Local Tech, Big Surveillance: Rethinking Municipal IT - Episode 24 of Unbuffered

Christopher Mitchell (00:16)
Welcome back to Unbuffered. We're having a conversation today that'll pick up a little bit with where we were last time with the Flock cameras. as we were talking about Flock in the last show, I was actually thinking back years ago to my conversation with Keith Hanson, who is a consultant currently at Keith Hanson.io. but he previously had been the Chief Technology Officer, the CTO for Shreveport. Welcome back to the show, Keith.

Keith Hanson (00:46)
Thanks. Awesome to be here.

Christopher Mitchell (00:48)
And you and I talked before, it's probably been four or five years on an early episode of Connect This! you joined us

Keith Hanson (00:55)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (00:56)
and we talked about some of the cool projects you are working on there. now you've moved on to AI because it seems like that's where everyone wants everyone to be.

Keith Hanson (01:06)
Well, unfortunately, you know, as a as a programmer since I was twelve, it basically ate my industry, so it ate at first.

Christopher Mitchell (01:15)
Yes.

Keith Hanson (01:16)
And I had to acclimate very quickly, but but it's been it's been pretty cool.

Christopher Mitchell (01:22)
That's good. Yeah. We talked about some of the projects you're working on. So we're gonna talk about that. And I really wanted to tap your brain because when we talked before, you were doing some pretty innovative things and also just having some challenges of doing them within the city environment, I think. And I thought you'd be a good person to talk about what a city like Shreveport, which I think is gonna run into the same kind of challenges, most I will call that a mid sized city in my mind.

you know,

Keith Hanson (01:48)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (01:49)
what what they're gonna run into. And and I wanna see these local governments being much more innovative. And I think you'll give us a good read on the challenges and the benefits of of trying to do that. but but first I think it'd just be useful to get a better sense of of aside from battling printers, which I think is like the nightmare of everyone in doing any technical

Keith Hanson (02:09)
Ha ha.

Christopher Mitchell (02:09)
work, whether it's for your parents or whether it is for you know for an entire bureaucracy like

Keith Hanson (02:16)
Right.

Christopher Mitchell (02:16)
What did you do aside from battling printers?

Keith Hanson (02:20)
Yeah, I mean, you know, and if if we're lumping sort of printer battles into the kind of IT problems bucket, including, you know, security and, you know, all the things that go along with that and multiple devices attached to your network and like etcetera. If if we set all those aside, right?

Then, like, I think any generally CTO is particularly commanded to understand deeply all of the technology going into their government, all the technology available to help the government and the citizenry, and you know, enact those things and know it as well as the consultants walking through the door, right? which is not easy, I don't think. but

Christopher Mitchell (03:06)
No, it's everything from like

boring electronic records processing stuff to like very technical

Keith Hanson (03:10)
Exactly.

Christopher Mitchell (03:12)
surveillance cameras to any number of other things, right? I mean it's really a wide big umbrella, I'm guessing.

Keith Hanson (03:18)
Yes, yes, definitely. fortunately I'm, you know, one of those guys who likes to tinker and just explore and you know that was fun to me to to learn about all the different things. But but yeah, I mean, you know, we were juggling mostly, you know, there was the IT s components of my job and then, you know, our mayor had very broad technical goals or technology goals, including broadband,

you know, broadband everywhere basically and not just, you know, not any broadband but good broadband. And then and then, you know, in the third year I was there, the real time crime center came online. I had a lot of great folks working on that with me, but it was I was definitely the tip of that spear and very few believed we could do it. 'Cause we had very little budget.

And when I started really, you know, trying to figure all that out, I was just like, these are just cameras. These are just networked digital cameras, and

Christopher Mitchell (04:24)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (04:24)
these people are charging a million dollars a year for it. And I refuse, right? Like, not only do I not have the budget, but I wouldn't even recommend that, right? and and then when they're all farming every single frame into the cloud and an AI is analyzing all of it.

You know, I just it just rubs me the wrong way, with how how easily you can track you know, normal citizens and I I think that violates rights. I don't think anyone has the right to understand that without a warrant. So

Christopher Mitchell (04:58)
When you were doing that, was it primarily Axon? Was Flock Flock was around, but I don't know how big they were at that time. Was it how what was happening at that time?

Keith Hanson (05:04)
I love I mean,

Flock was so so y let's be real, right? Like s one of the things that I think every person has to grapple with is surveillance helps solve crimes. Period.

Like one of the main reasons we don't see a serial murderer all the time now is 'cause there's cameras everywhere and the Internet exists, right? you know, my wife and I are in true crime crime documentaries and we're just going, Why don't we see these anywhere? yeah, right? Like, you know.

Christopher Mitchell (05:35)
Well, I I'm reminded of

Las Vegas, this show like twenty years ago with James Kahn. And it was set in Las Vegas and he was a security guy for them. And whenever anything would happen, they would just go to the tape and they would like rewind and like see the person walking backward to see where they came from and what they had done. And and I I agree with you. If you have

Keith Hanson (05:52)
Exactly.

Christopher Mitchell (05:54)
that level of ability to recreate what's happened, it is very difficult to get around things. Now

at the same time, I I made the distinction last in the last show, I think it is worth noting that is true for many crimes, like, but not all crimes. And there are significant numbers of crimes that that actually still doesn't help with, including very violent crimes like rape and things like that, which can happen, you know, behind closed doors often with people that are known, not like some stranger that gets ducks people off the street. So I just I feel like

it's always worth keeping that in mind.

Keith Hanson (06:24)
Absolutely. Yeah,

and just, you know, to pile on to that point, like most of the violent crimes that happen in us in our city at least, I was just watching you know, a local spot from our Shreveport Police Department.

You know, the news was interviewing and whatnot. And it's domestic violence. Well well, that happens inside a home and very few people have cameras pointed at themselves inside their home. Some some people do, you know, for theft and burglaries and and things like that for all reasons all kinds of reasons, right? But

But I wouldn't. I mean I have very a very low tech home. I there are no cameras, right? Like I don't have ring. you know, there's that printer connected to Wi-Fi is about the the most complex device on my network right now. Nice.

Christopher Mitchell (07:16)
Yeah, I was just gonna hold up my keyring. It's got a lot on it.

