Goals Update + Types and Visibility of Board Work

[ira_gladkova]

tucking a "tl;dr" version up here, see below for ALL THE ELABORATION

I'm self-aware enough to know I need this, all right >.>

• I am really not caught up yet!


• There are three types of Board work shared by all, in addition to various tasks undertaken by or assigned to specific Board members.
  
  • Meetings tend to focus on items that are shorter/smaller and/or have already been hashed out by email, as well as occasional bigger items that benefit from face-to-face discussion. Overall, meetings focus on the "what" of our work. They also make our work more visible and give us a chance to feel part of a team.
  
  
  • Email discussions are less visible but focus on the "why" and the "how" of our work. They trend towards a lot of the meatier topics, particularly technical issues (code, money, legal), and also serve to prepare us for meetings. Also used for quick-turnaround items that can't wait for a meeting and longer FYIs; we have a label system to distinguish it all. Email also lets people who can't make meeting catch up and participate.
  
  
  • Liaising with committees and workgroups (orgbits) is a huge part of our work. It makes particular Board members more visible and accessible to their assigned orgbits but also means those Board members have less time to make themselves visible to orgbits outside their range.


• My participation tends to lean heavier towards email than meetings, and medium on liaising.


• We made fair baby steps progress on principles, but a lot of it is modular change that isn't immediately apparent org-wide, but gradually works towards the more far-reaching and cultural change
  
  • Diversity: Three visible and important steps are the OTW Community Survey, the Fan Video Diversity Showcase, and the Category Change Workgroup; a more diverse set of Board members has helped maintain focus on this issue overall. Still need general cultural change.
  
  
  • Transparency: Public minutes, more visible open sessions, hard work from Comms, reports from workgroups, and general move towards documentation are helping. Still a long way to go, but it's important to note that we're currently in the hardest and most vulnerable place: partially exposed, but not enough for people to grasp the full picture — a scenario ripe for misunderstandings and frustration.
  
  
  • Sustainability: Good cultural momentum towards documentation, with specific manifestations in documenting committee procedure and projects (Tag Wrangling committee is a great example) workgroups and other such initiatives. Also increased awareness of succession issues. Three concrete items are the Strategic Planning Workgroup (now with Roadmap!), the OTW Community survey and the new format for org-wide meetings, which will, in different ways, help make a more sustainable org. However, still a huge overall problem with internal communication and overall org culture: too much burnout. Way too much.


• Not ready to give update on general goals!


• Updates on eight specific goals/action items!

I am far from caught up yet! But I figured I could do an update on 2012 goals even without that, and then, if necessary, do another update once I'm caught up. But first!

Types and Visibility of Board Work

There's been a lot of talk in the wake of jennyst's post about the frustration of Board member absenteeism. It was a good post and a good thing to be open about, so please do read it. I also want to draw attention to a clarification she made later:

Obviously, it's a problem if someone can hardly ever attend, misses a lot of meetings in a row, etc. But if someone misses one meeting, reads the transcript shortly afterwards, participates in discussion via email and votes via email a few days afterwards, it's not a big deal. So long as people are still doing the work, still contactable, still have time for discussion, it can work. The problems come when someone is too busy to do the work. Attendance figures are a symptom, not the root cause and not the whole story. Statutory holidays and illness can easily mean missing 20% of meetings or more. So yes, I was frustrated by the difficulties in getting quora for votes and particular discussions, and I still am. But that's more about responses to emails and participation in discussions than just numbers of meetings.

This is true! And I wanted to kind of break that down a bit further and talk about the ways Board members participate and do their work. I definitely do not want to minimize jennyst's frustration or concerns, because those are on-point and valid (and I am assuredly included there). However, from what I've seen it looks like it's not very clear what Board does (okay, that's old news), and where, and how. I think breaking that down a little bit may help everyone understand both where jennyst is coming from — though she generally does an excellent job communicating that herself, but I'm hoping a multiplicity of viewpoints can help — and how the Board functions overall.

(Quick disclaimer: This is my interpretation of our roles and work. I'm only an authority in this insofar as I happen to be one of the seven people doing this. Other Board members may have different ways in which they think about our work!)

