Okay, we are recording. Hello everyone! This is CircuitPython Weekly for Monday, February 27, 2023. This is time of the week where we get together to talk about all things CircuitPython. I'm Liz, and I'm sponsored by Adafruit to work on CircuitPython. CircuitPython is a version of Python designed to run on tiny computers called microcontrollers. CircuitPython development is primarily sponsored by Adafruit, so if you want to support Adafruit and CircuitPython, consider purchasing hardware from Adafruit.com. This meeting is hosted on the Adafruit Discord server. You can join anytime by going to adafruit.it-discord. We hold the meeting on the hashtag CircuitPython-dev-text channel and the CircuitPython voice channel. This meeting typically happens on Mondays at 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific, except when it coincides with a U.S. holiday. In the note stock, there's a link to a calendar you can view online, or add to your favorite calendar app. We also send notifications about upcoming meetings via Discord. If you would like to receive these notifications, ask us to add you to the CircuitPython NISA's Discord role. There's a note stock to accompany the meeting and recording. The note stock contains timestamps to go along with the video, so you can use the doc to view only a part of the video that interests you most. The meeting tends to run 45-60 minutes, so this gives you the option to skip around. After each meeting, we post a link for the next meeting's note stock to the CircuitPython-dev channel on the Adafruit Discord. You can check the pin messages to find the latest note stock, so you can add your notes for the following meeting. If you wish to participate but cannot attend, you can leave hug reports and status updates in the document for us to read during the meeting. This meeting is held in five parts. First part is community news. This will look at all things CircuitPython and Python on hardware in the community. It's a preview of our Python on microcontrollers newsletter. Second part is stay at CircuitPython libraries in Blinka. This is a statistical overview of the entire project. It's a chance to look at the project by numbers separate from what we're all up to. Third part is hug reports. Hug reports is an opportunity to highlight the good things folks are doing, taking time to recognize the awesome folks in our community. Fourth part is status updates. Status updates is an opportunity to sync up with what we've been up to. Take a couple minutes, talk about what you've been doing in the last week, since the last meeting, and what you've been up to over the next week until the next meeting. And the fifth part is in the weeds. In the weeds is an opportunity for more long-form discussions. These discussions can come out of status updates or be something you've identified ahead of time as too long for status updates. And that covers how the meeting will go. With that, we're going to go to community news. And I think the biggest piece of community news is CircuitPython 8.0.3 was released. CircuitPython 8.0.3 is the latest bugs fix version of CircuitPython as a new stable release. And some changes that are notable are the correct error reporting in SSL socket for the RP2040, increased number of LWIP timers for MD&S, and on the SAM boards fix pad assignments for bus.io.uart and improve pen validation. And then our CircuitPython weekly newsletter is a CircuitPython community-run newsletter emailed every Tuesday. The complete archives are available at AdafruitDaily.com. It highlights the latest Python on hardware-related news from around the web, including CircuitPython, Python, and MicroPython developments. Contribute your own news or project, edit next week's draft on GitHub, and submit a pull request with the changes. You may also tag with CircuitPython on Twitter or email cpnews at adafruit.com. You can also hashtag on Mastodon as well. Some notable projects I saw this week were a clock that changes time when you look at it, and that's when Guy Dupont, basically there's like this little sensor and it can tell when you're looking at it that it shows random numbers instead of just, you know, the actual time. And another notable is playing GIFs in CircuitPython. Our own Mark Komu Gambler has been developing GIF image playback on CircuitPython displays coming CircuitPython 8.1.0 beta. It's best on lower resolution displays so that your controller do the high data transfer requirements. And that wraps up the newsletter, which will be out tomorrow, be sure that you're subscribed. And the next is going to be a state of CircuitPython, the libraries, and Blinka. This is the quantitative overview of the entire project. Gives us a chance to look at the health of the project separate from what we're up to. We'll talk about the project overall, then separately discuss the core, libraries, and Blinka. So first up, in overall, there were 37 pull requests merged from 25 authors, eight reviewers, and 17 closed issues by 11 people, and 19 opened by 17 people. And now we're going to go to Scott for the core. All right. Thank you, Liz. Okay. For the core, we had 24 pull requests merged from 17 different authors. So thank you to all of our authors. I think Melinda Movasha is a new name. Exorbit is occasionally FTAB, Atlantor, Luzon00 are all new names to me. We had four reviewers. So thank you to all of our reviewers. We have 27 open pull requests. We're getting close to the 25 limit that gets it on a single page. So as always, please take a look and help us out if any of these draft PRs can be pushed along the line. That would be great. Issues-wise, we had eight closed issues by six people and 12 open by 11 people. So we're up four for a total of 624 open views. And this seems to be, I think we're in them. Now that 8.0 has been stable, we are getting more testing on that. So I think our issue influx is a bit due to that. No problem, we should get past it and all that. Speaking of categorizations or 8.0, we have three open issues in 8.0.x. These are things that we think we should do pretty quickly. We have 12 open issues for 8.1, and we have 62 open issues for 8xx, which are kind of bugs that we'd like to do sooner rather than later, or yeah, that we'd like to do it all. Again, this prioritization only really applies to those of us who are funded by Adafruit to work on CircuitPython. We're happy to see other folks come along and do things, even if they don't necessarily match up with these milestones. We have three issues not assigned to milestones. So those need to be taken a look at and categorized as well, triaged, and that's it for the core. Thank you, Scott. And next we are going to go to Libraries. Catney is out, but Jeff has kindly offered to read for us. Hello. So this is about the CircuitPython Libraries. And numbers-wise, we had 10 pull requests merged across all of the libraries from seven authors. And I want to say thanks to EA Graham Jr. and LNK2Past, who are names that I don't recognize, as well as the five reviewers, thanks to all of you. There is in the notes document a list of those merged pull requests, and that leaves us with 46 open pull requests ranging in age from one day to 881 days. And that one that's 881 days I'm sure is aging like a fine wine. Issues-wise, we had nine closed by six people and five open by five people. So this week we turned it downwards, but that leaves us with 593 open issues. Among those are 75 good first issues. If you're interested in this information and more, check out circuitpython.org slash contributing. You'll find all the open PRs, open issues, and a list of library infrastructure issues. If you're looking to contribute, this is a great place to start. The issues can be sorted by label, so you can search for good first issue if you're getting started, or bug or enhancement if you're looking for something a bit more complicated. We have a guide on contributing to Git and GitHub, and we're always available to get you started with that. So let us know if you need any assistance. All right, I've got some more numbers before I wrap up the libraries section. We get download stats from PyPI, and in the past week we had, I think this is weekly, yes, we had 134,494 PyPI downloads of over 306 libraries. And in the notes document is the list of top 10 libraries that were downloaded. Bus device often tops the list, Neopixel, and then some of the others vary. So if you're interested in statistics, go check those out. And as far as library updates in the last seven days, we had several updates, but no new libraries. And that's what I've got. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. And next, we are going to hear from Melissa on the state of Blinka. Hold on, I lost my document here. Here it is. So Blinka is our circuit pack. The layer for my Python reservoir by another single board computers. And this week we had three pull requests merged by two authors and wondering viewer. There are currently four open pull requests amongst the repositories. And there were zero closed issues by zero people and two open by two people leaving a net of 92 open issues. There are, or there were 19,779 PI PI downloads in the last week and 7,793 PI wheels downloads in the last month. And we are at 101 boards. That's it. Thank you, Melissa. And that is the state of circuit Python, libraries and Blinka. Next up is hug reports. Hug reports is a chance to highlight folks in the circuit Python community and beyond for doing awesome things. I will start and then we'll go down the list alphabetically to give everyone a chance to participate. If you're text only or missing the meeting, but have hug reports in the notes document, I will read them off as I get you on the list.  