Abby Covert Greetings IA friends and mentors. I am speaking to you today from sunny Melbourne, Florida. Now I have to start by acknowledging the elephant in this virtual room. This is not how any of us expected this event to go. Heck, this is not the way any of us expected this year to go. Abby Covert We are living through what will likely be referred to as one of the darkest times in our collective history. People are dying all around us and there's nothing that most of us can do except follow directions, stay home, wash our hands. And add to that many if not most of us have had to change how our lives are fundamentally arranged. We've had to make incredible sacrifices to make sense of what we're experiencing both collectively and individually. Abby Covert Now I can say that for me, these weeks have felt like months, and somehow the days have felt like seconds. I guess I just can't place myself in relationship to time as easily right now, and that's a really anxious place to be. And yet, I'm here today to talk to you about information architecture in spite of the current situation. Now to be honest, in every version that I imagined of today, it never occurred to me that my today would actually need to be transcluded into your today. Another inspiring moment in the progress of technology, I suppose. Abby Covert Six months ago, I started to think about the subject of this talk. And I landed on a topic that, let's say it's been interesting to reflect on in light of the happenings in the world today. The topic I chose was persistence. When I look at what this community and specifically the team that runs this event has had to persist through, it leaves me breathless. So before I get too far, I want to take a pause and just sit with those complexities. All the things that this team had to work through to get us to this day. And I want to say thank you. Thank you to all of you that persisted through this incredibly difficult time. Thank you for prioritizing the needs of this community over what I am sure are your family's needs and wants. Abby Covert To be honest, after some consideration, I can actually think of no better time to talk about the concept of persistence than in a time such as the one that we're currently facing. Abby Covert So my talk starts from the recognition of the persistence of this community, the information architecture community, the one that gathers at this event once a year to compare notes on the ways in which the world is reacting to and interacting with this thing that we all hold space for in our professional identities. Abby Covert We have seen the need to persist in spite of many trends and forces over the two decades that this event has been taking place. And what we have waded through has been messy and not at all simple to make sense of. Now many of the people in this virtual room not bound by time will recognize the story that I'm about to tell. But some of you might be hearing this for the very first time. Abby Covert This community has had to persist through some pretty big periods of pushback. Times where our day to day jobs stayed exactly the same while the words to describe those jobs started to become more and more slippery. The boundaries around things became harder and harder to hang on to. Abby Covert I remember a time not all that long ago where it felt like everyone around me was encouraging me to give up on information architecture. Just give up on the term and just keep doing the work, they said. Abby Covert First, I was told that IA wouldn't be needed because web 2.0 and asynchronous JavaScript calls we're eliminating the need for navigation entirely. Now this perspective, presuppose that IA is just navigation, which is its own whole thing. But in this period of pushback, it was really commonly believed that rich internet applications would make such a great user experience possible, that IA would simply not be as needed because the experience wouldn't have to be parceled out into pieces at all. Everything would just be instant. The next period of pushback was when we were told that we didn't need IA because modern search engines were getting so attuned to human needs that machines would do a much better job at my job than me. Everything would be findable. Abby Covert Next, it was mobile. IA wouldn't be needed because screens were getting smaller. So teams would just be forced to have less stuff to organize so everything would just be tiny. And then when teams didn't seem to get the memo about having less stuff to organize, everything became tiny hamburgers. Then it was social media that would eliminate the need for IA. No one would need IA since businesses were just operating within the confines of a platform's IA decision. Everything was the stream. Everything would be social. Abby Covert Next up was apps. Everyone needed an app, but apps are all the same, right? No IA would be needed because all we needed to do was copy the other apps and then adjust the structure for whatever we were designing. The Shazam of car insurance, the Google Maps of shoe shopping, the Angry Birds of retirement investment planning. Please go ahead and raise your hand in your home loan today if you were ever in a meeting where any of those ideas were actually considered circa 2011, even if just in jest. Now if you worked in agency land, you might have had the pleasure to attend meetings involving all three. Everything would be a walled garden that mirrored other people's walled gardens. Abby Covert And most recently, it was agile and all things Silicon Valley startup culture. We didn't need IA since all we wanted to do was move fast and break things. We needed to move too fast to think about things like language and structure. We needed to make things fast so we could get feedback fast. So surely the right information architecture would just be iterated into existence. Everything would be autonomous and broken. But it would be first to