There are three major things we all currently do as Board members: we hold meetings to talk to each other and make decisions, we hold discussions and make decisions over email, and we liaise with committees/committee chairs and workgroups/leads. Various Board members also perform other tasks specific to their skills and duties: some of these are the positions mandated in our bylaws (chair, secretary, treasurer), and some are less well defined but involve networking, seeking out opportunities to connect with other causes, etc. We also give each other assignments as a product of email or meeting decisions, such as putting together writeboards or emails about something we want to discuss or propose, or contacting person A about topic X, or hosting org-wide meetings. However, the core of our work involves coming together with each other and with people inside the org to make plans and decisions about the overall direction of the org.

So here's how it shakes out:

Meetings! also known as Definitely Not Fight Club We Swear

The most obvious and visible mode of participation is attending meetings (especially since meetings were made public and open sessions were moved to a more visible location; see below in accomplished goals!). However, in a lot of ways, it's also the least of our work in terms of overall volume.

The official Board meeting generally takes about 2 hours per week and is dedicated to specific kinds of work. This is only a fraction of the overall time commitment of a Board member over the course of a week, but definitely a loaded and valuable time. In terms of discussion items, what tends to make it to meetings includes:

• Updates on the committees and workgroups we liaise with. This helps us have a regular check-in with each other, with each other's work, and with said liaising targets.


• Items brought to us by non-Board members that they would like to discuss with us.


• New items we have not had a chance to email each other about and/or want to explain in person.


• Stuff we have discussed a lot in email and want a check-in or final vote on. A lot of the heavy-duty discussion takes place in email (see below), but on a lot of topics we still like to check in with each other live, or need to wrap up the email discussion quickly (which is easier to do face to face). One other reason we tend to touch on email items even in meeting is because it also makes that work more visible: no one sees our emails, but at in open session, we can at least mention or wrap up the work we did over the week. That said...


• Items we feel are better discussed live for whatever reason. This is a hard to define category, but some of the stuff we look at just needs to be hashed out in real-time conversation. For example, a lot of very technical (coding, finances, legal) items do not fit here (except as final/summary votes) because they often need a lot of explanation that's best done over email. But a lot of high-concept, wide-reaching things that we all have a more or less common background on (what goals should we set for sustainability? what will happen with elections? should we focus on sponsorship? what are we interested in offering/asking our emerita board members?) tend to work best here, especially as it's a good time to throw out quick ideas or thoughts, brainstorm, etc. We can then also return to the subjects over email once we've had a good idea-generating session.


• FYIs, heads ups, and ephemera: things that are too short or too underdeveloped to clutter our inboxes with, but which we want to alert other people about or ask for quick input

Besides covering the actual items themselves, meetings serve a few other purposes. One very valuable such is offering staff the chance to see us at work. It also gives those same staff a chance to drop in and talk to us about items they'd like added to the agenda — people can also talk to us over email, but having multiple channels and multiple communication types is important.

It also gives us a chance to see each other. Board work can get passionate and also oddly disconnected: we have a high potential to hurt and frustrate each other because we all care deeply about what we're doing, but we also have our individual passions and it can be hard to remember that we're all in this together, that the people on the other end of the line are helping hands and fellow travelers as well as the person voting against X and for Y. Meetings are a valuable time for us to recognize each others' humanity, to put it dramatically. We also tend to use the time to vent a little, support each other, and interact less formally. Much as meetings can wear me down — and my gosh, can they — they also give a unique and valuable space for me to feel like part of a team.

However, meetings remain in large part a place to check in about, move along, make final decisions on, and otherwise touch on work that primarily takes place elsewhere. Those two hours a week represent only part of the work we do that week, and in many ways are a culmination and product of everything else.

Email! aka The Slow and Tragic Death of the Inbox

Boy, do we talk a lot. One easy way to see this is to check the items discussed/decided over email section in minutes. That's a really useful section, as it hints at the reality that meetings are not all that we do.

So what happens over email? Something I need to make clear about email right off the bat is how closed it is. Even with the closed session portions of meetings, it's at least clear that those are happening. Email work is mostly invisible to the org at large, both figuratively and literally — it's a very private form of communication. Sometimes this is an advantage, when we want to discuss complicated confidential items; sometimes this is a disadvantage because it makes a huge meaty chunk of important work hard to see; in particular, a lot of our reasoning, consideration of various approaches and alternatives, takes place here. Meetings tend to showcase the what, but email is often for the why, the how — you know, the stuff the org as a whole is weakest at sharing in general. This is definitely a problem, because it means that a lot of the stuff people really need and want to see — why did we make this decision? how do we plan to implement this? — remains difficult at best to access. So email is private, which is both a blessing and a curse.