And next I'm going to go to see Grover who is text only. He has a hug report to Dan H team and community for the latest release. And now we will go to Dan. Thank you. Thanks to Scott for starting to work on it at mx issues because we have a new board coming out. And thanks to Jeff and Scott for an issue review meeting over it at mx issues that we had last week. So we kind of assign things to everybody and push some things forward and decided what was more important. Thanks to X orbit for finding a regression of what is printed when we do a soft restart. We used to print soft reboot and some tools depended on that. I didn't know that. And there was a bug also where that ended up not being printed. So X over the night together found a very simple solution to that. Okay, that's it. Thank you, Dan. Next we're going to go to David Glau who is text only. He has a hug report for Scott for Dan care of his PR for display. SSD 1306 and J Pesada 2020 for testing it on hardware. I don't have Mark Glambler for the anime gift library and PT for chatting about my two product ideas with more. One was hinted in desk of Lady Aida. That's very exciting. And next we're going to DJ Devin. I have a hug for Nair Doc and Dan H trying to help me with the reason UM Feather S3 issue. I'll talk about that later. Thanks you to scur for having me find an alternative part in digikey that I couldn't find. And to Stendl and the help with 3D printing channel for very interesting discussions about 3D printers. I've been learning a lot about 3D printers in there. That's it. Thank you. Next we are going to go to foamy guy. Thanks Liz. This week hard reports for me. First one for Tetric for working on the JavaScript simulation with the walk walk we project. And only getting that up and running with some of the circuit Python stuff but also thinking about ways that it can be used to enhance some of our automated checks. Lots of interesting stuff on the horizon in that area. I think her report. Thanks to Scott for working on the seven color E Inc support inside the core as well as making a couple libraries. Thank you to GitHub user Vladac who has made a bunch of improvements in the mini QTT library lately and then a group hug for everybody. Thanks. Thanks foamy guy. Next we are going to go to Jeff. Hello, I have a group hug and then a couple of individual ones. One for Melissa for the very cool web based ESP 32 installer stuff. It's just every time you take a step forward in getting the software onto the device it's wonderful and this is one of those things. A hug to Jim and Scott for some outlandish flash savings idea discussions and making me explore some haunted corners of the C preprocessor. And finally a hug to Dan for releasing that latest version 803. That's my God. Thank you Jeff. Next we're going to go to Jose David who is text only, and they had a group hug. Next we're going to go to make her Melissa.  Thank you. Next we're going to have marks share has hug report for DJ air. I'm so sorry if I'm saying any of these names incorrectly. Michael LeCocque Deshipu and Dan H for troubleshooting documentation problems with on disk GIF. Michael LeCocque for writing a small Python tool to prepare GIF images so it will work with circuit Python. Larry Bank again for the anime GIF library and who reached out asking if we wanted to include anything upstream to help with integration to circuit Python. And then next is retired wizard who is also text only. Dan H and near doc for all the times they gently get me back on course a group hug to the entire circuit Python community for being awesome. And bill 88 T for the setable high stack PR. I never really believed I would get away from custom CP builds for my app but bill 88 T made it happen. And then we will go to Scott. Okay, sorry. Hug reports for me hug to Jeff and Dan for hopping onto the IMX RT train. It's going to be helpful having you to testing is and fixing as well. A huge hug report to Jeff for the lead on code size reduction. This is kind of for the CMD 21 that's it's pretty tricky to fit anything new. And I really value that Jeff gave me something from his back pocket to free up some space on the same day 21. So thanks, Jeff for that. And then also hug report to tactic for running circuit Python with the RP 2040 JS. I think this is really exciting being able to run circuit Python in the CI as if it were on RP 2040. I think we're going to get some really cool library tooling out of that. So thank you for working on that. Thank you, Scott. And that is been hug reports. Next up is status updates. Status updates is our time to sync up on what we're doing. We'll start and we'll go through the list alphabetically to give everyone a chance to participate. When I call on you to take a couple of minutes to talk about what you've been doing since the last meeting and what you'll be doing until the next meeting. This is also an opportunity to provide tips and tricks relevant to what people are working on. If the discussion becomes too much for status updates, we can move it to in the weeds. And with that, I will begin. And I've been working on a lot of product guides recently. And in between that, I've been doing a lot of CAD for an updating robots liar harp project. I finished printing the pieces over the weekend, so hopefully I can try and get a demo going soon. All I have to do now is, you know, put it together, which is always the toughest part. And next we'll go to C Grover, who is text only. Flurry of activity, assembling, testing and coding two projects consisting of four new PCBs. One of the project involves completely refactoring some older circle Python code with a fresh approach. The second is a new board family and code design. In the process of refactoring the first project, I found that when setting the duty cycle of a PWM pin with a fixed frequency, a code execution delay equal to the period of the PWM frequency is introduced. The blocking delay was experienced when trying to rapidly change duty cycle, particularly for DC motor and servo projects that prefer PDOM frequencies in the 25 Hz to 500 Hz range. The delay also complicated the use of async IO for motor control. The SAMD 51's PWM timer hardware has a double buffer mode that might eliminate the delay, but the symptoms indicate that it may not be in use. An issue was submitted. A tangent, wondering if the PWM duty cycle set delay could noticeably impact the throughput of other uses such as RGB LED arrays for non-neopixel devices. And this week, a solder paste extravaganza, which sounds very exciting. And next, we're going to go to Dan. Okay, so as people mentioned, I released sort of Python 803 on Thursday. We already see an 804 coming up probably that exorbit that fixed from exorbit, and there's probably at least one or two other things as we have three open issues on 803. We also want to release the first beta for 8.1.0. There's just some testing that needs to happen before that happens, but it should be very soon. As I mentioned last week, I'm working on UF2 Booloader fixed with the SAMV 21 that has brownout detection in it, which a number of people have asked for. One of the things that I'm testing for 8.1.0 is the implementation of the Metro M7-1011 to i.mx, NXP chip, and I've rediscovered or I discovered that even though this board seems to work properly on a lot of platforms on my kind of bog standard Intel Linux platforms, CircuitPy doesn't show up because it fails in the process of setting up. It's a kind of read failure. So I'm working on some folks with that and Scott is going to test it. He ducks up to get out of the closet so he can test it as well. This is not a problem for most people. It does work on some Intel Linux platforms and it works fine on Mac on Windows on the same computers. So this is really a Linux specific thing. All right. I wrote a guide about CircuitPy found safe mode and that guy is being reviewed so it probably will show up around Wednesday or so. And I did get a PyPico Debug Probe which I'm interested in seeing whether it works kind of as effectively as a J-Link or at all for people who now are being priced out of the J-Link market because the minimum J-Link cost is now $60 even for the educational model. Okay, that's it. And next is David Glau who is text only so I will read. No CP activity this week except consuming Adafruit YouTube video. And time spent in upgrading, installing my hardware and playing with stable diffusion, AI text to image. And next we're going to hear from DJ Devin. Thank you. This week I finished the physical 3D print of my mail boom box which took about 150 hours in total printing in clear PET-G which was a minor victory in itself. I attempted to start the wiring up the I2S audio module today which is going to piggyback onto the Laura Featherwing so it's a double stack. And I couldn't even boot that up because Windows refuses to detect the UM Feather S3 as a USB storage device which was something that just happened like hours ago, I just started on that. And it's stuck as a JTAG device which I've never seen before. And in the very last minute I think I discovered a potential issue with the USB-C connector itself that unexpected maker is using. It has some really weird issue where if you move it by a hair, one of the LEDs on the side will barely light almost like it's a capacitance kind of issue where, I don't know, it was weird. So there's something going on there and it could be my cables. I could have just all bad USB-C cables but since I've never been able to get the thing to work right I'm kind of starting to lean toward a bad USB-C connector or maybe some kind of crosstalk next to the USB. That would make a lot of sense. I've been in touch with CHEP3D who is a popular YouTuber for 3D printing about a possible 2.0 revision of his eLeveler PCB incorporating some of my ideas from the Betabraider PCB design which that was originally based on his. So I said, hey, you take it and you run with it. That's fine. I was really interested in the additional gantry leveling switch idea that I added on there