market. Now, if you're attending the IA Conference in 2020, chances are that you entered the working world in enough time to have experienced one or more of these periods of pushback. Now, the last couple years, they've been hard for those of us who have positioned ourselves as information architecture specialists. Abby Covert We have watched the IA job title fade almost entirely. We've watched an entire generation of UX designers doing IA work, many of whom are doing so without knowing anything about IA's history, or even knowing the term information architecture. And these UX designers they have worked with a whole generation of product managers and engineers and researchers who have also not been exposed to these theories, practices, and language of information architecture. Abby Covert We've watched companies stop seeing a need to request IA services from external consultancies and agencies. And if you really want to have a bummer of a day, just look up information architecture on Google Trends. To be honest friends, this has been hard to be a part of. There have been times where I felt like my own self esteem had become far too tied to the success of my field of practice. And I am sure that I am not the only one who feels that way. In reality, everything I know about IA tells me that it is A) a thing and B) important. And every project that I have ever touched with my IA skillset has been better for it. Every conversation I have ever had about IA has given me fodder for a seemingly endless appetite for figuring out the world and making it a clearer place. Abby Covert And yet, and yet I wake up every day and worried that what I do for a living, what I use to support my family, what I spend my free time reading, writing, and speaking about is not a thing at all. Or even worse, that it is a thing that is just not important or of value to other people. This makes me feel isolated on the best of days and completely crazy on the worst. Is it still called gaslighting if you are the one holding the match? Abby Covert Now, I don't think that this is my story alone. I think there are a lot of you out there who have had the same feelings that I'm having. Many of you have moved on in terms of job title admitting amongst your IA tribe once a year that yes, you still do IA work but that your company just prefers that you call it UX architecture, or navigation design, or UX strategy. And to be crystal clear, I have absolutely no problem with that. In fact, I applaud you for rolling with the punches and doing this hard IA work in the face of the pushback from our end users. That said, it sometimes makes me laugh to make comparisons to other professions. Would they ever ask a lawyer to just not call it that? Perhaps they could be better labeled as an argument maker. Perhaps we would see more value in a librarian if we call them a book finder. And I know that I personally would appreciate the expertise of my acupuncturist a bit more if he just allowed me to call him my needle sticker. Abby Covert Now, my point with these absurd examples is to show you that in few other cases are other people telling a whole industry of people who are fields in a practice to call themselves something different. But this isn't happening to lawyers and librarians and acupuncturists. This is happening to us, the ones who pride themselves on helping people to make sense of things. This is not an ironic observation. This is a proof point about what we are good at. We always want to be clear and the term IA doesn't feel like it's able to be immediately clear to people. So of course we're okay with iterating on our label until our services are findable and the work can progress. You see, information architects are persistent in our practice, even if it ultimately ends our ability to identify our practice with one another. Now, it has only recently occurred to me that the people who lose the most in the current arrangement of practice IA but call it something different is this community. Abby Covert So is it too late? Is that all doom and gloom? Is IA a thing of the past that we'll all look back on fondly as a thing that faded along with the web trends of the early aughts? Will I be walking off this virtual stage and finally changing my Twitter handle to Abby, the box and arrow maker? Well, not so fast. You see, friends, this is where the story gets interesting. Abby Covert What happens when the world that these circumstances built turn into a full stack of persistent structural deficiencies? What happens when suddenly organizations are feeling that pain with no name that might feel familiar, but only to those who survived the.com bust of the late 90s? What do organizations need when suddenly everything is expected to be instant, findable, tiny, and social, but all you have are walled gardens that were built autonomously? What happens when the world is then facing an unprecedented pressure to change the way it fundamentally operates? And that world turns to those organizations who have been built with the mindset to move fast and break things? The answer is that the thing that they need is the thing that they have been pushing away for the last 20 years. They need structure. They need governance. They need clarity. They need sense makers to bring those things to the messes that are growing more complex every day. As my friend Jorge Arango recently reminded me, we were made for this moment. Information Architects are built for this level of VUCA: Volatility. Uncertainty. Complexity. And Ambiguity. They are our base materials from which we can bring to life clarity, intention, and meaning. Abby Covert I spent the first 10 years of my career working mostly agency side and after a decade of dive bombing into organizations to make sense of their information messes, I landed at Etsy in a beautiful mess that I knew would take longer than a single mission to make sense of. And I have learned in the last several years