Keith Hanson (07:22)
So

Christopher Mitchell (07:24)
So

so right. Okay. So so we the point is is that like, you know, surveillance can help solve a lot of crimes and indeed can help s you know definitely has dramatically cut down on the number of serial killers. I think perhaps there's also some hopefully like it's a healthier society in a number of ways with that lead paint that causes fewer people to want to do that, but also much harder, even if you're a smart criminal, to just get away with doing the same thing over and over and over again. So yes.

Keith Hanson (07:50)
Absolutely.

Yeah, that said, like, you know, they're like a real time crime center is not a panacea, it is not a silver bullet, and in fact, many of the real-time crime centers that I toured were not real time. they're all after the fact. And they're basically a detective's, hey, can you look this up for me, right? we try to do it quite differently, but

But I think I'm straying from our topic. I'm sorry. I you're gonna have to rein me in, so

Christopher Mitchell (08:19)
No, no, I think this is actually this is this is really this is useful. And I

just I I also flash back to when I was checking out what Santa Monica had done with fiber 15 years ago. And they had these live cameras. There are these cameras that could be live, but they didn't use them often for that. They did it every now and then when they had like something, you know, that they could. But like you said, it's difficult to know when something's happening. there's a joke among Internet service providers that that we talk about, the smaller ones, which is that like

a lot of times smaller ISPs don't always set up the right monitoring on their network to know when there's a problem. And you don't want your knowledge that there's a problem to come from a Facebook post that someone puts up three hours after the Internet goes off, right? And similarly with crime,

Keith Hanson (09:01)
Yes. So true.

Christopher Mitchell (09:05)
like it's not you'll have this imagine people calling 911. Well, for some crimes they do immediately, but for other things, like it's happened an hour ago before anyone even notices it or something. So real-time crime, pretty difficult to track.

Keith Hanson (09:18)
It

is. now it's funny you mentioned 911. It's like it's really the only signal that's real time you have on crime. And so we used that. We had a map of every single 911 call popping up, and as soon as it popped up, we're pulling up the cameras in the real time crime center. I say we, I I walked in there but only 'cause I built it and it was in my IT department.

It was actually kind of interesting. We it was to my knowledge, the only civilian led non police officer led real time crime center in the United States. And we hired

Christopher Mitchell (09:56)
Huh. I assume you called it the real time

crime center in part for budgeting reasons to justify it so that city council would be excited about it and things like that. But it's really you're

Keith Hanson (10:04)
Ha ha ha.

Christopher Mitchell (10:05)
s those these people that are sitting behind their normal computers that would just like be able to turn on the feed basically.

Keith Hanson (10:11)
More or less. I mean that, you know, when we're really boiling down the soup and nuts you know, soup to nuts on this, it's like you know, that's what we're talking about. We're we're talking about pulling up a camera and watching. and then, you know, being able to clip and then securely transmit that in sort of a a vault for for evidentiary purposes, right? now interestingly though, like you know, being able to go back and pull evidence is

kind of part and parcel why a lot of these companies and real-time crime centers in general are building massive storage arrays or pumping everything into the cloud. and that's just like it just rubs me so raw off. Like we should not go ahead. Sorry.

Christopher Mitchell (10:57)
Right. Well, but you're I think you're combining

two things, right? And I I will say, like in I I in the last show, which you probably haven't heard, I went through I I have ex I have real problems philosophically with large databases. I think large

Keith Hanson (11:10)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (11:11)
databases, particularly privately owned, but also publicly owned, I think that they are incompatible with an open society. And I think that we will ultimately come to that conclusion. However, there's two different things that that you're talking about that I don't want to combine. One is an open database.

And the other, I mean is a very large database. And the other is this desire from these companies to figure out how to pull as much profit out of that as possible. Right. And so that's one of the other things that I don't think you and I all spend as much time on, but like there's a real concern when not only can governments get that information, but also like corporations or I don't

Keith Hanson (11:46)
Sure.

Christopher Mitchell (11:46)
know, jerks are able to pay for that information if they want to.

Keith Hanson (11:51)
Or not even have to pay. Just a public records request. Cause Sunshine Laws, right? Like that was

Christopher Mitchell (11:56)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (11:56)
that was number one on my mind was like

Every every single news station is gonna be calling in and wanting like this intersection and rando requests, and well, we didn't find it, and let me give you five more look places to look. No, these people should be helping the police, right? Like they should be benefiting our citizens, not

Christopher Mitchell (12:16)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (12:17)
your spot on the six o'clock, right? Or or worse, more nefarious, kind of what you're hinting at, is that lots of companies can mine those images for data.

Of all kinds. Well and Shreve Port, what kind of car is the most popular? What paint is the most popular? What race is the predominant race? Like demographics, all that can be pulled out now with you know AI and and vision models and like all kinds of stuff, right? So so I knew as soon as we started creating the data, there was danger for us in the sense that one, we can get overloaded with requests and bog down the mission of the real-time crime center.

but too like gross. I don't want anyone profiting off of public space information unless they climb the pole and put it up there and get the permits and do all the things, right? You know, it it so

Christopher Mitchell (13:13)
So our conversation previously focused on how you built your own license plate readers and did it in what I think of as the reverse.

Keith Hanson (13:19)
Well, not license

plate readers, just cameras, but we were working through the machinations of like R and D around I mean and that license plate readers aren't magic either, right?

Christopher Mitchell (13:31)
Right. Well, that's the thing. I remembered us talking. I thought

that you had some basic character recognition. And this is just my fuzzy brain, I guess. But like the way that I remember it was that you had this this goal of being able to like put up the cameras and then you could flag if a license plate went by. So you weren't gonna store every license plate, but you could be on the lookout for a given license plate and then flag if it was triggered anywhere, which is much, much lower privacy implications, I think.

Keith Hanson (14:00)
Yes, I agree. I wanted a sort of blacklist versus an all everything list, basically. We did deploy license plate readers. I worked with another company for that 'cause we needed it now and there was no R and D time for that. and they do what you said.

They also help do citations in school zones as well. So that's kind of how they how they fund themselves, other than just the cameras themselves, the license plate reader cameras, rather. but we deployed plain chain network cameras in a box, you know, with a small computer inside that box, two hard drives inside that box, and an electrician. We worked with a local electrician, they helped us wire up all the electrical to it and make sure nothing melted.