as well as making it all one-sided flat PCB so you can use it on a heated bit. Just overall improvements and I was like, take it, run with it. Cheers, have fun. And that's all I've been up to this week. Thank you, DJ Devin. Looks like there's some tips in chat from Dan about what could possibly be wrong. And I'll also say just anecdotally, on Windows sometimes with these USB drives, I almost have to reboot sometimes just to get to work even if I've tried everything that would seem to make sense. So I'm sure you've probably already tried rebooting, but just wanted to mention that too. Next we'll hear from Foamy Guy. All right. I was not as around as much last week, so I didn't have a chance to attend last week's meeting. So I got a couple extra bullet points in here, but stuff I've been up to trying out the animated gift support on a couple of different devices. I was kind of tacked on to the side of that. I was doing some experimenting with the color converter class to try to get a better understanding for myself of how it works and specifically like how it's different than pallet and just the similarities and differences between them, what different functionality they have, all that sort of stuff. In the process of doing that tinkering, I uncovered that one of the changes that I made recently in the argument validation, actually I think limited the number of colors a little bit too small, smaller than I had intended to. So I actually went back and raised that limit in the PR, which I was happy to find this out by tinkering around with color converter and I walked away with a better understanding of it as well. So I'm feeling much better off on how that stuff works together. I tested out some instructions that were in a PR for using the Neopixel library on a Raspberry Pi without having to use sudo for executing the script. So that's pretty cool stuff and that was working pretty well for me and it was nice to see that somebody submitted that, somebody from the community submitted that as an update to the library. The other thing from the last couple of weeks, I was working on wiring up and testing the Pimeroni Impression e-Ink screen, which is one of these seven color e-Inks. I was wandering down the wrong path for a little while, but I eventually realized one of the libraries that Scott made actually works out of the box for this device. So now I've got that up and running. Moving into this week and the next couple of days, this morning I was testing out some PRs for Airlift and Mini MQTT. I got a couple other lined up to look into this afternoon as well. I want to make some more examples for those e-Ink screens. There's basically a simple one that loads a bitmap in those repos, but I think it would be nice to have some colored blocks and some other more basic things that don't require external images or anything like that as well in order to test it out. And then the other thing I have in mind for this week is to start looking into updating examples and learn guide code for the new DisplayIO APIs. Those are changed with 8.0. It's still backwards compatible for now, but I think now that 8.0 is released and live is a stable release, I think it's time to go and start figuring out how much of all of that code will be able to be updated for the new API. So that's what I've got in mind for this week. Thanks. Thank you, PomiGuy. And next we'll hear from Jet. All right. It was another light week as far as CircuitPython work goes, but I did fix a bug on Pico SSL sockets where a funny large number around four billion was returned instead of raising an exception. I investigated the PWM IO frequency limitations on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller and improved documentation in response to a user reported issue. There is a possibility that it could be made more frequency accurate by using a slightly different algorithm, but it's a lot of effort for a pretty minor return as it is a typical error is like you ask for 60 Hertz and you get 59.95 Hertz instead. And the original poster, although they weren't thrilled with the idea, I suggested that they could directly use the PIO peripheral to generate a very frequency accurate and low frequency pulse. And then Dan, I don't know if you mentioned this, but Dan was going to pick that up and make it an exception if you ask for a frequency six Hertz or under on the RP2040 because the lowest value that it can give you is about seven and a half Hertz. Anyway, I've been working on and will continue to work on the floppy feather wing product guide. So look for that soon on the learn system that board does work with circuit Python or Arduino and it's fun if you're into that retro stuff. And also just this afternoon, I plan to check out the functionality of two prototype boards that the more sent me both are can bus products. And I think they've both been teased a really long time ago on ask an engineer or the Sunday night show or something like that because they've been in the works for a while.  And that's really exciting. Now we're going to look at Jose David's notes. Who's text only last week updating some examples for the paper displays worked in the verbose output for bitmap label worked to get ASCII art from a bitmap based on the work from Jeppler for the OV camera need more work. Circuit Python Jason working to build a font for knitting pattern symbols based on the work of Martin and Jeppler with the fork awesome font as a knitter that sounds great to me to this week, different personal projects. And now we'll be going to maker Melissa. Hello, let's see. I finished up the circuit Python installer and it's now live. There's still some cores issues that we're trying to work out, but currently the bootletters and Ben installs are working fine. But the U of two installs are the ones that are failing. So it's just a matter of just downloading and copying to the boards and not a big deal. I wrote a merge Ben library and JavaScript like ESP tools merge Ben function. And it's producing what appears to be a quick file but some more extensive testing is needed. And I updated the whippersnapper firmware uploader to be able to use that library. And I submitted a small circuit Python code editor bug fix for the USB workflow this morning. And so I'm just going to continue on that. Thank you, Melissa. And finally, we will hear from Scott. Hello. First on my list is testing the IMX RT USB with Intel USB controller. I have an AMD box that I use here. So I need to date and try it on Intel and had some issues. So I am going to dust off this Intel nut and give it a try with that. That's first on my list because that's kind of a showstopper. After that, the Bengal JS 2 and seven color ePaper PR was merged in. Thanks, Dan. I have two libraries to finish. And as I finish those, I also need to go through the, we have the creating and sharing circuit Python library guided ages ago. And it says there's some guide feedback there that I need to actually go through and update for. So when I'm in library mode, that's what I'm going to do. Besides that, I was working on getting the micro Python perf bench going with circuit Python. This is what the micro Python devs use to judge impact of their code changes on how performant the micro Python VM is. So I wanted to get that going on circuit Python in particular to understand the impact of changes with memory hierarchy decisions on the IMX RT. There's basically like all your code lives on flash, but then the CPU has some cash in front of it. And then you have RAM and different types of RAM on those chips there. They're a lot more complicated than a lot of the other micros we use. And so by having perf bench going, I can like try the IMX in different configurations and get a feel for what the right trade offs are. I'm going to write this up in this guide, this implementer's guide that I've been working on. So as a smoke test figure out like is the performance about what I want out of the port that I'm working on. A consequence of doing this was that we usually have a size analysis script for a build that says here's how full flash is here. Here's how full RAM is and the IMX because it has different types of RAM and flash is a bit more complicated. So I also am looking to redo the size analysis script so that we can see how big each different memory region is. So we'll be working on that as well. And that's my update. Great. Thank you Scott. And that concludes the status updates. Next we'll be going to in the weeds and I currently don't see any topics in the weeds. So while I read the description, that will be folks time to add in if you have them. In the weeds is an opportunity for more long form discussions that either come out of status updates or the folks have identified ahead of time. If you have any in the weeds topics, please make sure they get added while we're discussing other things. So we're not waiting around to see if anyone has topics. That I will wait once, twice, and we will move on to the wrap up. This has been the Serga Python weekly for Monday, February 27th, 2023. Thank you everyone who participated. If you want to support Adafruit and Serga Python and those of us that work on Serga Python, consider purchasing from the Adafruit shop at adafruit.com. This meeting will be released on YouTube at youtube.com slash Adafruit and the podcast will be available on major podcast services. It will also be featured in the Python for Microcontrollers newsletter. Visit adafruitdaily.com to subscribe and that comes out tomorrow. The next meeting will be held next Monday as usual at 2 p.m. Eastern 11 a.m. Pacific. This meeting is held on the Adafruit Discord which you can join by going to adafruit.it slash discord. To be notified about the meeting and any changes to the time or day, you can ask to be added to the Serga Python nieces role on Discord. We hope to see you all next week. Thanks everyone.


