thank you all for coming we are recording this so if anyone would like it to remain private after the recording's finished let me know at the end of this event and we'll make sure not to make it public online but the idea would be that we would share this recording online afterwards so people who couldn't make it could see it after hello welcome we have name tags scattered here you can feel free to write your name your preferred gender pronoun if you like and what else housekeeping there is bathroom down that bathroom's down that hallway there's some water fountains the ladies bathroom is open but i understand that that might not be the case for the whole event they might lock them other in that case there's bathrooms downstairs somewhere i'm not sure exactly yeah thank you two to share your friends with the cctv venue and recording and all sorts of stuff thank you yes and also to say for those of you who know me that i am i am not here in official burlington telecom capacity today i am here as abby tycoki so anyone who has things they want to discuss about any sales related things i'm happy to stay after and and hear that but this is something separate so thank you all for being here thanks abby and thank you for helping me connect with all these folks okay so momentarily i would like to to do a round of introductions and hear where you're all coming from what brought you here to give some context for this particular event i'll do an introduction of myself and this particular event and then we'll jump into some stuff that i prepared to look over and then get to some activity where we're brainstorming about particular questions and topics related to digital inclusion so my name's julia vallera i'm relatively new to the area i moved here about a year and a half ago a little less than that so i i'm really excited and inspired by the energy and the people that i've been meeting since i've been here i've had great conversations about internet related issues a few of them being related to digital inclusion web literacy in the area i'm really excited by the initiatives and the services and the the various projects that i'm learning about since i came here so i'm here as someone who is very passionate about the topic of digital inclusion i've been working on that topic and web literacy for the last six years and i moved here from new york city and then in addition to that i've been working at in the area of media and arts for over fifteen years probably closer to seventeen now so i really i'm kind of at this intersection between digital inclusion technology art design and i dabble in all of those things and often they overlap so i'm here just to meet everyone and really dig in more with all of your expertise in the room and i've been managing a lot of local and global projects as well the work i work at mozilla foundation right now and before that i was working with a lot of different nonprofits in new york city running events and doing different types of trainings for professionals teachers young people collaborating on lots of projects with fellow artists and designers so i'm just i'm very excited about the idea of collaboration and that's what brings me here this particular event i'm hoping is is the first of many more so we had a previous event during innovation week that drew a lot of interested people on the topic of internet health and lots of issues that tie into that and this is the kind of continued conversation of that event but i think drilling down into the digital inclusion piece of that which we're gonna do today is really a good start to thinking about what we want to do to move forward and with all the people in the room how we can leverage that in in continuing this conversation and then just the last thing is that it's a flexible agenda so so this is i'm very much interested in hearing the expertise that you're bringing here tonight and so i've i've kind of created an outline and an agenda and have topical questions to to get to but at the same time like i want to hear from you and and feel free to you know surface questions or thoughts or any relevant examples as we move on throughout the event tonight so with that said just briefly this is what we're we'll be going through we're gonna do introductions i'm gonna go through some slides that cover some information related to local initiatives and and statistics and then we're gonna do a group activity that i'll talk more in detail about and then i really want to take a good amount of time like ten minutes or so at the end to have reflections so we'll have some time to maybe give feedback on this event what we could do better next time what we need to include and things like that okay so now i'd like to know about you all if we could go around the room and do our name preferred gender pronoun if you prefer to do that and what brought you here today where you're from and i added your favorite winter activity here for selfish reasons i'm very curious to know since i'm new to the area what all of you like to get into during the winter months yeah and and please try to keep it short just so we there's a lot of people here so we can you know get through it all so maybe no more than a minute each would be preferable all right so does any side of the room or corner want to start let's maybe go this way starting in this corner here okay okay sounds good well i didn't want to know about i heard of ruins in telecom and that's what i'm interested in as you know we just had the the whole sale of that and everything involved with that and so this kinda got my attention i'm not particularly interested in the internet i never really learnt it and i frankly don't like it very much and i find it very difficult because it seems to change all the time and unless you had somebody sitting right next to you telling you what's happening you're just out of it thank you and my i'm barbara winbroff and i'd say to describe myself that i'm a community activist here great in burlington thanks for coming oh and what's your favorite winter activity avoiding snow okay well noted okay next i'm dennis moynihan i'm the executive director for btv ignite and i'm here because digital inclusion is one of the things that we're very interested in btv ignites's our mission is to position burlington to thrive in a 21st century digital economy and digital inclusion making sure we're inclusive we have web literacy it's a huge part of that and my favorite winter activity probably involves something that comes with a court condition maybe steven in the back and then jumped back then all right stephen barraclough i run burlington telecom what brought me here today is that we're in a a very changing world and i think it's critically important to me and many people that somewhere like burlington actually becomes a an expression of what you can achieve in an engaged community on the front on the on digital literacy and digital inclusion now what can we do that actually brings the best of providing equal opportunity to everyone and actually have burlington be an example of that my favorite winter activity used to be skiing as i got older my favorite winter activity became became planning summer good ones thank you i'm carolyn bates i'm from burlington i've been a resident here since one thousand nine hundred and seventy three i came today because some people from burlington telecom and katie teal which i remember suggested that i come and i have been an activist since way back in the early 90s when we were trying to put dog parks in the city so anything that seems to go across who i am or what i believe in i like to you know well anyway just like to get things going right and well and like backwards and so i hope that the internet and net inclusion and net neutrality all this somehow i could help with that and winter well let's see i like walking on the ice along the lake to see all those summer cabins that i can't see it with someone oh that's a good idea but you have to be sure the ice is cold oh yeah right thank you welcome so i'm alan matson i have been very involved with the keeping the local cooperative that had put a proposal forward for beats telecom mhm i think we're trying to figure out next steps and i also know that shae got us involved to help sponsor a bit i think through reds and democracy to help out with you in this evening and like i said so i'm here partly filling the purpo personally i would for the cooperative of what next steps might be and i live in vermont because i grew up in minnesota and i love winters it's hard to pick a favorite but keeping on carolyn's team i also like walking along the ice close to shore but usually i need to have about ten to fifteen holes drilled with my tip ups down in ice fishing so ooh cool thank you welcome my name is dan a recent burlington president about two weeks ago here i worked remotely with harvard's berkman klein center for internet society doing research on internet content controls and censorship i also just recently got back from a a year long travel fellowship on the topic of internet infrastructure censorship and surveillance around the world and so i'm here to see what kind of initiatives are already in place what kind of needs need to be addressed and see if there's any room for volunteering and getting involved i'm from florida so there's not a lot of difference between winter and the rest of the seasons but i'll take any excuse for a hot dog thank you welcome oh let's just get over here and then we'll bounce back my name is paul sumner i'm a communications coordinator for the city of winooski i have this tweet actually very appropriately it's what brought me here and technically i've got to say a lot of stuff based on the part we do try and communicate i mean sort of say and i'd say right now my favorite winter activity is helping our community member's understand the winter mmm our community is the winter park vans the parking vans the parking vans in when you see the winter parking vans yes yeah that's my favorite activity hm on the computer my computer you know just let people know to show a response thank you we have someone skyped in is he there he turned up his video he's there yeah so sean oh there he is sean can you hear me yep you wanna introduce yourself shanghai with abby at telecom yeah i'm excited to be part of this i'm semisnowed in up in enosburg so this is something that i wanna be a part of to kind of expand digital inclusive digital literacy outside of geneva county as well and that