Email is also extremely useful! When someone can't make meetings, it's a way for us to check in, catch up, and participate: it's very common for us to ask absent members to comment on something discussed in email or request votes. However, email is not merely a meetings substitute: it's a distinct way to communicate with each other with its own strengths, the primary of which is being able to tl;dr at will.

I mean that. The longest email I've sent to Board (so far) was about 10,000 words long. 100% not kidding here.

Email gives us a chance to hash things out in depth — really, really in depth — and explain complicated aspects of our work to each other. This is where a lot of the aforementioned technical discussions — coding, finances, legal — happen. As a side effect, email tends to showcase our familiarity with given subjects, while meetings tend to sort of do the opposite: there tends to be a lot of "wait, what, can you please explain" in meetings, because they go so fast and we all want to feel caught up. Either way, email is where the bulk of work on a lot of the more complicated stuff takes place, because we need the space and time to explain all the issues and address all the things. Then, in meeting, we can be all caught up on the basic issue and everyone's input on it, so what's left is to wrap up the discussion and take a vote.

We also use email for shorter things, too, particularly for stuff that needs a quick turnaround or can't wait until meeting, and a small labelling system that helps us distinguish these urgent items from everything else. Our email labels include items we need a 3-day turnaround, items in need of vote, discussions, and FYIs. We know stuff can get bogged down in Board back-and-forth easily, and this system is in part an attempt to combat that, though email can still sometimes seem like a black hole where tl;dr goes in and is never seen from again. We're definitely aware of the problem, though.

All that said, email is not quite as closed as all that, as we do occasionally have or invite people to talk with us over email, especially when we feel we need a consult on something, so it's not like no one else is ever invited to the party. But it's definitely both one of the meatier and one of the quieter parts of the job.

Liaising! aka Nagging aka Love aka Yeah

This is a huge chunk of our work and is paradoxically the most and least visible. Every Board members liaises with committees and/or workgroups, providing oversight and guidance, passing information up and down the line, facilitating Board approval of projects and finance requests, and in general providing a link between the Board and that section of the org. This used to be a pretty ill-defined thing, and particularly a bit difficult to differentiate from chairing work (and boy is that unhelpful), even when we can all agree that yes, it is very very different. Somehow. However, we did a lot of work at the start of term towards concretizing expectations in liaising and what we want to accomplish there, which has definitely helped (again, see below for checkmarked goals!). There's still work to be done there, but we're in a better place overall in communicating with our various committees and workgroups on an "individual liaison + individual bit of the org" level — note that this is separate from communicating qua Board as a whole to either specific sections of the org or the org as a whole. That definitely still needs work.

(Okay, you know what, I can't think of a good term that encompasses both committees and workgroups, so I am going to call them "orgbits". Like orbits. Or ogre bites?)

So the nature of the work involves communicating with and being visible to chairs, workgroup leaders, staff, and volunteers in the assigned orgbit. In this way, liaising tends to give that Board member and their work more visibility within that orgbit (and often its sister orgbits of frequent collaboration). However, it's also pretty restricted work: we all have limited time and liaise a given and limited set of orgbits, so we have correspondingly less time and visibility in other places. It also makes for a kind of odd relationship in terms of visibility of the Board as a whole. Liaisons can often bring with them that nebulous aura of "Board presence", but that doesn't really illuminate the Board in and of itself: the liaison has to specifically work at doing that. And while that particular liaison may be known and approachable, that doesn't render the rest of the Board so, even in that specific orgbit. So in a way, this segments Board and Board member visibility across the org, making the work of the majority of the Board less visible while shedding light on one specific member and aspect.

Overall, then, liaising involves a lot of work and a lot of balancing acts. It's work we rarely seem to talk about in public, and, correspondingly, it's work a lot of observers don't realize we're doing. At the same time, it's often difficult to discuss liaising work for confidentiality reasons, as part of the job is supporting the chair/lead with staffing issues or keeping track of other problems. But for what it's worth, it's part of what we do.

So that's an overview of the shared work of Board, though that's still far from all we do. And I know this is all very general, but it's meant to be — this is more about how we work and where than anything else. I'll be trying to talk about what we/I am up to more soon.

