Thank you. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week, as we are doing today. You can watch any of our archived recordings later at your convenience. I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all those archives and how that all works. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. Most of you, I believe everyone today is here from Nebraska, but just in case anyone is watching who is not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission. We are the state agency for libraries. So, and that is all for all sorts of libraries, all types of libraries in Nebraska. So we provide services across the board. So you'll find shows on topics on our Encompass Live show that are for K-12, publics, academics, schools, colleges, universities, corrections, museums, anything and everything. Really our only criteria that it is has something to do with libraries. Something libraries are doing, something we think will be fun that they could do. We bring in guest speakers from different libraries across the state and across the country to talk about things they're doing. We do presentations for our Library Commission staff do presentations sometimes for things that we specifically are offering products and services here through the Library Commission. Today we have kind of a combination of that and I'll talk about that in a second. What I want to do quickly though, just briefly here for our Nebraska Libraries, we have in the line, I want to remind everyone, here on our Nebraska Library Commission website, we are still full on and involved in the COVID-19 pandemic. And we do have resources on our Library Commission website for our libraries. Right here at the top of our page, we do have a list. We try and keep up on what libraries are open or closed or offering certain accommodations, reopening, re-closing as things situations change. So take a look at that. Please, if you check your library's info, if it's not correct, shoot us an email so we can make sure it's up to date there. We also do have a poster that's pinned to the top of our page. It'll always be there at the very top so you don't have to go searching for resources related to COVID-19. We have a link to that list. We have some maps showing what services some libraries are offering. And then we have a sub-page here depending on what you might be wanting to know, what I do with my kids at home, my business, and employment, etc., But I just wanted to highlight our library page here for our library staff. We've tried to gather information as it has been put out since this all started back in March. Information from places like CDC, World Health Organization, ALA, OCLC, IMLS, all the organizations that work for, will help us with libraries. And various things here related to opening, closing, host-holding meetings, summer reading programs, policies, etc., etc. As we hear of new things, we add them to the page. There'll always be new information on here, so keep checking back here. Some of this stuff for those of you who might be listening that are not in Nebraska, some of this is general just from anywhere. Some of it is specific to Nebraska. So do pay attention to those certain things. And check with your or if you're not in Nebraska, check with your own state library or your state library association. They may be doing the same thing in your state for you. But I just want to make sure everyone knows that that is out there for you to help, doing what we can to help our libraries get through this pandemic. So on to today's show, I'm going to hand represent control to you, Christine, right now so we can get your slides up as I do. My intro about your screen, let's see what it does. Okay. And then. Is it showing my screen? Yep, we can see your slides. And if you do a slideshow, and then from the beginning. Well. There now work. Okay, I don't know. Okay, perfect. Right. Okay, sorry about the technical difficulties there. So this morning, we are going to be talking about. That's right on screen. Great, Bennett donor advice fund. Good morning, Christine. This is Christine Gale, who's from the Nebraska Community Foundation. And this is a great grant opportunity for our libraries in our small towns here in Nebraska, population 3000 or less. Everybody should be applying for this, if you ask me. But I'm just going to hand over to you, Christine, to talk about it and tell us all about the grant and that the fund and where it came from and how libraries can get involved. OK, thank you, Christa. Well, as you mentioned, I'm Christine Gale and I'm with the Nebraska Community Foundation. I'm a community impact coordinator. And so I help many of our different funds and affiliated funds grant out their money and actually work with them to make the best impact that they can. So it's a pleasure to be involved with the Crews Bennett donor advice fund because I think it is a unique opportunity for our small town libraries. So hopefully you will see something here and be able to see how it can benefit you. So the Crews Bennett is a donor advised fund and we have all different funds at the Nebraska Community Foundation, but a donor advice fund is set up by a donor and it can be set up for a specific purpose, which this one was set up specifically for the benefit of some of our rural libraries, a donor advice fund can also be set up just for general charitable giving, which we have some of those as well. Donor advice funds can be given and set up during a donor's lifetime so that they are a part of that and they can be a part of the committee who decides where the grant should be given, or it can also be set up upon donor's death as part of their estate planning. And that is the case that happened here with Shirley Crews, who was a lifelong educator, as you can see, and a lifelong learner. And she was from a small town and went to Harvard High School. She left Nebraska and got her education in lots of different places, as you can see on the screen there. But her love was definitely learning and education and, of course, libraries and she was a traveler, a world traveler. And as she was getting older, she just felt that she should provide an opportunity for others to experience the world as well, even if they could not necessarily travel to those places. And one of the ways that she could do that was by helping out the libraries, because libraries are such a great resource for discovering the world. And so Shirley did not have any children. And so she decided to leave some of her estate to begin this Crews Bennett donor advice fund. It is specifically to help rural libraries. And she does have some living nieces and nephews in Nebraska. And so she named them as the individuals who serve on this donor advice committee. And so they meet once a year and review the grant applications and then help make decisions on where this donor advice fund gives grants. Last year, we gave grants to 15 libraries and gave out over $116,000. So there's lots of different communities that are benefiting from this very generous gift. So who is eligible in Nebraska? She basically wanted to really support the small rural communities and understood that those libraries are sometimes difficult to continue to fund and the communities sometimes have a hard time keeping them going. So she wanted this to be another tool, another opportunity for those libraries. So she chose to have it for libraries of population less than 3,000 and she made it pretty broad for libraries that they can apply for a number of areas that libraries need funding. She set up so she could do a planning grant, an enhancement grant, and a facilities grant. And I'll go through each of those for you. But one thing is, you know, many of you have probably applied for lots of grants and you will notice when you get to our application for the Crute Spendant donor advice fund that it's fairly simple and that's by design. We really hope that we don't get people hung up on a really challenging grant process because we know the good work that you do and we'd like your time to be spent on actually providing the services to the people in your communities and not having to do a lot of research for difficult grant application. So hopefully it's straightforward and very simple, but you can always give me a call if you're looking at the application and need some assistance. I'm happy to help through the process as you're filling it out. And also, if once I receive it, there are some things that need clarified, I will definitely contact you. So a pretty simple application process. So the planning grant, as you can see, is one of the areas and that's a non that's for those libraries that are not yet accredited with the Nebraska Library Commission. And this was a way to just help some of those libraries get over that hump to actually become accredited because we understand that it does it is a rigorous process and it has some costs involved with it, whether it's your time or travel to go to webinars or seminars and that sort of thing. So this particular portion of this grant is to help alleviate some of that to help continue the process of accreditation. And so I'm going to probably have if you have questions on what could be covered, I'll probably have Chris to talk a little bit more about the accreditation process and what some of that might include. But certainly, as you know, there are lots of different categories in the accreditation process and and pretty much anything in there that has a cost to it that this this grant could definitely help. So as you can see, this is a little bit of a smaller grant, but it is for that purpose, minimum 500 maximum 2,500. We do do our grants on a matching basis. So this is a one to one match, which means for every dollar that you apply for, you have to match with a dollar. We don't really have any restrictions on where that match comes from. It can come from private donors. It can come from your library foundation. It can come from any of the city or village funds that they would like to speak that they can match with those dollars. So really, there are no restrictions on where the money comes from for the match, but it does need to be a one to one match. And as you can see on this grant, we do not allow in kind match, which one of the other ones does. So this can be a multi year grant because we know the accreditation process can take some time. So that's the planning grant, the first grant. The second one is an enhancement grant. And this is the next two are for libraries who are of town's 3,000 population or less and are accredited libraries. They've been accredited at at least one of the levels of the accreditation process. And so enhancement grants are for mostly to enhance programming at the library, and this can really be a broad area that you could apply for. We've had some we've had recently a very popular thing are the maker spaces and having either equipment or software to go with those programs to help offer that to the community. And and so that we saw a lot of that last year. It can also be for summer reading enrichment programs. It could be after school programs. It could be adult reading programs. I mean, pretty much anything, any programming that a library wants to do, bringing in special speakers, doing a special focus area for a period of time. Really, this guy's the limit on that. So if you have any creative ideas that you would like to bring new programming to just get people excited about coming back to the library. And of course, it can be books. That's an obvious one and certainly not one we want to forget, but we know that libraries provide a number of services these days. So the books definitely fall in here as well. So that match is a one to one match as well with the minimum amount to request is a thousand dollars. Maximum is twenty thousand dollars. So the this is the one where I'm sorry. Whoops. This is the one where a in kind match can be considered. And so it just depends what that is. It could be if if maybe the library Friends Fund has already purchased a piece of equipment towards the makerspace and you want to try to count that as your match. That's something they could look at. The in kind is a little case by case situation that the committee members will take into account and decide on that. So that is one thing I was going to ask it because I know people are always questioning, you know, what exactly does that mean? What is an in kind match? Yeah. And, you know, I should I should have started off that this is only my second year doing this grant because Reggie Carlson, who just retired from the Nebraska Community Foundation has kind of led this process from the beginning. So she would better be able to address that about what maybe has been approved in the past for in kind. But generally in kind is time labor of maybe maybe sweat equity work that you've already put into something or it's a match of a item that someone else has purchased that can be combined with this. So that's other things that could be related to the grant project or helpful to it, but that aren't straight out cash