my favorite winter activity is definitely skiing i think it's specifically move to vermont just to ski so good to see everybody thank you alright and then so we'll bounce over here hi st philips i'm a remote employee for google i grew up in vermont and got here about a year ago and i'm here cause julia sent me a message after i looked up an article a meeting about net neutrality and and my favorite winter activity is going ice skating with my two girls very important okay thanks for coming maybe we'll do zigzag so we'll go straight back and then around i'm l wagoner i'm a member of kapiti local and i'm here for the digital inclusion i think it's incredibly important and i agree with stephen that we have an opportunity here to create something that that the whole country can take a look at and learn from and i hope we can pull that off i've been here for i don't know since the early 90s and my job is helping people with their computers so my favorite winter activity i think is shoveling snow because it gives me a great opportunity to get fit stay fit and get something accomplished at the same time not that i don't like cross country skiing and stuff like that but i especially like snow shoveling that's great thank you that's very funny more on that later so my my name is kit andrews and i've been back here in vermont since one thousand nine hundred and eighty four and i'm a member of kbtl coop and what brings me here tonight is i really value the kbtl coop community and like to spend time with kbtl coop people i'm not quite as internet illiterate and phobic as barbara is but i'm pretty illiterate and not deeply interested in that stuff so one of my favorite winter activities is snow shoveling i had no idea someone else was going to say that you're sitting right next to each other i know perfectly positioned now a favorite activity i'm inviting everybody over tomorrow yeah a favorite activity around the holidays is defined a messiah singalong and there's one tonight in the new north end so i'm gonna be leaving here early so i can go sing them aside oh wow nice thanks for coming we'll go right next to you in the back i know i'm godsram i live in burlington in burlington cohousing and i'm here because this seems to be an issue that abby was really concerned about and i thought well if she's concerned and interested in this maybe it's something i should find out about so i don't know much about it so that's why i'm here and my favorite winter activity when i can do it is cross country skiing okay thanks for coming my name's matt crock i've been i spent a number of years in my twenties doing kind of frontline work doing computer literacy as a social worker with people who've been recently housed after having being homeless so kind of i've had my fingers in that world and my other affinities are a member of the laboratory b hackerspace and i'm generally involved in as you know the coop movement soldier on many things of abtl ate a lot of my time over the last five years but i'm really sort of interested in seeing what what things the that kind of our community can pull together that are both kind of ethically designed and nonextractive but also very very involved in the platform cooperativism movement so curious to see what people bring to the table thanks for coming i'm andy crawford i work for cctv which runs a bunch of different programs one of them is john seventeen three hundred and seventeen he will i work there as andy as a tech director yeah sure we run a bunch of programs at cctv channel seventeen we have a statewide nonprofit organization that helps you find the best deal planning or common good vermont into that and then we have we also operate a small openstack cloud attached to the burlington home network so i'm interested in access to resources digital resources access to digital resources for everything from civic data projects through small scale entrepreneurial projects with a focus on localism hyperlocal engagement mostly interested in the policies of the small and large scale structural internet so thanks i'm david lansky i've lived in burlington twenty some years i've been i'm on the board of kbt local keep it local i've been i'm the new member to the port so it's only been about a year and i've been very actively involved i'm here to join the conversation in one of the places i'm hoping we're going if kbt all had managed to find what would we do with it and how much of that can we do even though kpl puzzle and that's figuring out those things we can act on gives us some direction and one of my favorite winter activities is dancing thanks for coming i'm barbara delfi i have lived in burlington for a long time i live with don who's next door to me there and i'm interested in where where we think we might be going i feel pretty confident about you know technology and my favorite winter activity is probably sledding mmm thanks for coming i'll go dad and i'll do you go no you go i'm laurenglenn davitian i work at cctv the center for media democracy we've been interested in digital inclusion for many years i would say since one thousand nine hundred and ninety when we started the old north end community technology center and my favorite winter activity is shoveling there's three thank you for coming my name is solvay and i live in old north end of burlington i've been there since one thousand nine hundred and ninety one and i'm here because i'm interested in and i have a lot of concerns about use of the internet and people not understanding some of the the risks of things that are going on commercialization and data profiling and manipulation and filtering and so i'm very interested in trying to educate people to understand some of those factors that that the cool factor about apps it sort of distracts people from really recognizing what's going on and so i'm now thinking about ways that may end inclusion part of it is part of it everybody understanding options for use of the internet safety but ways to deal with potentially having to try to anonymize things so that you can actually use the internet without having to be profiled and monitored and tracked and filtered which i've had serious concern about and helping people understand what programming is about and how you are being programmed if you do not understand the programming that is behind everything that's going on and my favorite activity i mean i like shoveling too which i just came from before i came here but i i like walking and snowshoeing and cross country skiing and ice skating thanks for coming my name's james lockridge i'm from king street a couple blocks over and i direct big heavy world which is a volunteer run nonprofit that supports local music and for years for close to twenty one years now we've used emergent technology to support our local music community so i've been a community builder there as a candidate for city council more than three in burlington i have a very keen personal interest in inclusion of all time and for winter activities i i enjoy walking around downtown when it's snowing and just seeing this and just living in a beautiful place but my favorite of all and this is a bit of an echo is shoveling what the road cloud gives me i like the triumph of that thank you thanks for coming hello i'm jessica bright i'm president of some of my work has been around trying to keep the civic cloud running and just generally promoting technology and the community i imagine i'm probably one of the few people with an actual networking degree in the room if not the only one maybe there's someone else so i do know a lot about the internet and technology if you bring that to the table and i endeavor to do as much work towards that towards really freedom of the internet and what i would say is internet works in my role as president of the lab i kind of feel that part of it is that everyone has a network and the inner network is a network of networks and really what you're buying when you're buying an isp is the ability to connect to other people's networks and if people don't understand that on a fundamental level i don't i don't think we explained it very well my day job is at cctv but i think that sometimes takes me away from my work like many people's jobs but i think the internet helps you get your work done winter sport or winter activity i'm probably gonna say video games like sims where you got a lot of blue skies and cups with like seasonal not seen blue skies but like it yeah nice thanks for coming i'm very mary danko i'm the director of the fletcher free library the library has a long tradition of digital inclusion and providing internet service to the community so we're always very interested in this conversation absolutely particularly i'm interested here in burlington we have this incredible internet service access to everyone but not everyone is getting it so i'm really interested in trying to find hard data on what are the barriers why people are not getting connected and what we can do to help them okay what do you like to do in winter mary oh in perfect conditions cross country skiing can't be sticky can't be too cold thanks for coming so i'm dodeci bomba i work for the printer for library i am one of the people around the tech center so we ideally like a busy day with people who want to access the internet and people who want some app with the computers so i think this is a good thing to know about more about whats people need if we can give or add some experience about what we are dealing with everyday by participating in this kind of meeting so for the winter activity i guess i'm new in the snow and i don't have like a particular winter activity that's okay you get lots of ideas stay warm i'm going to get i'm gonna let abby comeback i'm back just in time abby so this is henry he's three and super into digital inclusion i went pee in the potty and he went pee in the potty oh good job henry and i'm abby takaki and i almost simultaneously moved out of burlington to essex and started working for the city at burlington telecom which for better or for worse has given me the opportunity to meet all of you and get really passionate about fiber internet technology smart cities gigabit cities i'm also an executive fellow b2b of night and and steven hildo he may be regretting it today was the one who said look more into this digital divide thing and find out how it can be implemented here and it got me really worked up i'm passionate about the frustrating lack of data that we have in the city even