In the box, and then we hooked up cameras under the neath that you would hook up to your home system. I mean, but most of the cameras that our police department were working with were not even ten eightyp yet, let alone four K. And I was putting four K cameras up there with good zoom levels and you know

good aspect ratios or I mean focal lengths and whatnot. So

Christopher Mitchell (15:12)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (15:13)
had to learn a lot that I'm now like wiping the rust off as we talk about cameras and whatnot, but but it's basic, right? and when those get done, there's a file on a drive somewhere and you just need to layer over a user interface on that. and so

What I've just described is just about any camera system that you can get your hands on off the shelf pretty much, but so too are a lot of real time crime centers until you're like big data in it and like, you know, AIing everything and and whatnot.

Christopher Mitchell (15:46)
Trying to minority report,

do a little predictive work.

Keith Hanson (15:48)
Exactly.

Right. Ugh, I hated like it just made me cringe whenever I was like touring real-time crime centers to learn more about them and like they'd be like, our predictive analytics those like we're we're huh like how are you predicting? How are you eliminating your bias? Right? Like, how do you even know that you have bias? and there weren't great answers there, but

Christopher Mitchell (16:18)
No, the computer does it.

Keith Hanson (16:18)
I mean everybody r yeah, the computer does it. Right.

Yeah. Well and this is I think why you want a deeply technical person rolling these things out, right? Like someone who can ask these types of questions.

Christopher Mitchell (16:28)
Well, and

that that brings up for me one of the things that I want to make sure we talked about, which is this challenge. And I I was formed in part, I had this opportunity to do a a summer I worked with Oregon OSHA and a bunch of us when we were in grad school were technical people, were embedded within different state agencies and provided some services that that we could do.

And and then also got to see how they operated. And when I was working with them, they were using a stats package. I mean, this was 2007, 2006, and it was a you know, it was a Microsoft based stats package that they were using, and they paid a bunch of money for it every year. And I was like, Well, there's this free Perl script that provides

Keith Hanson (17:15)
Right.

Christopher Mitchell (17:16)
better stats, and it's

Keith Hanson (17:19)
Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (17:20)
super easy to run. And like I'm I wasn't a technical, I mean, I'm I'm a technical person.

I wasn't like a wizard, you know. Like I taught myself PHP. I never actually learned Pearl, but I knew enough of other stuff to be able to just like make it work from a command line. And the reaction

Keith Hanson (17:33)
Mm-hmm.

Christopher Mitchell (17:33)
I get from a person who worked there was like, no, I need to point and click. And I'm, you know, we're not gonna

Keith Hanson (17:37)
Wow. I see.

Christopher Mitchell (17:40)
do any like command line stuff. We're not like hackers, you know. And I'm just it's sort of like, I'm well, this is just a question of whether you have basic curiosity or not to like save.

You know, it was less than an FTE per year, perhaps, but like, you know, it was a chunk it like fifty, seventy-five thousand dollars, something like that of savings potentially. And to have better results. Like

Keith Hanson (17:59)
Dude, that adds up. Exactly.

Christopher Mitchell (18:02)
and just that that kind of walled it. And the person wasn't like they weren't like bad, right? But they were like thinking

Keith Hanson (18:07)
Sure.

Christopher Mitchell (18:08)
responsibly about like, okay, well, if I bring this in, like are we gonna

be able to run it in three years? You know, like and

Keith Hanson (18:11)
Yep. That

question, I I hate that question. No, none of your software will run in three years. You're gonna be lucky with five, right? Like in my industry as a software developer at least, all the code I wrote three years ago is embarrassing, right? Like because of all the progress we make every single year, right? So like I just I just live in that world where you're just buying new software all the time or you're building new software all the time. But but that question really just is such a drag because it's like

You can't innovate in that realm where you're just worried about what happens in five years again. And I mean I get it. Like that's government's job to be like responsible with, you know, the dollars and like

Make things smooth, but get real. Like the world doesn't operate that way. You can't lock yourself in like that. You should be exploring open source. You should be finding your local talented contractors that you can bring in and be like, make me a thing, right? like

Christopher Mitchell (19:09)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (19:10)
it's not it's not magic what these companies are doing. Mostly what I think companies do for government is provide some stability between mayors, right? Like

Christopher Mitchell (19:22)
Right.

Keith Hanson (19:22)
and and that is the

Death knell of like any innovative thing that you're trying to get done. Usually it's like one mayor's like or from my experience at least with my one term, right? But but you know, you've got your mayor and his innovation and like he's got all the steam behind it and he wants to get it going. New mayor rolls in, we gotta show books, you know, reducing, and like we've gotta.

You know, get a quick win and so cut that, cut that, cut that. These are innovation pro get this out of here. We need, you know.

Christopher Mitchell (19:54)
Right. These are and this is

they're they're cutting things that they don't really understand, I think often, right? Is that is that uncharitable? Yeah. Okay.

Keith Hanson (19:59)
Not at all. I don't think at

all. Yeah, exactly. Like it was unfortunate that like we basically ended up abandoning our in-house team that could build

A poll camera for less than a thousand dollars. any CIO who's listening knows there's no way in hell, and that's a thousand dollars climbed the pole and mounted and online and visible, right? nobody gets those prices from a government contractor, right? And which I could I could just go on and on about that whole

Christopher Mitchell (20:35)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (20:36)
problem. But I I'm sure everyone knows those issues ad nauseum at this point, but

Christopher Mitchell (20:41)
Right.

One thing that I think DOGE got right in regards to that was this idea of there are people out there who would do some of this work. I mean, a lot of them younger, you know,

Keith Hanson (20:50)
yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (20:50)
and and be enthusiastic about it. I think n they did everything wrong, but they did show that there are people that

Keith Hanson (20:57)
Sure.

Christopher Mitchell (20:57)
are that want to go in and solve problems to make their communities better or to make this the federal government better or whatever. There's a lot of people that I think would do that if they had a sense that they would be meaningful.

Keith Hanson (21:08)
That's why I did it. I mean I was comfortable eight years into running a software development agency and then got asked to be the CTO and I just you know, I had run for

local council at the time and, you know, met that mayor. but I did that too, like knocked doors and met citizens at the door and had conversations like those awful and amazing conversations you have.

Because I wanted, you know, my work to mean something more than a paycheck to a company and a corporation. Now now today I I totally geek out when I'm able to, you know, raise profits and lower costs, right? But but certainly then it felt really good to me to

to work on something that that could change us, you know, our whole community around me that I live in. And I have a son, you know, so like all of that plays in, right?