money. Right. Exactly. Think on cash. Yeah. Exactly. And so like I said, that is kind of on a case by case basis. And this also can be a multi year grant if you would like to run something beyond just a one year time period. And the third area is the facilities grant. And this, again, is for accredited libraries. And the amount is a little bit higher because obviously the cost for facilities improvements tends to be a little bit higher. So the minimum is five thousand for this grant with a maximum of twenty thousand one to one match. And this is a situation where in kind match would not be allowed. So if you did have a local contractor who wanted to to in kind their labor services, that would be awesome. And you could certainly accept that, but you could not count it as the match for this grant. So that would be a situation where it does not apply. But this type of grant is a multi year grant. If you if your project did expand beyond one year, we could definitely do it for more than one year. But there are a couple of stipulations on this facilities grant. Obviously, facilities is building and bricks and mortar kind of thing. The one piece that we say is not eligible are ongoing maintenance and how we define that is like replacing an HVAC system, gutters, roughing, sidewalks. And the reason for that is these this grant money is actually supposed to be used to help you do something that might not otherwise occur or to do some extra things in your community or do some extra work that may not have otherwise been able to happen. We don't want to use it for just helping the community so that the city does not have to take care of their own building or, you know, something like that. So this is supposed to be above and beyond what the normal maintenance is. And so that's the say, not for your regular maintenance and upkeep that doing like you mentioned, you are going to need a new HVAC system or something. Right. Special case like, I know we've had some, especially last year, flooding damage of buildings that would be like you probably didn't plan for that. Exactly. And that is like bansions to the building or something that isn't in the part of the regular daily keeping distance, the building going. Yeah. Right. And that definitely we know lots of Nebraska communities had to deal with recovery from the flooding. And so certainly anything that was in a clean up situation or getting rid of any mold or things that happen due to moisture that could definitely apply. Some other projects that have been approved are we've had some some facility safety things brought up that enhanced like their the lighting in their parking lot or more bike racks for places for kids to a safer place for kids to put bikes. Of course, it could be bathroom upgrades. We know that some of our buildings are aging. It could be we have had some external like bricks and mortar projects where, you know, the work needs to be fixed or the I'm trying to think the mortar actually between the bricks is cracking and or the steps are cracking. You know, things like that can be paid for through this facilities grant. It's just that we will ask what kind of support you have from the owner of the building. Now, sometimes that's the the village and sometimes that's the actual library foundation or, you know, and make sure that they are doing their part. That's just the point that we want to make with this one. But certainly some great things have been done with this facilities grant to improve our libraries and make them more enjoyable for people. So those are the three areas. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about Ravenna Public Library, which is one that we've given a couple of grants to. And that brings up that there is no limit to if how many times you apply for this grant. So if you apply annually, I suppose that's something we could certainly look at. We will obviously do our best to make sure that we spread out the money across the state. But we definitely there is no limit. So if you are a very engaged library with lots of great ideas, please feel free to apply because that's exactly what this is for. So Ravenna is a library that has received this grant a couple of times. The last time was 2007 or well, not the last time, but one time was 2017 and they received a $20,000 grant to build a they actually built a brand new library that was one point something million dollar project that did change their entire building to a new one level building. That's a beautiful new building, but particularly for this grant, they asked to use the money towards a children's library room. And so they, here's a picture of that library room and they did this nice plaque in honor of Shirley Crute-Spinnett because this grant helped pay for this room. And channel 1011 and Lincoln did do a little feature story on this grant, but also on this donor advice fund overall. And so I'm going to let Krista go ahead and play that. And that gives you a little bit more background information and maybe get some questions answered for you. There we go. We'll show that right now then. Yeah, Dean, do you need me to do anything? I'm going to switch over to my screen here so you can get it up. There it is. So this is the page that has the article. And then if you scroll down. Yeah, scroll down. They've got a nice little video here. We might have to listen to a quick ad. Stephanie Rosenberg. Oh no. The four-year-old son, Chasper, and her two-year-old daughter, Mullen, to the Ravenna Public Library. They come here at least a couple of times a week. We enjoy the time. It allows us to read different books. It allows them to have imaginative play. This new $1.4 million library officially opened in August of 2018. The community worked together to make it a reality but local leaders also utilized grant money. A large grant came from a Shirley Croix Bennett donor advice fund. They definitely came through and donated $20,000 for it. The children's library is now dedicated in honor of the Croix Bennett donor advice fund. The fund was established by Shirley Croix Bennett. She was a lifelong educator and she was also a world traveler. And she wanted to provide people a world of information just like she had through her travels. And she decided that by investing in libraries she could do that. When Shirley died, she made a gift to the Nebraska Community Foundation. According to her wishes, every year a fund advisory committee of her nieces and nephews makes grants and receives applications from the libraries and communities where there are fewer than 3,000 people. Jane Stone is a niece of Shirley Croix Bennett and she is involved with reviewing the applications for the grant money. Every year we give out about, it's about $80,000 a year that we grant out every year. So plenty of funds available for people in their projects. Jane says her aunt would be happy that small town libraries are getting assistance. I think probably the reason that Shirley focused on rural communities is because she was a farm girl herself. She was a 1941 graduate of Harvard High School and our family farms still to this day between Harvard and Yelver, Nebraska. So she, you know, I think that's where her heart is. There are a number of requirements for libraries to be eligible for the grants. There is a requirement that libraries need to provide a one-to-one local funding in order to get matching grants. But once the grant money is secured, local libraries are finding plenty of ways to use the money. We have three different areas that we do grant funding in. One is towards accreditation and then we also do enhancement grants and facility grants. The Ravenna Public Library is a beautiful facility here in this Puff Low County community. And as you might imagine, it's being used in a number of ways. We are an after-school bus drop-off location. So the school bus brings them to our doorstep every single day after school. We do programming three days a week for those kiddos. We have book clubs for the adults. We have Pinterest nights. And for people like Stephanie, she is just glad that Shirley Croyd's Bennett Donor Advice Fund played a role in building a library in Ravenna, where her kids can start the journey of learning. That's probably good. Now, quick note, libraries are being encouraged to apply for the Shirley Croyd's Bennett Donor Advice Fund. The initial deadline is coming up on October 1st. For more information, you can go to NebraskaHometown.org. Well, it really is great to see how this library fund is helping the smaller communities in the state as well. And so joining us now with more on this is the Nebraska Community Foundation Executive Director, Jeff Ghost. And it's good to see you this morning. Good morning, John. Yeah. So, Jeff, we heard in this previous story about a donor advice fund. What kinds of projects and programs are sponsored and supported by donor advice funds to the Nebraska Community Foundation? We can use philanthropic dollars for all sorts of public good purposes. Libraries, K-12 education, early childhood development, youth engagement, aging in place, economic development, leadership development, entrepreneurship, training and work. I mean, we've done that sort of work in lots and lots of communities all over the state for years, and it's really fun to see the difference it makes. With libraries in particular, this is, libraries are one of the main pieces we have to help communities not have a digital divide in their place. So libraries are actually more important than they represent. Yeah, I know we're talking to them and they were saying, hey, libraries aren't not about books, just about books anymore, a lot more going on. When it comes to a donor advice fund, can the donor choose to remain in the house? Yes, we have a number of donors who have chosen to remain anonymous for a short period of time, or maybe that's their wish indefinitely. So we're happy to protect that donor confidentiality if that's what somebody chooses to do. Let's say someone out there is watching right now and they wanna maybe establish a donor advice fund in their hometown, how could they do that? They can contact any of us at the Nebraska Community Foundation or they could talk to one of the affiliated fund leaders in their community. We're working about 250 communities around the state. So you probably have a friend or a neighbor that's now connected from the Nebraska Community Foundation. I know in my town of Pender, there are lots of people connected. So it's a network across the state. Yeah, and the website it can is NebraskaHometown.org. Okay. And the telephone number is 402-323-733-0. Okay. Okay, thanks, Krista. So... I just wanna mention, while we were watching this considering right now, it's August 2020. As you can see, this was a year ago, August 2019. So of course that library is not currently having the kids come in and the same number as considering the pandemic, but that is what they were doing a year ago. Yeah, the schedule is still the same. So do you want me to go back to you to continue the slide? Yes, please. Just a sec, I will get you back. And Krista, you bring up a great topic, which is we are in different times now. And the Nebraska Community Foundation has, I think, reacted very quickly in a number of communities with many of our funds to address the COVID-19 situation in a number of ways. We have some other matching grants that we have been offering. One is bridging the learning gap to help with students in schools. And one is bridging or connecting elders with family because we know there are several elderly that are isolated in either facilities where they cannot receive visitors or in their homes where they just are very isolated. So we are doing our best to help where we can with some other charitable dollars. But this particular one, I want libraries to consider that if they are considering, I mean, obviously the digital divide existed prior to COVID-19, but we've all noticed that it has become very more visible these days because of COVID-19. And I know that libraries can serve bridging that gap. And so certainly technology and programming or any assisting students that might be falling behind in school, that library, any programming like that, that libraries would like to do, that would all fall under the enhancement grant. And this is certainly something that we would consider. So we will try to be flexible with the times as well. I don't think anyone could have foreseen that this was coming. And here we are. So certainly as your programming needs change, this grant can also accommodate that. So just wanted to throw that out there. And Ravenna, besides doing this fantastic new facility recently, just last year then they did ask for another grant under the enhancement grant and they did receive another $20,000 from this donor advice fund. And that was for their maker space, as I had mentioned. Those are, that was a popular program, the innovation studios project, mobile maker space that the library commission did was extremely popular across the state. Ravenna, we're trying to get it back up. We've been on pause because something