though everyone knows there's a need so i had a really great experience during innovation week with julia and i'm excited to that she's excited that she's excited to continue the discussion and my favorite winter activity just in the past three years has become making snowmen sounds good and snowwomen snowpeople trying to be inclusive very good yes it's snow and impulsive great so did we get everyone i think we did awesome so there are a few goals for today i'll back up so you can see these and again this is a flexible can you hear me okay we're good this is a flexible event so we can steer in whatever direction we need to steer in but in general we want to tonight draw attention to the digital divide that impacts many diverse communities here in the burlington in burlington but also in burlington area we want to identify what we are all currently doing so that was a great start and what we could be doing to increase digital inclusion in the area and then also just to figure out ways to leverage the uniqueness of this area so our large new american population and the universities that we have here the services that are available like all of these really great resources really think about how to leverage those in the best way so very quickly the last event we did in case some of you weren't there was an event that focused on a broad view of internet health and that's a term that has been getting more and more attention lately mozilla foundation has been doing a lot of work around five issues related to internet health and one of those issues is digital inclusion another one of those issues is web literacy and some of these are these questions were were what we really focus that event on so you can see as you read them they're pretty broad facing but some of the outcomes of that were there seemed to be some trends happening so one of the trends after during the event and then as we looked at the notes afterward was the need for more data so like a lot more granular data on what we know about who's using the internet why they're using it why they're not using it and how you know that may paint a picture of gaps and places where we need to really focus on and then another one of those outcomes that we noticed was the need to share the resources that already exist more more on the forefront of of the communities that we work in and that we serve and are a part of because we do have a lot here already so that was another thing and i think another one was just that there's a lot of examples out there that we can draw from from other cities that are close to our size or have a similar i don't know geographical location and access that we do that we could really learn from so those are some bigger outcomes so today we decided to drill down you know onto the into the digital inclusion topic specifically and before we do that and look at some other stuff i just wanted to make some clarification about terms so there's two here one is digital divide and one is digital inclusion and those terms often are used simultaneously or in conjunction with each other but for the sake of this event i just wanted to clarify kind of how they're different so digital divide is a term that refers to inequalities in the access that people have to information technology so that's a very specific way of pointing to gaps that we know exist and then digital inclusion is more of a framework and that framework is used to assess and consider the readiness of communities to provide access to communities and then within that framework and again these are definitions there's many definitions out there many and a lot of them are great i picked these because i think they really kind of are quick and easy to understand for the context of this event so to think about digital inclusion as a framework here there's three areas we can think of access adoption and application so the access is just the simply the affordability and the availability of these tools and these resources that connect people digitally and then the adoption is that digital literacy piece so how people understand it how secure they are unsafe they are using it and then the application of it so how they're using it to better their lives and create opportunities and seek out opportunities in a community so that's kind of the framework we're talking about when we're talking about digital inclusion this is a great quote that was i pulled from a research project called digital inclusion survey it was from an association yes over here is the list feed better i'm worried about the mic though i'm okay okay i'm trying to speak loudly hold the mic yes she said hold the mic hold the mic i think i'm okay can you hear me alex yeah like to hold the mic that would be better oh okay let's try that then i think that's good okay are you going to be comfortable is it going to be in the way of your presentation i think it'll be okay i'll manage you've got plenty of slack all right so yeah so you can take a read i won't read it verbatim but basically this quote is referring to that that fact that access is one thing but then there's a larger issue of how people understand what they're accessing and then how they apply that mimi ito is a researcher and the founder of connected learning research network this is another great quote that i think does a nice job of demonstrating how the the way that we disperse these tools and the way that we're informing people about them and creating resources around them is a huge part to making them oh thank you to making them accessible can go ahead so now i just wanted to point to existing resources where we can find data related to what we that i know of and obviously you all have been doing this work for a while and probably have even more places to point to but you can go ahead and go and so oh and then so i i am like obsessed with quotes you'll see a lot of these in this presentation justin reich is another really great person to follow he's managing a research project out of mit in cambridge massachusetts this is the quote just related to that data piece like how important it is to have data in order to know exactly what to make to serve people and to really bridge that divide okay so we looked at this mary brought in some slides at the last event and i just wanted to refresh everyone's memory this is the broadband availability data set that is available i pull just the chittenden county stats here it's hard to see i know it's very small but basically it is an assessment of the total number of buildings and then the percentage of those buildings that have access to different levels of broadband this section is one hundred one hundred megabytes per second download and upload speed so one hundred over one hundred and then it goes down twenty five over three and then four over one so you can see like the different cities and towns in chitteden county and how it breaks down i mean if you look at it the the rate for burlington is nine hundred and nineteen with one hundred over one hundred so that's pretty good that's like but what does that mean like does that mean that these are the buildings now is every apartment in that building have access like how does it break down further so i think there's some pieces there that we could learn more about center for rural studies at uvm i don't know if anyone has worked there or knows more about this i was intrigued by this report but it's old it's from two thousand and ten and this report goes into a lot of detail about household internet connections through a survey and this is vermont wide so digging through this this particular one i pulled as an example is just going into detail about household income in comparison to access to or ownership of computers access to broadband and then some other combinations of the both so i think this is great if we could do this again or yes lauren the vermont department of public service he's updating the tenyear telecom plan which they do every three years and so they will have the most accurate data around the state awesome i mean along the lines of what mary's showed maybe even more detail that's great so you can talk to them if you want more data awesome thank you i'm gonna check with you later to make sure we get it written down so i remember yes is the percentage of a computer is that considered like more desktop or smartphones or combooks probably like anything that people wouldn't get access to that's a great question and i work with i imagine yeah no that's a great question i'm not sure and i don't know how a lot of the stuff i don't know how it breaks down like you know is it mobile is it are they laptops desktops so i don't think for sure in two thousand and ten there were any computer problems with desktops yeah that's not from my time yeah and so in league with mobile internet connections when did the iphone come out it went out yeah so ben is working on it but anyway a really great place does anybody know center for rural studies yeah okay so do you know if they're doing report more current reports in this type of way or they're calling themselves now the vermont data center okay and michael mosher is the primary contact there so he's the person to ask about if they're updating typically they do contract work so someone will hire them to update certain data sets so he's a good resource to talk to about the status of the data great perfect okay next slide and this little gem over here is the comprehensive economic development strategy the ceds and this is a report that characterizes the state of chittenden county's economy its strengths its weaknesses opportunities and threats and then identify strategies and actions to maintain and to grow it so this is a lengthy document but it goes into a lot of detail and then i just put this image here cause i think it's an interesting way to explain in really in a short way this circle of prosperity that they're talking about in this report which is kind of how things like the health of people and the quality of education really affects that the workforce switching then affects the increase of regional income and opportunity which then affects the healthiness of the environment and the vibrancy of where we live so i put that in there as just kind of i thought that was a neat way of doing it next slide and so within that framework of strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats there's more opportunities than what i pulled here but these are the ones that are significantly reflective of technology so