how extruded time is when working in house. I have seen minor problems turn into major missteps. I have watched the impact that people churn has on organizations and their information challenges. And most of all, I have learned how important persistence is in practicing information architecture in these environments. Abby Covert So I want to talk to you today about what I've learned about persistence, and what I've learned about persistent problems, and what makes them so damn hard to make sense of. There's been a lot of talk in this community about wicked problems. And while I find those conversations endlessly fascinating and inspiring about how IA could impact the world in such large ways, I struggle with how I can position myself to support my family while thinking about such wicked problems. But while wicked problems might be the white whale of the information architect's world, persistent problems are more like the car. There is a seemingly endless supply. Every organization is very well stocked. And there is plenty to go around so that everyone can be fed. Abby Covert So what is a persistent problem? It's well tread territory. It's a problem that everyone sees, but no one changes because it is just how we've always done it. And it's messy to think and talk about. It's a problem that holds the organization back, but no one changes it because it's just really hard. And lastly, no one owns it. When no one owns it, no one changes it. So how do persistent problems become persistent? I've identified at least five factors that contribute towards the persistence of problem. Time, attrition, autonomy, boundaries, and my monsters. Abby Covert So let's start with time. Persistent problems are created over time, and they take time to fix. Now time is a material that I have had a lot of interest in exploring over the last several years. One of the main reasons that I decided to close my personal practice to join Etsy was that I had this hypothesis that I just wasn't practicing what I was preaching in terms of collaboration and information architecture, since the longest client engagement I have ever been on was still less than a year. So let's talk about time for a minute. See what I did there? Abby Covert There's a little secret that I have learned that I want to share with you. And that's the mess plus time equals messier. It's true. Every day that you ignore a mess instead of starting to make sense of it, it grows. Now this is an overwhelming reality for many organizations whose messes have been ignored and fed on that lack of attention for years, or even decades. Abby Covert So what happens when an organization has an ever growing mess? When is the right time to start to make sense? Well, that actually begs another litany of questions. How much attention will the Making Sense part take away from business as usual? And who's going to have to stop working on business as usual to focus on this? And how much will this even cost to make sense of and is that actually less than what it's costing us to let it persist? And lastly, is this problem even measurable by measures that we have in place today, which is often not the case. Now, there's another important point here, which is that most organizations are just not set up to tackle problems that break the timescale of the organization. Abby Covert We all have felt Parkinson's Law in action, when amazingly, our work expands to fill the time allotted. And in my experience that fits into the conversation about persistent problems too. Because the timescale of the organization, not the scope of the project, dictates what can and can't be done. So what happens when the time scale of your organization is at odds with the time needed to make sense of a persistent problem? It never gets done. It's like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. We can have the best pitch, we can have put together the best team, we can present the best project plan and we still won't get the support to fix what we need to. Abby Covert Now in some of these cases, we don't get a no. In the best cases, we are greenlit to tackle a small part of the problem or to pilot a potential solution. And in the worst cases, we're actually asked to move faster. And in trying to solve the problem more quickly, we make it messier. Now "move fast break things", while making me queasy, is at least a brutally honest retort. Because if you move fast, you will break things. And if you were only ever moving fast, you will probably never fix things. Abby Covert I often wonder what the world would be like if we thought more like "move slow, fix things". What would it be like if we were actually given the resources and runway to fix the persistent problems around us. To move slowly and deliberately and most importantly, to collectively admit that we are not going to get there anytime soon, but at least we might have a chance to get there. Simply put persistent problems are created over time. They don't appear one day out of nowhere. They are the result of lots of tiny decisions that are made over time. So to think that they will be solved without being given adequate time is a fool's errand. And it's one that many of us, myself included, have attempted at points in our careers. Abby Covert So let's talk about attrition. People leave, messes stay. How many of you have been in your current role for more than a year? How about three years, or five or 10 or 15? Abby Covert The truth is that people leave organizations all the time. The average turnover in the design and tech world is said to be only around two years. That means that in a typical organization, there are just not that many people who are going to stick around long enough to work through a persistent problem. And to make matters worse, when people don't stick around, they have no incentive to fix things that are broken. They have every incentive instead to work on whatever will get them the next job in