else with the pandemic, but it is, we still have another year through June or July of next year that we'll be doing installations and things into various libraries. Well, I encourage you to take advantage of that because we have seen through these applications how popular it is. And it seems like a great way to test it out and see if it's right for your community. And many of our communities like Ravenna found that it was so popular and really brought in lots of new people that hadn't been using the library before or recently and also all different age groups and that it was really something that was very useful for their community. So Ravenna decided to invest some dollars of their own to develop their own maker space and they did ask for our assistance with that. So I think once they go through that innovation studios process and get some of their staff trained, that's a barrier sometimes just to start from scratch of not for sure that we can handle the tech side of things, but once you have the staff trained, it does seem like that's something that your program, Krista, really helps with and then libraries can go on their own to do it. Yeah, the library innovation studios, this is an IMLS grant that we received here at the commission to put maker space equipment for a temporary time in libraries. They have 20-ish weeks each library gets to have some of this equipment. Like some of the things they mentioned their vinyl cutter heat press, there's 3D printer embroidery machines, but a Lego mindstorms for robots, all sorts of things. And basically to test it out and see, like I said, learn about it, their staff, their volunteers can learn how these things work and then decide which part, because there's a lot of stuff going on in maker spaces now, it's huge. There's so many different pieces of equipment, how do you know what to get? We bring in the equipment, you get to test it, then we take it out, bring it to another library or for them, but then this is actually exactly what we want to happen with that grant. We got you the taste and you know where it works and you know what your community out of all this equipment really wants in your town, now find a way to get it permanently for yourself. You may have monies you already have or go and look for a grant that will then get exactly the pieces that you need that you know your people are using. This is the perfect result, exactly what we wanted. Exactly, yeah, and I do think last year we had about five or six communities, community libraries apply for that purpose. So that's certainly a popular thing. So hopefully that gives you some ideas of some types of programs or facility improvements or if you are trying to be accredited that you can use this to help through that process, I'd be happy here at the end to try to answer any questions that you have, but as far as the application process goes, we do have something called a short form which is extremely short and basically just asking what the idea is that you have to use this grant for. And then also it does ask you where you think the one-to-one match would come from. It does not, at that point, you do not need to have it all secured and in place, but it's just for us to get an idea that you're on the right track for this grant and that little short application form is due October 1st. And then we go through those short-term forms or short forms and we, those that are then eligible, we ask them to submit a full proposal which is a little bit longer, but like I said, we tried to keep it as simple as we could and still get the information that we need, but that is due in the first part of January. It's, I believe January 11th in 2021 this year, but you can certainly go to this website. Whoops. This website is the Nebraska Community Foundation's website. It talks about the current Spenet Donor Advice Fund and then this one is the Nebraska Library Commission and where the red arrow is. I'll let Christa. It links right out to that your page on the Community Foundation site, yes. So there's a couple of ways that you can get there to learn more about it. And as I mentioned, I'm happy to answer any questions if you're not sure about something. So here is my information and you can find me also on the Nebraska Community Foundation webpage. So Christa, I guess are there any questions that have come up while we're doing this talk or do we just wanna open it up? Yeah, not yet. If anybody has any questions, go ahead and type into your questions section. If you have a microphone, you wanna use that, just tell me that and you can do it that way. If you wanna know if I have any questions about applying about what you could and couldn't apply for, tips, tricks, whatever, put it in there. I do wanna say as far as the application form said go, applying for grants can be intimidating. These are not, there's a relatively painless these, I would think, it is, you know, tell us what your idea is, what's going on in your community, what kind of support you have from your local community for whatever the library's doing. And we can also help you with writing those grant, those applications too. You can reach out with to me or to Christine and I've reviewed some people's either short or long applications before they've actually submitted just to give some tips and advice on, you might wanna beef up this part or don't forget to tell them, you know, what the mayor or the city administrator thinks, you know, whatever, you know, I can give you tips. I actually participate in, along with Christine and the nieces and nephews in the deciding who, the grants when we do that in the spring, spring-ish February. February. Yeah. And we should maybe talk about that. So after that January long application is submitted, the committee, the donor advice fund committee does get together in about mid to the third week in February and then they make their decision and everyone is notified the very first part of March, around March 1st. So that is our timing as far as this process goes and it is a once a year process. So we are just beginning. Now's the time to be thinking about those short applications and the different projects you do. I will mention that we have been able to give multiple grants to the same community in multiple areas. So that is an option too. If you have a programs enhancement idea as well as you need a facility upgrade, you could apply for both. And we would at least look at that. That's one thing that's great about too that I've had also people ask me, well, I already did that. So can I do again? Absolutely. And multiple ones. There's not, as you mentioned, there's not a limit. Just apply every time, everything you come up with. It could be the same type of grant next year just because something else needs to be done or a completely different one. Do a program instead of a facilities one. There's no bad marks for, because well, we gave one last year so we can't this year. It's actually more the opposite. They're all about, we want to give out this money. Yes. I was just gonna say, where is this money? This isn't like money that, afterwards we can keep it for some other, it's the only purpose is to give it to libraries. And so we need you guys to come and ask for it. Right, to do good work, we have to give the money out and we want to give the money out. So we are a unique granting situation where we are not looking for reasons to catch you that you did something incorrect in the process and so you no longer are eligible. We are actually looking for ways, if something's not quite right, that we'll call you and we'll try to figure out a way to make it work so that what you are ultimately trying to achieve does happen. So definitely. And I know definitely also over the time of a grant, even after it's been approved, I don't know if that's the right word, it changed requirements. Like the library has said, okay, yes, thank you for the grant. We're gonna do this thing. And then something changes in the community and they can't do what they wanted to do. Things can be changed. None of this grant stuff is really in stone just because, well, for example, last year, we wanted to do something, but then there was a flood. So instead we now have to change gears. And that can be done. You can always negotiate about what the grant might be for or put it off a year because we couldn't do it this year because of extenuating circumstances. That's fine, couldn't do it in 2020. We'll bump you to 2021, it's okay. Right, and that did happen this year with COVID because obviously it changed the libraries being open necessarily. And also for some that were trying to get accredited, as you know, you suspended the accreditation process. So some of those workshops and things were not available. And so we have offered to extend those grants from last year that were meant for assisting with accreditation. And the same thing could happen if it was a facilities grant. And even if you had a construction delay of some sort and you needed, the only thing we do ask is that you communicate with us and don't assume that we're going to fund something differently, just communicate with us. And if we are aware of things ahead of time, we'll do everything we can to work with you. The other stipulation I should mention on facilities grants that seems to come up is we do not grant to things that have already been paid for or spent. I'm sorry, I'm gonna sneeze. So if you are doing a project, obviously most projects that are facilities related unless they're just small projects, they do cost more than the 20,000 match that we provide. So if you're midway in a project and if you specifically asked us to pay for, let's say windows, but windows were done prior to hearing if you got our grant, then we would not be able to use that grant for the windows because the work had already been done. So usually when I work with people on a facilities grant, it needs to be for upcoming new pieces of that project. But if parts of that project have been done and paid for, that's okay, that's not a problem. So hopefully- It can't be for something, it's not a reimbursement or something you already did. You've got to be thinking forward, but it can be, like you said, part of it, like we haven't done the windows yet. So nothing has been done. We did this other work on the building, but not the windows, that's gonna be next year. Then yes, you can ask for that money because you haven't gotten to that part of the big full project of other stuff that you did do. Yep. Exactly, exactly. Just think of it, always thinking forward. What am I doing next that it happened? Not what I've already done. Right, right. We do a couple of comments and questions here. Tammy, who's from Genoa, well, okay. Was the library director in Genoa says, I agree with Krista, everyone should apply. Yes, Genoa did. Actually, one that did that, you were talking about the mortar and the building is coming apart. And you've done multiple grants. Tammy's now our director of our three rivers library system. She has now become our director of directors. But yes, Tammy's a great one to talk about this because she's done multiple applications that they have received in Genoa. And then we have a question from Lori, who is, I believe from, yes, Culbertson. We're working on changing from pen and card checkout to the electronic checkout in conjunction with the joint membership to the pioneer consortium. Pioneer consortium is a group of libraries that share an online catalog here in Nebraska, 20-ish, 20-25 libraries. Would the enhancement grant be an option? I believe. So switching to electronic, sure, I think. There is an opportunity to join the consortium. There's costs to join that, to getting all of their holdings and records into that. If, can you remember back when this started, did you have a lot more of these kind of requests that people were moving from kind of the old school paper version to electronic or has that happened during this grant time period? Yes, we have had it happen. Actually, we've done grants here at the Library Commission for the same exact purpose where we support the pioneer consortium, what we call our library improvement grants. There's lots of kind of grants you can apply for, obviously, that we have given grants to libraries for exactly this purpose for becoming automated if they never were before. And then also to join this consortium, the pioneer consortium that's here in Nebraska. Our library improvement grants here, it's a funding question on our side. It's money that comes to us from the federal government, Library Services Technology Act money, LSTA, and it varies each year how much money we might get. Some years we haven't been able to do them. We did last year, we're not sure about this year. And we don't know how much money we'll have too. So we haven't always been able to do it. I don't remember if we've ever, so I know we've done it here through the Library Commission grants for library improvement grants for this exact purpose. I don't recall. I'd have to go back and look to see if it's ever been done via this that creates Bennett, but I'm just looking to see about our description. Community education outreach programs or services that benefit loan. I'm going routine causes with general maintenance.  I think if I would, like I said, I do participate in this, this is the kind of thing I think if you remember last year, when we did the evaluation of these, Christine, I do a lot of the, because, you know, Christine and Anise's and nephew's don't, I'm like the library expert for them. Exactly. She's our expert on libraries. Libraries need and do and whatnot. I think this would be a one that I would advocate for doing. Yes, it falls under the description where it talks about equipment or software purchase or upgrades that serve as a component of a larger programmatic endeavor. The program being we're trying to, you know, get our online catalog better so that people can kind of, you know, reach out and use our services. That's what I would say, too. Community education outreach, people would be able to look online to find out what the library has. Absolutely. So I think this would be a grant that I would explain to them and advocate that, yes, I think it does fall in that category and it would be okay. Yes, I would say definitely in the enhancement of the three areas. And what I would suggest is that you address not only the issue of moving from the paper and pencil to the electronic, but the benefits that you hope to achieve by doing that. Because I think that's what the committee would really be interested in is how can, not only does this help you become more efficient and modern as a library, but also like Christa mentioned, what benefits to your patrons does it provide by going electronic? So that's what I would suggest. It's not like, it's not just that we want to automate. It's, we want to automate and it's going to have this effect. Exactly. That part is what gets you into this particular grant. Exactly. Yeah. If we do library improvement grants, it's pretty much for that. For us, it's just we need to automate. Great. And we have had some libraries apply for ours and yours and they have received a little bit of funding from you and a little bit from us. So that is an option if someone can make it fit. And that's what I think is something to, that I think is a benefit to the fact that we are here at the library commission involved in this particular grant, this opportunity because we talk to each other about well, we can give them, we only have this much to give, but if you guys give the other part, then together they can do the project. So we do work together to get you multiple grants as you apply for them to complete something. Yes. Exactly. I can't remember, we did something like that last year and I can't remember. I think it was, if we gave ours, you guys would do yours. So we had to go back and make sure that they could get enough to actually do it. Whatever the project was. Yeah. Yes. So yeah, so look into it, Lori. Look and check out the, Chris Bennett. We are right now, we're talking about grants in general at the commission. We are right now working out our budget for what grants we will be offering for next year for 2021. Should be some announcements coming up in the next couple of weeks. So keep your eyes open about that. We usually do youth grants for excellence, for youth services, we do internship grants to get you an extra staff person, continuing education grants and then the library improvement grants. Those are the four that we can offer if we have the funding and we're working on budgeting how that could work this year. So any other questions or comments anybody has, go ahead and type in the questions there. You can always reach out to Christine of course, anytime or me, if you do have questions and check out the website too, where all the resources are. I'm going to, I'm waiting to see, pull back to my screen because I'm gonna show you guys too since we didn't look at it, let's see how it can do. There we go. I, we do, we talk about where to get to the grant page. Also in the session description for today's show, which will also be in the recording that you guys will all get. When this recording is ready for today, you're all gonna get an email letting you know that's available and ready. And you'll have a link to the recording and a link to Christine's slides. So you can look at those afterwards. But also right here, there is a link right to the page on the community foundation site. So that can jump you there quickly. And here's a link to the short application form or PDF, whichever you want, and the grant guidelines. So everything that you need is right there to get started with it. And October 1st is your first deadline for that short application form. It doesn't look like anybody typed anything in yet. We're almost getting to the top of the hour again. So. Well, I appreciate you allowing us to come on and share about this great opportunity. And hopefully those of you who are listening, your brain is working and you're creatively thinking about how this might benefit you because we really would love to see a lot of great applications. Like I said, last year with the 15 libraries who received funding, it was one of our largest years of number of applicants. And this money, it will not be there forever. It does have an end date of 2030 or when the money is spent. And so now is really the time to apply because you'd like to take advantage of it while we still do have some resources. But we certainly have plenty of resources for this year to really do some great work. So please do look at it and see how easy it actually is to apply for this money. Yeah. And that's something too that I was actually thinking about. Some of these grants that you think about, it's just like, oh, they'll always be there and they're making interest to have more money. It's earning interest to have more money to give out. And it's like this circling thing that'll always be there. This particular fund, as Christine just said, it is making interest, but it's not for that purpose. The whole, at the very beginning, there will be an end date for this. We are not doing this forever. Right. So in our world, yeah, we call that endowed. And so there are several funds with the Nebraska Community Foundation that are permanently endowed funds. And that means that they will be there forever and that there is a payout every year forever. This particular fund is not that kind of fund. It is invested, but it is not set up to last forever. It has an end date of 2030. But honestly, we have been very generous with the money. And so it probably will not extend to 2030. So that's why I say now is really the time to apply. And there's also not, I know we've mentioned in that video, she mentioned how much is given out each year. There's not a limit to how much can be given out each year either. It doesn't work that way that there's this much this year. It's, we have this total amount in the fund of whatever is at the moment and we'll get whatever applications we get this year and we'll fund them. We might give out 80,000, as she said, we might give out 150,000. I mean, it depends on what applications we get. So there's not really a, oh, we got to stop because we ran out of money. It's running out of money of the entire fund, which has got all that left. Right, we don't airmark per year. 23 is the official end date. Well, we've got a lot of money in there, unless something goes crazy and we use it up this year. I can't imagine that happen, but. Yeah, we have given out over $570,000 since the time that this fund has been established. And so it's just amazing to see the list of communities that benefited from this One Donor Vice Fund. It's a great story to tell, not only to share how many communities can benefit, but also how One Donor can make such a huge difference in so many people's lives, because it's not only all those communities, but all those people in those communities who are benefiting from it. So I think Shirley would be very, very pleased with how many people she has touched. Absolutely, yeah. And if you're interested in, as you know, we sort of share this or hear about Ravenna, if you're interested in wondering every year when they do do these, there's an announcement, a press release that goes out that you can look for. In our, on our library commission webpage, if you go to our blog, we always post something about it. So if you just look up, you see, I've done this before. That's a great idea. You can see what grants we've given in the past. So this is what I'm about to show, but here's the announcement from this year in back in March, when, of which libraries received it and a little blurb about what they got. So if you wanted to maybe talk to a previous recipient, do a search here, you know, find all the previous announcements. This one's just last year, that there's no one to get to. That's an excellent idea. And if you keep going, there'll be, here's one encouraging, and here's the ones from the year before 2019, listing the library. So you can check there and see who else has gotten them. And if you wanna get some advice from a previous, we should see. Absolutely. We're here to help. All right, yeah. All right. Oh, and Tammy says, like I said, Tammy our previously director of Genoa, now director of our three Rivers Library system. She just typed in, anyone can ask me, I've received at least four, totaling $17,000 over time. So yeah, absolutely give her a call too. You can see, yes. It's kind of the best kept secret, even though we've tried to promote it and obviously 1011 has done some promotion for us. And definitely the library commission has been promoting, but I think there's a lot more people who could be taking advantage of this, but those who have discovered it, are certainly seeing all the benefits of being able to apply more than one time. So. Absolutely, definitely. All right. So doesn't look like there's any other desperate questions. That's fine. I think we'll wrap up for today. Thank you so much, Christine. Like you said, we're able to have you on again to talk about the grant. Like we'll keep promoting it. I'm gonna, you'll see messages from me pushing that the grant deadline's coming up once it gets to October 1st is that first deadline. So go ahead and look at it. So thank you Christine for being with me here today. Absolutely. Thank you everybody for attending. As I mentioned, we are recording the show and it will be on our Encompass Live webpage. There we go. These are upcoming shows that we have scheduled, but right here is a link to our archives. You can go there and you can, these are the most recent ones at the top. So today's show will be there at the top. By the end of the week, it should be done as long as go to webinar and YouTube cooperate with me. And as soon as it is ready, I'll send you guys all the links, the link to it and let you know. I'll show you too while we're here that you can search our archives for up show topics if you want to. You can search the full archives or just the most recent 12 months if you wanna get something really, really current. And the reason we have that one limit there for searching is this is the full archives of Encompass Live. Encompass Live premiered in January, 2009. So over 10 years ago and all of our archives are here.  That'd be crazy. That's why we have that search there. So, but so just pay attention when you are watching our recordings. You'll see they all have their original broadcast date. So do pay attention. Some things will stay on the test of time like book lists and things and stuff about grants applications. But certain topics may become outdated. Products and services might not exist anymore. They might have changed completely. Websites, links might be broken. You never know over time, of course. So just pay attention to when something was originally broadcasting and what the topic was if you do watch one of our recordings. But if you just want something current just really meet your search for the most recent 12 months. It will search the description, the presenter or anything I mentioned about that particular show. So this is our upcoming shows here. We're working on some filling in some more dates here. As you can see, I'm still looking for next week. So I'll have something out of that very soon, hopefully. And our upcoming schedule. So keep an eye on there for our upcoming shows. And we do have a Facebook page. If you do like to use Facebook, you can give us a like over there. And we do reminders about shows. Here's a reminder to log in to today's show when our recordings are ready and available, I post on here. So, you know, if you do like to keep up with things on Facebook, give us a like over there. Otherwise, we do post things onto our mailing lists in our library commission blog and various other social media that we use, Twitter, Instagram, IEM or elsewhere. We have a hashtag and comp live with abbreviation if you wanna see what's going on with the show. So that wraps up for today. Thank you so much everybody for being here with us today. I hope to see you on a future episode. Bye. Bye.


Everybody can see you and you can see your teacher, you hear him through a speaker. There's cameras on both sides of the room, one in front and one in back. You have your mics on the table so he can hear you and you can hear them through the speakers. I like interacting with other schools and you get to learn things that you wouldn't learn in a normal class. Taking these courses are pretty much study skills because I've had to work a lot more independently, studying on my own and managing time and studying from the book myself and not relying on the teacher to give me notes and things like that. I think that an IVC class really combines the best of an online class and a face-to-face class in that it takes the independent learning from the online class and the interaction from the face-to-face class and just combines them. That's not even saying that it would cover the entire border. Giving presentations helps me master the material because you have to be able to understand the material and know the material really well so that you can teach the other students and show what you know. The archives are great for when I was absent from school and I needed to catch up on my works. I could go and watch the class and get the notes that I needed and also when I was studying for my tests I could go back and review with some of those sessions. It was interesting to finally put a face with a voice and actually know that that person was interested in you I guess. They're not just there to teach. They actually love what they do. I would definitely recommend taking an IVC class. Like I said, it really enhances your independent learning.


So Sam, again, great to meet you. We'd love to hear just a little bit about your background, what you've worked on to date. You know, I maintain my own independent consultancy that I've had since about 2015. And, you know, that's sort of been sort of my focus is cloud computing and DevOps in that consulting capacity. And so, you know, I've been working with a company that's in the field of orbital communications, which just to say they deploy communication satellites. How does GitLab in any way help your ability to do anything with disconnected satellites? Directly, it doesn't help you on the satellite itself. But in order to operate an orbital communications network, effectively, you also have to have earthbound communications. But the actual sort of communications relay technology is all software-based. And it runs predominantly on earth-based computing. And so we employ GitLab to provide continuous deployment into staging environments, into prod environments, predominantly on Kubernetes. And I think that that was one of the key selling points actually for GitLab in this case is the very tight integration with Kubernetes. How does that enable iteration work for you? So GitLab makes it really, really simple because all of the tooling is bundled into one platform that is directly there with your issue tracking and your source code. And as a result, you can directly see, okay, this particular event in CI or in my tests, my test failure or whatever, is directly related to this specific value objective that I wanna get into my product. So whatever my value objective is, I can see what's blocking it and I can track it down very, very directly because it's all in one platform. You think about times where like your work got better or felt easier because you were able to bring GitLab into a company or perhaps just like you utilize it in a way that sped things up or enhanced a project? There was an engineer who I was working with who didn't have a whole lot of time to work on a certain set of features. The effect of GitLab in this case was that because of investing, like having a platform that already solved most of this for us, but investing a little bit in good testing and in automation, that person's work was enabled to basically commit like half an hour a day on a certain set of problems and still show marked progress. I think what it ultimately does is actually we're saving somebody's time of their life. Like we're not wasting their life. They also get to feel better and because they feel better, they are more, I would say innovative actually in the long run about what they're going to be working on next. What has GitLab done for you personally? Yeah, I think it provides a great playground for testing ideas. And that is extremely valuable because validating an idea allows you to make the next step forward into how do I somehow productize this? And I think that it's that easy starting place that makes GitLab most effective for me personally. Is there something else that you wanna highlight or share that you think is worth talking about now? I have found that the transparency is very useful for us to understand, okay, what is the state of this request? Is it prioritized at all? And if it isn't, why? How does GitLab feel about the thing that we said they should improve? So that transparency I think is extremely beneficial. And in other cases, I'll say transparency creates trust and I'll say it here too. It's one of our values. We care a lot about it and we try to be a good steward of it. So that's definitely a good validation.


So deep see adventure This is a real simple game. It's a Japanese indie tabletop game. Yeah, our friend Chris has gotten obsessed with the Japanese board game Industry, so he's getting lots of Japanese games Including this one, which is a good. They're real hit or miss like all games are like all indie type board games But some of them have amazing aspects like there's a game called Buddha Babel, which oh my god I want to I want to not a great game It's basically just sort of like vote who wins really fast But the instruction manual is so gloriously hilarious in its English It is amazing and also the concept God with your tower that is too tall. Yep. You are you gonna win the game? You have to build the tower of Babel that is the tallest but isn't too tall because then it offends God It's uh, I feel like there's a really good game there, but it didn't quite execute But deep see adventure final judgment. Oh, so the other common theme I'm I'm picking up on because I see other people complaining about this too is that for whatever reason Japanese Indie tabletop people can't seem to write rules very well I'm sure they're probably well-written some of them at least I mean In English can't write rules well, but I'm sure if we knew you know Emily read the rules She could tell us a better ruling than the so from what I have gathered that does not appear to be the case The rules are just not as tight as I would expect from a game in general But Kickstarter games have the exact same problem I mean games period have this problem people don't write game rules tightly and well seems like the only games that don't have this problem are The like the people who write game rules well are gay our rules lawyers and rules lawyers usually bad at designing games It's Rainer kinesia and a few other people are the only people who write good game rules or people with lots of editors Yeah, and big publishers But even they fuck it up a lot deep-sea adventure is so simple and so quick and I always introduce it to people as the drowning game It's a drowning simulator. Let's go. That's correct. Basically.     It's hard 25. It's not a lot of airs not a lot of airs at all But anyway Then you know when you roll the dice to move remember, it's 2d3. You don't move a lot You subtract one from your total movement for every treasure you're holding So if I roll the best possible roll a six and I'm holding two treasures I only move four spaces I'm holding two treasures and I roll a one or a two I don't move and my turn goes past the rules like to find out if you pick up Still use two air from holding two treasures And that is key because if the air runs out after the player's turn and ended the air Anyone who's not on the boat drops all their treasure to the bottom of the ocean and dies Yep, and then you play again you play three rounds everyone at the submarine goes back to the surface So anyone who's in it survives even though they ran out of air There's a little bit more about how you can just drop treasure and try to race back for the boat And how the lot like there's also positioning based on the other people So when you move if you step on someone else, you just sort of fast forward right past them So if there's a bunch of people in front of you It's really easy to get to the bottom of the ocean quickly to get more fancy treasures But if there's not a lot of people behind you It's really hard to go back up to that you need people in front of you whichever way you're going to move quickly with a low roll So you want people to be close to you But in in front of you on your way back to the submarine so you can get up there quickly Now this game take you if everyone knows how to play it Five minutes tops to play an entire game the thing that takes the longest amount of time is the dice rolling Yep, maybe ten minutes Teaching the game takes about two minutes and people just kind of get it and everyone I've shown this game to because I own it now Really likes it like everyone. I've ever introduced this to and I had them play it They just got really you can basically have all the fun of playing like infiltration It means 90% of the fun of playing in I had to say it I think this is better than infiltration. I mean because it's absolutely well I think infiltration has some complexities and some you know mere parts which make it sort of less pure and less good But it has a little bit more fun because it has extra bits like But it also has this meta of Doug it always goes kind of the same way. There's only two options on how that game goes, right? But anyway, so yeah, you can basically have all you know I think in terms of fun per minute per dollar per, you know unit It's better than infiltration This is like the perfect Busted out while you're waiting for the last person to come back from the bathroom to start a real game or Busted out when you're at a con and the room closes in a half hour You can get one more game out of the way or bust it out if you're on a literal submarine Yep, your divers bust it out like at the table at a restaurant. Yeah, so The thing I have noticed also is that when you play this game with people who haven't played it a bunch Almost everyone dies or everyone dies Yeah, first two rounds. Mm-hmm this game like everything's going fine And it's just you know, it's a press your luck game So and should I keep going should I keep going everything's fine as soon as one person decides to turn back all hell breaks loose Yeah, as soon as one person picks up two treasures all hell breaks loose Yep, the game is all about leaving Scott to drown at the bottom of the ocean as fast as possible Hopefully you're not the one who's at the deepest part of the ocean when people start turning around, right? You're at the deepest part of the ocean you should turn around first So that you get you know, it's like I'm the deepest right now I will grab a treasure turn around and I'll get a pretty good role because everyone else is right behind me And then I'll be on my way back and it'll be good times I've had a strategy here at the deepest part of the ocean and everyone else turns back and then it's your turn again Now this is a big gap behind you It's like wait for me and now you're dead if I'm way too shallow like I'm near the submarine going down and Other people have picked up multiple treasures.   