they kind of go through like engaging highly skilled and trainable retirement age population because we have statistically we have a larger time of population supporting and growing new american populations we have that unique feature here in this part of vermont to promote telecommuting and remote workforce here so these are all opportunities that in this report which is relatively recent is pulled out as something we really need to take advantage of so that's a great list next slide another thing this report does is suggest fourteen initial target clusters and industries for attraction and development efforts and out of the fourteen almost half are technology related so we have infotech here digital media ecommerce clean tech and green tech we have nonprofit organizations i think that ties very closely and then we have higher ed and i would say business and administrative services also is very closely related to this topic so i thought that that was interesting that you know this report it's general it's looking at all industry but even in their suggestions of what we need to progress half of them almost are tech and digital related and so kind of buried in this report is something called the environment community opportunity and sustainability scorecard has anybody heard of this scorecard yeah yeah okay so what this scorecard is is basically takes these top line yes there's indicators but there's several indicators for each of the i guess you would call them objectives or overall kind of markers results results results yes so there's these results and then indicators that show how those results are met is that a good way of saying it so i kind of dug around dug around dug around there it's intriguing it's you know if you like data and you like to read through this stuff you should definitely go look through it all cause it reports on all kinds of stuff like outside of tech sustainability efforts clean water all kinds of stuff so in my effort to find the broadband and internet related stuff it was buried in this in this result here which is to ensure adequate infrastructure and facilities and then ie water supply wastewater stormwater broadband solid waste and recycling so it's buried in this it's buried in like this infrastructure kind of group and then in the indicators there's no indicator that points to broadband so i don't know how we could get that in there and in my opinion even more create a result that's only broadband and then have like a handful of indicators that speak directly to that but i love this as a tool next slide and you probably are all familiar with the vtd performance dashboard that's online this is through the city website and each of these are clickable links that bring you to this this dashboard that does an assessment of these different topic areas and we have a city open data portal which is where the any open data like where you can go search for broadband access for example would be located or any other types of open data that we would want to find so i think this is a great place i couldn't find much here yet but i think it's an opportunity it's new it's brand new great okay but i love that it's there next slide okay so that's kind of a landscape of all the things that i could find and i'm very eager and we'll have a chance to talk about more that weren't there cause we can get them all written down i wanted to show some examples of digital inclusion initiatives in and outside of vermont and of course here's another quote danah boyd is a researcher and author that is very well known on writing about this topic and especially around teens and how they're using the internet and she says in a world where information is easily available strong personal networks and access to helpful people often matter more than access to information itself and i think that's very powerful and i agree completely okay so i'm not going to go through all of these projects and i'm going to make this slide deck available after so you can if you'd like but i do want to show one two or three of these that i think are very very influential for us in this context and i think we'll go like from small to big so there's a project and abby introduced me to this i'm going to let her speak about it but it's called e2d it's located in davidson north carolina do you want to talk about that yeah i'll just like sorry thank you a quick overview davis north carolina for anyone who isn't familiar with e2d is literally started with a daughter who came home and said to her dad all of our homework assignments are on the internet but i know that i have a friend who's homeless and she doesn't have a computer she doesn't have a home she doesn't have internet that's not fair and he said you're right and that has now grown into a digital inclusion effort that encompass it started in tiny little davison they raise money with lemonade stands every year lowe's is headquartered near there so they ponied up some support and it's just a really great example of a very small town that made a very big effort and turned it into something even bigger it's growing every year and now they're help they're taking care of all the middle schools in charlotte so like they went from tiny to huge city so i think that's a really cool example of small and then growing to be something really big through something just a simple question or a young girl who pointed out something that's just not fair and it resulted in that so i thought that was really cool example yeah yeah that's great grassroots kind of projects to show can you click on open austin there so i have a tree set up let me just close that close the tree i think it might be off of is this one yeah there we go so open austin is a volunteer organization that's been running for several years now and is focused mostly on open data or started to as a focus on an open data so their mission in the beginning was to get the the austin government to share their data openly online and they've been very successful and so since they've they've kind of reached these goals and as they reach these goals of certain data sets to become available they've kind of expanded at the same time so at the top here we have there's events projects advocacy and then just various ways of support and each of these have like the projects you kind of click on these yeah so these are all open projects that live on github which is a place for sharing content and open source code and these are all you can see like there's a fake news project there's community data project these are all community driven projects so they've identified needs in their community in different regions in austin and built these projects and open austin features them and host events around these projects so there's just there's a lot of ways that they're making they're making it possible for citizens and residents in these different areas to participate in the digital inclusion progress in these areas so i think that's brilliant and then the other thing they do if you scroll all the way back up go to advocacy so they they've created agendas that they've put here on the website and they've can you click on candidate questionnaires so they've actually prepared questionnaires anytime somebody runs for office that they send out to each candidate and they say fill this out and this speaks directly to the digital inclusion and particular needs that that they've identified and they say what do you think about this what would you do about this what would you do and so you can actually go through these and you can read each of the candidates responses and get a very clear understanding of how they feel about digital inclusion and if there's a plan or like you know if there's not a plan all of that good stuff so and this is this is the tip of the iceberg with this project so it's like a little bit bigger than the grassroots north carolina project but it started there and so now they have all these other elements that are embedded in it can you go back is there actually a platform for all of this is it all hosted there well it's all hosted there the site i don't know if the site is hoping it looks like it might be hosted there but i'm not sure but all of those projects are hosted on github and then if like resources their primary goal is openness so all of the resources that they use to run their organization is also on github yeah so you can access all of that stuff can you go back to the slide deck we're going to open up oh it's okay just go down and go back to yep that slide twenty four and click on the top link sorry that one it's gonna give you that thing there you go thank you so this is kind of the next level and this is the austin city government page that is dedicated entirely to digital inclusion so if you scroll down on this page each council district has a report and each of these reports is a highly detailed version of what digital inclusion looks like in that region or in that district so i mean click on one just as an example so this goes into great detail about the events that are happening in that region what progress has been made for digital inclusion in that region the data in that region so it goes and austin's a lot bigger than we are so i mean that says and that could go two different ways like it's a lot bigger so they have more resources or we're a lot smaller so we could do this too right so maybe we could like there's somewhere in the middle but i just love how much details included in each of these reports and on that main website page there is a map that people can see any upcoming event related to digital inclusion and internet related and digital topics yeah this one okay let's go back to the slides i have a question yeah are all the people in general just putting information on this or there's a specific group of people that put information that's available to everyone that's a good question for the events it's probably i have to look more closely but it looks like people are just submitting events so when they run an event they post it and then that gets shared on that kind of big map that we saw but the reports themselves happened through the city so they have i'm guessing either they work with organizations to do that research or they have people that work internally but those reports come from the city they probably have ten passwords to get on there yeah lots of passwords those are important so those are examples a lot of these others are wonderful i added some burlington ones and there's a lot