Christopher Mitchell (22:07)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (22:08)
the problem though is, in my opinion, is just like the the costs and the salary. you know, governments aren't typically competitive.

No developer is probably gonna stay with you till retirement, right? And and you really need software developers. Like, like if you're building like an innovation team in your IT department, then you gotta have software developers. Like they gotta be able to build and designers perhaps, or or at least someone who understands social media that can like help you broadcast what you're doing and like get adoption on the things you're doing and you know.

kind like a strike team. Like I had a special projects team basically that I put together.

Christopher Mitchell (22:49)
And and they have to be d well documented then if you're gonna have that turnover, which is I think the bane of everything, whether you're public, private, whatever. No one wants to document. No one wants to pay for documentation.

Keith Hanson (23:00)
But it's free now, right? So if you're building things, AI can document it. And if you're building it, you're probably using AI already. There's really zero excuse at this point for governments not to like, like it's easier than ever, in my opinion.

Christopher Mitchell (23:14)
that's great to hear. so let's just wrap up the crime center. We didn't really talk about you built this using C B R S network in part and and library fiber line and this is separate.

Keith Hanson (23:25)
No, not C BRS. that that

that was an interesting one where we we, you know, found all of the not adoption happening. Like like we got a wire next to every house in the city, right? So broadband

Christopher Mitchell (23:38)
Right. You have like a cable company that's pretty much everywhere, right?

Keith Hanson (23:41)
Yeah, DSL cable, just like every mid sized city with dense urban and then you know suburban out there. there's a wire next to everything. Now, has that wire been updated in ten years? No.

Right? Like, especially in our disadvantaged neighborhoods and where we were seeing lack of adoption frequently. And then, you know, but anyway, that whole endeavor with CBRS, we blasted fiber Internet from the library up over what we called air fiber, but it was like, you know, some 50 gigahertz dish, right? And then it went up to a water tower and then it came back out over cellular into that that area we identified.

And they could just walk into the library and get a kit, as long as they had a library card, which drove the library numbers up that everybody liked this, right? It was win-win all around that we were

Christopher Mitchell (24:35)
Right.

Keith Hanson (24:35)
doing partnerships with. and then they, you know, s suction cup an antenna to their window, plug it in, and bang, they have 90 megabit Wi-Fi. It is no must, no fuss, there's no rebate to deal with, there's nothing. And and so I, you know, that finally got off the ground on my way out.

suffice it to say I was I was very done with government at the time, so I didn't track that project very well. I was trying to figure out how to survive and and get out back into the private sector and whatnot. But

but that was a really fun project. And we owned that hardware, right? We hired contractors and consultants to come in and install, set up, and configure. But then we owned that hardware. We weren't leasing it, we weren't paying people every year to get the same speeds from Verizon. They wanted a million a year.

And I had five million for five different places, right? And they wanted a million for one, right? and so like the economics just didn't work out. I had a tranche of money, not a budget, right? And so owning it

Christopher Mitchell (25:44)
Mm-hmm. Like one time money, basically.

Keith Hanson (25:47)
Exactly. Yeah. It was ARP funds, American Rescue Plan funds. and so we we put it to the purpose that it was built for and try to get Internet in places where it was just not happening, right? but that was a lot of fun.

Christopher Mitchell (25:59)
Well, Tucson

tried to do that and one of the senses that I got in terms of the results was that they didn't have a lot of trust in the community and people didn't want to use a a free government network. you know, th to the extent people even knew about it. there was d do

Keith Hanson (26:15)
Fair.

Christopher Mitchell (26:16)
you have any sense of how that was overcome or

Keith Hanson (26:19)
I don't but I know that marketing was the worst part of it. Like it was the hardest part to get, you know, even like I we were going down streets and some folks were outside and so I was like, cool. Obviously out of place. I had I had my tie and like, you know,

Christopher Mitchell (26:36)
Ha ha ha.

Keith Hanson (26:37)
everything on, like walking around sweating in Louisiana, right?

Obviously out of place and there's folks that would just be like, Well, hello, you know, and strike up the conversation. And I just asked him, like, you know, do you subscribe to Internet? Do you know if your neighbors do? like, as I'm driving down here, like don't really see a lot of Wi Fi. which I had to explain all of that too, but

Christopher Mitchell (27:01)
Right, 'cause you

did the garbage trucks that had the Wi Fi, the war driving that were like collecting

it, right?

Keith Hanson (27:06)
Yes.

Yeah, we put raspberry pies with GPS sensors attached onto garbage trucks and plugged them into batteries and just you know, put in a little case. and then basically within two weeks we had two full maps of every single Wi-Fi hotspot in the city. all legal. when I can see your Wi-Fi

It's an unencrypted packet blasting into the you know the air. There's

Christopher Mitchell (27:35)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (27:36)
no expectations of privacy. Don't like it, don't broadcast it. Was sort of my answer to any technical folks who raised their eyebrows at me, but no one cared, right? As often they don't and and in these types of projects, right? there was like five people who even knew what I was talking about by the end of the project. But then I I produced a

Christopher Mitchell (27:53)
Right. But then but then you

Keith Hanson (27:55)
gorgeous map, right? And then and that helped me go get funding and like convince people we had a real digital.

Digital

divide here. I don't care what government programs are there. I don't care what lines you say are in the ground. No one's adopting it in these areas, like tell me why, right? And yeah, so like it was a real problem that war driving solved. Or at least illuminated.

Christopher Mitchell (28:21)
Right, because

I mean you ended up just for people who aren't super familiar, you're not capturing the data that was going across that network. You were just knowing that there was a network there. And then you can you know, if you look at like the the wealthy blocks, presumably, there's a Wi Fi network at every home or multiple in every home. And then in other blocks,

Keith Hanson (28:36)
Exactly.

Christopher Mitchell (28:37)
there's like three on the whole block and

Keith Hanson (28:39)
Exactly.

And that, like, I just fell out of my chair when I saw that. I just it was hard to believe. It was hard to believe. But you know, I d you know.

Christopher Mitchell (28:47)
Yeah, no, I l I just

lost Internet access for forty eight hours. It started on a Saturday night and well that's Sunday. We're going through the Blu ray collection. Fortunately I still have some. I'm trying to figure out

what to do. It was

Keith Hanson (28:57)
Nice. That's all. You didn't you didn't

want to just use your v you know cellular Internet man? Sorry.