the time that they have. Abby Covert I was recently talking with someone who has been taking on a large persistent problem for the last year in their organization. And when they got about three months in their product manager confided in them that their peers had started to poke fun at them for taking on this lofty, messy, under-the-surface project. In their world, taking on something that is clear and able to be time bound is the surest way to their next role. This person was really struggling with going against that grain. And as the project continued, many of the members on her team started to feel that same way. That othering moment of feeling different than the rest of your organization. Abby Covert Now one of the most important tools that we need when tackling a persistent problem is a shared understanding. But it is incredibly hard to foster a shared understanding, especially if something complex when people are coming in and out all the time. It also becomes a reality that the people that know the most about the problem space are like ticking time bombs, waiting to resign and immediately purge all of their nuanced understanding in their brain. When I was consulting, I often had to explain to my clients that they were merely renting space in my brain and that I wouldn't be offering any long term storage options. But it always amazed me how fast the details would float away after the engagement was over. And employees are the same way. Once they're gone, they take a lot with them. And they also leave the messes that they helped to make behind. So persistent problems are aided in their persistence by attrition and turnover. And if according to INC. magazine, the average tech employee only stays around 2.1 years, and the average persistent problem takes more than that to truly work through, well, you can do the math. Abby Covert I know it wouldn't be an IA talk if we didn't talk about silos. So let's talk about accountability for a second. There's this concept called the tragedy of the commons that I find incredibly applicable to many organizations. The tragedy of the commons is when people acting independently based on their own incentives deplete the thing they're working on through their collective action. In other words, persistent problems are kind of a death by 1000 cuts. No one sets out to make a decision that will deplete the organization, and yet. In fact, the key parts of the definition here are that they're acting individually. They're acting based on how they are incentivized. And that depletion, that happens through collective action. It is when all of the actions pile on to each other that the persistent problems arise. So we have to remember in dealing with persistent problems, that autonomy can be like kryptonite. We're drawn to its powers yet we are depleted collectively by that power. Persistent problems grow in environments where everyone is doing their own thing based on their own self interest and no one owns the collective action. Abby Covert While we're on the topic of silos, let's not forget how boundaries play into persistent problems. Toes get stepped. Turfs are warred over. Bucks are often passed. When it comes to persistent problems, there is this organizational phenomenon where no one cares about something until you want to change it. Then they care a whole lot about it. Because change can be very threatening. And in the case of persistent problems, they exist because of, or despite, everyone's efforts. Someone put that thing there. Someone decided those eleventy billion tiny decisions that got us here. So don't be surprised when you start to identify a persistent problem, that defensiveness rears its ugly head, Abby Covert Now defensiveness, that's a human condition. It's this protective mechanism that we use when we feel threatened. And it is rabid in most organizations and caustic in its impact on an organization's ability to tackle persistent problems. So do you know when you're being defensive? Can you feel it? Does it have a somatic element? I know it does for me, and the identification of that,in the moment has been a gift in trying to make sense of persistent problems. Because now that I've been at the same company for several years, that defensiveness is something that I am having to pay specific attention to in myself. For now, there are new people edging in on the boundaries of what I myself have created in past lives, and past incentivization structures. Abby Covert An organization is sort of like land. Every piece has a lineage, a history, and often an owner. But persistent problems, they don't abide by turf boundaries as much as we would wish them to. This is made even worse when the lines blur, or even are erased and re-drawn altogehter, maybe several times over time. I know that I'm not alone in being part of an organization that sees at least one major re-org every year. Everything in an organization's past happend because, reasons. Sometimes it's our job to figure out those reasons and confront them from the light of a new circumstance. But when it comes to organizational apologetics, the blame game is one of people's favorite pastimes when it comes to avoiding making sense of a persistent problem. Well, if so and so would have listened back then we wouldn't be in this pickle. We could have tackled this sooner if it wasn't for that thing that that other group did last quarter. We can't fix that until that team gets their ducks in a row. And my favorite. Well, if HR would just fill all of our recs, we might be able to actually start working on this. Abby Covert Have you ever had a time where your office or your house got like out of control messy? And for days or maybe weeks you avoided tackling it becuase it was just so messy? And then you finally tackle it only to find out that it really only took you 20 minutes? Or how about a conversation that you've been avoiding? Have you ever built up a moment in your head so