more than this but these were all really inspiring to common good vermont code for btv burlington telecoms edge unit and lifeline so there's lots of stuff happening locally here that we can use as an example and leverage but yeah just kind of a snapshot thank you okay so what do we want to do the big question of the evening what time is it right now does anybody know six hundred and forty six hundred and forty six hundred and forty okay great perfect we have plenty of time again this is i don't know what had just happened is that an old quote did i do this one can you go back a slide okay great so we're good we're in the right place so this was we're going to break up net right now and have a break but also but also think about and brainstorm some questions particularly and if you go to the next slide abby so i don't know what we want to do i don't have the answer none of us have that exact like thing that's gonna make everything better right but we have each other and we have all of this experience so these are some things that we can tonight start to brainstorm around so one is do more research and we have i've put these posters up around the room so i don't know where this one is but it's either how can we improve how can i help yeah so there's a poster back there that says who can help us get the data we need to identify barriers to digital inclusion so like you know lauren had some great suggestions so anything related to people organizations initiatives research hubs like who can we reach out to to help us try to get more specific with this data identify existing resources what would a one stop shop look like for digital inclusion in vermont like could we model it after open austin or would we want to put it on that city portal that i showed as an example like where would it live what would it look like and then build alliance so you know having strong advocacy and support and buyin from the mayor's office and other institutions that are very prominent here is really important and just recognizing that no single organization can solve the digital divide right it's a combination of many so you know what would those guiding principles be for digital inclusion and how would we be able to craft them with all of the expertise in the room and then just reaching a targeted population you know we have all of these great diverse communities here seniors the unemployment population low income households new americans public housing residents veterans so there's like all of these very specific groups that if we had more data we might know how to serve them better and bridge that gap so these are some top line things to kind of think about and what we're going to do next is next slide we're going to focus on these three questions and i pointed out one already which is who can help us get this data how do we start this who can we talk to and there's markers and i have some postit notes so we're going to add ideas related to that question in the back the second question is how can we improve future meetings like this and what could we include to make them more beneficial so like i said in the beginning i'm hoping this is the first of many conversations so what would we want in the next one how could we really start to be effective with this group and on this topic and the last question here is what is our bhag for this movement and what is the change we want to see does anybody know what bhag stands for i have a hand in the back big hairy audacious goal exactly so in other words what is that big crazy goal that we want for this movement this digital inclusion movement so all answers are welcome this is a brainstorming opportunity and then in addition to that question is just what is the change we want to see so we may not have these answers tonight it's likely we don't because we don't have a lot of information yet but we could have fun brainstorming a little there the last poster i have is the parking lot poster and this is a very important poster because this parking lot poster which is in the back as well is a place for you to add things that aren't on these posters yet so questions that we still have that i didn't address topics or concerns that you didn't we didn't address tonight that would affect digital inclusion suggestions anything that you think is relative to this conversation but can't put it on a poster throw it in the parking lot and we'll use it for the next conversation i think that's the last slide is that the last one yeah aren't you going to end with an awesome quote oh you're right oh i failed it's all over we can all go home okay so i'm gonna end there before we jump on these posters here and take questions if you have them i would like everyone to go on a break you know i've been talking for a while but yeah what do you guys any questions what is the big hairy goal here yeah good question i'm curious good question and i don't have the answer if you stop moving the floor becomes lava or the room becomes dark or something yeah we all have to constantly shift and move the motion detector is all the way over there which makes no sense i'm curious i mean does anybody have a thought on that what that goal would be i think mine would be like every single person in burlington has sorry every single person in burlington and then chittenden county and then vermont and then the country and then the world has affordable or you know whatever free super affordable access to the fastest internet available and all of the tools and resources necessary to use it i think we should rephrase that i think everyone should be able to make their network their personal network access any other network on the planet yes i love it because they want to internetwork it with the other networks on the planet and they need to own and have their own network first to internetwork with another network and whether their network is simply their phone and that's why i'm asking those questions whether it's a phone or a chromebook or a more comprehensive computer and you may have a router or network you know what is it where is that barrier and if you know someone only has a phone but they say that they're connected are they do they have their own network that can connect to other networks is that the barrier i think those are good questions to ask i love that that's an example then of how that is two different things you know it's different for every one of us and the people who have no interest i'm struggling with the big goal too but for me it's something different than digital my voice carries it's something different than just giving people access because in two thousand and seventeen more people have access than they used to but i often say that as we talk about a digital economy the pace of change is accelerating in our society it wrapped around digital technology digital technology is empowering us but also changing our world and i summarize that when i'm talking about what i'm trying to do is to make sure that this disruption is happening for us as a community and not happening to us now that means lots of all kinds of very wooly things but it's the fact that our employers are able to use to be cursed with people using the technology in the way that they they get access to the right employees and that recent graduates are speaking the same digital language as our employers for example or that something that works for you today doesn't change on you the internet somebody said the internet is always changing so how do we make sure that we're riding that wave and we're proactive and it's a very very broad thing and i think it needs to be nailed down but there's something around that that for me is a big challenge yeah yes one of the things that i really like is the you showed from the austin communitybased was hosted on github and if that's really done on github and it's all open source i think that's a crucial piece of the model i think it's very important that whatever happens here it's important that much if not all of it is done in open source tools with available code and that any research is reproducible research so that you're publishing here's the code we used to process the data here's the link to the data here's the report that came out of it so somebody else can dissect it and it is fully transparent yeah if we build that into the culture of what we're doing and then we also bridge to the maker community who was working with you know raspberry pis and arduinos and experimenting and making everything from art to robots with this technology using open source tools in transparent ways we make this more accessible to everybody i think that's a real that accessibility takes the mystery out of it and makes it available to all of us you're right hold on one minute alex again yeah absolutely okay we'll do a couple more i saw three hands go up and then i do want to capture these suggestions so they don't get lost in the air so let's do the rest that at hands i saw whoa whoa hold on i just got oh so sorry about that oh are you writing oh thank you okay yes in the front well i find that my difficulty is that people even though they know a lot about the internet don't know how to teach it and they'll they'll go off into the jargon of the internet and lose me within seconds yeah and and you're always trying to you know get what they're saying but they're going so fast and aren't really good teachers mhm so i think that's a skill that's very different than the average teacher i agree completely we're getting all these notes down yes i was gonna piggyback on what barbara said in saying that we need classes that have extremely easy ways to understand things and i think we should use macbook computers because they're a lot easier maybe there's some place part of city hall where they have classes on a weekly basis where people can come in and people can teach them on a oneonone help them find exactly the things that they need mhm and i would look to think there was a book written by one of the photoshop gurus on how to use your iphone when it first came out and i compared that with one for those other computers not in saves it was so easy you could understand it that maybe we can look to someone like that to write a comprehensive use of the internet both that goes nationwide or international so you can start off having similar or the same language if i could just quickly add yeah jessamyn west who's a librarian in vermont has written that book actually and she does work on digital inclusion i think she'd be