Christopher Mitchell (29:05)
You know, you know what's funny? I did. I

so I did. And like I'm I I've talked about this on a number of my shows. I I'm actually two eSIMs. I have I'm Ting Mobile and on Mint now as well. And so I've got the two different networks and in my my monthly allotment had just recycled over for for mint, and in

Keith Hanson (29:26)
Amazing.

Christopher Mitchell (29:27)
48 hours I went through two-thirds of my monthly allotment, and I was really trying not to do anything, you know, and it's just funny.

Keith Hanson (29:33)
Right?

Christopher Mitchell (29:34)
There's just little things, like all these little things you do on Wi Fi that I don't think about. Like, you know, like it was just like, like I need a new book on my Kindle or something, you know? Like

Keith Hanson (29:43)
Exactly.

Exactly. I it was a hard conversation to have. Like I I was kind of surprised by how hard it was to help people understand that that is not the solution. Especially when you have data caps and especially when you have you know, pay by the the megabyte type plans for the data. No one's gonna use the Internet.

Christopher Mitchell (30:06)
Well, I mean, we we ran the experiment.

I mean, this is what kills me is that people are like, they act like this is a hypothetical. It's like we gave out to millions of kids in low income neighborhoods wi f or the the cellular devices. And what

Keith Hanson (30:18)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (30:19)
happened was all the towers in these areas are overloaded because they weren't built

Keith Hanson (30:22)
Right.

Christopher Mitchell (30:23)
to even handle the the normal population because nobody like the Verizon and T Mobile aren't pulling their cash out of there. So they're not upgrading those towers as much.

And you suddenly want to saturate them with home access, they're not able to handle

Keith Hanson (30:34)
Rise.

Christopher Mitchell (30:35)
that. It's it's you know, it's like it would be like having a it's trying to solve a traffic jam by giving everyone an extra car.

Keith Hanson (30:43)
That's such a good analogy. I wished I had that analogy when I was running and you know doing things in there. That's fantastic.

Christopher Mitchell (30:52)
So so so but I

wanna I didn't want to talk about like you said about leaving, so you're pretty burnt out or just frustrated by the end is what it sounds like. And so, you know, like it part of that it seemed like it was the new mayor, maybe new priorities and seeing that happening and not wanting to start again. I'm putting

Keith Hanson (31:08)
yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (31:09)
words in your mouth. I'm just trying to get a sense of what you were feeling like as you were fleeing for the private sector is the d is the sense I get from you.

Keith Hanson (31:16)
Yeah, no, I part of me regrets leaving 'cause like I know there was a so much that I could keep doing and so much like I could have put my stake in the ground and, you know, told like how important these things were and ha tried to convince and whatnot, but by then I knew that there were political wins on the calendar that had to be had and

There was a lot of frustration with our HR, like just you know like part of success means putting the right people on the bus, right? Like I think we can all recognize that. Like gotta gotta find the technical guys, gotta gotta go find the hyper smart ones, right? But also it's getting the wrong people off the bus, right?

And I know that's sensitive. Like I it sounds so callous to say, but as an employer and as a leader of an org, you have to think like this. It's equally damaging to your organization and your mission when your rock stars are being demotivated by the people who are basically leeching off the system.

And I didn't see a lot of that. Okay. I'm not saying I had a whole department full of this, right? But there was enough of it that I just, you know, having to go and document some crap, some insane actions that anyone on the planet would instantly fire somebody for. And I had to have five of those documented before I could actually get rid of people. I'm sorry, like I can't operate in that environment anymore. Like it was very frustrating.

Christopher Mitchell (32:53)
Well, it especially because

you're trying to solve problems and you're sitting there being like, All right, now gonna take an hour away from solving problems to document this thing, which is not the first time it's happened. Like that's no manager is like immediately like, you know, is immediately like excited to be documenting stuff. Like it just doesn't happen.

Keith Hanson (33:11)
No, because like th

that poisons your culture, first of all.

Christopher Mitchell (33:14)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (33:14)
Like as soon as someone s receives a piece of paper, they know what's up. They're not dumb, right? And so instantly the behavior gets better and like the problems go away until right? And then it occurs again. And then well now you've got all these HR rules, you've got to jump around and, you know, trying to figure out was it still is it still valid, right? Like,

It was awful. I I even had those clocks reset like twice on me once between like two years and it was just like I I just couldn't believe it.

Christopher Mitchell (33:46)
Right. It's like sometimes a person's good

but they're just not a good fit for the team too. Right. I mean it's not like the person's bad necessarily. Yeah.

Keith Hanson (33:50)
Exactly. That's what I said all the time.

It was like, this just isn't the job for you. Like, there are places out there that would love to hire you and employ

Christopher Mitchell (33:59)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (34:00)
you, and you would feel much more comfortable at, but you're here. Why? Right? And the answer is retirement. I I'm like saying the quiet parts out loud. I know it's like I really, but like, you're asking me, so I'm telling you.

Christopher Mitchell (34:13)
Mm-hmm. No, it makes me uncomfortable. I mean, I'm I work

for so I mean I I work with a lot of local governments and I see ones that work well and I research ones that don't work well to try to better understand, you know, what's going on. My wife worked for local government for a long time. She's been at the state for a for a longer time. And we've seen this. And most of the people that she works with are great and they would be making more money in the private sector and they're they're passionate.

Keith Hanson (34:37)
Right. Totally.

Christopher Mitchell (34:39)
But there's always a few who

are you know like maybe they're having a bad time maybe they were a good employee for a while like it's not like someone's a bad egg from day one and they're always a bad egg, right? It's like no. But

Keith Hanson (34:46)
Right. No doubt. Exactly.

Christopher Mitchell (34:50)
what happens is like you're saying it's helpful to know is that you have superstars and like if the superstar is having a bad day and they're looking around like and then they they just get drugged down. You just you you want to take all the barriers out of the way of the superstars, right? Like

Keith Hanson (35:04)
Exactly.

Well and like you I mean that's your job as a leader. You are to hire the people, set the vision and then remove every obstacle. How do I do that when I have one arm tied behind my back constantly and I can't incentivize, you know?

Christopher Mitchell (35:18)
And I I mean I will say so you so

the reason this is related to technical stuff for people who are like, wait a minute, is this a management show? Like, yes, I'll tell you, any technical

Keith Hanson (35:25)
I know, right?

Christopher Mitchell (35:27)
stuff involves management. And I've seen this in the private sector where I, you know, I worked before I worked for the nonprofit. And so, like, I'm not pretending this is only in in the in in the public

Keith Hanson (35:38)
Totally.

Christopher Mitchell (35:39)
sector, but we see it more often in the public sector, it feels like, in part because the public sector is more visible. so

Keith Hanson (35:46)
Absolutely.

Christopher Mitchell (35:47)
there's there's a real challenge and it has to be overcome in order to to deal with in part because of what I already mentioned, which is in my experience, most of the people that are doing very well in local government could be making much more in the private sector. And right. And this is in

Keith Hanson (36:01)
Like you have to have that incentive, right? There's gotta be

Christopher Mitchell (36:04)
my sense of what happens is that like those people don't just like leave. It's like

Something bad happens with management or a leadership change or a budget downturn where they're being like scapegoated by like some people in the legislature talking about the the government workers that suck. And like, you know, I don't need this. And like it's like that bad week where

Keith Hanson (36:22)
Right.

Christopher Mitchell (36:23)
they're like, I'm gonna take the payout. But then they're gone forever. And and that's what hurts to watch.

Keith Hanson (36:27)
Usually.

Yeah. I yeah, I don't know that I'd go back. I I can make way more as a contractor. for government, for private sector, I have a lot more freedom to do what I want to do. There's not some terrible council to answer to.

Christopher Mitchell (36:46)
Right, which

which could be good today, bad tomorrow, good again later. Like it's just un uncertainty is the brutal.

Keith Hanson (36:50)
usually bad. But yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it's brutal. It's brutal. Every four years your entire life changes. Like that is brutal, right? if you're lucky, eight, right?

Christopher Mitchell (37:02)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (37:03)
but but yeah, it's just it's not a lot of it's not easy to attract excited high capacity talent, right? high caliber talent.

Christopher Mitchell (37:13)
So

give me some advice here. We're I've been trying to trying to push for local governments. and there's a there's one particular instance in which I've been working with the city, trying to get them to evaluate and do test projects of fiber optic sensing or distributed acoustical sensing, which this is not the first time local governments are doing it. It happens a lot in California. They may have started with seismic monitoring, but on the fiber optic cables, and this is true whether you put it in the ground yourself or whether you're you're leasing a line.

But you can actually put sensors on each end and it will tell you what's going on along that line. It will tell you if animals are burrowing near it, right? In fact, I believe this is

Keith Hanson (37:53)
Amazing.

Christopher Mitchell (37:53)
how in like the long library libraries along highways where when you're driving, it says like, you know, like moose crossing or something, and it like lights up if one is near. A lot of those are based on acoustical sensing, is my sense. So like they know if like a creature of a certain

Keith Hanson (38:06)
that's awesome.

Christopher Mitchell (38:07)
weight is around. I think that's how a fair amount of them work now. So like.

There's all this stuff. And and so I'm talking to this city and I'm like, I think this could actually result in you over time having a much greater visibility into traffic patterns. I think this is where most of the money is traffic patterns and water leaks. so if you have a water utility,

Keith Hanson (38:26)
Yeah, nice.

Christopher Mitchell (38:27)
like and tr and you have traffic, like these are two things you spend money on that you will have much more insight into at a much lower cost. And the benefit then is that you will have

A much lower cost effectively to get fiber across the city that could be used for a variety of purposes, right? Not necessarily to compete with a cable company, which is like something a lot of them want to avoid. I understand that. But like just for your own uses.

Keith Hanson (38:50)
Compete.

Christopher Mitchell (38:51)
Even if even if you don't want to compete though, I mean, Keefe, you know that like there's a ton of

Keith Hanson (38:54)
Yeah, yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (38:55)
things you could do connectivity with you can use for connectivity, including just like

Keith Hanson (38:59)
Absolutely.

Christopher Mitchell (39:00)
lowering the bills to like every shack the city owns and to have like an environmental sensor in it or something.

Keith Hanson (39:03)
Exactly. trying

to constantly have a redundant ring across forty-two freaking buildings was a nightmare. Man, a nightmare.

Christopher Mitchell (39:12)
Mm-hmm. Right. And imagine if you could pay

for that ring just solely from like the traffic benefit and be able to measure traffic

Keith Hanson (39:18)
Ha ha ha ha.

Christopher Mitchell (39:19)
better. And so you have a sense of the cost. But I I was talking to the city and they're kind of like, well, like what will we like what will we use it for? And I was like, Well, could you I I I basically came down to like if you could give me a sense of what do you pay right now for an intersection? And I said I would work with a vendor to come up with a sense of like across these like

three miles if you put in like this area, you'd cross this many intersections, you could have this amount of traffic knowledge. And then I want you to talk to, and I'm talking to a CIO, I want you to talk to your traffic folks and find out what it costs you today for the limited knowledge that you have. And this person was just sort of like, I don't know. I'm like, come on. I just I feel like I've not been able to figure it but so w the last thing I'll say before I hand it back to you to give me a sense of what I should be doing.

Is I get a better sense of why vendors exist, right? Why you why you have a salesperson that takes people out to lunch and and mercilessly beats them over the head with information. Because this person's really busy. And if they hear from me once every six weeks, I don't exist.

Keith Hanson (40:21)
Yeah. That's fair. That's totally fair. I I do remember a lot of lunches. I don't think I paid for a single lunch, I feel like. I you know, as which I don't know if that was ethics or not, but but yeah, probably

Christopher Mitchell (40:36)
I think in Louisiana you get away with it.

Keith Hanson (40:39)
that's probably true. But but there was a bunch of vendors, they were constantly trying to educate me, they were constantly trying to get in front of me to, you know, understand our needs and like all of that.

And it's fair. It's a fair system. I I mean, that we don't have the time to even evaluate ourselves because frequently as a technology department you're under budget or under budgeted, under capitalized, you're everybody has three jobs, not one, right? Like, etcetera. And in fact one of one of

really highly skilled employees on staff would frequently say, no, like we want contractors in here so that we're not the ones getting blamed. We're not taking the call at 3 a.m. We're not doing that like they are. And I'm like, but they're five times the cost of you, right? Like

Christopher Mitchell (41:36)
And they're not as good often.