Thank you. Welcome once again. When Dave was showing the video of the uni robot, as I would probably want to call that, I was reminded of a colleague of mine in a company I used to work for. That guy was a human uni robot, actually. And a very funny thing, he used to actually walk in the cafeteria like this and we used to think, oh my goodness, let him not go close to the window there because it was always scary who's going to take care of the liabilities if something happens to him. But just to bring some energy level in the room there with your permission, I want to do a very small experiment. Now what Dave shows us was a video of what I would like to call that with Dave, that's okay with you is a mobile agility, right? I mean, there was a device that was actually mobile and it was trying to control itself through an internal PLC or some mechanism. So it had a feedback mechanism, it was trying to do that. How are you game today morning for a static agility exercise? Would you like to do something like that? Okay, so the energy levels are a little low, so I hope it helps all of you. So it's a very simple exercise. Anyone has been to China? Okay, so I'm claiming that it's a Chinese exercise. Please don't call my bluff, but I believe it's a Chinese exercise. So what we're going to do is you all will stand up at your seat, right? And let me just explain you so that you get the thing. Chinese believe there are six meridians that pass through each of these legs. So what they do is actually you take your own position and you try and control yourself and stand as much time as you can. And it's very easy as you can see that I'm standing, but you have to keep your eyes closed. And that's when the fun begins. And you do this and then you do this like this and it's supposed to create a lot of energy in you. Now let's see how much of us are cut out for a static agility, right? You have to keep thinking your mind has to be constantly agile. A lot of knowledge that they've talked about. I think you have to really feel it inside your mind to be able to balance yourself when you are actually keeping your eyes closed. You see, I cannot even do it for a few seconds. So I hope we have a last man or a last woman standing at the end of that exercise. So with your permission if you all would like to stand up and at the count of three, no cheating, right? Don't hold anything, right? Make yourself comfortable.  Just find your position that works for you and at the count of three, close your eyes and stand on your right leg first. And as soon as people keep falling down, just sit and watch others how they are doing. Let's not disturb the ones who are able to do that, right? Okay, so one, two, three.  Ma'am, what's your name? I think you were the one who were last standing. Deepa. Give her a big hand. Thank you. How was it really imagining when you have all your inputs, you are flying blind literally.  How was that for being a mobile agility, right? I just coined a new thing here. Okay, so with that I just want to stand here for the next ten minutes and just introduce the program today for all of you. As you all know, we are in the day four of the largest conference in Asia that we have been doing. I want to just share a few of the things. Once again, thanking all the sponsors, making it happen there, would not be possible without all the active support from sponsors and the community. And this has really been a great effort planning this. I've been happy to be a part of the team, the narration from who they've been leading. We have this fabulous bunch of speakers here and a lot of authors here in the midst of us. I just want to make a brief mention of the team here.  So narration is here and I want to actually take this opportunity to also see if Pramod is here. Pramod here. Hi, Ellen. Ravi is there. Doc. Okay. And that's the last is me here. I just want to call out my own team here, Jerry. Maybe Jerry is not here. Ted couldn't come all the way from Australia. And the other team members, Srikanth, Pradeep, Prasad and Evan. Okay, I see here. Hey, thanks, guys. Thanks for making it here. I also want to take a few seconds out and actually call out Naresh for the leadership that he has been providing to the community efforts here. This is the 10th year running and I believe there's a ninth conference in the 10th year running that it's been happening there. And every year as Todd, you would be happy, as Dave would be happy to. So we have been incrementally raising the pitch. We've been just getting better and better all the time. We have been getting a fabulous set of speakers here. The attendance just keeps increasing all the time here. So I just want to call out Naresh. Thanks for all the help. Thanks for all the leadership and guidance here for making it happen for all of us. As you can see here, we have a lot of, I mean, the statistics speak for themselves.  We are in the day four, technically the last day of the conference. And tomorrow we are going to have the first Agile India job fair, the first of its kind. Don't tell your company if they have sponsored your attendance here, right? You probably don't want to be expensing that. So we are in the day four here with the Agile beyond Agile. And these are, this is the day you already have the schedule here with you. I do not want to repeat it all for you because you all have it. There's just one change here. We'll be having the tea break right after the small session. And the Victoria session on Agile coaching is not happening. She couldn't make it. So we'll be having a short Q&A session in the room where it's meant to be. So, yeah, thanks. Some other hygiene announcements. So the DVD of these will be available. Look out for a mail that will hit your mailboxes in due course of time. Once all the DVD recordings are available there, they'll be available for payment. So you can make the payment and buy the DVDs. I hope you have been giving your feet good exercise. Or I hope you have not been giving good exercise to your feet. Because I would like to believe that we have been able to have a great set of sessions for you. But yes, please exercise law of two feet. If you don't feel happy or you feel that you would be better off in some other session, go ahead and do that. We had, we were also in touch with a lot of other speakers who were, because of other prior engagements, were not able to make it to the session. And what we did was we actually held a series of hangouts on Google Hangouts. And some of these are available now, so you can actually go and have a look at them once again if you'd like to do that. We will also be having a book signing by Dave today during the coffee break right outside in the bookstore area. There are books available for purchase. You can purchase them and have autographed by Dave. And if you have your personal copy of one of his books, that's also okay, but use the time when we have the coffee break there. This is about the job fair that we are going to have tomorrow, the whole day there. Hopefully we want to build a different kind of ecosystem here because no marketplace can really truly sustain if there is no demand and supply. So we want to make sure that we have a bunch of practitioners and thinkers. We want to make sure that we are able to get people to come together and have a direct connect with them. So it's a great community effort. I hope most of you or all of you are able to come there and make it a success. It's an experiment by itself. And I hope for the interests of the community we succeed in that. Is Richard here? I guess Richard is not here. But we'd probably have it a little later than the Agile Art or Narish would like to just... So as you guys know, we've been doing the Agile Art event in all the receptions during the evening and we've put together the final art piece and it's there for viewing. A lot of fantastic art out there in terms of the Agile India logo and a lot of creative stuff done. So we'll leave it out here for people to take pictures or watch it and get inspired with the artwork. In the evening when we do the closing talk, we will actually dismantle it and people can take these art pieces and go back to home as a souvenir. So come back again here during the closing note if you'd like to pick up one of these art pieces back home, right? And thanks to Richard for organizing this whole art event. I think it was a fantastic opportunity for people to meet and work. Thank you. Thanks, Narish. I also want to make a forward announcement for two of the conferences that we will be conducting. The functional conference and you can go to functionalcon.com April, mid of the month. And the Selenium conference is going to happen in September time frame. So you can go to these links and follow up and sign up for more updates on these. Just a small word on feedback. As we have probably already told in the last few days, we are not collecting any paper feedback. We're not collecting feedback on the dead bodies of trees. Let's put it this way. We would like to collect your feedback electronically. So if you are happy, tweet with Agile India 2014. If you are not happy, let us know so that we can fix it the next time. Right? You can still tweet it. That's perfectly okay. I mean, I'm not saying that censor it. Do make it a point to give us a chance so that we can improve it the next time. I mean, I would feel short chained if you did not tell us and you just went on social media, which you all should do by all means, because it's a chance so that we can help you correct that the next time. I think the make a friend happened sometime back. So how many people here are here for the first day here? Very few people. So I guess we had this fun exercise, but I was trying to see if we have a way to do that. But I would encourage you the rest of the day to make some friends and go back with some more of your network as it happens. We are on Twitter. I hope the Wi-Fi is working for all of you. So with these, I want to just... So these were some of the few hygiene announcements. The rest of the program remains as it is. Only the 1030 will be changing now. And hope to see you all at 530 when we have the closing talk here. And we'll see whatever. I know it's been a long conference. Day 4 Saturday is your family day. And many of you have probably been away from the work as well. But do make it a point to be here by 530 so that we can do a wrap up and we can listen to all of you. And if there's anything that you would like us to do the next time better, please give us a chance for that. With that, we will be breaking for the tea and coffee. But just one more thing. I would request all the speakers to come here. We would like to take a group photo with all the speakers here. So I would like to call upon all the speakers to come here. But we can break for the tea and coffee. But the speakers can please join us here. Thank you. Thank you.