In the end, it's all valuable and important work. We do not all do each type to the same degree or in the same amount — and that's okay! These are different types of work with different strengths, weaknesses, and compatibilities. An overall level of involvement and engagement in a Board member is crucial, and it's also reasonable to expect a minimum amount of each type of work. That kind of participation rubric is pretty difficult to set and calibrate in a way that's fair, but I do think this is worth talking about as a Board — not least, to set clear expectations for anyone running in future elections and further pin down the edges of the job. In the end though, the work we do is varied, as are we, and that's all to the good.

For myself, historically I've been stronger in email than in meetings (who here is surprised that I pick the tl;dr one? anyone? Bueller?), and medium on liaising. That said, during The Great Computer Vanishment, I could not do any of these. Ouch. That has definitely set me — and the projects and people I'm responsible for — behind.

Overall, I've also historically had little energy to talk about the work — it all gets used up in doing the work; sanders talked about this sort of thing as well. I mean, look at all that up there. Our job pretty much is ALL TALK. That is a LOT of talking. No wonder I run out of talking before I make it to this journal =|


But okay, enough explication. What got done during my alleged quiet presence earlier this year?

Goals Update!

As always: While I do serve on the Board, this doesn't mean I have a magic wand or anything — the OTW's very strength is that it's the work of many people with many different skills, backgrounds, and opinions, so no one should have a magic wand and that's good. A lot of work is done by people who are not me, and I'll do my best to acknowledge that and give credit. Corrections, questions, and updates welcome!

This time, also an additional caveat: I'm definitely not caught up, so this is mostly meant to cover in broad strokes my period of radio silence before about mid-May. I may be missing things still — scratch that, I definitely am — but I'm operating on the principle that a partial update is better than no update.

See the master post of 2012 OTW Goals

See my general approach to being on Board here!



[Caption: A small cheerfully-yellow booklet depicts, in an ink sketch, a house massively on fire. Along the top, handwritten imperfect block lettering reads "SHIT'S FUCKED". Along the bottom, "a positivity guide" in peppy cursive.]

Principles Update

This is of necessity pretty general this time around, but in the future I hope to focus on specific developments as they go down.

Diversity
Here, I want to pull out a few particular items. A huge one is the massive awesome that is the OTW Community Survey (about which the team has been posting regularly), which is a tremendous step in helping us understand our current coverage and the gaps in it. This has been coming a long time and was a massive undertaking, and I am very excited to see where the results — and acting on the results — will take us. Two more are the Fan Video Diversity Showcase (please read the blurb to see what that's all about) and the formation of the Category Change Workgroup (working on overhauling the names and structure of the fandom categories on the AO3 to be more inclusive). I was not involved with the former, but I've been part of the category change discussion from the start, and will now be serving as the Board liaison for that workgroup. See below! Having a more diverse set of Board members is also definitely helping overall, and that is great. We've made some important steps forward here, but— they've been pretty modular, often confined to specific projects or committees. This does not mean those victories don't matter — on the contrary, we can't have the larger changes without the smaller — but it does mean that we have a lot of work left of the bigger scale. More on this when I'm caught up!

Transparency
Progress! Board minutes being public is a huge plus, as well as moving Board open sessions to a more public room. Communication is improving overall due to hard work by many people, including the awesome surge in project updates and reports, and the Comms committee has specifically been working to make more solid and concrete plans and expectations. However, again, an overall cultural problem: I feel we're still rather afraid of having our guts exposed. It's scary and it's hard, and in a lot of ways we're still opaque to one another and to the outside world. I mean, why else would I have written the entire first half of this post? It's super basic stuff. And this partial transparency, this progress: it puts us, in a lot of ways, in a lot more vulnerable position that either the better transparency we aim for or the worse we had before. For example, the Board minutes being public is great, and has invited scrutiny of Board member attendance and participation — I consider this to be overall awesome! Scrutinize away! Ask what we're doing or why we're not doing enough! However, because Board work is poorly understood outside of Board (and let's face it, sometimes even within Board), it also means that criticism and scrutiny can be misdirected or based on misunderstandings or lack of information (again, see the entire first half of post!). That is absolutely a failure on our parts, not on the part of our audience and stakeholders, but I think it's something to keep in mind: right now, this transitional stage, is when things can be at their most confusing and unclear.

