is not for me. I don't like the environment is too stressful, or it's not inclusive enough, or it's too much work and I don't have the time to do this. And so that subset is also interesting from the point of view of there's something that perhaps could have been done to keep these people around. That's the one pack. So these are the people who just come for one month and never come back again. So let me actually now go into the green people. So the green people are the ones, sorry, the ones who contribute for the first time. For example, if a person is in January of 2010, and this is part of this 40 people. That meant that that person contributing to 2010 and contributed at least one month later. So it contributed maybe one more month, maybe two months, maybe a hundred more months. So these are the people who contributed for the first time at that point and keep contributing at least once more in the future. So they could become part of the team somehow. This plot doesn't have, doesn't demonstrate how much they contribute. They just says they actually became part of the contributors. And then the corresponding opposite to that is the red line, which essentially means that these people contributed for the last time in that month. So if a person is part of this, let's say 26 people, the red one, it means that in January 2010 was the last time that they contributed. So they're essentially the green people who stopped contributing. And we haven't seen signs of them since then. So as you can see, sorry, say it again. Yeah, and we haven't seen signs of them since then, basically, though they sort of dropped off and not reappeared. They're counted in, yeah, they're not. They'd be counted differently. I'm not understanding what you're saying. Oops, sorry. Keep going. I'll keep quiet. Yeah, they'll do it. It's horrible in the presentation for this. But anyway, so the interest is so, so let's now look at the trends because it doesn't really matter what the numbers are. I think that what matters is what the curse tells us a whole. From this period, so for example, from 2010 to 2015, we see a little bit of an increase. There's a lot of viability, but you can see that this curve is growing. But this period here, it starts to be flat and then it starts to go slightly. It's almost like we have, let me draw here and slide. Sorry. I don't think you're going to draw again. So they can't see you drawing Daniel. It's something like this. And in that curve. And well, the red one, which is the people who leave, it's going up.  Is this problematic? We don't know. All we see is just the data. So the data is saying that there's certain trends that are of concern. And you need to perhaps investigate them further and try to understand better what they mean. I think that there's a very interesting research question in terms of what is the best way to evaluate the sustainability and survival of an open source project. And we don't have precise answers for that. We just chime in here that we stopped the data a year ago effectively because that was our threshold. So that's why you're not seeing into 2021. However, March of 2020 is when you're seeing some of the key changes kicking in there. You know, we have a lot more new people there. We don't want to use data after that because the closer we get to the present, the more that this information will be biased. Because a person might still contribute, might have like a gap of three months and might not be contributing, but they're planning to return. And so we didn't really want to include information for the last year. So we just clip it right on August of last year. We'll probably, like I say, the trends may, some of these people may show up again later and so forth. So revisiting this sort of yearly basis will probably tell us whether or not this is significant in some ways. Yeah, and that also becomes an interesting question. So is there a significant proportion of developers who come back after one year of inactivity? So what is the likelihood that a person lives and they will come back? So at which point we basically consider that person to be lost or at which point that person can be recoverable within the system. I think that there are a lot of interesting questions regarding the people who come and they leave. And I think that we have, as a community, as a research community and as open source projects, I don't think that we pay a lot of attention to these people that only do changes once to try to see whether there's something could be done to keep them around. And make them become long term contributors. Because ultimately, the survival of open source projects depends on having software developers, software developers contributing to the project. You could have all the evangelists that you could have the people doing the documentation, etc. But if you don't have the software developers that your project will suffer. So let me switch over right now and touch on diversity a little bit. Obviously, there's many, many dimensions of diversity. There's geographic. Yeah, I'll leave it to you. I'll leave it to you now. There's geographic, gender, age. We can touch on all of them. But the ones that's easiest for us to do analysis and we've been sort of trending with is looking at the gender one right now here. And the women. So these plots are from Daniel and we're looking at the proportion of women per each release. And that's been plotted that way. At the starting point, obviously it's a lot of variables because very few numbers. And then as we've been going along, you know, we're getting over between 7.5 to 10% each release. Okay.  