Keith Hanson (41:38)
and and they have multiple concerns, not just us, right? Like, like so I think, yeah, I think you need to build that

Bench of folks who want to be there, first of all. have the technical chops and the curiosity, like go find things and learn and decide that this is a better way. And then it's your job as the leadership to like sell that vision to everybody who matters, right? So in your traffic case, it's fifteen thousand dollars a pneumatic tube sensor that a car drives over one side of the road.

Right? Now, how often are you measuring your major thoroughfares? If it's like my city, it was once a year. Which, like, I'm sorry, as you can see now with data centers going up everywhere and gigantic increases in traffic, there's some real-time needs where you may want to start measuring those things it in real time, right? So, you know, it's just it's it's too slow any other way, I feel like, if

Christopher Mitchell (42:44)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (42:44)
you're not.

You know, you're just on the back foot constantly if you're not pushing that that forward internally in a way that you can care about and you can understand and then you know sell that vision as opposed to you know a company coming in and selling that vision to you. You know your needs better than everyone else. Just like you were you were on the outside talking to a local government. Well, how much does it cost? They know. They know somewhere every year, they know how

Christopher Mitchell (43:11)
Someone does. Yeah.

Keith Hanson (43:13)
much that costs. Exactly.

And they can do that math and and start mathing it out. And and then when you start thinking about the time it takes to lay those things out, collect them again, how many times are they getting stolen? How often are you buying them again? It's just a mess. It's just a mess, right? So, you know, if there's a better solution for that, you should be exploring it and trying to figure out how to do it. Now, I'm not saying like go get you a fiber truck and you know a directional bore, but maybe do

open bore rules, right? Like if you're opening a channel up, everybody gets to s take a crack at that channel now, right?

Christopher Mitchell (43:52)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (43:53)
you know, that's something that uniquely governments have power to do. and I'm ashamed to say like I wasn't successful in our open trench initiatives, but my fiber my fiber everywhere bond failed. Well it was it was terrible. That was a terrible year.

Christopher Mitchell (44:12)
So you did

it get on the ballot? Was it how

Keith Hanson (44:15)
it was on the ballot.

Christopher Mitchell (44:18)
okay. So let's wrap up with that. I didn't I was gonna wrap the show, but I feel like we're worth another five minutes to to hear this story.

Keith Hanson (44:24)
Yeah, well mean, it was on the ballot, it was a vision of the mayor. I you know, I wanted community broadband. I showed him why. Everybody agreed this makes sense. well, internally inside government. we looked at Lafayette down the road, quickly found you know that that we could not do what they did. It is illegal in Louisiana. They were the first and last exactly

Christopher Mitchell (44:48)
Yeah, they did they change the law. Yeah.

Keith Hanson (44:52)
so what we were gonna do is just at least do open trenching and get way more fiber from way more competitors. and just, you know, people care about the potholes, the garbage, the sewage, like if you're not nailing those things, they don't wanna hear about any of that, you know, and who

Christopher Mitchell (45:08)
Yeah, roads

are hard to maintain in Louisiana. They're you s you have a very difficult it's like Minnesota also. The both of us like it's hard on the local budgets, but that's something that people pay close attention to.

Keith Hanson (45:19)
Yep, yep. So it was it was a pretty bismal failure, honestly. Like the vote was so low. but I d you know, I went to the town halls, I'd I tried to explain to everybody, you know, the value of this. I don't

Christopher Mitchell (45:31)
Mm-hmm. That's gotta be part

of the dispiriting reason that you wanted to get out then. I think you feel like, you know, you you you see something like that go down and you just like it's a little stab in the soul.

Keith Hanson (45:42)
It is, it is. 'Cause, you know, I intimately felt the damages that the digital divide did to our community and is doing to our community. And then in the middle of the pandemic, like how could you not see that, right? but people didn't. And I don't know, that's that's people, right? Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (46:03)
Yeah, not everyone has not everyone has Mayor Durrell, you know?

Mary Durrell

was was unique in fighting that in Lou in Lafayette where they had that they had their referendum and he would call a press conference at the drop of a hat.

Keith Hanson (46:18)
Yeah, I mean you basically

you you have to have a personal mission at that point. And that's that just wasn't me at that point. Like, you know, I'm I'm in year three, two, something like that. I've seen enough to know that

Christopher Mitchell (46:31)
Well yeah, but also you're

not the former head of the Chamber of Commerce. Like he was he was a local business owner, former head

Keith Hanson (46:36)
Spare.

Christopher Mitchell (46:37)
of the chamber of commerce, like now he's the mayor. He's one of the most conservative elected officials in the entire country, most likely. And for him to be

Keith Hanson (46:43)
Amazing.

Christopher Mitchell (46:44)
playing that, it's a different role than you, a a a a geek.

Keith Hanson (46:49)
That's fair.

That's totally fair. I did I wanted to quickly note on the Flox stuff, like you know, I didn't wanna get out of this call with you without, you know, touching base on that. Like

Christopher Mitchell (47:02)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, let's come back on it.

Keith Hanson (47:06)
it's so important, I feel like, for every technical government official to understand that LPRs, license plate right readers,

Christopher Mitchell (47:14)
Licensed play readers.

Keith Hanson (47:16)
you know.

That is not the only draw people like Flock for, obviously, but like license plate readers are, in my opinion, the safe and effective way to find people with warrants crossing your city lines. And I think that's important. I I think we need to, you know, handle those things.

what we don't necessarily need is some minority re minority report level, find the blue Chevy 2003 Impala that we don't have a license plate for or something. Yes, there are tons of instances where you don't have a license plate on the camera feed, but if set up properly and whatnot, you can get off-the-shelf LPR and hang those cameras and have them feeding in via a webhook to any API.

You want and go from there, right? And there's like 40 companies out there that you can go talk to that are not flock that can set those up, power them, etc. Now, do your due diligence, right? Find out about those companies, etc. But you don't have to have some giant cloud brain analyzing every single photo for you, you know, and sharing that. And I think that's the downside, like.

Like I said, we were watching two crime, my wife and I, right? But but like you when you go way back, you can see that they had a real trouble when things cross state lines and like communication

Christopher Mitchell (48:44)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (48:45)
between departments break down. And you know, I've seen it in the modern police forces when we were talking about the real-time crime center and in communications. you know, it's not fully solved, but it's so much better today, right? That they're all inner you know, discussing between each other and whatnot.