Hey everyone, it's Gabrielle and I'm over here today at Oxmer Toyota for our pretty owned vehicles of the week this week We have three Ford F-150s to share with you. So three pretty large trucks So why don't we go over some details on this first one? This is a 2019 Ford F-150. It's an XL. It is four-wheel drive. Now the exterior color is in black metallic So it is a five liter V8 There is 17-inch silver steel wheels. There's gonna be a sidestep. You will have Bluetooth There is the exterior parking rear camera. It does have the dynamic hitch assist There's one owner clean car facts that interior is in a black mileage is 42,665 The price is 43,395 One of the best values within a hundred and fifty miles for our seconds This is a 2020 Ford F-150 Lariat four-wheel drive Exterior color is black metallic. So this has a 3.5 liter V6 You're gonna have 18 inch machine aluminum wheels For the interior, you're gonna have heated leather seating. There is sink 3. You'll have an exterior parking camera with dynamic hitch assist One previous owner Clean car facts so that interior is in a beautiful medium light caramel Mileage on here is 15,954 The price is 55,000 now. This is one of the lowest prices within a hundred and fifty miles For our last vehicle, this is a 2014 Ford F-150. This one is an XLT four-wheel drive Exterior color is Oxford white This has a 3.5 liter V6. You're gonna have a 17 inch machine aluminum wheels This vehicle has 25,000 less miles than the market average You're gonna have a CD player sync voice activated communication and entertainment and there's a clean car facts That interior is called pale adobe Mileage is 82,089 The price on here is 26,000 now This is one of the best values within 250 miles So if you guys have any questions on any one of these trucks feel free to let us know all of our contact information Will be listed right here. Thanks everyone. We'll see you all next week. Bye


Dear students, in this module, we are going to talk about the components of culture. And one of the important components of culture is the use of symbol and language. Symbols are the objects, images, or gestures that have specific meanings within a culture. These are the aspects that do not communicate using words or different mediums. Rather, we use different symbols, gestures, objects, or images for them. Language, on the other hand, is a system of communication that allows individuals to express their thoughts and ideas. So, for having a much more complex communication, we use the language. Language makes your abstract thoughts communicable. These are ideas, images, and thoughts that cannot be seen or felt. They cannot communicate within a physical object, physical word. They also make different words and concepts communicable. So, in any culture, the importance of language and symbols is just like the basic foundation of the international process. So, symbols help to convey cultural meanings and values. Any entity or object in itself cannot make sense until that culture or language does not have any meaning. For example, when you are a student, when we say that you are a student, then it would communicate nothing as long as you have a concept or you have the sense of meaning that is attached to this sentence. Who will be called a student? Its definition will not be communicated with that word until it becomes a concept in your mind. So, language, on the other hand, the symbols and language help to define and reinforce the cultural identity.  Food, as an example, we can see that as a Pakistani food, we use the language to communicate a lot of things within the food. But at the same time, there are some things in the Pakistani culture that we use to reflect different symbols. For example, the flag of Pakistan. So, Pakistan's flag is the symbolic value of a country's representation. In the language, we see that Urdu is our national language, English is our formal language. So, different languages use the complex nature of communication. The symbols are the symbolic reflection of different cultural identities.


Ben Clark is a Clean Transportation Emissions Analyst with the BC Climate Action Secretariat. His main role is coordinating the community energy and emissions inventory. Mary Storzer is a senior planner with the Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development. Since joining the Provisional Government, Mary has worked on numerous projects to support sustainability planning in BC. These include smart planning for communities, green communities performance measures, and community-scale GHG and energy modeling. Mary has been with the Ministry of CSCB since December 2006. Michael Wallinus is our third presenter, and he is developing a publicly available and user-friendly community energy and emissions forecasting model. Michael works with two Vancouver-based energy consulting firms, MK's Dockard and Associates, and Navia's Research. And then our last presenter is Dale Littlejohn, and he's the Executive Director of the Nonprofit Community Energy Foundation. Dale designs and oversees delivery of the BC Hydro C-E-E-P Quick Start Program. I'll pass it back to Derby to go over the poll score of the day. Great, thanks very much. And this is also our agenda for the day.  So, and again, we will be trying to be time for some questions between each of the presentations. So I would just like to remind you that at any time you can use that Q&A button at the top of your screen to pose your questions, and we strongly encourage you to do so. So we do have some poll questions for you to start off. So I'll just put those up in front of you. So here they are. Here's the question. Have you or your local government used the 2007 Community Energy and Intermission Reports since they were posted in the spring of 2010? So please, you're welcome to vote on this for your particular situation. And I will post these so that you can see them as well, show the results to you. There, you should now be able to see the results. We seem to be consistent, fairly consistent there. We're just going to take a record of these. Okay, great. Thank you. And we do have one more question for you. So who is being the user of the report? So local government council board, local government staff members, consultants, or all of the above, and we realize it might be a little hard to hear if you're two of the three of the choices there. But please do your best with the selections that we have there. And take down the numbers for these in our graphic. We're going to talk about what to expect from the CEI in the future and how this need was identified for a cost-effective way for local governments to report and track their energy consumption and GHG emissions. The system available to all local governments was staffed to focus the resources on setting GHG reduction targets and related policies and actions. It was the first such initiative in North America at either the state or provincial level. And 80 local governments in B.C. have made a volunteer amendment act, also known as bill 27. The private protection program currently has 67 members in B.C. to include only those directly under the control of the local government feedback on how to improve the content and how to accompany the reports when they're released. We're actually quite a while at CEI reports going into the future. So specifically what we expect you'll be able to see in the 2012 reports. So there's components, I guess, that you'll see. The first is an improvement to the building's data. We've been working on a project, or we've been working on this, I should say, through a project called the TANDM project, which some of you may have heard that acronym. And the intent of that project basically is to align data, building data categories amongst the data providers that we have. So B.C. assessment data categories with B.C. Hydro, with Portis B.C., etc., etc., and as well to align those with NRCAN models energy data categories. The second intent of that project is to enable reporting at the neighborhood level. Is that something we've heard from you that you'd like to see as an improvement? And so as a result in the 2012 reports, we are hoping that we will be able to produce for you building data in two different ways. One is at the major building category level at the neighborhood scale. So by major building categories at this point, I mean residential, commercial, institutional, and industrial. And neighborhood scale is currently being, we're currently looking at census boundaries to define that, both tract and dissemination area, as well as looking at neighborhood planning boundaries that are currently being used by local governments where known. And then the second way we hope to be able to provide it to you is at the subcategory level, at the community scale, so a bit of a larger geographic scale, but then the finer grain in the actual categories. And what I mean when I say subcategory is, for example, within the commercial sector, you might see information on buildings that are retail strips, buildings that are big box, buildings that are other retail, etc., etc., and the list goes on now. Privacy is our main constraint here. The issues related to it will, that's what we're working within, but what we're trying to get is a little bit finer grain detail for you in two different ways. The second improvement that you'll see for the 2012 reports, and by that I mean the 2012 reports, those that will be coming out in 2013, not the 2010 reports that are coming out in 2012, is that we will have the updated data from the 2011 Census of Agriculture data. In addition, the third thing that you will see in there is this round of the 2010 reports that are about to be released will not see supporting indicators included. The reasons for that basically was delayed in order for us to be able to include census information, 2011 Census information, and as well to enable us to actually formalize our data collection procedures and align reporting years, because some of the data for those of you that are familiar with the supporting indicators, you saw 2009 data on supporting indicators in the 2007 reports. So we want to be able to try, we're trying to sort of formalize it so that it's going to be more useful and more streamlined and sort of a consistency that you can expect out of that. So you will be seeing in the 2012 reports updates to the 2007 indicators that we provided, so you see them there, housing type, community work, et cetera, et cetera. And as well we're working on data for new indicators to be included being approximately the transit, building energy intensity, and that goes back to the work we've been doing to join, like I was saying, VC assessment data with energy data as well, and floor space, waste diversion, and a mixed use of proximity to services indicator. I think that's all I want to say there. There's still work underway. We have additional supporting indicators and we haven't lost sight of those. We're working on those. And now I want to hand it over to Michael and Dale, who are going to take you through how they have used the CEI data in the tools and processes that they have been developing to assist local governments in greenhouse gas reduction and energy consumption reduction. But first, I think maybe we would take questions at this point. Am I right? Yes. Okay. Yeah, thanks very much. And I do encourage strongly our attendees to put their questions in in that Q&A off at the top there and we can address those and we do have one there now. And that question