a great person to bring up here and she has given very simple ways to discuss how to use computers how to use the internet working in all different kinds of demographics she's also she serves on the board of wikimedia with me as well so she's very and she's based in vermont yeah wow we need to get her to come next time if only we had a librarian in the room that knew jessamyn i'm friends with jessamyn i think that i mean i think sometimes if we do we keep hearing you know this is something that the library can do we do we have classes you can book a librarian and they will sit side by side with you and do those things sometimes our resources are really stretched right now and i think a lot of what we're hearing now is we're getting the late late late late adopters and they are definitely the hardest folks to bring along and it's a challenge yeah but i'm hearing a lot of similar kind of feelings and thoughts here what literacy digital literacy in the back you want visual litters so people can understand visually not verbally right donald it has to be something entirely different and i may end up making a total fool of myself even though i've worked in technology for quite a while i don't think of my digital iq as being particularly high but barbara and i live in a community of thirty two families and they're all ages lots of different abilities lots of different incomes we're basically a privileged community anyways there may be some benefits but it's a community we could study yeah it's a community where i mean it's already happening like canopy the two hundred dose well i've been going through different families and showing them how they can get access to that and so but that's just a minor example i mean we have people on a totally different level we could do a survey very easily i just wouldn't know how to go it would be nice to make a study out of this thing start with the survey so we could identify where we're starting at try to define the goal of where we want to be and then sort of measure that you know it would be a nice project that we could use as a model for doing this with other communities now there's being a cohousing community collaboration is a really key piece and we're learning how to do that and one of the things we're learning is about how the internet is a source of abuse it's a source of you need to be careful i mean we have more we practically have more rules within our community about what you say in an email to everybody and what you don't and what you know so there's that piece so there's a social piece as well as the the digital skills and resources and i don't have i mean i have a little piece of an idea how we could do this but boy if we would do this i would need a lot of help just even coming up with the original survey and i would love for that to happen and how do we deploy it so that the people who need it are taking the survey it would have to be super grassroots i think which is kind of exciting like it can't be something we put out on the internet that's a perfect example like having people invested and involved that could say like take the survey so that we know how what who we need to serve and how we can serve you better right well we can we just we just did a survey and got a forty one response sixty five was a whole different thing yeah but it's a community where you could do that and but i wouldn't even know exactly how to what questions to ask to begin with right and that's what we would want to build that's something we could think about here when they put this through yes yeah i think the notion of reaching folks where they're at and trying to really assess what are their barriers to accessing the digital economy and i serve on a few boards and a couple of cases residents one of them is affordable housing it's northgate apartments actually and one of the few of the board members don't use email and don't use the internet and it really puts them at a significant disadvantage and i can already tell that there's like a divide in our group and it's unfortunate because the board is almost all residents i happen to be a community member who serves on that board but it's ten residents in four community reps and it's the largest affordable housing complex in vermont it's resident owned resident control it's a truly unique community but right there in that group we've got folks who are being left out and left behind so i think engaging people where they're at to find out what would make you more able and capable to access technology do you want to first of all of course and if you do and you see the benefits what supports do we need to give you to be able to access that and if you don't why not yeah yeah so kind of related to that i was on a board that's kind of i'm one of the youngest people on it it's mostly kind of two generations above me and so we had there's a lot of tension for awhile over use of technology because there's and i think this is something that i'm involved in the neighborhood planning assembly in the new north end and this is something i think there are two where we see kind of open meeting law hasn't caught up with what's possible for engaging online governance and so we eventually got to the point where i sat down with all the people on the board who wanted to and it was like this is why we don't send attachment emails this is why we use google docs instead and this is how we use this kind of online voting system so we don't have to make all of our decisions in inperson meetings and after when it was kind of when we got drilled down and got clear on what are the benefits of these things adoption was very quick yeah but it was sort of there was kind of like a block of without sort of comprehending what those benefits were you know why learn the new system if the old system is somewhat workable because those gains in efficiency and sort of what's possible aren't visible and so the thing that i've been kind of really thinking about in terms of setting goals is you know the idea of having inperson once a month neighborhood meetings is great but it also there's inherently just a limited number of people who can show up and be involved in things that are you know key for engagement with city counselors and you know development planning in each neighborhood and if we can kind of set for me what the big hairy audacious goal would be is getting the citizenry of burlington to the point where we could have complimentary online platforms that people would feel comfortable with but that could engage a vast greater number of people that are currently engaged by these inperson meetings yeah that's great i think we got those i think we got the notes down lauren's writing vigorously over there yeah i saw a hand over here i just want to point out from just hearing the room i just hear three basic categories which is just general access to internet working education about anything and everything surrounding technology and then particularly applications which are much more thermal and are gonna move you know the thing that might be applicable today might be something better tomorrow like you know ten fifteen years ago email was so like awesome and past me right but yeah we have a better way of doing it yeah for a lot of things also the irony here the fact that you're i don't know the right word of like clearly we're all in this room because of the internet like that's how you found out about this meeting but we didn't do anything to reach out to the people who are trying to help so how do we bridge that and make this whole thing more inclusive let alone a solving agent yeah yeah this is perhaps an oblique comment but i think maybe necessary is to think about consent with who gets the internet and whether they want it in the first place we've heard like pitterings of that in other comments but i just want to drill down and say that as we think of the internet as a saluatory force it's you know it has all of these benefits good for job applications increasingly necessary and throughout your life it's also can be used as a tool for surveillance and for privacy violations and with many of the targeted groups they are also targeted groups right so when we think about the ways that we're going to bring out surveys to vulnerable communities and then how to engage them in ways that first has their consent that they want to be using the internet and then also that whatever apps or resources that are provided to them have very transparent ways of saying this is how your data is being collected how it's being used and that if you want to request your data you can other people were talking about open source and get help that's one effort for transparency so i guess i would i would be concerned in the process that both the method and an outcome there's privacy built in yeah and i think that that also ties into the notion of being a contributor to what contents being created so like at a very basic level like if we're going to make surveys or ask for information like maybe the people who we're surveying should have a role in that process or you know whatever the case so but that's a really good thing to remind us of yes that was sort of related to what i was going to say is that i have serious concerns about people using the free apps and thinking it's so cool and there's so much going on that they don't know and we don't really have a good way of right now there's no rules about that so i have concerns about all the google apps that everybody uses and so even facebook and twitter and all of these things i choose not to have a facebook account not because i'm technologically deliberate and could not do it i'm very concerned about this and so one of the scary things is that this inclusion process and access process is layering on top of free apps that are to make it convenient and efficient for us to network and get to know each other and share information and documents but in fact it's just totally being data mined profiled and so it really it bothers me every time somebody says oh let's just you know i mean i hate to say it the google docs thing you know and others we don't have platforms that are actually the equivalent that we know what's going on and that we have the ability to say no and so i'm really supportive of what you're saying because to me it's really a tricky thing right now because the way everybody's connecting with is free apps and you don't have any control over what's going on and the people that do ancestry dna i mean what are you