Sustainability
It often doesn't feel like it from the inside but... I cautiously think that we have made progress here, or at the very least, the rate of progress has improved (acceleration!). There is a long way to go. Long, long way. But overall, we have agreement and a good amount of followthrough on some basic principles: most strongly, we generally appear committed to documenting all the things. Documenting the nature of various positions and the reasoning behind major decisions are great steps towards better sustainability, but, more importantly, I feel the overall culture is improving in terms of being aware of succession and the need to document and prepare. For example, there has been a lot of focus on documenting project and committee work in general, for both internal and external consumption, including taking into account the workload this entails and acknowledging the need for specific positions and workgroups to get this done — a shoutout here for Tag Wrangling, which has grown a tremendous crop of documentation making expectations for wrangling volunteers and staff clear and explicit and making it easier for anyone in wrangling, from volunteer to chair, to land on their feet. It's great sustainability work For example, there have been several workgroups or other positions created specifically to document project and/or committee work, which is great. We've also had an upsurge in liaison agreements, which are put together by individual Board liaisons and the people they work with to lay out clear expectations and guidelines. Board is also definitely trending towards making roles and expectations explicit; I know that was a big hobby horse of mine early in the term. However, there are still major problems in terms of burnout, communication, and overall org culture, and I want to go into a little more detail here.

A lot of people in pretty high positions have stepped down recently, and this is discouraging — but it's also important to keep in mind that not everyone who leaves the org leaves because something went wrong for them in the org. A lot of people leave because something is going on in the rest of their life, and I want to emphasize this: this is a difficult decision to make and I want to applaud and encourage everyone who has made it. This is fandom: a lot of us find it hard to give up on this thing we love just because life is keeping us busy or down. And I wish everyone who has had to make that call a lot of luck.

However! I definitely do not want to paper over the other side of the equation, which is the people who quit because of the org itself. This is still a huge problem, and the two are interconnected: the more people the org burns through, the harder the work becomes for everyone else as we scramble to fill the holes, the bigger and more overwhelming the job gets and the harder to fit around other life commitments, the more people on the edge of that boundary decide they can't handle this volume of work, the more stressed and burned out those filling the gaps become, etc. The people quitting because they have to — for reasons of health, busy-ness, or needing to get away from a toxic situation — are not the problem: our inability to support people from the start, and fill the gaps afterward is. This is partly a problem of documentation and succession planning, and this appears to be what we're trying to focus on right now. Without clear expectations of a position, it's hard to tell when someone is doing well or when they need help; without clear structures of responsibility, succession, and channels of recourse it's downright toxic. It's a huge problem, with, correspondingly, a lot of angles of approach. Board has been talking a lot about being more accessible, more open to feedback and criticism, and how to encourage the same throughout the org. It's a difficult problem, but we're hoping that making firmer structures for succession will be one brick in the foundation of the big bridge we must build.

Overall, again, we're kind of in the middle of the worst of it — we're doing a lot of the work necessary to make things easier later, but the transition is the hardest part. I definitely applaud the improvement — baby steps! — but boy is there so much left to do. Three items I wanted to pull out here. One is the new format for org-wide meetings: rather than a rehash of the newsletter, we've been trying to make them more a space for discussion, feedback, and development. The OTW Community Survey will also help us be more sustainable, as it is helping us understand our audience and stakeholders. And finally, the Strategic Planning Workgroup (see below!), which is preparing us for a huge step forward, though we are definitely in the early stages still. The going is slow, but I believe the progress is there. Baby steps.

General Goals Update

This is, unfortunately, the section I feel least able to comment on right now until I've taken better stock: this is the middle ground between overall principles (which I feel a pretty good grasp on in terms of where we are/overall progress) and specific action items (which are small enough to easily catch up and comment on) where I feel I could too easily miss or mischaracterize something. So I'm going to work on checking in with my projects and people and see if I can put a good focus on this soon. Apologies!

Concrete Goals and Action Items

The fun bit! I'm only pulling out goals/items where I have relevant comments/updates here.