is, when you say 2012 reports, do you mean the 2010 data released in 2012 or 2012 data released in the future? That works that into my dialogue there, but basically yes. So what I was talking about was 2012 reports, i.e. that will be coming out in 2013 reporting on the 2012 year as opposed to what you're about to see, which is 2010 reports in 2012, which sort of goes back to my rationale around the supporting indicators in terms of trying to formalize and align our processes in order to limit the confusion. If you don't see any other questions there at this time, perhaps we'll move along. And again, I will encourage you to please put in your questions up top there. So, Michael, we'll turn it to you. Michael, if you could unmute your line and I'm putting the camera over to you now. Okay, I believe I've taken the mute off. Great, we can hear you. Excellent. Okay. My name is Michael Wallinitz and I'm here to talk to you about a project I've been involved with that's made use of the Community Energy and Emissions Inventory data. That project is the Sims Community Energy and Emissions Model. The model is an Energy and Greenhouse Gas Emissions forecasting tool. And you can use that for quantitative analysis as a part of the community energy and emissions planning process. The design of this model has it as a user-friendly and free-to-use program so that it can be used by local government, alleviating budget and time constraints associated with energy and emissions planning. As well, we've designed it to have a very quick setup that allows experimentation with a variety of different assumptions in order to facilitate ongoing analysis and planning. The development of this project has been a collaboration between two consulting firms, MK Jackerton Associates, as well as Navius Research, the Energy Materials Research Group at Simon Fraser University, and it was funded by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions. As well, we've had the support and input of members of the Sunshine Coast Regional District and the Regional District of Nanaimo. Now, I will briefly explain what the SIMS model is. Now, first of all, the name SIMS was once an acronym several decades ago that now no longer makes sense. At this point, SIMS is just a proper name for the modeling framework. What this modeling framework does is forecast the energy and emissions of a region from the present out to 2050 in five-year increments. So we can track how the energy consumption and emissions are developing through time. I provided a schematic showing a very basic portrayal of what the model does. On the assumption side, we need to tell the model what the energy price is, as well as sector activity we are assuming. And as an example of sector activity, that could be the number of households and the amount of residential floor space that requires energy for heating or appliances or what have you, or alternatively, it could be the amount of personal transportation, so how much people need to get around. This gets fed into the model, which has certain model characteristics that make it useful for forecasting energy and emissions. These include a detailed representation of the technologies as well as sectors that result in energy consumption and emissions. And this model is able to simulate the policy impact on the choice of technologies that people are using as they replace their worn-out. So if you, say, buy a new fridge because your old one is broken, what kind of fridge do you buy? If you're getting a new car because you've gotten rid of your old one, what kind of car are you getting? And it also shows the impact on technology use. So for example, how much heating is needed, and that's a factor of the kind of homes you're living in, the size of homes, the number of shared walls, and the energy efficiency of the building shelf. So these are the model characteristics that we're simulating. The results that come out of that are, as I said, a forecast of greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. Now to understand how this might fit in with community energy and emissions, I like to think of these factors, the energy and emissions associated with community, being driven by three interrelated components. The first is the demand for energy services. So this relates to things like economic growth, population growth, as well as the choices and technologies at play within the community. The other component is, of course, the technologies. So specifically, what are people using to provide their energy services? How are they getting around? How are they heating their homes and so on? And last, the energy and emissions of community also depend on urban forms. This is the structure of the community, how things relate to each other spatially. Now to show where SIMS fits into this, it is a specialist in simulating what kind of technologies people use within the region and what kind of demand for energy services. So both of those are simulated results, as well as based on a certain assumption of activity within each sector. So how many houses are there? How many commercial buildings are there? How much travel do people need? The third component isn't directly covered by SIMS. This would be urban form. However, you can use SIMS to explore the implications of changes to urban form relative to the other drivers. Now the question is, how can SIMS help at the community level? It can facilitate community energy and emissions planning by answering a number of questions. For example, what would greenhouse gas emissions be if we do nothing? What would be the impact of provincial policy on these emissions? What would be the impact of local policy? Is there overlap or interaction between different policies? And given the existing technologies and infrastructure, basically since we have our buildings and our cars and whole communities full of things that consume energy right now, how fast can we change? For the more SIMS facilitates ongoing planning, letting us answer questions such as what if the fundamental assumptions change? What if we want to explore a different population forecast or assume energy prices may be completely different from the earlier assumptions? It lets us answer targets such as what if emissions targets change? What if we want a more stringent or more relaxed target? And what if we change the strength and timing of the policies that are helping us meet these emissions targets? Now unfortunately, previous to this project, SIMS was a very complicated and not user-friendly program. So what we've done throughout this project is take that SIMS functionality and distill it into a user-friendly tool to forecast energy and emissions. Now this tool covers emissions from residential and commercial buildings, personal and freight transportation, as well as solid waste. As I mentioned earlier, the model was designed for a quick setup. It uses the community energy and emissions inventories. And with a click of a few buttons in a couple minutes, it can be automatically set to represent any given community covered by those inventories. It then forecasts energy and emissions driven by user inputs. And as I said, it's very easy to test new assumptions. It's simply entering a new forecast for say population or population growth, allowing to see what the effect of that is or on the other hand it could be energy consumption, any number of other user-defined assumptions. And then it allows the user to test the effect of several different policies. And it's very quick to experiment with different policy packages. Results from the SIMS community model include things such as energy consumption. For example, here we're seeing it by residential end use. We're seeing energy consumption in a theoretical community with a growing population in the residential sector broken down by appliances, space heating, water heating, and lighting. Similarly, we can also look at greenhouse gas emissions. And the example I've chosen here is broken down by the sectors covered by the SIMS community model. Again, we're seeing emissions from residential buildings, commercial buildings, personal transportation, freight transportation, and solid waste. And again, because these results are driven both by assumptions of how the community is growing, energy prices, as well as the technologies used within that community, you can see that you don't necessarily get linear trends. A good example of this, for example, is emissions from personal transportation. Declining over time as cars become more efficient and energy prices become higher than they historically have been. And basically on the results side, we're also able to show technology-specific data. And the example I've pulled out here are the share of residential buildings divided by their vintage. So how old they are and what kind of building shells. We can see old houses, essentially, pre-1963 to 2000, post-2000 standard construction. And as time goes on, we start to see a larger adoption of higher efficiency homes or higher efficiency or near net zero homes. Again, these are not assumed results, but they're simulated results based on the input into the model. Now I'll just take a moment and talk about the design of the model and highlight some of the features that we are striving for throughout the project. We wanted to create a model that's complex enough to be useful. So in other words, it creates a realistic portrayal of energy use and emissions in a community and how policies can affect these. So it's simple enough for anyone to use. And most importantly, the whole point of the project is to create a model and documentation that are free to use. So this can be picked up by anybody, anyone in local governments especially, and used for a variety of purposes, such as a standalone analysis, used as a comparison to a previous analysis, used as a source of assumptions for some other kind of analysis, or potentially even as an education tool, because it's a very interactive model. You can quickly see the effect of a variety of different assumptions and planning designs. Now I just want you to take a moment and link this back to the community energy and emissions inventory, which is the focus of this webinar. So these inventories provide a standard data set to the model. The model contains all of the inventories that exist, which means it can automatically represent any chosen community covered by those inventories with a click of a button in a couple of minutes for calibration. So in short, having these community energy and emissions inventories makes it possible to create a simple, useful and free-to-use model. So this is the end of the presentation. I'm just going to touch on the next step is to do as I'm doing right now, inform local governments and other people in the public and provide access to the tool. Right now we're nearing completion of its development, just working out some of the bugs and how it operates. In future, we're hoping from this project to learn about the potential for in-house tools, that being analytical tools, quantitative tools that quote-unquote non-experts can use. In other words, you don't need to constantly be going to consultants to explore the energy economy system or energy and emissions in your community. Ultimately we hope to apply this learning to the platform we've created. We've created a model that can be used by anyone, and as we get a better understanding of what people's needs are and what they want out of such a model, we hope to have an opportunity to go back through and continually improve what we've done. And lastly, hopefully this will expand the scope of user-friendly tools. As we see how this is successful or not successful, we may increase our knowledge of how we can provide analytical tools to people and to the local government. And lastly, if you would like... Back up one. Any updates or have questions on this project, please feel free to contact me. I've got my contact information below, as well as in the brief two-page description of the project that's contained in the handouts with this webinar. So Darby, I'm all done. I guess we can have questions and I'll pass it back to you. I'm Michael, and indeed it must have been a concise presentation, as we don't see to have any questions just at this point. So I would, again, encourage our attendees to use that Q&A button at the top from the toolbar on the top. Okay, great, people are jumping through it now. Some quick typers. Ron actually does have a question, and he's raised his hand. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to take the session off lecture mode. So please attend these. If you could all just mute your lines now so we don't have any feedback. So if you could please hit star six, mute your line, and hopefully we won't have any feedback. Yeah, I see actually Ron has actually typed in something in. Is the model, I should say, available for distribution? Michael? We're not ready just yet. We have a one sector demonstration model I can hand out. As I was saying, we've got the full model just about ready, but it's full of bugs that make it crash and follow up. I don't want to put that upon anyone yet, but you contact me. I can let you know as soon as it is ready and we'll be passing the model and its documentation out to anyone that wants to use it. Thanks, and we do have a couple more questions here and we see we have time for it now. So another question from Anne Matthewson. What was the time frame in developing this model? When did its development start and is this the first time local governments have been advised of a detail? This model was initially conceived about a year ago and development started in earnest last spring. This is the first very, I'd say, large-scale discussion of the model. So yeah, I would say this is the first time local governments have been advised of it in its details. As I said, we were working with members of the Sunshine Coast Regional District and the Nanaimo Regional District. They were providing support, answering my questions, helping me get the local government perspective on the number of issues that I was encountering. But we didn't want to open the development process up too large just to try and keep the process tractable. Great, we are getting quite a few questions here coming up. The next one here we have from Allison. And okay, so I had to step out, though may have missed it. Oh, that question may have been taken away from us. Oh, maybe that question was answered. And now to bounce around a little bit on here. So that was the time frame. So over to Donna's question. A question for a previous speaker. Will the new inventories for regional districts be separated by electoral areas? And we do have two more questions here and we are certainly still saving time for Dale yet. Funded the development and maintenance of this model. So we received funding from the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions to develop this model. The maintenance into the future, that remains open. And the initial question to answer is, is this going to be useful to people? And that's what we're hoping to find out in the next little while. And assuming it is useful, we'll have to come up with some kind of a business model or funding model that we'll keep it out there. That being said, I'm quite excited by the work we've done. So to a certain extent, this thing is going to be taken care of by myself and some of my colleagues. But hopefully if we're looking at significant improvements or changes to the model, and it's something that there is a demand for, we'll be looking for ways of funding ongoing maintenance. That last question there is actually in regards to Dale, who's next up. So perhaps we'll turn things over to Dale. Thanks again, Michael. Dale, if you could unmute your line and... Thanks, Darby. And can you hear me? Yep, you can. Please, go ahead. Awesome. Well, thank you very much. I'm Dale Luljan, Executive Director of Community Energy Association. And I'll be talking today about VC Hydro's Community Energy and Emission Planning Quick Start Program and how that's leveraging the CEI data. The CEI data really makes something like this possible because the program is designed to go into smaller communities, communities under 20,000, in a very rapid cost-effective way. It's a very practical, in fact, relentlessly practical approach to reducing energy emissions across the community. And we're able to do this rapidly because we built the tools that take in the CEI data and also have the specific actions that local governments can take to reduce energy emissions currently. And I should note that this is one approach to modeling. You've heard from Mike about another approach for the larger communities, particularly as well as for ones that want to go into more depth. And modeling analysis, there's other models out there. Ron McDonald from Staten Tech is doing great work in this, as is Alex Boston from Golder and there's some other folks out there too. I'd also recommend that if you do have interest in this to watch out for some overviews of the models that are coming out. And I think Mary Storzer and Ted Sheldon are continuing to work on that as well as pulling the modeling community together in BC. So thanks to all those folks. For the BC Hydro-C Quick-Start Process, this again is a pre-process for local governments funded 100% by BC Hydro because Hydro recognizes that local governments in BC have a legal requirement of GHC reductions goals in their OCPs and regional growth strategies. And it also recognizes that fuel switching to electric baseboard heaters is a really, really bad thing and would like to help ensure that electricity is part of the energy and emissions conversation as well. So the process is actually pretty straightforward for local governments. You can go onto the website, sign up, arrange a date for a call and a webinar and make sure that we've got a webinar before and a full-day workshop with local government to ensure that everybody is prepared and that's as productive as possible. And we also try to ensure that there's some council representation at the workshop so that a staff move this forward interest at the council level and some understanding there as well to again help focus things on the implementation. So as I mentioned, we come into this with two key tools. One is community energy and emissions inventory for the local government. That tells us where you're at currently. And we also come in with the actions guide. There's about 40 or so specific actions that local government can take today within its current powers to influence energy and emissions across the community. That includes buildings and urban form and transportation, its fiscal initiatives, its policy and regulatory, additional things as well. So we describe each of those and provide approaches to estimating what you might be able to get out of those. So very much focus on what a local government can do. So we come in again, like I said, with community stats. Those form a basis for the future projections. We base the business as usual projections. Assuming that more people means generally more emissions. Assuming that you continue to grow as you have in the past. And we also look at the impact of provincial and federal policy. And that's where you do see a significant decrease over the short to medium term in transportation emissions because of local government fuel standard and tailpipe emissions standards. We also bring in some very specific process and saltation techniques to move you through this. What we ask for local governments to provide is the GHG targets that they've already developed. As well as to take a look at the population projection numbers and adjust those to ensure that they align with what they're currently using. We also ask for any previous studies or any local knowledge. So the green down here on the bottom of the slide shows what we come into the workshop with. The baseline, the business as usual projection year by year, fuel by fuel by sector into 2050. The gap between that and the targets as well we also estimate the overall community wide energy spending. Now this is often somewhere between $2,000 and $4,000 per person in a community. This represents a significant economic development opportunity if you can cause some savings in that and cause some of that money to be recirculated within the community. Based on this we can also identify some of the top measures that might be applicable for the unique circumstances of a particular local government. We've done this in high growth communities, in urban areas, in small communities that have a lot of seasonal population and that. And we do see that the content is really quite different, particularly not growing significantly than a lot of the urban-formed things that you can do that can often provide a big influence on emissions long term. Really, you only have so much to work with there if you don't have new development. So what comes out of the end of a very collaborative workshop with actions by year who's going to do it and some of the key steps for some of the actions. A draft community energy and emission plan and epiphanies, I'll get into those a little bit more in the slide or two. So this is an example of a high level overview with a fair bit of detail in there that we bring into the workshop. So one page snapshot of where things are currently at, person. So again, a community with a huge population spending a little under 1.5 million a year on energy. Down towards the bottom, we see the business as usual line to see a decrease mainly because of the impact of the provincial and federal policies. And we've got the targets and the gap that we spend the rest of the day looking at. We also have land in a community and this is fairly typical of a lot of small communities where the majority of the energy spend and energy use being on transportation fuel. Multi-community pilot, it shouldn't be sick unless it should be in Vermeer along with Kimberly and Golden that we got together in the East Coupes as part of the pilot. And Peachland, a number of communities. We've got a few more coming up and a couple of communities in CRD looking at this as well. So we're proving this but in very, very different circumstances whether it's resort communities they're not growing or shrinking. And across these a few key lessons have emerged focus on practical actions. We've actually delivered this program in communities that already have a community energy emission plan but staff weren't able to have practical actions to do like this quarter to meet the targets in that because it was so high level. So what we've done is we've come in with this process and developed a very specific work plan on what actions are going to happen who's responsible for them and if we have capacity. We also try to focus on the what more than the why because as we go through BC we're actually going to do a lot of that resistance states away because a lot of these actions just make a lot of sense to begin with in terms of