long that it actually prolonged you actually dealing with it? We've all been there. And the same is true for persistent problems in organizations. It can feel so scary in our heads. It can feel imposible, overwhelming, and oh so scary to even start to unravel. But here's the truth. Monsters are always scarier in our heads. Once we start to get them out of our heads and start to share the view of them with other people, they become less scary. These mind monsters feed on our isolation. They lurk in the darkest corners of our mind, jumping out at us at absolutely the wrong times. So how can we persist against these problems that defy timescales and feed on attrition and autonomy? How do we even start to think about going after these monsters in our mind? Abby Covert I want to start with a skill that I don't think gets talked about enough in the work that we do. That skill is bravery. Now stay with me here. I anticipate that some of you might be feeling like this talk is starting to take a sharp turn towards the woo woo. But hear me out. In my experience, those who are practicing information architecture are the ones who are walking into messy situations that are fraught with historical context, a variety of personalities, and various levels of ambiguity, complexity and unrest. This is scary. Let's just all sit with that admittance for a few seconds. This is scary. The work that we do can be scary and to tackle that work, we need to be brave. You have to be brave to point out a problem that no one else seems to see clearly. You have to be brave to start to sort out something that the people around you might assume is un-sort-out-able. You have to be brave to ask hard questions. You have to be brave to push back when you see a train wreck approaching. And you have to be brave to make sense of persistent problems. Abby Covert One of the first steps of bravery that you can take when facing a persistent problem is to draw a picture of that monster that your team has lurking around in their heads. This is brave because once we put pencil to paper, mouse to screen, we've already decided to try to make sense. Bravery is what gets us ready to make sense. And it continues to amaze me how even the most basic scribble can move a team from terrified of starting, to we got this. Have you ever been in one of those moments? The discussion is getting harder and harder. People are starting to push away from the table. They're sighing loudly. Maybe somebody started pacing or rubbing their eyes while leaning back in their chair. And at that moment everyone is scared. They're scared that it is their job to talk about and do this hard thing that they do not yet understand. They're scared that the thing that they need to sort out might no be sort-out-able. And they're scared at the thought of a future where this problem isn't solved but it needs to be. In this moment, the bravest thing that someone can do is grab that marker, walk up to that whiteboard or that piece of paper, and start to break things down so that they can be pointed at, discussed, and considered in the light of day. Abby Covert Who here likes being right? I know for me, the feeling of being right is like a warm cup of cocoa with marshmallows. It's so sweet. It warms me up inside and I enjoy every drop. You know what totally gets in the way of being a team player? An overwhelming need to be right. But I'm an expert. They pay me to be right, you might be thinking. Now in my career, I've had that feeling. Early in my career I had that feeling all of the time. But it's interesting. Because the more experience that I get in IA, the less I feel like an expert. Coincidence? I don't think so. I think that sometimes we hide behind our expertise, when really what we have is an overwhelming need to be right. And if you really break that down, it's a symptom of a much nastier disease. It's a reflection of our professional self esteem. Abby Covert So what do you do if you are the outlier on a decision being made by your team? Let's say that I am working on a new taxonomy, and the team wants to call one of the top level buckets something dumb. Let's say I don't know just for the story they want to call it um, "More". Now in this case, I would use my three times at bat rule. I will try three different tactics to try to convince the team not to do this. The first time up at bat I might suggest that we do a tree jack A/B to see how well "More" performs compared with my alternative label. Let's say that all seven of our test participants struggled with the label "More" and that my fault label performed much better. But guess what? The team still wants to go with more, because reasons. Now my second time at bat, I might dig up some articles and white papers about the value of clear navigation labeling, and discuss my concerns with the team through the lens of what other people in the industry are saying. Let's say that in this meeting, my team instead makes it clear that our product is unique and therefore, any comparison that I could make is just not worth making. Hmm. Abby Covert My third and final time at bat I will escalate, synthesize, reflect, and let go. I will say very clearly in both writing and in the meeting that I have provided you with both industry and user feedback that supports "More" being the less clear label for this. Next I will tell them what I see as the ramifications of this decision. And then I will say, Are you sure that given this information, we would like to proceed? And if they say yep, I will fall back. I will be a team player. I won't sulk. I won't shit talk. And most importantly, I won't do the told-you-so dance when the fire drill to change the label comes down from on high. Because the only thing worse than a person who has an overwhelming need to be right is the person who does the told-yau-so dance. Abby Covert Now let's return to the question of expertise. Isn't it my job to keep them from making this