thinking things like that just crazy well let's do you next and then we'll go over there okay i have a candidate pa you what oh okay wait what for the bhag big hairy audacious goal bhag open source user completely own the control data version of facebook isn't that social no they're vc funded let's do it social a coop all right all right ello which is the burlington is kind of a step towards that but i don't use facebook for some of the same reasons that i won't put anything out there of mine that i can't take back and i mean yeah there there's so many parts to that and there's so many ways it's still i think knowing what those vulnerabilities are are a part of digital inclusion so choosing not to use it as very much part of the conversation but knowing why you're choosing and like what you can say i don't want to use this because it does if i have to sign this agreement that makes you give that so like that literacy is a big part of this conversation in effect a movement to build a we own it we manage it we use these principles to guide what's out there this is a very different approach check out platform cooperative yes on my behalf would be to live in a community where there are no barriers to enter to connection right so we need that data right to find out what those and i would just echo what you said about there's definitely a literacy component about under working working with what you have and making it as safe and secure and you can even be offense in the way you act online that can thwart some of those things but people have to know and you have to teach them and having a healthy digital community does that yeah yes i agree i'm choosing to be excluded because of the lack of ability to control so exactly and you are fortunate because you have all of that knowledge to say like this is dangerous but i'm also excluded from participating my sisters and my friends know more about my sister's activities than i do i don't participate in linkedin so professionally i have challenges any of those things it's really a digital exclusion of a different form absolutely well that brought me to the point that i was making and i'm really trying to take a step back and say what are we talking about it as a group here and what i tend to get into with folks that don't understand technology is we're talking about this application or that application or this application all is built off of two things which is really the networks you're talking about the computer systems that use those networks and are part of that network and the literacy around that the education around that and that's what she's really getting at and part of that might even be you can't necessarily even escape the surveillance around you how many people have a cell phone in your pocket right now that's picking up your voice picking up everything we're doing every moment we're here you can't actually escape it how many people are running a messenger app on their phone right now it's picking up everything we're doing i bet there's at least one in the room point being is education lets you understand what the applications can do and what the capability of these systems might be it might be better to flood with disinformation and to think that you can actually avoid it completely but that's an education thing it's not about whether you're using that application or not does that make sense the default should be privacy not open and give it all away that's my concern because you can't introduce we just don't live in that world i guess the education i'm trying to get is that it's an education aspect and a network aspect and we'd get lost in these conversations weighing applications talking about this application or that application and i think it would be very difficult to start saying unless we come up with like something is there some kind of application that we think is really going to help our community access the internet and education around the internet that's why i'm having a hard time synthesizing from our conversation yeah and so another thing is just like we should have something to match an online service in an offline way so like this education that we're speaking of you know obviously putting stuff online is very beneficial for people who know how to get to it and feel comfortable getting at it but we should also have things available for people that don't feel comfortable in those spaces but can access the same information and learn the same thing in perhaps an inperson session or with printouts i mean it's like providing options i think at least at the stage we're at and the communities we would maybe wanting to reach is important yes i'm looking at hearing everyone and just my own having been with the internet for years i still get lost on i still get mixed up i still hit the wrong thing i still have pages fly up or blow up or won't open and i'm looking at things that are paths with that little phone that's supposed to be a simpleton phone and it has i think six or seven words on and his phone and his messages it has photos and you just push i presume you just push it and i'm looking at perhaps we need to really write a software maybe it's specifically a software for a town that wants to have a private or just in town space that we use or regardless one that's super simple for us to use so when someone opens up the computer screen all they do is press go or they express stop or they press enter you know they press maybe one of four words to get where they need to go and it just keeps simplifying the process and instead of complicating it as i feel it does as i try to dig beyond the very basic thing even still trying to go to google and sometimes it doesn't you know it doesn't happen so it can can some of us start writing or is there some software out there that's called easy for the seniors one word only at a time you know and you know that could be cool people here could write it and then it could be sold to other people and maybe we could make a little i would love it these are all really great suggestions obviously it's going to take us a little while to figure out what we want to do and to figure out what that big hairy audacious goal could be for this group and i think it will be in steps so for the next like if we think about this as a movement let's say a local movement to really kind of grow digital inclusion in the area what would be our immediate next steps we want to turn this into a regular gathering how frequent would it be would we want to create a place online for us to connect using an app like signal that's encrypted and one of the safest that exists as far as privacy is concerned right now where we could connect with each other and share content would we want to i mean what do you think like how could we move forward in a small way and to meet the capacities we all have and the interests that we all have what do you think what would be good like synthesizing a lot of these comments is the first thing i think you know i will collect it all lauren i think there's a lot of work that's been going on for a long time on this issue yeah and i'm not sure starting a movement is particularly the next move i mean in my opinion i think there is here's the centeralized here's the future a decentralized effort i think that we need to identify who's doing this work and needs and we can leverage their efforts great because there is already work identity that's going on to get resources skills training whatever through the library and maybe other places and the library's probably got resource constraints and they've got issues that they can just help them so i would say leverage what we're already doing instead of creating new work and then see what the data actually does show about where the gaps are that for example the library or other entities are may not know and that might point towards another area or a particular group of people as you said yep but i think that we want to apply our effort to what's working and help it work better i agree and then from that new things come but there isn't anything new that anyone's said i think what we're missing as a community is a digital security plan and that might not be the way to put it but that we actually have a plan about how we what our goals are and which i think is what you're trying to get at what are our goals as a community now we want open networks we want access for all we want whatever the people said and then we want privacy protection and then each one of those has deliverables underneath them you know that in the legislature you're looking at privacy and for data not only for broadband providers but data aggregators right so there's stuff going on now there's stuff there's a telecom plan going on nobody ever shows up to talk about it and they ask for input so exactly yeah so i'm just this is a long way of saying i just think there's a lot happening and building on that inventory of what's happening and seeing what resources are needed and then the collective effort of this group and intelligence can help put pressure yeah in a movement like way on those areas where we need to leverage more resources or more protection yeah i saw lots of hands kind of sprinkled just a quick story about something that happened here when the city was pursuing a cable company and the cable company said to the city it's been bernie was mayor we're going to stop you and bernie said yeah right you're gonna stop us we're going to do it anyway they said okay what do you need and bernie said i need you to ensure that senior citizens living in public housing and other lowincome seniors will have a fixed cable rate forever and it didn't last forever but it lasts as long as that company was around they owed us a million dollars and a million dollars as well to please the city so it was a ten flat fee for all seniors from there on that lasted for well over a decade probably fifteen years maybe maybe closer to twenty and it was before bt arrived obviously so i'm just saying something like that that ensures access for folks who really need access would make a huge difference and i think we just have to be practically and like that educational thing right exactly right and the device too right yep exactly yeah yep yes i'm looking at this and seeing all these different areas and let's see if we can pick one maybe it's a library where we can let everyone know that if you have questions at all about the internet you could go to the library as a starting point because they're always there so