And then there's the actual relative number. But you actually have the scale of the numbers taking in. Oops. And this is a much more sensitive tension pad. So, you know, we're seeing about 150 women contributing each release, which for most projects is actually kind of a good number. But the challenge is, of course, in relative scale to the overall.  And one of the things that Daniel's been, you know, focusing on a bit is, you know, how many of the commits have been authored by women. And these are the ones that women only showed. And again, we serve can touch up towards about 10% of a release. And in the recent years, it's sort of, like I say, in the last year and so forth and 2020 from March onwards, you know, the question is, is it was going on quite a nice little trajectory upward, but we have a little bit of a blip. So I was, I was sort of hypothesizing that there was an impact and things happening with COVID were happening more that way. So that's where we, that's where we start all these discussions off to try to understand is there anything there or not that significant and only time will tell probably at this point. Why are you making more comments about that, Daniel? I'm not understanding what you're saying. Oh dear. The audio through the conference system is not very good. So I don't quite understand what you're saying. Okay. Okay. I'm just a second. Let me see. Let me just try something here. Computer and improve that. Let's see if this will help. Does that make it better? Or no. Yeah. It sounds a little bit better. Okay. It was on the other side. That's why. So I was just basically commenting. We can't really tell after March 2020 whether that drip is significant or it will be continuing on the upper trends eventually. Data's too young. At this point. Okay. Sorry to interrupt you. There's a latency of around 10 seconds between the Zoom session and when I hear on the other side. Lovely. So I cannot actually talk to you. So what I hear here in Zoom is very different than when I hear there. So if I respond to the questions there, it will take around 10 seconds before you hear me. Okay. Okay. So I'll just keep it here. So because otherwise. Okay. The other fact that I hear you now better. Yeah. Yeah. The other factor that Daniel followed on is.  They provide, you know, commits, they provide guidance and so forth. And the interesting challenge is we only have 17 women who've ever done it out of the 701 contributors, but 2.5%. So while overall, in terms of developers, we're servicing 75 to 10%. The maintainer type of or those who are basically in the pipeline for commit and so forth is only about 2.5. So the challenge is going to be, how do we start bringing that pipeline on board? And some of it's going to be a function of, you know, time and what motivates people to sort of start to step up to do more of these type of maintainer roles. So essentially, the maintainer shortage is well known problem. And there is a reasonable pool of women here potentially that might be, if we can figure out the right motivations help help this problem along. And then there's the commits by the non author emerges and then again women only are being shown. And there we've, you know, we've got that 2.5. So the sort of commits and so forth for release is this was a big spike that happened back there. But for the most part it tracks proportionately to the actual absolute numbers that are happening in each release. So there certainly is indicators though. Again, what was sort of happening in February of 2020 to today it's sort of like it looks like there's something going on here. So I still don't know, but it was interesting. Any comments you want to say about these things before I go on. Yeah, so I think that some of one of the, the simple explanations for this is that women are younger in the system so therefore don't have the level of responsibility that comes with superiority. I explain actually why they are significantly fewer changes and significantly fewer women part of it. I think that it would be more interesting to do all of this analysis by generations so the people who start contributing in 2010. Where do they end? What portion of them become long term long term contributors of those become long term contributors, which ones take a role of committing code for somebody else. And how does it break by gender. So the raw numbers don't look very, very useful but I think that to make a, another quick conclusion. It would be necessary to really take into consideration, not to compare against the entire population, but compared against the population of people who started at the same time as them. Effectively a cohort. Yes. Okay. So, as you can see, we can't really drawing real strong conclusions yet from the data we're seeing. But one of the things last week we had Linux plumbers. We ran a survey as part of the plumbers event to hold that audience. What do they think is significant. It was an anonymous survey. And we just wanted to see what they were thinking about what's happening in the future and what the trends lines are. There's about 1000 attendees. And we had about 203 responses to a very short, simple survey. And so one of the first questions is, you know, do you think Linux will be as popular 10 years from now as it is today? And the answer is pretty overwhelmingly yes. 96%. Now that's kind of interesting in the sense that I interpret that personally as trust in the seniority, the senior people in the project. And they feel like it's on a good trend line and I don't think I was too worried about that. However, when you start looking, it's 20 years from now. Well, between 10 and 20 years is when we'll probably see a bunch of people retire. So that could be a part of it. Most people think it's on a solid, but about a third. You know, don't feel confident 20 years from now.  It's certainly not representative industry at all. But it was an interesting insight and, you know, get back to sustainability question. What's going to make things sustainable? What's going to make things, you know, how do we, how do we, how do we see the problem? And, you know, how can we put steps into address? And then we added a few other questions that I thought were kind of interesting. You know, do you think the git will be still used to collect and manage patches 20 years from now? Well, I think that's a vote of confidence in the git system. That, you know, 20 years from now, everyone still thinks they'll be using git or 77% too.  But I don't definitely know. So I think git for developers is working out fairly well as a way for distributed sharing and collaboration on code is kind of how I take and interpret those numbers. The next question we had is, you know, do you think that contributions will continue to come in value mailing lists in 20 years from now? This has been a source of tension in LKML. The rate of it is such that you basically need a bot to manage it for yourself and to focus on the things you want to keep track of. And that workflow is pretty much baked into the whole kernel repositories. And there's been tensions for new developers coming in to actually master that email workflow and frustrations have been heard in various surveys along the way. And so I think that's starting to show up in here.  Others are saying no. Others aren't sure. So the email workflow, there's something possibly that, you know, it's being under discussion at the Chrome community multiple times and probably will continue to be under discussion as, you know, people age. And as a generation's age, you know, the senior developers who are very efficient with it, the new ones have probably less so. So trying to figure out, you know, is this an area that we should be focusing on with the, you know, from the development workflow perspectives. I think it's things that get talked about at the maintainer summit. We probably continue to get talked about the maintainer summit for the next 10 years until we figure out something that makes people effective and happy.  So that's an interest, that was sort of an interesting trend. And then the other question, because of last week, all the Rust talks that were then, and the security aspects and the safety aspects is, you know, do you think that the links will remain fully, you know, primarily implemented in C? And 43%, 44% said yes. But we had about a third saying no. And, you know, there's a lot of actually really good discussions going on in the Rust with Rust and, you know, how can we make the security of the kernel safer. So, I guess to wrap it up, conclusions we've got so far is, you know, pretty much the kernel is vibrant, active, and it, you know, remain fairly resilient with the challenges implemented by COVID-19. You know, there's no really statistically significant slowdown that we can, you know, trust at this point, and there's possibly even an increase from the numbers you were seeing at the start. The trend lines are up, there's more commits, there's more contributors. And, you know, we're hitting these new milestones all the time. But some groups are being impacted, but we can't be authoritative. Potentially, you know, like I say, the women may or may not have, quite frankly, been impacted. There's fewer women that came in. That line was flatter over the year. But, you know, ask me in two years' time, I'm probably able to be a bit more authoritative. However, the sustainability focus is important. You know, as we transition the current leadership, as people age and retire, and get tired of working on the kernel, making sure we have a diverse pool of new contributors, and to keep things vibrant going forward. And part of doing that is to really understand the motivations for the new contributors. And, you know, why is it going to motivate them to stay, contribute, and be effective in the community since we all had to depend on it? And that is pretty much what I had for you guys today, and what Daniel has been sharing with some of the things that we sort of talked about through the course of the year and discussions on these topics. But does anyone have any questions? I'm looking around the room, Daniel. No one's raising a hand or opening their mouths. However, we did get enough people to serve eyes following, and I don't see anyone snoring, so I guess that's a good sign. Go for it. Not that we've been able to tell from the numbers yet. Like I say, we were seeing a lot more, but it's hard for us. Like, most of the corporates went remote, so there's no real data to let us see that. What was the question, please? Do we have any, sorry, my apologies, Daniel. Do we have any data showing the, you know, distribution between the corporate contributions when COVID started and the community? Paraphrase that correctly. Okay, good. And we really didn't do any analysis there. I was going to mention that that's something that we want to look at, and there's a little bit of threat to validity because sometimes people use a public email address. We see a lot of contributions from Gmail, but it's obvious that there is influence by the organizations. And in fact, my personal opinion, and this is more hypothesis, is that the through survival of the kernel doesn't depend on volunteers who joined the kernel, but it depends on organizations who joined the kernel and put developers to work on the features that the companies are required. So the true agents that control the future of the kernel are not volunteers, but are companies who have vested interest on the survival of the kernel. Thank you for the question though. If there's no more questions then, I will say thank you and appreciate your patience with us as we managed to figure out how to get this to work. Thanks.