decision so wrongly? For a long time, I saw a clear yes to this question. But after all these years of doing this kind of work, I'm starting to think differently. After years of trying to be right all of the time, I realized it makes me hard to work with. It means teams will be less willing to collaborate with me. It also means that I will be training my team that they don't need to care about the IA because I will always do that for them. In reality, I want them to care. I need them to care so that we can get to the right solution. By positioning myself as a person who will provide a reasonable approach to proving my case, while also making it clear that I am willing to set aside being right, I am telling my team that they can trust me. They can trust me to work through hard things alongside them, not just point out the flaws of their approach in an effort to make my approach rise above theirs. So the next time you're in a disagreement about how to proceed, ask yourself how many times you've gone up to bat. Ask yourself if you've tried different approaches each time or if you're just a broken record in your team's ears. Because you need their trust as much if not more than you need their agreement. Abby Covert And this brings us to partnership. My best advice here is be sneaky, find advocates in unusual places. One of the hardest things about persistent problems is finding the right partners to build the case. Now, I have found that the most obvious owners for one of these persistent problems is sometimes not actually the best partner to start making sense with. In many cases, the most obvious owner is actually the main purveyor of the persistent problem. And if not the main purveyor there at least the one who is most actively ignoring and working around the problem day in and day out. In these cases, finding other partners, maybe non obvious or even unusual partners is a powerful tactic that you can explore. Abby Covert Some of you might remember when Jenny Benevento and I talked at the IA Summit in Chicago about how we approach the refresh of the global navigation of categories at Etsy. We hadn't improved our category navigation in more than three years. And we just added and added and added links to the point where those poor mega menus were just so heavy that users reported feeling overwhelmed and they started to not even know what we meant as a brand. Now, the obvious owners for such a problem would be product, right? But time and time again, the funding for improving the navigation was thwarted. It was the thing that everyone knew needed to get done eventually, but it just seemed really big and hard to attach to financial ROI, so product just kept not doing it for years. But then one day, I got a meeting invite from someone on the SEO team, and they wanted to talk with me about reducing the navigation by 50% because other retailers had seen major SEO returns from having done so. Suddenly, there was daylight on this persistent problem. And while the Ask was slightly different, the task at hand was exactly the same. So we took the project and used an unlikely partner to see the project under a different marquee. Persistent problems sometimes need us to break the traditions of how things get done. Hence the aforementioned overwhelming need for bravery. Abby Covert The most important and overlooked tool in our tool belt that is needed when dealing with persistent problems, is kindness. Which is in my humble opinion, the basis for all cooperation. We can't cooperate without first being kind. We must build trusting relationships with those around us to make the world go round. We must foster those relationships based on a shared respect for each other's practices. We must stop the blame game, the shit talking, the finger pointing and turn inward. We must look at others through the lens of assuming best intentions. And lastly, and most importantly, we must be kind to ourselves. Pandemic or no, you are each facing a unique combination of trends and forces that are causing a lifetime worth of joy, pain, and anger. Be kind to yourself as you pursue your work making sense of messes for yourself or for others. And remember that the journey that you're on just isn't all that predictable. Abby Covert When I was gathering the bravery to deliver this talk in these new circumstances, my friend Jorge Arango reminded me about the importance of resilience when it comes to persistent work. Like someone floating over the edge of a waterfall, if you relax your way through it, you'll be fine. And you know what, Jorge? Today, I am fine. Abby Covert So I hope my thoughts on persistent problems have been useful to you in whatever messes you might be facing at this incredibly strange time to be doing pretty much anything at all. I hope that I gave you some new frames to look at some of our collective challenges through. And I hope that I left you with a feeling that persistent problems can be persisted through. They just take bravery and trust, partnership and kindness, to make sense of. So sure, mess plus time equals messier. And it's a very scary reality. But I am starting to believe that mess plus bravery, trust, partnership, and kindness, multiplied by the gift of time equals a clearer future. The time given to us to work on persistent problems often feels so far out of our control. But if we look to the rest of this equation, we are in much more control than we might have thought. Abby Covert It has been an honor to speak to you today, even in this very weird medium. This community has been like a family to me over the last decade. And the idea that you all see my words as wise is one of the things that I am the most proud of in my life. We are a resilient group of people working on a really important persistent problem. So let's continue to be persistent towards our goal to make the world a clearer place. Abby Covert Thank you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai