hi beautiful i'm not a fashion critic by love fashion and this is autumn winter 2023 gucci without alessandro michel because this is the first year without him let's see what they're doing whoa gucci tatas absolutely i want that gucci crumb pants he looks badass this fuzzy bag gucci gucci louis louis fendi fendi prada i want it it's giving all gucci but like refined gucci which is interesting kind of missed the fun crazy outrageous gucci a little bit already alessandro where are you huh this one's interesting i would have never thought that was gucci giving louis baton again huh the socks and the boots oh he looks uncomfortable the more i go through these the more i'm wondering what is going on exactly you know what brand this is quite giving but it's not gucci is it mu mu i can't quite place my finger on it but i'm confused i'm going to end it here i don't know what to say about this one interesting collection i'm going to give this one a four out of ten don't submit


Okay, we have a quorum of people. So I'm going to go ahead and call to order the meeting. It's Monday December 12 meeting of the molecular planning commission. We first have to approve the agenda. So, if the planning commission could take a look at the agenda and open to a motion to approve. I'll just add that the SC groups conversation will be more than just the energy draft. So it'll be more broadly what they're working on. Oh, right. Okay. So we have a motion to approve the agenda. So moved. Okay, motion from Brian to be the second. I'm second. We have a second from Gabe. All right. I think Gabe's coming in really remotely. I think he's in the car. Motion from Brian, the second from Gabe to prove the agenda. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. You posed. Motion approved. Brings us to comments from the chair. I'm going to assume we're not going to meet next time. That's going to be right around. The holidays. I'm just. Thinking that's not going to work for people. So unless anybody has any objection, we'll just plan to meet the second Monday of January for our next meeting. And as far as the upcoming calendar goes, we're trying to finish up these last chapters of the plan as we all know. But I have every intention of starting in January, starting to get moving on some of the zoning update stuff and the response to the commerce, Congress for new urbanism report and solar shading and just zoning related work as well. And I'm going to start putting work in myself. To. Prepare some things for us and get the ball rolling for that. So you can look for that on the agenda is coming January. We'll start balancing out some of these other things. That's all I have. Does anyone else have any updates? Sorry, I missed the beginning of the meeting. So I don't know if we. Did we welcome Maria or is. Is that on the council agenda for this week? I just wanted to acknowledge that. We have a potential new member or a new member here. I'm not sure where we're at. Yeah, Maria on the council agenda for Wednesday. So we will have all of our seats filled. Pending Maria's appointment on Wednesday. And I don't know if Maria wants to introduce herself. Quickly. Hi, thank you everyone. Maria, our semblance. I'm a parent in town and a small business owner too. And I'm really excited about joining. The commission. That's wonderful. And this is news to me. I missed our last meeting. So I'm a little behind. Cause. So that's, that's wonderful Maria. Thank you so much for offering. To apply and joining us. Also. Oh, good. No, no, no, finish what you were going to say. Oh, well, I was, I was kind of moving on to go for it. Oh, okay. Well, I was just wondering. You know, when I started, I didn't get any sort of orientation. And I know before Marcella left, she was talking about that. And I don't know if she was. She made any progress on. I'm thinking about that, but I was thinking at least one thing that I think it would be nice for new members to have. We probably didn't do this for Brian either, but. It's just if they can get a print out of the updated. Zoning regulations, because I found that really helpful when we get. I mean, we're working on the city plan right now, but. When we get back into the zoning. Yeah, I think that that's an option.  So that, so that, you know, Maria, you can access the zoning regulations on the city website. If you want to, if you're like the kind of person that gets accustomed to things that way. I don't think that we have any assumption that you need to do a bunch of homework, but. I think one of the best things, and we have been doing this, but it's been since I was in the chair. Which, you know, Marcella didn't get that. And I don't think I was the chair when you came on our on, but I have been meeting with people and just for an hour and doing a walk and catching people up as a form of orientation. And I did that with Brian before he was actually appointed. So, and I did that with Gabe and Jeff and. Other new folks. So yeah, Maria, we can, we can. Talk offline about. Like, usually it's a walk, but I don't know, it's like 20 degrees right now. So maybe a coffee in an indoor place or something. Or just whatever or a phone call. But, but yeah, we can connect and. And talk in that way. And when we do that, I can tell you all sorts of other resources besides just the zoning regulations. Yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to like, you needed to read the zoning regulations. I just, that was just one thing that I found helpful. Cause I personally found it hard to put it all together, looking at it online. But that's great. Kirby, I didn't know you were doing that. So that's really fabulous. Yeah. I mean, I've been extending the offer, you know, it's up to people if they want to do it, but that that's the best way I can think up to do an orientation other than. If we wanted to go through the process of developing like an onboarding materials or something, but that's not, we haven't done that. But I can point you to resources and. Answer questions. But yeah, yeah, we should be in touch. And welcome. And also welcome Brian. Officially. So. Next on the agenda is general business. And this is where, if there's any members from the public who are here to discuss anything that's not on the agenda for tonight. It's your opportunity to do that. So do we have anyone? It looks like we do have one. Do you have any others besides Peter? Okay, Peter. Hi, I'm Peter Kalman. I live in Mountain View. And I have a lot of friends that I've met. I dropped in on this group once in a while. To offer them a piece of my mind. I just want to. Start out just by saying a few things. You know, I keep. I read a lot. What's going on around the rest of the country and Vermont and so forth. And I send those around to people. I generally send them to Kirby and Mike and. To Josh Jerome. And I get various responses. I just want to say that. Yes. Affordable housing is a national problem. But it is also a local problem. Yes. Affordable housing is made very challenging by construction costs. But there are other significant costs that municipalities like Montpelier can help to reduce or offset. And I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. Yes. Developers can make more money by building in Chittenden County. But we can also create conditions here. With carrots and. Whether it's dollar carrots or health carrots to encourage. They. A developer sector. Down here as well. Or maybe even draw people from Chittenden. Yes. But it's just a subset. Of an attitude that permeates. American society. And it's one. Because. We've lost sight of the fact that. Our houses are where we live. Instead, our houses have become the largest part of our assets. And that causes us to want to protect those at all costs for ourselves for our families. And for our community. And for. For our, you know, heirs. But I think what we really need to make clear and we're going to need to make this clear every time nimbyism rears its ugly head. Is that whatever excuses are made? Oh. Too many trees are going to be cut down. Oh, what about? You know, then, you know, our natural resources of work. What we need to remind people of. that has created segregation, racial segregation, segregation again, ethnic groups again and again over the last 100 years. And it's why we have this cute little town. And we've gotta understand that the price of having a cute little town is the suffering of others. And I really think that we've gotta do something to change the attitudes. They're all gonna show up at the meetings, and they're gonna object to the density of changes and so forth, we've gotta start calling a spade a spade. This is immoral, this is unethical, and this goes against all the things that those very same people actually think they believe. And I just wanna add to it that we, and here I'm talking to Mike, we need the department to begin to take an aggressive, proactive approach, not just to get better regulations, but to streamline and to help people, and big developers and individual property owners to be able to actually do ADUs that aren't gonna cost them $100,000. To figure out how to divide up their large homes into a smaller units. And if they're older like me, create an apartment on the ground floor that is age-appropriate and have the upper floors be where other people live. There's so many in-field buildings. There's so many things, but people, particularly seniors, and we have a lot of senior homeowners, don't know how to do this on their own. They're going to need help. And all the government programs in the world and all the regulations that are changed aren't gonna make a bit of difference if we don't have some very, very strong hand-holding. I've been saying this for five years and I'm gonna keep saying it. You can't just be passively saying, as it was said to me by Audra when I came with my first idea up on College Street, she said, oh, well, have your place surveyed, get an architecture draw up plans, come in and we'll help you. Oh, yeah, right. Spend $10,000 and then you'll help us. How about helping us at the front end? Thank you. Well, thanks, Peter. And I think you will be seeing some proposals from us in the near future. Go to city council that are, I think, gonna be in agreement with some of the things that you want. And I would encourage you to come and show support when that happens and rally people as well. Because, yeah, we'll need your support because we wanna do a lot of what you're talking about. Okay, with that, anybody else from the public? Okay. So then I will turn it over to SE Group to show us the progress they've made on the website design. Hi, everyone. I made an e-call from SE Group with, can't wish turned off. I can't say I see familiar faces but some familiar names for sure. I'm here today with Julia. We've been, Julia has been doing the bulk of a lot of the drafting and content creation and we're sharing responsibilities in a lot of ways. Our last meeting, we kind of gave an update on our progress with the drafting the chapters from the planning commission content to then taking them into story maps. We edited some of the content and flow of that. And that is still underway. I think Mike's gonna send over some more comments so that we can really make sure that we're nailing the flow of this. But the last time we said that we would come with a draft version of like the landing page for this. So we have some content to share with you today. For that it is, it's getting there but it'll be good for us to have feedback and for this group to have an initial reaction. Julia, is there anything else you wanna add in? No, that's all we did have a meeting with Mike last Friday to talk about the status of the other plan chapters and make sure that our process is tracking along with you all. So, if there are any scheduling things that the group would like to talk about at this meeting, that would be great too. I think I have the ability to share my screen, yep. Have you seen a screen with trees? Yes, okay. This would be the landing page of the Hub site. So the Hub site is where we see people who, maybe there's a link from the official city page that says, see the city plan here. This is where it would take them. So there's a little update on what the plan is, what the website is for, or sorry, what the website is for and then kind of pointing people towards plan resources. So as you scroll, people would get options. These will eventually be clickable. They are not as of now, but little icons that will take them to each chapter. Then we have an idea, as you can see it's not only built out yet, but for each chapter to maybe have a statistic that really tells some sort of story about progress or a little snapshot as to where they are. It's a goal of Julie and I to kind of have one for each chapter and Mike's gonna help maybe point to a specific stat, but for this group, as you are writing chapters, if you like highlight some important statistics, we can absolutely highlight them here. But anyway, for each of these, there will be, for each chapter, there's gonna be some sort of statistic like this. And then having some, I think this is the placeholder photo, right Julia? Yeah, feel a bit of all of you that you'd like to include here. That would be great, but this group is hard at work for sure. Then have some, just kind of point towards where people can find more implementation information. Up here, these links will, hopefully it'll take you to the plan chapter if they've been having some issues, but it looks like it's going. So this page is where if you want to just go to the plan chapters and not scroll to get the icons, you can just jump right here. So as you can see, there is the main photo, that's in each of the story map pages right now. So this economic development one will take you to the economic development chapter eventually. You're kind of seeing the back of house version, you won't see this thing pop up when this is public. Is that solar array and mobiliar in that photo? It might not be. Yeah, so I will update that cover photo. Before we had received the energy plan data requests last week, I was using photos that I was able to find online that are without any permissions, just to make sure that they're usable for these purposes. But yeah, I'm gonna replace all the photos in the energy chapter with the ones that we received from that data request, so. Okay, so yeah, you're on top of it though. We definitely don't want the finished product, obviously, where we're using other towns. Yes, definitely, this is the mobiliar city plan and there are lots of solar photos that we now have. So yeah, including some ribbon cutting type photos as well. So there's a lot of great stuff to choose from. And as far as the people photos, I would just say before we get lost and forget about and move on. Mike, maybe that would be an opportunity for people in your office to get some appreciation because we don't have any group photos of the planning commission, but we, I don't know, I like the idea of if Mike has any nice photos of people are working in his office, especially since the caption there was planned implementation, like they're the ones really implementing. Mike's still there, but oh yeah, he's there. So anyways, proceed, sorry for the interruption. All good, all good. And if there was like a community event, I know we had some outreach events where we were taking photos, but something like that where there is community engagement happening. And I don't know how you would fully capture plan implementation in a photo, but I like the idea of having some staff people show up here. So there's only three that are in-story maps right now, but eventually this will have all 12 sections. Plan implementation, there is nothing here right now. John Adams, we still need to connect and maybe we can just put an embed frame on this page and use whatever tool that you have created or if we need to try to create something here using hub site, which is a little clunky at times, we can explore what the best method is there. Do you have any initial, I see you're here now. Yeah, that sounds good. I think planning just to embed an iframe is probably the safest bet. Perfect. And then finally for the additional resources tab, none of these are linked yet, but we see kind of one of these for each chapter so that as we link plans in the actual story map text, they can just go right to this page and people can kind of see a little library of resources. So if there is the Vermont Energy Dashboard or something like that, that can be linked here. So these are the four general sections that we have worked out right now, willing and welcoming any feedback, let me get back to the main page here. Hopefully it goes there. What are people thinking about the amount of information and the flow of content that there is currently? The landing page? Yeah, that's probably the most built out at this point. So yeah, so for the planning question, so this is the landing page that we're looking at now. I think it looks lovely. I think it's not too busy or anything. What do other people think? Anybody have feedback for the landing page? I like the icons or the info, like kind of the graphics, quick clicks below, make it easy. Yeah, that is nice. Is there a section on here? I didn't see like how to read this plan. And I'm sorry, maybe that you guys scrolled by that. It's more right now. Oh, I'm just saying that more right now just for the website, there isn't, I think we're still trying to figure out how and where we would link to like a full text version of this plan, where I can see how to read this plan blurb being really important. If you scroll down, Aiden, there's a section there next to implementation. Yes. I believe, okay, maybe we did eliminate this. Sorry about that. But there will be some sort of information on this page about different audiences intended to use this site. So if the commission is interested, we can certainly provide like a paragraph or some sort of explanatory text to say if you're a member of the public, these are some ways that you could use this site and the pages that you might want to visit or if you're a member of the development community, for example. So those are definitely possibilities. Sounds good. That sentence here, Julia, was just kind of absorbed into this section, but I think that it sounds like kind of building out a couple of different pathways or things to focus on for different audiences would be helpful. And is this where you would explain why we're doing the plan? I guess, you know, as one of the new guys, I'm just trying to get, I was met with Kirby and others to figure out the context for all of this and certainly they pointed me to a statute. So I assume that's gonna be part of this too. This is why we're doing it. This is how you do it. These are the sections we're working on. It sounds like that's yet to be built out, but it's coming. Well, that's an interesting question, Brian, because I think there is kind of a threshold question of, this is the website that takes you through the plan. There's going to be a version of the plan that's more of your classic book. And that would probably have to have the statutory reference, but I'm not sure that the website has to have it. So, and might correct me if... This is the web, this hub is going to be the city plan. There's not gonna be a separate printed document. We're gonna be doing it in this. This is going to be the plan. Okay, okay. So yeah, I thought we had talked about there being the like a second more official version, but now this is gonna be what we point to as the official plan. Does the statute specify that we have to have reference? It doesn't say it has to be a printed plan. It's just the plan has to include these 10, 12 elements in these certain requirements. It doesn't actually give a required format. So that's why we've taken the liberty to say then we think this is the best approach going forward. 21st century plan.  I'm glad that there's not unnecessary other things we have to do. So returning to like Brian's question, I mean, how do people feel about making reference to the statutes on the website? I think it can be buried in like the about stuff or... I don't know. I like how the proponent of less is more. Yeah, my only thought or think with this, which I think provide a really good framework, but instead of like the that intro paragraph, I would love for us to like, like let's put our big idea out there. Like here is we need like a 15 second version of the plan, a two minute version, and then like the 20 minute to infinity version where those very few people are going to dive in. But if there's like one or two like themes that tie everything together, they can be just like hit people with it like right away. How clear it is. And like, this is our vision. This is the community we're going to, we're working to build toward and get away from like a little bit more like the institutional like this is our plan adopted according to, you know, title 24, 43, whatever. And it doesn't, I don't think it would take very much to get there and, you know, without actually coming up with that overarching theme, it's, I don't think we can ask like SE groups like, hey, can you come up with the overarching theme of, unless like you're inspired and you're like, you know what, I've gone through these and I've got it, I'm going to synthesize all of their thoughts. What do people think about us at our next meeting in January spending some planning commission time drafting the inter-language for here for the landing page? Does that sound like worthwhile thing to do? That is absolutely something that Julia pointed out as well to really have to start with that vision. And I think this is a great spot for it. Okay, just quickly, I don't know, maybe I, I'd be willing to like throw up a draft for people to noodle while we're talking about that. What are the big ideas we do want to cover? I mean, what are those big story type notes that we should hit on? Do you have specific things in mind, John? I mean, housing in and around are, you know, walk-up-hole, downtown, housing has just been like the reoccurring theme in every chapter, right? Yeah, and like not only I think framing it also as a welcoming new inclusivity and like welcoming new household, but focusing on like housing, like we can't, we have to stop using the word like density and just, you know, dehumanizing the concept. We're not trying to shove as many buildings as possible in the Montpellier. We're trying to create like homes for as many new new households and new residents to come in here and live and have an opportunity to experience like the amazing city that we all do. So I'm thinking about how to frame that. One thing that comes to mind is talking about how we feel a sense of responsibility to provide housing and inclusivity for the region, considering, you know, where the capital city and the, you know, but is responsibility the right word for the tone we want or is it more, do we wanna use a word with less baggage? It's like a friendlier, like we have a desire to provide those things. I mean, let's just say we're gonna do it. Like let's just do it. That's our plan. We will, you know, become a community that has housing to accommodate a greater number of people. One question is like, you know, in a statement like that, we have a responsibility to provide housing or we are committed to providing housing, something like that is who is we? And I think my suggestion is that this statement should not be coming from the planning commission or like be written in a way where it's coming, it, you know, it could be read that way, but rather just like very general statements about the major directions and vision of the plan. So, I mean, when we're using a subject for our sentences instead of we, like the city. The city, yeah. Yeah, yeah, okay. We kind of, in things we write, we kind of use both of those, but that sounds good. So the city will blah, blah, blah, provide housing, walkable communities, inclusivity, anything else we want to capture here as the highlights high points of our plan. Something maybe about energy or climate change or, I mean, all that stuff is related, but I think highlighting that as well.  I mean, is that where we want to focus? Well, I guess, yeah, maybe it, maybe, I don't know. I'm just brainstorming here because I don't know how detailed we want to get, but just, I think reminding, maybe reminding people that it, I mean, it's all connected, of course, but I don't know. I'll think about that more. Okay. Yeah, it's just whenever I start thinking about, look at the work we do. I mean, when it comes to the environment, we're thinking local and global environment and different aspects of the plan. So I was just, I just wanted to know if we wanted to specify one over the other or something like that. I can draft up something, I can, yeah, nice. In previous sort of visioning exercises, we've done this for a variety of towns. What I am remembering the steps are, is that there's a couple just words that are thrown out, like character, vibrancy, walkability, and then it's kind of crafted into like a vision statement, Julia, is that kind of how you've done it in the past? Yeah, vision statements can be useful as just one very long sentence as supposed to capture the sentiment of the whole plan. And, you know, they, sometimes communities will use them in a lot of different contexts, like that vision statement will also function as like a vision statement for the whole community and not just the plan. But it's a useful tool to just summarize some of the main themes of the plan. But I think a vision statement is not necessary. It's not the only way to capture this kind of information. I think a couple, you know, short, there are a couple of ways that I could see this working in terms of showing this at the start of the landing page. One example is a couple of like value statements, like, you know, the city of Montpelier values the creation of housing to allow new residents to enjoy the community or something like that. And just having those couple statements, given that this is a, you know, webpage, we can try to make it that more dynamic than just like a couple, then just, you know, a block of text, we can add in media or graphics to spice it up a bit. But yeah, value statements could work.  So, you know, like a word cloud type thing, it could be like housing, sustainability, walkability, historic character or something. These are also things that you could, you know, provide. It's just a snapshot of the themes that the plan is concerned with. And then underneath that, there could be like a short paragraph explaining, you know, the context for those words. So those are just a couple ideas, none of them, you know, I think a variety of things could work here. Yeah, thanks. Well, I'm gathering from our previous discussions and I don't know where I'm seeing things as like John saying, like a statement of this is what we're going to do. This is what this plan is going to do is kind of what we're going for for the intro, but I'll draft something up. We'll kick it around. We'll forward that to you once we have something and you can also feel free to then also give us feedback about, you know, what could be done with it. Yeah, and I don't think there are any right or wrong ways of doing it.  You know, this is where we identify our values and identify our goals as a community and identify pathways to accomplishing them. You know, this could be, you know, how do we create more affordable housing? How do we, you know, so you could just lay it out and it kind of relays, communicates to the public. That's what this plan is looking at is to answer these types of questions. So I think there are lots of ways you can think about this same idea and there isn't a right or wrong way. And I think we can just think about it and we can talk about it in that first meeting. I'm trying to think I should check to see whatever that January date is and we'll sit down and talk about it. It'll be January 9th. Yep, January 9th. Yeah, so I'll try to throw something together tonight and kick it around and then people, we such as something to work off of for us to modify and get there for that. Besides the landing page kind of intro, is there anything else content-wise that the Planning Commission or SE Group feels like the Planning Commission should consider and try to contribute? Seems like folks had some thoughts on the different audiences that this webpage is speaking to. So maybe it'd be helpful to hear a little bit more about what that information and that section should look like on the webpage. Who are the audiences that we wanna make sure have a guide to looking at this resource? Yeah, what I remember before about our discussion that is just the general public was one where that's kind of what it's mostly oriented toward and then people who are really like looking to delve into like law and policy and just making sure that they have a way to get to the in-depth information that they would want. I feel like our conversation is mostly about that. Just thinking in terms of just making sure that the in-depth stuff's easy to reach and that knowing that it's mostly designed for the general public to get the gist of things. And did we talk about having an actual explanation for like did we talk about writing something about how the plan's oriented towards different groups? Cause I mean, I don't remember us saying that we needed that, yeah. I don't think we spoke about that. Yeah, so I don't think we necessarily need that unless other folks feel like they would contribute. I think it's more of just like what to keep in mind in the design process, if that makes sense. That's helpful. I think with these hub sites and particularly with story maps, we've sometimes created a little section at the start or a tab that says something along the lines of how to use this site and explains the different types of content that's available. And the hub site is maybe a little bit more straightforward for folks to navigate because it looks like a traditional website relative to like an interactive map and a story map. Someone might need a bit more guidance to know how to use that and look at that. But is that sort of page that explains the content of interest to this group? Or cause I do think we can put that together and that might be helpful to just indicate, here's all of the information that's provided on this site cause otherwise people may not know that they can access the full plan chapters but also the links to the implementation strategies and other things like that. It may be useful to just list the content on a page like that. What are people's thoughts about that approach? Maybe I'll go for some people. Yeah, I think we have to assume that people don't, most people don't look at this kind of document every day and don't have any context for it because you talked about the general public so John's comment about less is more. But definitely a roadmap of, I mean I can tell you as the new guy, the difference between aspirations and goals was something I looked back at the methodology document about what's the difference between those two. Just you guys are way into this. We didn't want to get ahead of anybody that's never looked at it before. That's the thought that occurred to me on the section on the landing page at the bottom where it looks like there was kind of some work in progress explanation. I was thinking that too, Brian, where maybe the most useful thing yeah, right here for this implementation information where it says example aspirations, I mean that made me think that it was going to explain what does aspiration mean, what does goal mean, what does strategy mean. If the individual chapter pages are using that jargon then maybe that would be a place to explain that. I'm not so sure though that we're building it in a way in which somebody needs to know what we kind of like slyly using the aspirations as like headers or something and then having the goals as kind of statements on there, in other words, we're using that jargon but I don't think you actually need to know those things to the way that the plan's being pulled together at the moment. Yeah. It says goals and aspirations there so I guess that is people may want to know what that means there but yeah, here in the content, I don't know Brian, what are your thoughts there? Like this stuff on the left side of the page is the aspirations and goals but it's kind of self-explanatory in context. Well, I mean I looked at this too, I mean nitpicky but aspirations should come before goals because the way you guys described it and the way I read it, aspirations are the big, what we're aspiring to do and then the goals are the specific, more specific ways or more specific kind of mission within that, even if it was aspirations were orange and goals were gray like you have here, there's something to make sure people understand what, I mean look, people aren't stupid, it's just a matter of, you want them to know what you're trying to articulate here. Well, that's a good point. So for Aiden and Julia to take note of is aspirations come before goals. Yep, we can certainly make that change. But I don't want to, I don't want to lose all of the stuff Brian was saying too though. Yep. Given that it's probably going to look like this Brian, do you think we need to explain some like on the landing page what we mean by aspirations and goals? Well, you guys have a template for each section that's the same, I mean, pretty much as far as I can tell. I mean, I know there was talk of maybe tweaking it here and there, but. Yep. You know, making it as easy as possible for people to understand what it is, I think without too many words is going to help them. Like I said, some people we have to assume we have to assume the lowest level of knowledge about things like this, I think, when we put it together. And in terms of saying, here's a, it doesn't have to be very involved and just say each section articulates, you know, a particular area of the plan. You know, we'll talk about the background, we'll give you some context and then we'll talk about what we aspire to do and how we get there and how we implement it. You know, stuff like that. I mean, I think that's a quick, again, less is more as John pointed out, but I think letting people know what they're about to read is always, you know, a preview, people love previews. I wonder if it would be helpful, you know, to, because just thinking about how people might use this site, say somebody is extremely interested in historic resources, but not really interested in the other topics and they just click on historic resources and they wonder what these goals and aspirations or aspirations goals are about, it might make sense to head up each of these goals and aspirations sections with just a short link to another, to a page on the Hub site that explains the architecture of the plan. So for instance, like right at the top there, I could say, what are goals and aspirations? What are aspirations and goals? Visit this link to learn more about the structure of the Montpelier City Plan. And then that could be a very short summary of what that is because, you know, I think it's what's important for people to understand about these aspirations goals is that they are actionable. They, aspirations just in our general understanding of that word sounds like something that, you know, is desirable but may not actually happen, but as, you know, this group knows, you know, the purpose of writing these things down is to make sure that there can be progress on these things. So I think it might be helpful to define that. The other thought, and John mentioned this is, but my thought is, you know, you've got the background synergies and goals and aspirations. There also might be a tab up top that's just, you know, I don't know, maybe about this plan that takes you to a different page that has answers some of the questions that you were just talking about, you know, rather than have it all in the landing page of the hub, maybe the landing page just says, you know, if you're interested in knowing more about X, Y, Z or, you know, each chapter will tell you about these things kind of the same way Brian was talking about it. It can be just a real short thing on the landing page that says, if you're looking for this type of information, look at the chapter links. If you're looking for detailed policy questions, you know, perhaps staff, members of committees, these types of things, you might go to the implementation page to find out specifics of how we do this. We don't need a lot, but we can put them inside by side boxes that says, you know, the links below are gonna, you know, take you to the chapters. The chapters will talk about these or you could go to the implementation page. They'll talk about these. If you're in the implementation page, then you'd have that extra tab on top that you could click about this plan. And if they click on it, we could have more detailed information that really gets into what's an aspiration, what's a goal, what's a strategy, what was our process, what was our purpose, you know, kind of getting a little bit more wordy and wonky into it. And that's just a thought. Yeah, yeah, thanks Mike. Wanting that information in one page that we can link to from everywhere versus having like a small blurb of text that shows up in each of the plan chapters. I was just throwing that out as an option to put it in as one, but we certainly, if we can digest it down to a small enough piece that we're not losing, you know, a lot of page space. Yeah. If it can get digested down into a pretty tight box that's not using up a lot of our space, then yeah, put it on each page. But I just think over time, we're gonna probably find a number of things that we keep saying, oh, that would be helpful to have. Yeah. You know, because a lot of our plan is about being strategic. Maybe we need to talk about what's strategic and why being strategic is important. Or, you know, the window of this plan is eight years. I don't think we wanna be really talking about that on the landing page. We don't wanna be boring people with those things, but if we've got a page that kind of hits a little bit of the wonkiness, then people who want that information can get it. We could potentially, and you know, we have four tabs up here. We could do like, this is actually just called introduction or something like that, where it has little bits of information about each. So you have the little blurb, you have the icons, which will be the same as the plan chapters, the stats, and then just a teaser for the implementation if people wanna get there. And then there could be like an actual true about the plan tab, where we go through the structure, the legality, the timeline, and some of like the glossary terms. And then people, we can just link to the about the plan. But I think explaining at some point in a more, at some point, even if it goes to implementation, explaining between aspirations and goals, I think will be important. And I think for, if this group can nail the definition of how they see it, then we can, we're happy to communicate that. But it's hard for me to actually verbalize the difference between aspirations and goals right now. I can help you with how we do it. Okay, perfect. How we framed it. Yeah. Because it was very specifically written. Okay. So, yeah, so what I'm thinking of doing is kind of with some draft intro language for us all to pour over. And then also drafting some, I'm gonna call it bottom of the landing page language, but that's, it's describing the basics of the terminology that goes into the plan. Both of them try to be as succinct as possible. But the idea with the top part being, like the capture the reader's attention story, like what John was talking about a while ago. And then the bottom stuff is just like succinct explanation of what we were just now talking about. So I'm thinking if we start there and we're comfortable with that, then we'll be in a position to see whether we feel like we need that additional page of explanation or not. Okay. So, yeah, I'll send that around before our next meeting. It's perfect. Yeah, I mean, I try to, when I am looking over websites, I do try to like be careful about the amount of text that's used just thinking about my own personal willingness to read block text on a website. So whenever there's ability to like make it bullet points or like we can make it into a little image like we did something like this. So, you know, this is probably like this text doesn't need to stay, but probably not much longer than something like this would be appropriate for both of those sections. Right. Yeah, that's what we'll do. Perfect. So for our, well, actually I'll pause really quickly. Does anybody have any other initial reactions from the quick first scroll through the hub site? I think we can talk about it a little bit more. My thought was the box at the bottom of this landing page that Kirby was gonna rewrite, I thought might be more appropriate in the actual implementation page rather than on this front page. But that's something we can talk about in January, that that was just my observation. And I also might move those statistics. My thought was I would have moved the statistics above the page, the block of the 12 tabs. Yep, absolutely. And we'll have to be careful about, you know, there's gonna be 12 of these as well. So how to organize those. I might take them just, I don't know, maybe like create different sizes or make it a little bit more visually interesting. So it's not just a bunch of icons. But I think that makes sense. Is it possible that the statistic icons actually just live in the corresponding city plan page? Just to see more longer terms. To keep it uncluttered here, maybe those would be a good feature in the actual chapter pages. Because they seem a little bit out of context here anyway. I think our vision for them was kind of like a community snapshot that had again, that little teaser of, you know, if you saw that 60% of the renewable energy or something was created for the town, would you then be more interested in like reading how they're gonna get to a hundred or something like that? But agreed, like we wanna make sure that this tells the story you wanna tell. So whether or not that's just, okay, this is the plan chapter. This is the city plan. Here's the chapters, go read them and have a little bit more of the snapshot in the actual chapters themselves. That's absolutely a strategy that we could take. Yeah, I'm open to either one. Just threw that out there while we were talking about the options. Because, yeah, but I love the graphics and the way that they're used to catch people's attention. I mean, that's absolutely great value you guys are adding there.  I'm just saying it opens the opportunity a little bit to, like the energy one is full of statistics. So if we do move that section to the energy chapter, it opens the door to have maybe three or four highlight statistics or graphs or charts there versus just one from each. Yeah, I mean, I like how things like this could put the chapters into, but to help people understand a perspective on the chapters. I'm sitting here, I'm like way meta thinking it, I think, but if we're trying to tell the story of the whole city on icons like this, then it's like Mark Twain lies, damn lies and statistics kind of thing where, for instance, if we're trying to describe our city and say 66% of residences are historic structures, does that seem to imply that it's a really big deal to us to get people into historic structures? Or like, you know what I mean? Which is that's actually probably a controversial topic really if you dig into what people feel. There are some people who think that, yeah, the whole city should be shut down and historic and made into basically a historic park. And then other people who were like, let's not fixate on that and let's find people places to live. So for instance, you know, like this, like I'd hate to inadvertently tell a different story because somebody else has a different perspective of error. Yeah. But again, I know that that's reading into it a lot.  Like that's absolutely my perspective on that statistic, which I know is covered in the plan and there are ways that you can modernize and be more energy efficient. But I completely agree. There's multiple, multiple ways to interpret these. And I think that goes to the question you were talking about Kirby and Aiden, you mentioned it earlier about the story to tell. I mean, what are we trying to communicate on the landing page? And I think we just have to once we know what that is we wanna capture them, we wanna grab people if they click on it and they get here we kinda wanna grab them and make sure that they want to move forward.  Why is it important? And just try to get those few pieces to capture them. And if we can use statistics to go through and you know, as I said, and I was just throwing stuff out when I said, have them in the forms of questions, you know, how do we get more affordable housing?  Now we've made, you know, now we put the statistic and we've started to communicate people why is the city plan important? Because we want affordable housing and only 32% of our housing is affordable. We want a clean planet and, you know, only 53% of our energy is renewable. And these are the things that our city plan is gonna try to address. Now we've communicated what we're gonna be talking about in the plan, why it's important and hopefully we've captured people and whether that's in questions with these things or whether it's with pictures or whether that I think is what we want with the landing page, people hit it. What is the city plan? I don't even know what the city plan is. You click, you see the city plan and we can very quickly grab you and let you know what this plan is about. And we're not getting into defining aspirations and goals, we'll do that in a bit, but we capture people and we have them start to be able to know why they wanna explore a few things on this page. And then we can go through and say, and we talk about it in 12 different chapter areas and here are the 12 chapter icons. Each chapter will tell you these pieces of information. And if you're more interested in the details, go see the implementation page where we talk about very specifically how we're gonna do it. And that's just one way of, here's the story we wanna tell and we're gonna do it. And I think you as the planning commission, we as staff, we've got to decide what the story is. And then that will help dictate which pieces we grab and how we use them. Because we don't have to do an icon for every single chapter. I think we just need to do enough to tell people, this is what we're doing and this is what's important. Then when we get to the page, we'll have more of these icons that says why historic resources are important. 66% of people live in historic buildings. That's why historic resources are important. And when you're saying icon in this case, you're talking about the statistics-based one. The statistic icon on the base. Yeah. And I do wanna make, just make sure I understand the icons we have for the chapter pages. That's all of them, right? Yeah. Yeah, I think that is all of them. Okay. Cause, okay. And this thing I'm gonna try to write up I'll mention that, that there's 12 chapters. Cause we haven't known how many chapters we're gonna have all along. So I guess 12 is the number I'm learning that. Okay. Actually it might be 11 because I don't know if we're actually gonna do governance that has, that was an idea that we haven't actually written a governance chapter. So it might be 11. We could replace that with the icon for the implementation plan though, if we were trying to keep it symmetrical. There is some humor to not having a governance plan, but it will, you know, having 12 is aesthetically ideal, but I don't wanna create more work. Symmetrical. And we eventually do plan to have a governance. And as I said, we can always put an icon in for the implementation plan as well. Takes you to the implementation, same thing as the implementation page, but. Yeah, no, that could be good. Where the conversation is going and really nailing down the story and we can create whatever graphic support to tell that story. So yeah, don't feel like any of this is set in stone. Icons and charts are super easy to make. So yeah, please feel like there's still creative freedom in telling that story. I think we just mostly wanted to get confirmation on the general buckets of content that we wanted to have on this website. And I feel like we have good direction on that. Yeah, one additional thing that I'm hearing is, you know, really wanting to draw people in and keep them, you know, they might click on it, but to really encourage them to peruse the site and having engaging texts and telling a story is a great way to do that. But you can also do that through, you know, just activity on the page. So things like video footage or like gifts, things like that, that are dynamic are really appealing to people. So if that's of interest, we can look into incorporating that type of media, which could be helpful in just making this a more visually interesting page. I think we definitely are counting on Essie Group using photos and other appealing, you know, aesthetically appealing things to help us. We definitely don't think that our whatever pros we come up with is going to alone capture people. So I think we're definitely counting on that. As far as gifts or videos, I mean, I would be inclined to defer to you to know what would, you know, practically work because I'm having a hard time imagining that. Like it seems like a video that's playing with audio is going to take all the attention, all the eyes away. And then I don't know if people would find a gift annoying or not. These are just things, I mean, this is why I'm deferring to you because I do not really know. Do any other folks have thoughts about options for things or any other thoughts? Does Essie have anything else they were planning to show us? Not at this point. Our next steps are to, you know, kind of continue to noodle on the hub site. I think we'll pause a little bit on that until this group has had more time to provide edits or feedback and copy and all that. We have highlighted on our little next steps list to do our draft of the utilities and facilities chapter, natural resources and arts and culture. It's my understanding that utilities and facilities will get confirmed this evening. Okay. So yeah, a follow-up on, you know, green light, red light on utilities and facilities would be fantastic. And then I think our housing chapter is the next one that is queued up for conversion into story maps. That's great. And you've probably collected that housing's a pretty big deal for us right now because it's a hot topic but it's also, I mean, it's just a hot topic for a reason that's really needed. So that would be a good one to have as a, you know, very high quality page for. Absolutely. Do we have anything else for SEA? Anybody have any other ideas? Everyone understand the plan at the moment? Okay. All right, well, we can move on. Thank you so much, Julian Aiden, for the time. Give it, and all the work. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. We appreciate it very much. Okay, let's move on. So yeah, we have to do this, the final review and approval of utility and facilities implementation strategy and the chapter. So turn it over to Mike to tell us where we are with that. But still, I mean, it was really, I think the only thing that was outstanding because we had already gone through in the first meeting in November and kind of reviewed and approved everything. And then we were going to approve it in the second meeting, but then a question came up on the Act 174. And so the follow-up on that is that, and I was pretty sure I knew what it was at the time, but I just wanted to double check. Most of what Act 174 was getting at was for allowing local municipalities or regional commissions to be able to comment and have more control at the PUC for siting. So our energy committee actually decided they, as much as we wanted, they wanted to participate because we were the capital city. At the same time, they actually were just as comfortable to not participate at all because opening the window up for the municipality, because right now we can't, I mean, we have very little participation at the PUC, but if we do this and comply with Act 174, then we get more comment, which actually in a strange way gives more opportunities for appeals and more opportunities for neighbors and people to oppose projects if we start getting ourselves involved and participating in the process. And so the energy committee was actually happy not participating in Act 174 and the advantages it gives it. Most of the reason that was passed was because there were communities in Addison and Rotland and in other counties for communities that did not want or wanted to limit the amount of solar projects that were going into their towns. So a lot of 174 is actually a good tool for opposing projects as opposed to encouraging the rollout of those projects. So that's why the energy committee actually wasn't that keen on participating in kind of going through that process. So I certainly can go through and we can do more work on that. And it was mentioned more with regards, in this case, to the utilities should we have because it was the utilities should we have more of a conversation about Act 174. It also could apply to the energy chapter and might actually apply more to the energy chapter. And this is a planning decision up to you guys. As I said, the energy committee's recommendation would be not to do that extra effort. Last week it was Aaron's question and all he was asking was just to make sure that we had taken a look at it and there wasn't something that we were missing because he remembered conversation from the past and based on the energy commission's discussion I think we'd be okay to move forward. But I don't know if there's other other thoughts on that but that's what I remember from our last meeting. It sounded like an Aaron question. I wasn't here, but that's where I went with that. Just because he used to work in that area or still does, I think. So how do people feel? Do we need Mike to walk through anything more? Are people feeling comfortable to vote or do we need to discuss the strategies any further? I figure we're gonna start with the goals, aspirations and strategies and then move to the chapter. Well, I think we've looked at it a couple of times. I mean, if there's people are ready to vote, I mean, I would move that we go ahead and move it forward. We can see what the SE group is doing. They're taking our sort of general trajectory and then turning it into something that fits the, what that's gonna look like. So it's not gonna be word for word anyway. So I feel like it was, I don't know if you saw this also but Aaron had condensed some of the goals that were sort of overlapping, right? Like I think originally there were eight or nine and now there's a handful. So anyway, I would move that we move forward with a Senate to Mike and SE group. Okay, yeah, so just to catch me up since I had in this last time. So yeah, Aaron was planning to do that and so I take it he has done that. I haven't actually read it yet but in everyone was happy with rewritten goals and that's what we're, yeah, we plan to approve that. Great, okay, well, Gabe has moved and what I was understanding from what he was saying is he also, you were also talking about the chapter language too. You feel like that's been finalized as well. So your motion includes approval of the goals and aspirations strategies as well as the chapter language. Yes. Okay, so do we have a second to Gabe's motion? Second. Okay, we have a second from John. Do we have any discussion before we vote? Does anyone need anything more about this? Okay, so go to vote. Those in favor of approving the goals, aspirations and strategies and the chapter language for the utilities and facilities chapter, say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Can you abstain? Okay, so that's five, oh, that's great, that's great. And thanks, I don't know why I said again for the first time. Gabe, thank you for covering last week. Seems like things went smoothly. And since we have some time left, we have some minutes to approve. So if everyone can take a look at the minutes from November 28th, that makes sense. And I'll take a, let us know if there's any edits that are needed and when people are ready, I'll take a motion to approve those. Can move approval of the minutes from November 28th. Okay, we have a motion from Ariane. Does anybody need more time? I'll do the second. Thank you. Okay, second from John. Second from John. Okay, those favor approving the minutes, say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, minutes are approved. So, okay, that was a good meeting. I think we've gone to the meeting. Did we want to check on the Bethel? I don't know if he or she had any questions or comments. I had thought that was somebody who was part of the SE group, but apparently not. So, sure, yeah, I was just going to let it go because, you know, no one spoke up during the, you know, open business section. But yeah, before we adjourn. You're always welcome to reach out. Before we adjourn, if there's anyone from the public still here who is wanting to reach us at all, now's a good time. We can revisit that. Okay. With that. Again, we'll meet on January 9th. Second Monday of January. We'll continue to do plan work. And that's, we're also going to start getting into zoning work again. I just want to make sure that we don't put that on the back burner for too long and we really do need to get on that. Also, in the meantime, people watch your emails and I'll send some language around for website copy. Okay. And with that, do we have a motion to adjourn? I'll stick here forever again. I move to adjourn. All right. Thank you, Gabe. Do we have a second to adjourn? A second. Okay. And those in favor of adjourning say. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. Okay. See everyone in the new year.


Welcome back to the Career Hacking Village here at DEF CON Safe Mode. Many times when we're talking on social media or on Discord, we're always asking, what is the best career path? And several times people will say, no, this is the way, no, this is the way, no, this is the way. What we can tell you is that there are many different ways, and I'm really excited to have my friend Pablo explain how he sees it and his recommendations on your career path. Take it away, Pablo. Thanks, Kathleen. So this talk is titled, In Theory, There's No Difference Between Theory and Practice. And so where did this come from? First of all, it's normally attributed to Yogi Berra, who dropped other pearls, like when you come to a fork and a road, take it, but this was actually not one of his. So the difference between theory and practice actually, according to Snopes, appeared first in the 1986 book about programming, the art and science of programming. So I thought it was apropos. A lot of times when we talk about how to get into infosec, we devolve into this discussion about going to college and learning theory or the school of hard knocks to learning practice. And so there's always this push and pull between theory and practice. So why are we here? As Kathleen mentioned, about every six months or so, we see these kind of flame wars and discussions pop up on Twitter about how do you get into infosec? And it comes from all sides. So you have some people that believe that security is a prestige class and that you have to spend 10 or 15 years on a watch floor or on a call desk before you can join security. And you have some people saying, look, I didn't go to college. I've got a fantastic infosec career and I make a ton of money and the college kids seem really upset by that. And the truth is there are many paths and they're all valuable. It's a matter of what you want to get into it and who you are as a person. So I thought it would be best to have a nice, balanced discussion on that. So why do we even have this discussion? Why does it matter? Well, we all go through these little life transitions, right? We finish a school, be it high school or college or a trade school that we have to go out and find work. Many of us serve some time in the military and we have to figure out what we're going to do once we take the uniform off. Some of us have life changes. We get married or we have kids or something in life changes and we decide that we want to do something else. Or sometimes our careers just go away or we decide we're just dissatisfied with our careers and we want to get into this thing called infosec. And so how do we really do that? So some disclaimers. First of all, these views are mine and mine alone. They don't belong to my employer. There's an exception to be found for absolutely everything I'm going to say. So if you try to find fault with this talk, congratulations, you will. Again, these are these are my opinions and what I've experienced. And those opinions are based upon my observations. But I'm also going to freely admit that I have biases, right? I took a very particular path and I've seen what I've seen and I haven't seen what I haven't seen. And so your mileage may vary. So a little bit about how my path came into infosec so that you understand kind of my latent biases. I've been doing this for a little bit. I got access to my first 8088 class computer in 1981 and then played with modems and BBSs. In the early 90s, I was a developer for expert systems. Those of you that are in AI may know what that is. In 1993, I went through a life change and I decided to join the United States Navy. Got a degree in computer science in 1998, spent some time at NSA. Got a master's degree in computer science 10 years after my bachelor's. Went back to cyber command. Then what was faculty at the Navy's postgraduate school teaching master's level computer science and information sciences. Then I went to US special operations command hacker maker space called softworks and I just finished a PhD in information sciences. Now that said, the picture is a little dated, but you might be able to make out that that's actually me with the rest of the school of root. So I have been in the community for quite a while. So with that all being said, we're going to have this discussion. Let's try not to turn it into a flame war. We can disagree, but we should be respectful about how we disagree with each other. So those of us that have been around for a really long time, remember the quote unquote traditional path and infosec job. There was no cybersecurity degree when I came up and went through college. And so the running joke was that if you wanted to be a computer security expert and you could either go out and work in a sock watch floor, become a forensic analyst and then the lab director and the chief security officer and 20 years later, you would be highly paid consultants or the hacker method where you became a hacker, you became a criminal, you got convicted of a crime and two years later, you were highly paid consultants, maybe 14 months with good behavior. Those days, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your standpoint may have gone by the wayside. So what are the contemporary paths? How do most of us get into infosec careers this year? Well, there's typically three paths. There's the School of Hard Knocks, there's the certification path, and then there's the college education path. And each of those come with their own pros and cons. And so we should discuss those a little bit. So the first one is the School of Hard Knocks. This is where you kind of teach everything to yourself. It's a very traditional path for hackers because there used to not be college classes. There used to not be a CEH or a CISSP. You had to go out and read Frack Magazine and read 2600 or go to hacker boards and teach this stuff to yourself. One of the pros is the cost. The cost is essentially free. You only learn the things that you're interested in learning. You don't have to bother with any baseline things you don't care about. It takes the least amount of time before you get to the subjects that you care about. We'll come back to that least amount of time. And you get practical skills now. You learn what you need to solve your problems. And so you become a practitioner immediately. And really, you're only limited by your personal drive and talent.  You can just hop right in and do the things that you're interested in doing. So what are the cons? Well, I mentioned time, least amount of time of the three pads. Well, that depends on how you cut it. Generally speaking, there was a paper called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell that says, in order to become an expert in any one thing, you have to spend 10,000 hours doing it. So 10,000 hours, if you break it out into eight-hour workdays means 3.42 years, which sounds remarkably like a bachelor's degree, which takes about four years. And when you add summer vacation and when you add spring break, you're at four years. You can do it faster. And again, your mileage may vary. If you're a very talented, very driven person, you might be able to do it in less time. But it is still a substantial amount of time if you want to become an expert. Typically speaking, when you go through the School of Hard Onox, you're all practice and very little to no theory. And the problem with all practice is that the tools change. And the tactics techniques and procedures change. And the approaches change. And if you're not based in a theoretical background and you're not actively using it, those skills become very perishable. And so if you're not actively using it, you're going to lose it very quickly. And you're going to have to come back and reteach yourself. Employment opportunities, boutique shops are a good opportunity for you because they're smaller and they're willing to take a chance. A lot of the boutique shops are started by rock stars in this community. And they didn't take a college education in many cases. They learned through the School of Hard Onox. And so they understand it. Independent Consultant is another one.  But you can certainly do that. You certainly can't get hired by a corporation. The challenge with getting hired with a corporation without a degree is you have to pass the HR check, the human resources check. And the problem with that is the way that the industry has moved is a lot of times, unless you get a personal introduction, you have to go through an automated resume system. And it's looking for certain ticks. And if you don't check one of those ticks, like maybe they require a bachelor's degree, your resume may never get seen by an actual human being. The other issue with the School of Hard Onox is survivability. So when we go through hard economic times, what happens is usually there's an accountant somewhere, an executive somewhere that wants to cut cost. And the first thing they cut is high cost assets which don't have a whole lot of background. So it's easy to justify in a business sense, paying somebody with an advanced degree a large sum of money because they've got a demonstrated record that the school vouches for it. That may be harder if you learn through the School of Hard Onox, unless you're a name brand. If you're a name brand, then that may be different, but it is something to consider. So here's a fantastic example of an absolute rock star who came up through the School of Hard Onox, Frank Haidt. So, you know, Frank got started in this earlier than I did. He started with a PDP in 1979 at his home. In 1981, he emancipated and went to go work for Chase Manhattan, never finished 10th grade. So not only does he not have a college degree, he doesn't have a high school diploma. He's one of the best read, most educated people I know without any formal education because he's just a tremendously driven and intelligent individual. In 88, he went to work for the New York Transit Authority, created the emergency 911 system for MCI, went to go work for NAFC and SWIFT PAC, which are Navy entities, found a NSA penetration testing operation in 1997 and became the 10th employee at at stake in 1999. And since then he's founded Leviathan Security, which has a tremendous name in the industry and he's been a 10 speaker times three. So again, no formal education, just a tremendously talented, driven individual with a curious mind. So absolutely, you can do this without certifications and you can absolutely do this without education. And here's a fine success example. So the other way is certifications. Those have come into vogue of late. And we've all kind of heard the names, there's your CEH and OSCP and OSCE and CISSP and what are all these things? Well, the first thing to be aware of is not all these certifications are created equal and they're intended for different audiences for better or worse. If you wanna work for the US government, you're probably gonna do much better if you have a CISSP and that's actually true in industry. I've got one, I've got my own thoughts on that certification as compared to other certifications, but it's important for you to weigh what it is that you wanna do for a living, what kind of career you wanna have and see if that certification is gonna help you get that job or help you become more proficient in what you wanna do. Many of the certifications focus on practice with little to no theory, but there's some exemptions. They're vendor motivated. Those certifications are there to make money, right? They wanna sell you a bootcamp, they want you to pay for the class, they want you to pay to take the certification and then they want you to pay fees to maintain that certification. There are lots of paths to getting these, but primarily you can take a class, a bootcamp or you can do online and self-teaching by picking up a book. Most of these certifications have books where you can teach yourself the same things and then your certification exams are tends to be to either proctored exams, which means that you go to a testing facility and they verify you are who you say you are before you take the exam and then there are online exams. One of the things that does come up and it was a problem in the past with some of the certifications is that the online exams, you could actually go out and pay somebody to take the exam in your stead and get the certification. So once that's out, those certifications become less valuable in the eyes of industry. And so just be aware of that. So what are the pros of certifications? It's a great bootcamp, right? If you're starting at zero and you don't know how to get going, you're gonna get lots of practice in a very short amount of time. Most of these bootcamps are a couple of days or maybe a week long. Some of them are a little bit longer if it's a program.  Theory may vary, but typically very little theory in these.  There's gonna be defined progression of knowledge. So if you don't know where to start or where to go next, typically these bootcamps will help you out with that. In the certifications, many of them will help you pass an HR check because they're familiar with the vendors, they're familiar with the certifications and they're familiar with the knowledge you have to demonstrate in order to achieve those certifications. And so in many cases, those automated resume checkers will actually tick the box if you've got the right certifications that they're looking for. So what you're looking out of the screen now is two courses. In the red box is one course and in the blue box is the other course. And my question for you is what is the difference? And I'll give you a few seconds here to read it. Good. So both of these are actually courses and exploitation development. One of them is a master's level course. The other one is a course from a vendor that you take in one week. So the master's level course takes 12 weeks. The vendor course takes one week. You're covering the same information. But what you should think about is if you take it in 12 weeks, are you gonna get a much deeper understanding and much more practice than if you take it in one week? And I would suggest that, yeah, you will. If you're spending 12 weeks with the material, you're gonna spend more time exploring that material and going deeper on it than if you spend one week. That doesn't mean that you're missing out on a whole lot of stuff. You've taken the one week, but just be aware that a one week bootcamp is just gonna give you an introduction to all of these subjects. And so you're gonna have to go through and spend some of your own time really studying it. So what are some of the cons of certification? So I went out to a well-known vendor who will remain nameless and I pulled up the cost for achieving their certification. So their one week class is $6,200. And then you have to wait a certain amount of time before you can take the certification. And so if you want access to their online labs after the course, it's another $729. So we're up at $7,000. And then each certification attempt is $729. So you're up close to $8,000. And that's if you pass it the first time. If for whatever reason you fail it and you have to go back and take it, well, you're probably gonna need access to the labs and you're probably gonna need to pay for another certification event. So that's another $1,500 every time that you fail to pass. And then on top of that, you're gonna have to pay to renew this every three to four years. So at $8,000, and we'll talk about the cost of college later, but $8,000 is a substantial amount of money, not just compared to college, but compared to anything, $8,000 is a substantial amount of money. The other part is, as I mentioned, the certifications tend to be tools focused, not always, not all certifications, but they tend to be tool focused. And so they're perishable, right? If you take a certification and then you don't do that on a daily basis for your job, your skill in that set is going to deprecate. The other thing is, what do they demonstrate? And so there's this ongoing discussion that always happens about, does that demonstrate knowledge or does that demonstrate your ability to take an exam? And different people have their own biases on this. I absolutely know people that could not pass a certification exam that absolutely had mastery of the material. They just couldn't take a test. And I've also seen it the other way where somebody passes the test and they clearly knew nothing about the material. And so there's really a discussion there that happens and hiring managers will think about this, about does the certification really demonstrate that you know what I need you to know? So let's talk about college. I know that this is a very personal subject for a lot of people. Not all schools and all programs are created equally, okay? If you go and get a computer science degree from MIT, it's gonna be very different than if you get a computer science from maybe a community college or from University of Phoenix or some other schools. Take a look at what the reputation is, not just of the school, but of that particular program in that school. Most of you have never probably heard of University of Texas Dallas. They happen to have one of the top ranked schools for computer science in the country. University of California, Santa Barbara has one of the top ranked schools for cybersecurity-based computer science. So really take a look at the programs, take a look at the schools and realize that they're not all created equal. Most of the colleges will focus on theory with varying levels of practice. And again, that is a question that you should ask when you're considering a school and a program. How much is this theory and how much of this is practice? Then the other question you wanna ask is, do I wanna just study? Do I wanna become a full-time college student or do I wanna work and study? Now, some of us, we're not gonna have that option. Our life situations are such that we've got people that depend on us, we've got dependents and so we're gonna have to work and study and that's okay. But for those of us that have the choice, we've got to balance possibly taking larger loans out to concentrate on our studies, vice taking smaller loans out and working and studying. And that's very much a personal choice.  College degrees are not cheap, they're very expensive. And so getting the degree shouldn't be where your college stops. If your college or university should help you with job placement afterwards. And then there's a value proposition versus cost. If you, getting a college degree in something that is not marketable is a personal choice. So really, if you wanna work in Infosec, that history degree may or may not help you and we'll talk more about unrelated degrees either. But if you know you wanna work in Infosec, perhaps you wanna consider cybersecurity or an IT or a computer science degree. But there are other degree paths. You can either get an unrelated degree and get into Infosec or you can get a related degree and get into Infosec. And those have their own pros and cons. And I'll show you an example of somebody that has an unrelated degree and has a fantastic Infosec career. So the pros of colleges is that all industries and all companies recognize bachelor's degrees and master's degrees and PhDs. They're resilient, they tend to be theory focused which moves at a much slower pace than practice. And so the tools change the theory very rarely does. But if you've got a degree in that field you're gonna get that HR pass. If they're looking for a bachelor's degree I'm not aware of somebody that says, well you've got a bachelor's degree but it's not the right bachelor's degree and therefore we're not gonna take you. Job survivability I talked about when we hit hard economic times. The people with degrees that have been in the that are working in a field with their degree tend to be more survivable than the people that don't have degrees that are working in a field. Right, wrong, or otherwise that's just kind of how it happens. It's a non-perishable skill, right. Again, I talked about the 10,000 hours become an expert 3.42 years. That's roughly the amount of class time that you're gonna spend getting a bachelor's degree. Writing, writing is absolutely critical. I'll talk more about that. You're gonna spend a lot of time writing in college. You can be the best penetration tester in the world but you have to be able to communicate your findings in writing. And if you can't do that you're probably not gonna be hired back. Non-related courses, is that actually a benefit? I actually believe it is. It's easy for us to learn things that we're interested in within our chosen major. It is much harder to pay attention and learn things that we're not familiar with than we're not good at. But learning is like anything else. The more you practice at learning the better you become at learning. And so as you're asked to learn new things throughout your career it actually becomes easier to learn things if the more you've practiced it. And then cost, it may or may not be a pro. Again, that depends on how you choose to fund your college education. If you use grants and scholarships then cost is probably not prohibitive.  Otherwise, you're gonna end up racking up a lot of debt that may or may not be a good value proposition. So writing in unrelated courses writing is absolutely critical for success. That's not just me saying that's Lenny's ulcer. Lenny's ulcer among various and sundry other things is a fantastic SANS instructor and he teaches the reverse engineer malware. And he says, listen, if you wanna excel on information security you've gotta have strong writing skills. Often these things are ignored. Many of us don't like to write. I am not a fan of writing.  And I know lots of people do and I envy them. It is something that I've had to work very hard at. Most of us in this field tend to ignore writing because we're more interested in the technical skills. But just like technical skills, writing requires practice.  And it's one of those things that if you're not gonna do it on your own you need to find somebody that's gonna force you to do it. This may help you do it. The other thing is that understanding other fields helps you explain things. Very rarely are we gonna do infosec for the sake of infosec. Normally we're gonna do infosec for the sake of a company that company's mission may not be infosec. It may be a bank. It may be an educational institution. It may be an engineering institution. And if you can't understand what it is that that company does you're probably not gonna be able to communicate very well why they should be concerned about infosec. So what are the cons? Well, cost, right? You have to be cognizant of the financial cost of college. College is definitely not cheap. You have to make some choices about how you're gonna live. You have to think about the applicability. Unrelated courses are gonna be required.  It's something we all kind of suffer through but you're just gonna have to do that. The baseline related courses are good because that's where you get your introduction to theory but they tend to be not very exciting. For those of us that love this stuff we already kind of know how to program in Python, right? We don't really need to intro to Python class but the college is gonna probably require that if you're taking computer science and so you're just gonna have to suffer through it. One of the criticisms is that college is not practical. They tend to be a little bit behind and that's true in many programs. They're not keeping up with the latest and greatest because they're not trying to teach you practice and many cases are trying to teach you theory which moves at a much lower pace. The other problem is time. College requires a significant time investment even if you're a full-time student it's probably gonna take you three or four years to finish a bachelor's.  So let's talk a little bit about the cost. This is the average cost as pulled from an independent journalist for a university. So a public two-year in-district is $3,400. A public four-year is $9,000. Now, if you remember a few slides ago we talked about certifications and a one-week class in a certification attempt was $8,000. So for $1,000 more you get to spend an entire year at a university becoming a dedicated learner. So what's the value proposition there? If you're gonna go to an out-of-state school yeah it's gonna be a lot more expensive, right? You're looking at on average $24,000 and if you go to a private university you're looking at $32,000. So these are all things to keep in mind maybe the best option is not to move far away from home unless you're chasing a particular school in a particular program because they really teach the things exactly that you wanna learn or they have good insight in the industry that you want to go. If you wanna work in Silicon Valley absolutely go to a University of California school, right? Because they're there and they have established relationships. But these are just the cost for tuition and fees. These don't include things like your living expenses. They don't include things like your meal plans and they don't include things like your books. Let's have a little bit of a discussion about reducing cost. This is a mock-up of my dorm room. Actually, that's not quite true. This is a mock-up of the dorm room after they remodeled it after I graduated. It looks pretty much like a prison. I lived a very smart lifestyle but because I did that I incurred very, actually in my case I incurred no cost.  And so while I fully recognize that college is expensive I often question when people say, well I've got $107,000 of debt for going to school and I ask if they lived in a dorm and they show me pictures of this fully laid out apartment with giant screen TVs. Delayed gratification is a thing. If you don't wanna incur a lot of cost while you're in college you may wanna cut back your living expenses a little bit. So comments of college, the applicability you're gonna be taking a lot of unrelated courses you're still gonna have to pay for those courses. Again, they're tangentially related. Practice varies, not all programs provide you the same amount of practice and not all schools are the same, right? Contact hours with your professors and your instructors matter. Faculty that have been in the real world and really are subject matter experts matter. One of the things I will tell you is you were gonna meet a lot of faculty members at some schools that have never been in the real world. They've spent their entire life in academia and so their view of industry and what's needed to succeed in the industry is gonna be very different than someone who has spent some time in industry doing it. Usually you get good, faster, cheap, choose two with universities and college education it's normally choose one. There are some that are good and cheap that's rare, you really have to be lucky enough to be living close to a school that has a good program but they're definitely not fast. If it's fast, there are some schools out there that are online and they will tell you that you can get a master's degree in one year. It's probably not gonna be cheap and it's probably not gonna be good. Let's be honest about that. So go into it with your eyes open. The other thing that you see is a lot of schools are gonna advertise that they're NSA academic centers of excellence. I will tell you having taken two schools through that certification program that that certification is absolutely worthless. It is not that hard to get accredited as an NSA academic center of excellence and it's a paperwork drill. They will, the NSA ask schools to make sure that they teach certain things and if they have one slide on one course that mentions that subject then they get to claim that they taught. That is really not what NSA and cyber command were after. So I would not really consider that academic center of excellence certification for a school is worthwhile. Don't buy that. So another con is the applicability. I used to teach not just at the graduate level but at the undergraduate level and I teach one of the last classes that my undergraduates took before they graduated. And many, many, many of my students would come to me and go, hey, listen, you know, Professor Brewer loved your class. It was great. I'm about to graduate with a degree, a bachelor's degree in computer science. I don't feel qualified to do anything. Congratulations, you're not alone. We all feel that way. If you spend any time in infosec, you're just gonna get used to the imposter syndrome. I still have it. Many of the people up on stage today are still gonna have it. But what you need to realize is that having a degree doesn't demonstrate that you're an expert in something. A bachelor's degree demonstrates that you're capable of being taught and learning new things. And so your employers know that because you've got a bachelor's degree in computer science, they don't expect you to hop in and be an expert programmer. They expect that when they stick you with a more seasoned senior programmer that they're gonna be able to teach you the things that you need to do to accomplish your job there.  It absolutely does not. What it means is that you're capable of teaching yourself. If you don't know something and you're asked to do it, you're capable of going out and finding resources and teaching yourself. And a PhD absolutely doesn't mean that you're an expert in anything. What it means is that you're capable of conducting independent scientific research. So a lot of people do ask me because I've just got one, should I get a PhD? And my answer to this is you should only get a PhD for three reasons.  There's a hard cast system in there about tenure track PhDs and non tenure track PhDs and then lectures. The other reason is if you wanna do research, professional research for your career, go get a PhD. And the last reason to get a PhD, which was my reason was I just wanted one. Does it really help your career? It's arguable, I would say most cases, the juice is probably not worth the squeeze on that one. It was just a personal goal I'd set for myself for reasons that, well, I'm just not gonna get into, but just be aware of what those degrees are supposed to demonstrate. None of these demonstrate that you're an expert. So unrelated degrees, everybody needs infosec.  And so they all need infosec. And taking these unrelated courses helps you learn the language of non-infosec people.  They pay you good money so they don't have to hear that language. They wanna know, what do I gain? What do I lose? What does it cost and why do I care? So you're gonna have to translate the geek speak and the infosec to business processes and thought processes of executives. Baseline courses regardless of degree are gonna be the same.   Those baseline courses are the same and they're meant to be a good foundation for the rest of your learning. I mentioned writing practice. You're gonna get a lot of writing practice regardless of your degree. That writing is important. It's actually critical, I would say in many cases. It's at least as critical if not more critical than your technical knowledge. But if you're gonna get an unrelated degree and you wanna work an infosec at some point you're gonna have to come back and either get some training or some education on the tech side. You can't just hop in from a history degree and decide that you're gonna be an infosec analyst without going back and actually understanding what some of the infosec language means and understanding something about how computers and networks work. So here's a fantastic example of somebody that's successful with an unrelated degree. Tracy Malif, many of you know her, Infosec Sherpa. She's got a bachelor's in history and she's got a master's in library sciences. She spent 10 years working as a librarian, then was a cyber analyst at Glasgow Smith Klein, got her first infosec certification in 2017 and in 2019 she became an infosec analyst for New York Times. So library sciences doesn't seem like it's a related degree. However, what it taught her to do was how to do research very, very well. She's certainly a much better researcher than I am and it taught her how to write exceedingly well. And because of that, she's been tremendously successful, not only in the hacker community, but as a professional infosec analyst. So absolutely, all degrees are valuable and you certainly can work in infosec if you have an unrelated degree. So Emanuel Kant said that experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play and it's true, you need both. You need a little bit of theory and you need a little bit of experience and practical knowledge if you wanna be successful, otherwise you're really just a one-sided professional. So you need a bit of both. So great, I've got more questions about this. Where can I go for learning and networking resources? Well, congratulations. If you're listening to this, you're already doing that. DEF CON and hacker conferences and hacker collectives are great insight. It's a great place to meet people that may be doing things that you're interested in or they have good and bad experiences to share with you on their path. Maker spaces, there are maker spaces throughout the country and throughout the world. Lots of professionals have a passion for infosec and what they do that are willing to share their experiences and share their knowledge for little or no cost. Capture the flag exercises are great. One of the things I often hear is, I don't feel like I know enough to do capture the flag exercises. That's great. If you knew how to do the capture the flag exercise, it wouldn't be fun. So what I would say is go out there and try it and figure out what you can figure out and what you can't figure out. Go back a week later, what you're gonna see is that the teams that did well did write ups on how to solve the challenges. And that's gonna give you insight into not only how to solve the challenges, but subjects that you may wanna go back and learn more on. Mentors and mentees, everybody needs a mentor. I've got several and I learned a lot from my mentors. Here's a hidden trick though. I learned far more from my mentees than I learned from my mentors. They often ask me questions that I go, you know what, I actually have no idea and I have to go back and research it. And I have to learn it well enough to explain it to my mentee. So both being a mentor and a mentee is a great way to learn things. There are lots of free online training, everything from YouTube to online classes to Khan Academy. Hacker Khan's, you can attend or you can volunteer. Attending is always great because you get to go to ideally all the talks that you wanna do. Hidden trick of mine is to volunteer at the Khan's. I've been doing it for a long time, particularly if you volunteer for speaker operations, you get a lot of one-on-one time with the speakers. You get to ask questions without anybody else in the room. So that's really, really great. For military members that are leaving, there's a program called SkillBridge where you can go get an internship for six months at a company. That company doesn't pay your salary. The DOD pays your salary.  So that's a great deal. For college students and for people taking either at the School of Hard Knocks or the certification path, go get an internship, either paid or unpaid. Internships are great. Not only do they let you gain some skills, they get, let you learn about the company that lets the company learn about you. And oftentimes you get a job, not because you submitted a resume, but because you have a personal relationship with somebody in a company. Professional organizations, ISC Squared, ISACA, all of those tend to have monthly meetings. Those are great. Go network, go talk to people. They will give presentations. If you wanna know how they got to learn about what they learned, they will tell you. Oftentimes they're happy to do that. Boot camps and lunch and learns, a lot of organizations will offer boot camps and lunch and learns for free in some cases because they want you to sign up for their paid classes later, but you don't have to. You can go for an hour and learn about network recon or OSINT or whatever it is that they're talking about. So lots of free resources out there. So at the end of this, what's the best solution? It's a choose your own adventure, right? If you wanna be a ninja, do all three paths, right? Do some experimentation on your own. Go through the school of hard knocks, get some certifications, take some college classes, get a degree, but choose a path and start on it, right? Journey to a thousand steps, you have to take that first step. What you should consider is what are your goals? When you start on this journey, what is your next goal that you wanna achieve and how can you best get there given your timeline, your finances and your goals? So there is no wrong path. There are pros and cons to all of them.  And so it's really just a matter of which path you wanna start on first. There is no wrong path. So with that, thanks so much for your time and I will be on the Discord if you have questions. Have a great day. Pablo, thank you so much for all of that. Just sort of great overview because as you said, we tend to have this discussion and everyone camps in my way as writer, and it really is everyone needs to customize their own career path and take bits and pieces and depending on your finances and where you are in life, all of it. And that's what's so great about the industry is that we have so many resources. We have so many role models. We can craft our own path and employers are also starting to really realize experience over certifications, but it's going to change depending on the employer. I really appreciate you pulling this presentation together and also all of your great comments to people's questions and Discord. I wanna remind everyone that we're doing resume review and career coaching all day Friday and all Saturday afternoon. You need to sign up in the Discord channel. Pablo, thank you so much. I can't wait to be able to hug you in person. Thanks, Kathleen, looking forward to seeing you. Take care.