It's what it's almost a pure Press your luck game. There's plenty of press your luck games is like, you know Fresh fish is a press your luck game in many ways to a degree, but it's much more obscured and complex Right. The press your luck is only one aspect of it, right? But there's no thanks is a press your luck game in many ways press your luck is a press your luck game Yeah, the game show on TV No, except if you figure out the pattern and you're not the luck component goes away And press your luck is also a core like it is a mechanic either core or just sort of part of the game Like it's part of way more games than you might realize infiltration I've we just mentioned because all it really means is that you generally have the option like a real usually a Really simple dial where you can dial up your risk raw and it yeah And it dials up the reward at the same time. Yeah, you can just you know a lot of games You can buy reward potential with risk right in most games out there You know, you're always making these sort of decisions based on a risk reward analysis sort of thing, right? Like a hot I've got three moves available. There's the risky move that has a big reward There's a risky move with a shitty reward forget that one And there's a conservative move with an okay reward and you can sort of choose to But a press your luck game is different in that you can choose pretty much anywhere along the scale of risk and reward It's like a free roaming, you know needle not just concrete actions And you can you know keep pressing and then at some point you flip and you know this sort of this movement of Increasing the risk until you stop and turn around and give up on the risk, you know Like a deal or no deal and things like that now pressing your luck Like it's in most games where they realized or not like even wizard has a heavy press your luck mechanic Or at least a component because once you're behind you're not gonna win You can you got to go for increasingly desperate strategies to try to catch up So you just dial the risk all the way up in the last round. You're like, yeah, I'm taking 10 tricks Yep, you just go for it even though you've got almost no chance because that's a conventional heuristic of almost all games If you're losing you want to increase randomness or Take on additional risk to attempt to get a greater reward because you play conservatively and you're behind You're guaranteed to stay behind Like you can't overtake someone with a conservative strategy if they're ahead of you because they're gonna play Conservative strategy and at best you'll maintain your current negative lead So the hallmark, you know of a game that's specifically a press your luck game is the turnaround point Yeah, at which point do you stop increasing the rate? You know, it's like, okay rim one out of two chance of making a dollar Okay, I'll do it. All right now you have to bet you have to go all in on every bet or not bet So not a four chance the next one is one out of four chance the next one's one out of eight sixteen It's like at what point do you say? Alright, I'm just gonna keep my money and I'm not going to go all in again. Yeah, right? How do you make this decision, right? It's like, you know, you've already you know, it's like obviously no matter what the odds are in any game you're going all in on the very first bet even if the odds are really small because It's like if you don't win the first bet, you're you give zero, which is what you can't have less than zero Yeah, it's like turn one like a pure conservative strategy and wizard would be to always bid zero unless you have wizards Sure, like yeah, you're not gonna like you'll get your two points every round probably but you're not gonna win if anyone takes even You're also gonna take tricks by accident actually lose maybe Yeah, but but like always easier to avoid a trick right then to take you would never in deep sea adventure or infiltration on the first turn Just leave and be like oh back in the submarine Yep, that there's no reason to do that you might as well at least go out get the first thing You know go in infiltration go out pick up one day to token and go back So there's two things one and it's are you behind or not like the further behind you are?   They go way deep and sometimes they almost make it out almost almost unlikely. Yeah But while there have been times for example where people who are trying to make it out made it out Faster than they thought so once they're out They're not using up the air anymore and this person is like left outside And the only air they're using is their own. Yeah, they have complete control over what's going on It's not like the other people can come out of the submarine and breathe some air and use it up So now they know exactly like whether they can get back or not if they should put treasures down or pick them up Or what and now they can score with like a really deep treasure So some games like this almost have a sort of coalition building where there's the coalition of people who are continuing to press forward into Deeper risk and the separate coalition These are just implied coalitions of people who are Turned back who have decided the risk enough and are bailing and depending on which of those is the majority Is a big part of the dynamic of the game and then you'll see that exact same thing play out in infiltration For example, but there's all this other stuff sort of obscuring it like it obscures the risk reward even though really infiltration Not much more deep than deep sea adventure. There's a bit of randomness going on a lot more randomness But also like most of the things are not nearly as powerful as you'd expect them to be and you're very rarely Rewarded for going super deep, but the game rewards you with these other things like theme and mystery And you really want to see what those cards are. Yeah, if you go deeper This has been geek nights with rim and scott special thanks to DJ pretzel for the opening music cat Lee for web design and brand okay for the logos be sure to visit our website at front row crew dot com for show notes Discussion news and more remember geek nights is not one but four different shows sci-tech Mondays gaming Tuesdays and my comic Wednesdays and Indiscriminate Thursdays geek nights is distributed under a creative comments attribution 3.0 license Geek nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience, but unlike those other late shows. It's actually recorded at night


Thanks, everyone, for coming, given the beautiful weather outside, and then it's Sunday, and the beautiful weather. Welcome to my presentation with the spicy name, all the things that didn't teach you at university. I hope you didn't come here expecting I'll teach you everything you didn't learn at university in 30 minutes. Otherwise, you're in for a letdown. So anyway, first the boring part, who am I? I'm Dan Cermak. I'm a software developer working at SUSE. I also work, do things in the Fedora community. And so for my interests, besides doing things on the computer, also working on development tools, I'm quite passionate about testing. And occasionally when I get to it, I write documentation and then break my home automation, because I like standing in the dark or implement funky stuff there. If you'd like to stalk me on social media, you can find a few links there. I might post some stuff there, for example, link to the slides, but there will be some later. So now that we are done with the boring part, I'd like to maybe share a bit of a history, because first I thought, yeah, well, so first the disclaimer, I didn't study computer science. So I studied physics. That means a lot of the stuff that I learned from my day job I had to teach myself. And I thought, well, I'd like to share a few things that I learned over the years. I mean, my Unix beard is not that long. So I most certainly don't know everything by far. But I learned a few things. I wanted to share them. And so I started to write my thoughts down. And what I learned over the years, and I realized this thing's going to start grow and grow and grow and grow. And it's not going to be a presentation. It's going to be like two lectures, maybe three, maybe a whole lecture series. So yeah, let's not do that. Because I'm going to tell you things like, yeah, you should test your stuff. You should have a proper staging setup.   But also more positive things like if you want to do today something with computers and with code, you'll have to use version control and that means git. I mean, nothing else is really used in practice. If you want to do backend development, nowadays you're going to use Python, Node.js, Golang in the front end. It's still all JavaScript. WebAssembly is becoming a thing, but it's really not that you're in there and if you go into the enterprise world, it's going to be Kotlin, Java, Java, Java, more Java. If you're unlucky, it's also going to be XML and maybe a bit more Java. And you're going to touch SAP, whether you like it. But, well, some of this stuff will change. Some of this won't. So I would hope that the infrastructure stuff will change, but I'm afraid it won't because it's been like that for 30 years. But if you work in open source, one thing will really never, ever change, probably, and that's you have to work with people. And the interesting and challenging thing with open source and when it comes to people, so if you work in a company, you also have to work with people. But you have the same HR department. You're kind of there because you get paid to do your job.  Or sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. But there's structures for everything. But if you work in open source, you are there for your own motivation. And the other people, they have their very own motivations. And they can be completely different to yours. Maybe you do it for fun. They do it to put it on their resume. Maybe you're doing it because the software doesn't do a thing. And the other contributors do it for completely different reasons. Maybe they just like the community. Your employers are probably some completely different companies.  