[General]

GOAL: Revisiting election procedures, including how candidate chats/questions are handled and reorganizing the Elections website

STATUS: Concrete progress. I cannot praise jennyst enough here: she is the new Elections Officer and has been doing a bang-up job sorting through this mess. For my part, I put together a tl;dr report on the last election: weaknesses and pitfalls, and suggestions for improvement, including of chat and question format, things we need to clarify, etc. This is chugging along, and all credit goes to jennyst and the fine folks working with her. A lot of work towards making elections have much better and more organized documentation, as well as a more sustainable format. I'll see if I can put something together publicly about the problems I saw with the process last year later, but for now I applaud the awesome work happening here.

GOAL: Put together the next iteration of our strategic plan

STATUS: PROGRESS! We have a Strategic Planning Roadmap! Check that shit out. It was put together by our Strategic Planning Workgroup! Who have been doing some awesome communications work with their updates posts. I have nothing to do with it, so not credit here! sanders and jennyst were primarily responsible for seeing it put together and liaising it. The purpose of the workgroup is not to write the whole strat plan itself, but to gather and synthesize input in accordance with the roadmap, and in the end put together a report and suggestions on what should be in the strat plan -- planning for the plan put together the strat plan itself, but to put together a plan for how how to put together a strat plan, because it's a big deal. Check out their intro, explanations, and updates at the links above.

GOAL: Name both basecamp and campfire (two key org tools) accounts to "transformativeworks" (the campfire account is currently "fanarchive")

STATUS: Proposed, tabled. I proposed this early in the Board's term, but some alternate proposals came up (possibility of switching to a different chat host) that took a while to evaluate, and by then we were past the term transition so it was a less ideal time to switch. I'd like to bump this up again: it's not a big thing, but I think it would be good to implement, and we can get it arranged well in advance this way.

[Board]

GOAL: Take up Denise from Dreamwidth on her offer for feedback and advice (Jenny Scott-Thompson has already started work in this area), and tap any other such contacts (e.g. at the EFF?)

STATUS: Modular progress. We've started tapping such resources, but so far we have started on a more technical level, by inviting Mark from DW to talk to our tech people about scalability and performance, specifically for the AO3. That's definitely an awesome resource and a very generous offer! In the future though, I would like to see more broadly-focused uptake here: technical expertise is great, but we need help with management, planning, and growth on a more general and org-wide level.

GOAL: Move open session meetings to room with greater viewership

STATUS: Success! Open sessions used to take place in a room only visible to chairs; I proposed a move to a more visible room, and open session now takes place in the Cross-Committee meeting room, which is visible to all staff. I'm interested in taking this even further, but for now this is a great step.

GOAL: Explicitly define the role of Board liaison, and the role of Board member in general

STATUS: Partial success. We discussed and laid out the role of liaison in much detail at the start of the year, and we've taken steps towards refining the idea of Board member; specifically, we want to move away from micromanagement and day-to-day hands-on work (which can be done at the staff and chair levels). However, I don't think the results were very well documented or publicized in terms of putting them where they'd be of use to people off Board (something to work on!), and we have a long way to go towards developing a robust and sustainable definition of Board work. On the plus side, we've had several liaisons and those they work with put together liaising agreements, several of which have been added to our internal wiki where all volunteers can see them, which I think is a definite plus.

[Accessibility, Design, & Technology + Internationalization and Outreach + Tag Wrangling]

GOAL: Overhaul of media categories

STATUS: Concrete progress! Hey so we have a workgroup for this now. The workgroup has two people from each of the above committees, and the lead is from I&O; I am the liaison. The group's had its first email and a fair amount of email discussions, so we finally have a group of people dedicated specifically to this. For my own role, I want to make clear that my duty as liaison is largely to facilitate and communicate; I will be less involved with the actual decisions being made here than with helping make sure they happen and that the group has the support it needs. The workgroup unfortunately formed right before my computer died, so this is where I consider myself the most behind. But! the lead and I have scheduled catchup time and I hope to help rock this thing asap!

[Webmasters]

GOAL: Redesign and restructure the OTW website — sponsored by Kristen Murphy

STATUS: Progress! This is sooo not my own item, but as something near and dear to my heart, I wanted to give a shoutout to Web and the work they've been doing getting this going. Web put together a roadmap for the overhaul and have since updated it to split up the visual and content/navigation aspects, and they've been collecting data from committees on requested changes. Awesome!

So that's updates for now. Next time, I hope to be ready to look at adding new goals and possibly revising old ones. We'll see!

Thanks for listening, and as always, questions and feedback welcome and I will try to respond =)