To begin Phase 2 of the housing contracting process, go to campushousing.uark.edu. Select UARC Student SSO Login as you did in Phase 1. Log in with the UARC username and your university password. Select Residence Hall Contract, slash Live with Parent Form and continue the academic year 2023-2024 residence hall application. On the Living Learning Community Selection page, select what LLC you would like to apply for or select that you are not interested in an LLC. If you selected an LLC, fill out the agreement and check any applicable boxes. On the Emergency Info page, fill out your two emergency contacts and indicate any applicable medical conditions. On your Personal Profile page, complete your Personal Profile. This information can later be used during the RoomH Search process to help with roommate selection. On the RoomH Search Agreement page, leave the display and roommate search results checked if you wish to be part of the roommate selection. Students who are members of the Living Learning Communities may only search for roommates who are also part of the Living Learning Community.  Once you have confirmed your roommate, revisit this page and opt out of the roommate selection process. On the Resident Reserve parking waiting list page, simply read the information about Resident Reserve parking. As a reminder, your name will be added to the Resident Reserve parking waiting list. It does not guarantee you Resident Reserve parking. You have now completed phase two of the contracting process. If you have questions during the contracting process, please email housingathousingatuark.edu or call<PHONE_NUMBER>.


This question is from Subhashesh Mukherjee and he says, I want to know the truth of black magic. My non-Bengali friends believe black magic has come into existence from West Bengal. How much truth is there in this? So very Bengali question. The truth, they're not asking how much truth in the black magic. They're asking whether it came from West Bengal or not. Well, Kerala people believe it came from Kerala. It's little fishy, both the populations. Lot of fish in them, you know? So, at one time in this country, as you have a family doctor, they used to have a witch doctor. Almost every family had somebody to consult on these kind of aspects because these arts were so widespread. Did it originate in Bengal? Did it originate in Kerala? No, I think it survived more in Kerala and Bengal today. In other places it's garden kid little wiped out. Essentially what you're talking about is occult. Occult is a certain technology that you can use your energies to create certain impact. But unfortunately it's gotten very negative press because market was for the negative. So people used it more negatively than positively. It could also be used positively. It's like any other technology. You can either use it positively or negatively. Unfortunately the negative usage became overwhelmingly larger than the positive usage. So people think occult means it's negative. No, the usage has become unfortunately negative. It could also be used in a positive manner. When I say it could also be used in a positive manner, you can transform life with it. You could help people out of their health situations, out of their psychological situations, various things could be done. Instead of that, because the market is mainly for the negative, because of that it's gotten a negative image. Occult is like this. See right now all of you have a phone. Suppose you had a phone hundred years ago, cell phone hundred years ago, you could claim you have occult powers. Because you could just take this and speak to somebody in America, everybody who they will shiver, okay? Yes or no? So occult is just technology. You could communicate. You could use your energies to communicate with somebody. But as modern technology becomes more and more subtle, the need for occult is receding. Receding quite a bit, because so many things that we used to do in occult today can be delivered. You can send a WhatsApp message.  It took a lot more energy and time to do that. Now, message goes. So messaging business has completely fallen out of occult. Otherwise occult was mainly used to deliver messages to people in a different way. You have heard of telepathy and telecommun… you know, not telecommunication, telekinetics and various other things where things were done from a distance. But today all those things are being done. By regular technology, so occult or the requirement for occultism withdrawing, the need is just going away and probably most of it will go away. There are a few things that one could do. But above all, if… if we created a society that whatever is given to you, you will use it in a positive way, occult can be a tremendous possibility. As technology can be tremendous possibility. As I mentioned earlier, most of the technology is used for developing arms and armaments and bombs and nuclear bombs and more and more destructive things. The same thing could have been used for something else. Absolutely positive things could have been done, but that's not been done because the market is for the negative. Similarly, the same things have happened to occult, your Mukherjee friend. Well, I think from what I hear, I think Kerala tops in the occult practices even today. Next comes West Bengal. Next, probably some northeastern states have this, but they're very rudimentary occult. Kerala occult is quite sophisticated. You will see a lot of occult in North America, in the North American tribes, but very basic, mainly messaging occult. But now they all have smartphones, so it's all going out. I think, Kashmir at one time had a lot of occult. Bengal, Kerala, northeast, well, some parts of Andhra Pradesh and Orissa, but now market is done.