And their HR department won't be bothered if you try to file a complaint because they do it in a free time. I don't care. Not our problem. Maybe they are on a different continent. And even if you do it in your day job, it doesn't concern them. People work from all over the world. And you have completely different cultures, which can be a great challenge when it comes to communication. And also, one thing that you really shouldn't underestimate is time zones. Most of us probably are sitting in Zoom, Teams, Jitsi, whatever calls all day. And you know the trouble of time zones. But this can be a huge problem for open source projects if you are suddenly all the contributors are sitting in North America, and you are in Europe or in Asia. And they decide stuff in a meeting. And for you, it's 3 AM, or it's 12. And you are at your job. And you just can't join a call for your free time project in the middle of your working day. And you have people in volunteering positions, maybe that get paid. Maybe you have outside contributors who get paid. You do this in your free time. And they tell you, hey, fix this bug for me. No, I'm not going to give you money. Sorry. Maybe you have students. And this all makes open source much more challenging than really close source development, where you just have corporate structures which may or may not provide you with some backing, maybe not. But so that's really the, I'd say, the most challenging part of open source. I mean, you can also just make your project open and not accept any contributions at all. Technically, that's most certainly open source to the letter. But in my opinion, it misses out the one big thing. And that's the community. So your open source project usually has some kind of community behind it. And for many projects, a community is really, it's just a bunch of people that work together on a common goal that they share. Usually, it's just keeping this project around. And for many open source projects, you just become part of it by showing up because there's no clear onboarding process. I know there's projects nowadays that have welcome channels and you can get, and they try to onboard you in very friendly ways, which is definitely a good thing. But I know the first open source projects that I joined, I just came there, started fixing bugs. And eventually, they told me far quicker than I was comfortable with, hey, yeah, why don't you get merge rights? You're sure about that. But yeah, so the point of the community is to have a common goal and really to empower others to work on this shared goal. And since we're dealing here with people, the big question is always, how do you communicate with people? So you've got your multiple options. You can have your asynchronous communication forms, where you have your mailing lists. We all love them, don't we? Forums, but then also more synchronous ones, like a simple chat, so maybe Slack, maybe Discord. Maybe you're still an IRC or a voice chat. But these really serve completely different purposes. So my recommendation is if you are building up your open source project, or you are participating in one, you should have one of each. Don't have five different places, because people will land in the wrong one. At least someone will. So really, just have one. Also, issue trackers, bug trackers, et cetera, PP. Nowadays, that's mostly GitHub. But there's also other things for that. Hopefully not JIRA. If it's JIRA for your open source project, I don't envy you, but you do you. And as I said, have really one place for everything. So have one chat. If you want to do voice chats and video chats, you can do that, but really take into account that people come from very different backgrounds. They come from very different time zones. If you want to do voice chats, you might run into people who are sitting in the rural area and the internet connection is really bad. And if they are going to join a video chat over Jitsi with 10 video streams, their internet connection is going to crash. So maybe don't do that for important decisions, especially synchronous communication always excludes people from the other side of the world. And that's still a big problem. So if you want to try to keep most of the discussion asynchronous so people can follow up when they want. And when it comes to communication, try to avoid ambiguities. So there's many people, unfortunately, including myself, who try to be funny. And if you say so, for those of you who are fortunate enough to enjoy an English education and maybe watch a few English shows, you'll know the phrase, yeah, right. If I pronounce it like that, it's an affirmation. If I say, yeah, right. I'm being sarcastic. If your English is maybe not so good because you didn't get the opportunity to learn it at school or because maybe you had to work instead of going to school, then I already lost you. If I try to put that in writing, well, all hope is lost. So don't do stuff like that. Try really to be as unambiguous as possible. It can be hard. And also, really, so try to keep your communication simple. And usually, what's always a good idea to just assume good intentions. Most people aren't actually bad.  But frequently, people don't have bad intentions. You can just, if you assume that maybe you misunderstood them, usually stuff gets resolved. So try to be kind to each other. That usually gets you very far. But how do you make really a community welcoming? And I'm going to suggest something that people might not like, but codes of conduct are actually not evil. It doesn't mean that you are going to enforce rules for everything and say, you have to communicate in exactly this form. And if you deviate, we're going to throw you out. A code of conduct really can mean be kind to each other, assume good intentions. But it also means if you decide on something like that, which you should, you have to enforce it. And you have to live by it. If you just slap a code of conduct in your repository and don't do a thing about it, it's not worth the, well, paper. But you get it. It's really not worth having it at all, because it's not going to do a thing. So if you want to put down some rules, how you want people to communicate in your community, how they should behave, or how you want them to behave, and live by that, and enforce them. And to have a nice community, you want to provide a place where they can meet, where they can talk. So that can be a chat room. You can also have video chats. But then again, time zones, unfortunately, make this complicated, and also what I would recommend for all things to document processes. Documentation is really king. Unfortunately, no one likes to write documentation, including myself. But sometimes I do, because documentation really helps. Especially when it comes to community processes, when it comes to code review processes. Because let's say you get a pull request for something and suddenly disagree. Especially bad if two maintainers suddenly disagree. Who gets to decide? If you have a rule written down, you can point to the rule. If it's just by some, well, usually we do it like that, people will start to argue.  Just use a code formatter. It decides for you. If you can document rules, if you can enforce them preferably automatically, that's always a net win. But please don't try to solve social problems with technology. That doesn't work. Technology can help, but technology will not solve people problems. You have to solve people problems with people. As a maintainer, you should always, or as a community member, try to be present and try to be friendly to newcomers. If you tell a newcomer to RTFM, you're not going to see them again, unless they really, really, really, really want to use your project. But nowadays, there's so many projects, they're going to use something else. And help newcomers to do what they came to do. So as a maintainer, you might feel like someone comes in and they could solve a problem.  Don't. If you'll help them, it will take you twice as long, but they might stick around. And in the long run, that will be a win. They might stick, they might not stick around, but you'll never know if you never try. So what I'd also like to cover is a little bit why do people actually contribute to open source. Because if you understand why people contribute specifically to your project, you can make them stick around longer. Or also, if you're self-looking for a contribution and maybe need some reason, you can find a few. So I mean, some people just contribute because they believe open source is the right thing and closed source is the highway. So let's take my way. Some do it just for altruism. People also just contribute for fun.  Some just do it for kinship. So you like the community, and you want to contribute to the community and do it for them. Or just for your reputation, because I'm the one who solved all the nasty bugs. Reciprocity. So you feel the duty to just give back. Maybe you use this project for your day job all the time. So you feel like you should also give back to this project. It's also a great learning experience. So that's most certainly a good way. Or the good old scratch your own itch. So if you've found a cool project that doesn't do exactly the one thing you needed to do with open source most often, you can tweak it. You can use it as a career starter. I mean, I'm a software developer at SUSE, and I don't know exactly the reasons why I got hired, but I'm pretty certain open source contributions didn't hurt. And nowadays, many people, including myself, are fortunate enough to get paid for doing open source contributions. So that's also motivation. Now, please don't get scared. This terribly looking graph, which you can kind of see it. I stole that from a paper. That's also going to be linked in the presentation. So if you want to keep your community engaged, you have to know why they're contributing. And you also have to keep in mind that this can change over time. So this graph shows you on the initial motivation. So this has been a questionnaire for why people contribute to open source. And this is the initial state when people started contributing and how it evolved over time. So I think the questions were essentially, why did you start contributing and how is it now? And you can see a few things. So for instance, the scratch your own itch decreased by a lot. But many and also learning decreased a little bit. But people kind of stuck around for fun increased, reciprocity increased, alt-rhythm. And at least in my opinion, the takeaway from this is that many people stick around either because it's fun or because they like the community.  Keeping people around because they'll never be able to scratch their itch, I don't think that's going to work. But you can try. But I don't think that's a viable way. But again, every project is different. And finding out why people contribute well. You can try asking. Maybe they'll tell you. But I wish I had a magic recipe for that. But unfortunately, I don't. A nasty thing, unfortunately, is conflicts. So in your community, you will inadvertently have conflict unless you're only one person. But once you have more than one person, there's going to be a fight at some point. With fewer people, it might take longer. With more people, you will get them, unfortunately. And I would really suggest that you try to resolve conflicts given your rules that you've put down. Because otherwise, if you just let the conflicts kind of linger on and fizzle out, people will build up resentment and either they'll start to avoid them each other and you'll get silos in your community, which is always not fun. Because then they'll start doing their own things. And also, if you get conflicts more often with one person, then the famous phrase, one bad apple can spoil the barrel. Unfortunately, it's very frequently used nowadays to say, yeah, you shouldn't judge the whole thing by just one bad apple. But the one bad apple can really spoil everything. So if you have a bad actor in a community, you shouldn't be, you should eventually think about removing them, because they can poison the whole thing. So with that, I'd like to switch more into the path of a maintainer. So if you find yourself to become an open source maintainer, one of the most valuable skills is, I think, that you should learning to let go of things and to share responsibilities. If you can't do that, you're going to have a bad time. Because if you hoard all the issues for yourself, you can do that maybe for some time. But eventually, just a psychological burden of having all of this on your mind, and I have to take care of that, it's going to burn you out. So try to share your responsibilities, try to share your tasks, because actually what studies have found is that if you give people the rights to contribute to your project in a more meaningful way, like they are allowed to accept poor requests, they're allowed to merge them, their contribution quality will go up. So if you want to have a better project, share your responsibility with that. But unfortunately, as a maintainer, you also have to do the boring parts like take care of infrastructure, write documentation. You'll be doing that a lot. So documentation is unfortunately never enough. That's not an excuse to not do it. Because no documentation is even worse. Unfortunately, people will still not read documentation, but again, documentation is still king. So you'll also be covering the onboarding process and mentoring, issue triage, merge requests, maybe find cash, because infra doesn't pay for itself. If you have a forum, you maybe have to do more duration of the forum.  And if you're very lucky, you also have to start looking into licensing, do all the fun managing stuff. But maybe more fun things like making your project more popular, because your open source project, unless you are the lucky person who found exactly the one thing that everyone needs, like I guess Docker or Curl or SQLite, which are literally everywhere and are something that people really need, getting this one lucky project, you will have to do very little marketing yourself. But if you're not that lucky person, you would have to do marketing. And as a computer scientist, maybe, or as a programmer, I think, talking in front of people. But otherwise, if no one knows about your project, no one's going to use it. So if you want to make your project popular, talk about it, write tutorials. And what also works, if you're trying to solve a certain problem, find projects in need and send patches, maybe they'll accept it. You might have to be persistent, but maybe they'll start using it. And over time, popularity will grow. And as I said, did I mention documentation? Write it. And making a project popular has also another advantage. So this is Mike McQuade's contributor funnel, slightly adapted of the sales funnel. But the idea is essentially, if you want to have more maintainers, the one most common path to becoming a maintainer, you start out as a user of some project, and eventually you get sucked into becoming a contributor, and then you get sucked further along the funnel and eventually maybe become a maintainer. But the ratio between maintainers and users can be, I don't have numbers, but I guess it's in a best case scenario, it's maybe going to be 1,000 to one, but I guess it's more like 10,000 to one or even worse. Really depends on the project. So if you want more maintainers and you have five users, you're not going to recruit more maintainers from that. So make your project more popular. How do you do that? So this is from a study from Mozilla that I think from 2007, so it's not super recent, but they reviewed how you get people on board of the project and what the influences of certain factors are. So essentially the x-axis shows you the impact of a certain property on onboarding and the y-axis, that's just certain factors. And what you can see is that what really has the biggest positive impact is the perceived future impact and the recent volunteering experience. So really if you want to get people on board, the vision matters. What actually doesn't matter is the past impact at all. So if you want to onboard people better, you have to give them a vision. And how much impact they had in the past isn't really that important. What matters to them is that they think they can impact it. I mean, if you just give them the impression that they have some impact and they won't, they'll eventually find out. But if your project has a vision and has a path to improve it, you will be able to get more people. So give them a vision. And also what this study found out, that if you have a great onboarding experience, it will motivate people to also onboard others. And another thing, if you want to keep contributors, especially for code contribution, quick responses are very, very important. So that's also from the same Mozilla study. They did a review of how long it takes someone to respond to a pull request. And they found out, OK. So if the maintain a response within 24 hours to a pull request, there's quite the likelihood that the contributor will stick around or that they will work further on this. If it takes you longer than a week, the chances are zero. But it doesn't necessarily mean that you take the time immediately to review the pull request. It can also just mean, hey, sorry, it's my weekend. I'll take care of it on Monday. Or I'm traveling. Sorry, my internet connection is super horrible next week. That's enough. But just answer them. And I know it sucks because it might have to check your work emails on the weekend, unfortunately. But really, if you want to keep especially newcomers around, you have to be quick about this.  So stay true to your motivation and why you started contributing. And if it stops being fun, stop. I mean, even if you get paid for it and the project turns into a toxic dumpster fire, talk to your manager and tell them, this is horrible. Because you must stay your top priority as a maintainer, as a contributor. If it's just going to stress you out and the thought of opening your issue tracker gives you cold sweat, it's not going to work in the long run. You might be able to force yourself to do this for just a while, but it's not going to work in the long run. And another thing that I'd like to quickly cover is feedback. And as we all know, maybe feedback in open source can be challenging because people often come only when things don't work. But then again, all feedback is still a gift because you get feedback from people from vastly different backgrounds that might have read your documentation and misunderstood it because you thought you said A and they read B. So still take it, thank everyone for it, absorb it and reflect. And really in most cases, feedback is not an attack on you as a person.  But really don't defend yourself. Try to absorb it, adapt to it. And if it's appropriate, discuss it. But don't take it as a personal attack that you really have to defend yourselves from. But as I said, unfortunately, very, very frequently, but I think things are changing maybe a little bit. You mostly get negative feedback on none at all. So it's often very hard to get people to actually tell you what they want, what they are missing, or to test beta releases and similar things. People come to you when their stuff's broken, unfortunately. And that can be very frustrating, can be very crushing, because you don't see the 10,000 happy users. You see the 10 who are unhappy and come to you and dump in your issue tracker. But then again, you don't have to address everything that you receive, because there's also people, there's stuff that you can't react to. And really not getting bothered by this is something that you just have to train. So I once had the opportunity to talk to Daniel Stenberg, the curl maintainer, and asked him about this. How do you do this? And his answer was, unfortunately, a little bit, he just told me, yeah, well, I just don't get bothered by it. Which as someone who is not a great open source maintainer and struggles with things like that, I'm, OK, damn it. So but as many things in life, you can train them. And given that I only have two minutes left, I'm going to do my favorite thing. That's one, two, skip a few. Yeah, if you provide feedback, I think you never hurt anyone. So thanking someone when you write a bug report, it never hurts anyone. And people are far more happier. I hope this didn't discourage you. So if you didn't start your open source journey, you can start now, or please start now. But if you're building something, maybe wait until it's kind of ready. It doesn't have to be perfect, but marketing still tells you the first impression counts. So the first impression should be really good. And if you think this all sounds very, very terrible, it's actually not. It's still always a lot of fun. You can learn a lot, but only stay in project as long as it is fun. And yeah, well, I told you this. No, I didn't tell you everything that you didn't learn at university because we all still learn. But I hope I gave you a starting point, some food for thoughts. And if you need more, there's the great collection called Uncurled from Daniel Stanberg. This is the paper I mentioned for motivations for contributing. That's a link to the study from Mozilla and the open source contributor funnel by Mike McQuade. And there's my slides. If you want to find them, or you can just grab the QR code. If you have your phone at your hand, if you have any questions, I'd be more than happy to answer them. Yeah? So how did you start, like, what was your entry point? So I started, I'm not sure if I started first contributing to Fedora, or I started, so really code contributions, were to a C++ image parser, which had some where I just found out, okay, it got someone found out that if you run an ancient C++ code base and you use AFL to fuzz it to hell, you'll find about 100 bucks in an hour. And I started fixing them. And eventually did all the mistakes, like hoarding bugs and trying to fix every problem myself and eventually burned out. So that was a great example how to not do things, but that was my start. I was already, I mean, at that point, I thought I was fairly experienced, but it was, I already had my master's degree, so I think for like a month or so. But then again, I studied astrophysics, so I learned coding on the side to write simulations. Okay, then, thank you for your attention, and enjoy the nice weather outside. Thanks for having me. Thank you.


Everybody for us here with a box of 2022 boom and chrome baseball lights for Brian D Here we go Brian. Good luck He says it is Dude he talks about it every day. Yeah There's like a there's an agave one. He says is like legit Hey, we should open the whole box and show them off real quick. Let's do it I'm gonna open the box All right, we got a Christian Yelich to $199 black and white mini diamond There's a non-numbered Alexis Hernandez First Bowman Invicta atomic Tyler black. This one's numbered to 150 Simon Juan Pareto Black, white mini diamond Samuel Munoz It's not numbered He must be See Abrams green shimmer Arribiel on helis number 10 of 99 Victor Acosta Three more packs. Come on nice color. Come on She's a rookie refractor of Joe Ryan to $4.99. Oh, no, that's the rookie short print. Excuse me.  Thank you for the order Brian. We'll get these cards out to you shortly