we don't have to worry about someone not being there and people can go to the library free it's wheelchair accessible it has bathrooms it has nice places to sit and that at least the conversation could be started there perhaps we can help initiate or fundraise whatever you might need to start collecting information that people are bringing in access and helping you get access that they need to use so that they can work on the internet and let you be the focal point with from which we all can bring in information and as you have questions you can come back to us maybe we can form an email for them to come back to us but we need to centralize all this into one space and it seems like we really need education and we need access and we want some privacy and we need to simplify the whole system i think it's really interesting that both our innovation week event and this one we landed at we have so many resources how do we let everyone know about them and then how do we utilize them and leverage them in the ways that we need and i'm building a new collection or growing your collection at the library might be exactly it and then how do we get the word out that that is the hub for burlington digital inclusion and just talking about resources we know that pt offers a very reduced rate to folks in the community ten a month but we have people that aren't taking advantage of it so we still feel like what are the barriers why is it they don't have the device is it that they're nervous about security is it an i think we really need to drill into let's say that usually when people are struggling that hard going to check all their t's and get everything figured out is probably very difficult for them we have to get to them cause they can't they can't well we've got senior citizen places but i'm sayin let's get the library as the hub from which everything works mhm yes and do a fundraiser for it i think what's most interesting to me in this whole conversation it's certainly it's things we've thought about before you know sitting here talking to that is the idea of regionalization right so coming from winooski you know we talk about things that are happening in burlington and i think quite often our community is compared i think other communities now we can talk about essence and stuff like that kind of unfairly it's different sizes obviously there's different tax spaces i think regionalization is huge so you know we talk about you know some of these things with burlington telecom i know one of our projects that our planning commission is looking at right now i don't know if you guys saw this but there's the main street revitalization project so within that there is sort of this research around including you know along with some of the stuff that you were showing about wastewater and all of that stuff it is very much included to sort of think about high speed internet and fiber and stuff the city lights building i love the city lights building so they have you know the burlington telecom correct me if i'm wrong the supply gigabit big building in vermont yeah exactly so many of our community members always ask how come we don't have access to burlington telecom by the way you're ten offices at burlington telecom as well right right right so yeah a lot of our community members say why are we boxed into comcast why don't we have access to this burlington telecom and in that conversation one of the most fascinating things i saw one at the loi's was sort of this idea that it could be regionalized or it could be offered at least to other communities to get into them i think to answer a lot of these questions that we're talking about whether security or access or anything regionalization is huge so they talk about regionalizing you know the emergency response system and the nine hundred and eleven stuff there's conversations about regionalizing the airport it's sort of i think we often get lost within our own boundary lines right i think that's it's huge in the work that we're trying to do i think it's going to be huge in the work that everybody's doing so let me just clear up quick feedback saying that the whole reason that bt got eight letters of intent was because of the regionalization aspect and the whole focus going forward is expanding more broadly throughout chittenden county and that'll start happening sooner rather than later and the whole focus beyond that should be how do we actually broaden even further so that broadband can become a reality in some of the more remote communities you know for monitor's full of meaningfully underutilized fiber networks that press across the state that run past most towns and cities or through most towns and cities in the state and they're just sitting there unused say couldn't agree more with and i wonder too if you know to sort of share the burden right if an organization like the chitteden county regional planning commission ccrpc you know they've been super gracious with us and number of huge amount of projects and it's great they've got a great team they're a huge resource for us you know i think regionalizations is going to be key yeah that's a great point yeah is there a mailing list or a website or something where i could access or others could access the things that we've been talking about is there one to tap into is there anyone here that didn't actually register for the events online and then yeah so if you did i know how to get to them you don't anybody who didn't register online if you want to just give us your contact information before you go and then we'll yeah we can use you know this group as a way to start a community but also if there's one that already exists we could connect there as well so i don't know it's kind of a question and an offer at the same time like we could abby and i can work to you know connect all of us through the library so maybe do the library i don't know we can figure that out but also if that already exists somewhere like there's a community that is good to leverage to continue this conversation we can also do that i don't know if anyone has thoughts on the best thing to do is that is it almost seven hundred and thirty right now yeah okay i say listen to a lot of different ideas that one thing that i've learned building products for awhile is that it's easy to get ahead of yourself and start thinking about the features and the aspects that you're going to be delivering but the real key is who's life you're making better through the product and so if we're looking at digital inclusion then the first people who we should be talking to are people who are digitally excluded and it's tough to you can get really ahead of yourself thinking about what you think their problems are but until you actually meet them and talk to them and understand it could be a different concept so the things that we might think in this room might not be good ideal solutions if they don't agree for a solution for a problem that doesn't actually exist so that data that like information is the key so i'm like i'm kind of a metric skeptical so i really like talking to people so i would try to find the people that whose lives would be better because lots of stuff can get lost as a and so i think that could be an interesting next step is if we had an inclusive burlington would never leave what would be different and who are the people that we think would have a delta of change here and go to them and say how you feel about this idea of the library or this other idea or what's your idea any mayoral or city county council candidates that as they're knocking on doors would be willing to start those conversations for us sure sure i plan on doing that yeah i'm running a war three and i plan on and there was someone else who was here we have in burlington bike recycle where if your income below a certain threshold they'll set you up with a bicycle and a lock for twenty five and they have a program where they train people to work on bikes and it's a great program between resource and the schools we can do a program where kids are learning how to repair computers are showing up at somebody's house and for twenty here's a used laptop or a used computer in resources selling used machines with windows on them for seventy five that's actually included in our program right so are we trying to work with resource and for a number of years now what the challenge we found is really them being able to have enough scale and capability to to do anything in a meaningful way we've even bought machines refurbished machines from resource and then further subsidize them to deliver it an even cheaper price to lowincome families but it's never proved to be sustainable because of just the lack of hardware yeah and their inability to really get to the populations that need it the most so that they know that this resource exists so a little program that struggles we can learn from and build on yeah yeah we're kind of at the end one more yeah i just want him to say is that i did a lot of photos and cuts and that some of the people there who were part of class and it's a group of maybe thirty forty people perhaps we could start right there and they're homeless some of them most of them and that's why we start small and see what we can do with them i know the heads of it i think so i'm kind of leaning towards now after hearing all of this is that maybe we should plan the next conversation but invite individuals from communities or places that are within have those barriers yes maybe as a next step at least to start to cause i don't yeah i don't think we know really enough right now about what we need to make or how we need to do this so maybe that's something we could work on and then what we'll do is send you just a follow up and maybe a survey just to get feedback on this event and in that survey could be like what communities do you know of that we could reach out to to invite to the next conversation so we can start to think about what to build to know what we need to do does that sound like a good plan at least for i still think we gotta have a target the library right away just to start collecting data from people who come in i think you're yeah yeah we'll talk that sounds great so so yeah thank you everyone for joining this was a really amazing conversation i'm thrilled with everyone's experience and contribution tonight and i can't wait to read through those notes that lauren's taking there was so much good stuff that was said yeah thank you for a good one thank you thank you