livability in terms of saving the community money and in terms of just better quality of life overall. The other thing that we're seeing is it's important to work the map behind some of these actions. So I just have an action but in the afternoon of the full day workshop we try to unpack at least three or four specific actions going through a very structured logical process around estimating what the impacts could be and feel for people and also helps identify areas where perhaps we thought there was going to be a lot more impact on what actually is learning that we've that we've uncovered going through this as well as the fact that the CEI is absolutely critical for doing something like this because that allows us to go in with an inventory already there and when we have the 2010 and 2007 CEIs together that provides a nice trend line that we can use along with historical data on population growth to maintain some of the business's useful assumptions. So what does it feel like and look like? Well up in the top left we have a number of the documents that we bring in the one page overview the quick start guide that's available during the workshop the opportunities from DC Hydro. We go through this from CEI and DC Hydro and this is really a workshop this is an event of presentations this is Roll Up Our Slaves and let's figure out what we're doing where we collaboratively put together what actions we want to have in which years on a board that everybody can see and that we can adjust as we see resources and constraints and things like that. A lot of this is based on the unique character of a particular community this photo is from Armstrong where we did a community energy and it's a photo of a unique opportunities that emerge that become very local, very quick for example here working through some of the math where it's a facilitated exercise using a flip chart work through the math process and that structured thinking process so that they're better able to make decisions and projections going forward. So what do we end up out of the day with? That workshop that we co-create is a work plan that are filled in so we don't come in just with preprinted cards we also have some that you want to do because not all actions are appropriate for all communities so we help facilitate that process we put this into the model typically overnight business as usual which we saw before, targets and then a new line in the middle which is the plan. Now it's important to note that you don't necessarily the first time you go through this you don't necessarily have to have a full plan to get all the way to 2050 given that we're only in 2010 for every year to planning you need a plan for the next few years to get started putting on the right projectory and then revisiting this so we've got GHG emissions as well as per CAPTA emissions as usual and we can see what the differences are we also look at it by we've got responding to kilowatt hours for actions so electricity savings and we also look at what mobility fuels are going to cost 10 or 20 years but my guess is they're going to cost more than they do today local governments to adjust those in a very easy way so that can be changed to 2020 business as usual energy cost the energy cost based on actions in the plan so what we're seeing with this one is five million dollars the community within eight years for climate and energy they also make a lot of financial sense too the draft community energy and emissions plan that we developed for them will refine that their OCP so they embedded some of the specific actions coming out of that day into their OCP as a fairly strong statement of where they want to go more on some of the specific things they're interested in the OCP others like Armstrong their OCP which provides staff with something to go back to with current councils or future councils when they want to execute on these activities so again my name is Dale O'John Community Energy Association we're a non-profit society TIBC we go forward as local governments we'll open it up to questions Thanks very much Dan here quickly just to get some of us pointed towards the right tools here for the budget period I'll just bring it over to me here the video so yeah we would actually like to open things up to a discussion at this point so what I'll do is point your attention back to the feedback indicator in the top right hand corner of your screen you have the ability there if you didn't catch it off the top you just change the indicator from green to purple which is a question and the questions are up there you can also use the Q&A box as we have been doing so I see a few there already so you have two avenues to ask questions we are dependent on you we are to open this up to discussion to mute your lines so if you could all do that now please mute your lines at star 6 to unmute your line and please don't put your phone on hold as well and if you just queue up there you will need to unmute your line as you come up in the queue there so we'll try this now I'm going to take it off lecture mode and hopefully we'll have clear lines just a moment here the conference is no longer in lecture mode we do have a couple questions that are queued up here and I'll try and take them in order and it asks a question here and I believe it's for Dale and here's the question Dale Hydro is not a large emitter for our community natural gas is because we are a northern community does Fortis have a similar program question there but we just had two more queued up in the Q&A section so I'll go to them next here so the next for regional districts it seems that it might be more direct towards specific community as opposed to unincorporated rural areas has been designed primarily here so what resources models are available for communities that are larger than 20k we are I'm not sure it's here I just wanted to point out that here working to try to help local governments have access to these tools and there are quite a few out there if you just look at the second resource there what we're doing right now is on that site you'll find a number of case studies of some of the models that have been around for a bit and Dale's touched on a few of the people and in fact a few of the people are actually on the line right now that work with communities that have these models and so I would encourage you to go check out that site also Ted Sheldon Ministry of Environment they're working really hard and us assisting him in putting together an inventory of the known tools that are out there basically in BC working in BC and helping local governments and that should be available very shortly right now you know we don't have an inventory as such but the intent there is to tell you a little bit high level give you an overview of what the various tools are available to in BC and that would cover all scale all populations etc so check out the site now and there's even more information coming down the pipe I guess that's my main message Dale there's just one more that are being used in BC that aren't in one form or another doesn't take a wide variety of things into here in BC I see you've actually indicated a question in two Madis but would you like to start six and ask your question? Can you hear me? Yep we can I was just wondering if the quick start will be updated or how quickly it will be updated to reflect the 2010 CEI data Yeah thanks for that question Marlene we haven't been making some adjustments to what are pre-forwards if you could just speak very briefly to them and then Dale in the act refunded energy and emissions in its own operations as well as community wide one element that we're able to you know because there's this page we wanted to draw your attention to the list our ministry has put together both summary lists of actions taken as well as highlights as the corporate and community wide actions and you can actually search those actions by community size I believe as well as various types of actions categories of actions and like I said the distinction between the corporate actions and the community wide so I think it's really interesting and it could be very if you weren't aware of it and if you take a read through it it's quite inspiring and I think it can help people really get a sense of what their colleagues are doing across the province and then thus maybe give another spin on oh maybe we could try that or who I should phone them and see how's that working is that how's that how do we get started one of the main intents of those reports and those lists is that you go and search them Marlene thanks Dale you have your virtual hand raised would you basically I was just wondering if Mary could expand a little bit on the data that will be used from the 2011 Census of Agriculture that they're going to need to improve the 2012 CEI reports I'll have a very low voice because I'm going to pass it over to Ben here and this question is from and pay 20,000 population limits applied to the whole regional district or just to the unincorporated areas our regional district is more than 20,000 but unincorporated areas are all together equal less than 20,000 in the top right hand corner in the toolbar there is an icon up there that looks like three pieces of paper next to the camera icon and if you hover over it it should come up as a hand out a box and you just check mark the box next to the document you want and you're able to download it there so I strongly encourage all the attendees to do that to do that now that the slides the slides that you're looking at are there as well as some documents that Ben has as well as a piece that Michael also spoke to as well you do have another question here they should avail as a hand out or as a video recording so as I said it's it is available I should have also mentioned that we are recording this session today and we will be making this webinar available for the rural BC website as well as the Climate Action Toolkit government site does record the webinars as well so there will be two places that you'll be able to access it I will be sending out an e-mail advising all the attendees that registered once that is available include the supplementary materials and the slides as well so you tackle the questions that we do you have or are there any other questions an open call to questions now Ben did you want to pose any of the questions we have on the screen at all the feedback on the line if you aren't posing a question if you could just leave your line last call for a question and if we don't get anything we'll wrap things up these are the resources that we can teach you during the presentation so these are available here and as I said you can download these slides in the hand up section here I recommend you do so and also I'll be putting out an e-mail later on pointing towards the rural BC website and where these documents as well as the recording and supplementary materials will exist on the web so if you've registered you will receive that e-mail the contact information for our different presenters who have kindly made themselves available for your questions if you have any additional ones or think of any after the webinar and finally I would just strongly encourage these to respond to the survey that we'll be putting out you should be getting that in just a few more days and your feedback really helps us develop these webinars both the content and the technical features that much better and that's more hopefully rewarding experience for us all so for that thanks again to everyone