But you don't have to have some cloud connected system for that, right? you can build

These systems where you can send data packets when they need to be sent and then erased and forgotten when they're not, right? and and that was something that we did with our poll cameras. There was only enough physical hard drive space for those three 4K cameras to store three days worth of footage. That means that we educated the heck out of our police department constantly. I mean, so many just general outreach attempts that we did between IT and

SPD, where we help them understand, like if you need something, you gotta say it like now, right? Like it's

Christopher Mitchell (49:46)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (49:47)
gone in three days because privacy, right? now could somebody climb that pole and add 10 terabyte drives to it instead of a two-terabyte drive to it? Sure, right? But at least I made it challenging and difficult instead of like just uploading it all to the cloud, right? And so, like, I think.

you know, just sort of summarizing all of that, like if you if you can't understand those things, you need to find somebody who does, right? and

Christopher Mitchell (50:18)
Right. Yeah. 'Cause there's a balance.

And and I think we'll we'll be having arguments in a hundred years about what the balance is. That's always gonna and as technology changes, the balance may shift also. But I think it's important to understand that like the balance is not some private company amassing all of this information forever, even if they tell us it's gonna be deleted after thirty days, which you know, there's a real honest right, that's what I'm concerned about. you know, I feel like it

Keith Hanson (50:42)
Like how do you prove that? Yeah. Same.

Christopher Mitchell (50:47)
In a few years we'll like maybe in a few months even we'll just see like some like AWS like exposed service to be like, we forgot about that one that has like you know, like petabytes

Keith Hanson (50:55)
Exactly.

Christopher Mitchell (50:57)
of of information that like

Keith Hanson (50:59)
Like can you imagine the national security problem when Flock gets hacked by a nation state actor, right? It's just they have to be.

Christopher Mitchell (51:07)
I assume China is inside flock. I mean, like I assume that like, you know, that's the thing, is I feel like we're just

to some extent we make it easier for our for blackmailing for national security reasons and things like that. I mean, I just I'm it's it's it's horrifying.

Keith Hanson (51:21)
You know, and I'm I'm just like plucking

a very, you know, very hot button topic when I say like nation state actors and things like just to get people realizing that like this is dangerous and

Way more ways than you can imagine, right? Not just

Christopher Mitchell (51:34)
Yes.

Keith Hanson (51:35)
that not just like like the argument like, well, what do you got to hide, right? No, no, that is not the danger. Nothing. I don't have anything to hide. You're right. I go literally the same route every single morning, drop my kid off, you know, come back home, do my work, etc. That is not the problem, right? But if somebody were targeting me and wanted to know more and they could hack in, then or even worse, somebody hacked.

In a year ago, sat on it, and then dumped all of that to the dark net for forever, right? Like we're now you've got many more people trolling through that information. Like those are the real dangers why

Christopher Mitchell (52:14)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (52:15)
we should never allow these companies into our homes, let alone our cities, you know. But

That's my two cents. And you can build it. It's not complicated technology, especially with AI coding agents today. That's a game changer, I think, for every local government today. If this was happening, and it was happening right on the tail end of my leaving government, right? But but like if this if I had the tools I have today that I do my job with today, back when I was a CTO, I would have three people on my special projects team, and that was it, instead of like the six or

seven that we had, you know, doing everything, right? Those three people could churn out project after project and maintain those things and document them. And you know, another next, you know, mayor, etc., could happen, but it doesn't matter now because AI can read that code and read that documentation and maintain, which I'm sure is like a whole nother topic, AI and government, but

Christopher Mitchell (53:12)
Well, I'm I I do I think I wanna

have you back on to talk more about that. Cause I'm I'm curious.

Keith Hanson (53:16)
Awesome.

Christopher Mitchell (53:17)
I mean, you you've seen like the I'm sure you've seen the the reels of some of the programmers talking about like, yeah, AI doesn't. It's like the train that like runs off the track and then like it like finds its way back onto the track and it's like going around and it's like and like, you know, there's a question of like, I mean, I've I've known people back when I used to program that that was how they got things done also. So it's not necessarily a big change.

Keith Hanson (53:36)
Exa I I would say I yeah,

I just like we see bad behavior in AI, developers have been exhibiting bad behavior for quite a while, right? So,

Christopher Mitchell (53:46)
Yeah.

Keith Hanson (53:47)
you know, I'm not trying to paint AI into like some silver bullet picture here. It's not. You need skilled practitioners guiding those things for sure. but it is massively useful, right? I am not

Christopher Mitchell (54:03)
Yeah, no, and I think that that the the point

about documentation is huge too. I just feel like for that continuity, that's one of the things that is really great.

Keith Hanson (54:10)
Exactly.

I agree. I agree.

Christopher Mitchell (54:15)
Well, Keith, it's been wonderful checking in with you and we'll probably try to find you a

Keith Hanson (54:18)
Yeah, absolutely.

Christopher Mitchell (54:19)
way to get you back on here before too long. We don't want to turn this show into AI, AI, AI, but there's certainly

Keith Hanson (54:24)
Ha ha.

Christopher Mitchell (54:24)
areas in which it overlaps. So thank you.

Keith Hanson (54:26)
Yeah, I think there's some good

basics that you can deploy without much fear. And then, you know, there's some good guardrails you can put in place as developers building a thing. And, you know, just because you're using those tools does not mean you can just deploy it, right? Like all of

Christopher Mitchell (54:43)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Hanson (54:43)
the same software development lifecycle practices apply still today. So.

Christopher Mitchell (54:51)
All right. Well, thank you so much today for today.

Keith Hanson (54:53)
Yeah, absolutely.

Jordan Pittman (54:55)
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Unbuffered Podcast. We have transcripts for this and other episodes available at ILSR.org/podcast. While you're there, check out our other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcasts. Email us at [email protected] with your ideas for the show. Follow us on Bluesky. Our handle is @communitynets.

You can catch the latest research from all of our initiatives by subscribing to our monthly newsletter at ILSR.org While you're there, please take a moment to donate. Your support in any amount helps keep us going. Unbuffered is produced

by Christopher Mitchell with editing provided by me, Jordan Pittman. Special thanks to Riverside for providing the song Caveman. Until next time, thanks for listening.