 Hey everyone, my name is Matt Roots. I use he and pronouns and I'm actually with an organization called Tech Equity Collaborative on Ten of Protections.org. It's the program that I'm going to be talking about today. We are a non-profit that addresses inequities within the tech industry and also created by the tech economy. And I run a program, a civic tech program. So we do advocacy, we do member organizing and we do education. And I run a civic tech program within Tech Equity where I work with volunteers to develop web apps, visualizations, other tools that work with the initiatives that we're working on. So specifically talking about Ten of Protections.org today, this is a web app that is helping California renters navigate the landscape of local and statewide laws to figure out what they're eligible for, whether their landlord may have raised their rent illegally. So a little bit of background on rent control in California. The Ten of Protection Act was passed in 2019 and that extended a cap to people who qualify statewide. And based on estimates, we think that that extended some form of rent cap to approximately 8 million people in California. Got 40 million people in the state, about 45% of us are renters. So that's a lot of people that then got covered by rent control. There's also, going back much further, there's about 25 municipalities in California that have local ordinance. Typically the way it works is the local ordinance will cover fewer people and have a lower cap on the maximum amount that landlords can raise that rent. While the statewide ordinance is kind of a wider net, like I said, it's extended to 8 million people weren't previously covered, but that caps a lot higher on the statewide. And one thing we see is with those local ordinances, they're very specific. So, you know, those eligibility requirements are different in every municipality. It's often very confusing whether you're covered or not. And, you know, different municipalities have different levels of kind of clarity on how they document and present that information on their city website or whatever. It can be really hard to tell or to know just by Googling it depending where you live, whether you're covered or not. So we built this app to help people figure that out. So, very simple web app that we built here. We've got an eligibility quiz. We've got a rent calculator and then we've got just some links to resources. And what we were really prioritizing when we were designing this was that it would be fast, simple, lightweight, easy to use. We really want to make this as accessible as possible, knowing that, you know, renters come all up and down the kind of socioeconomic spectrum. And we wanted to really hide some of these complex eligibility requirements from the users. And then everything that is developed with my volunteer team is open source. We try to make stuff as maintainable as possible. So we built a really simple app here and I'm going to show a couple of screenshots. I don't, I think the screenshots didn't come through too well here, but just to get an idea of what the app looks like. You've got your landing page. I was trying to give you a, give you a sense of some of the questions we asked. When was your building built? What type of building do you live in? And, you know, they just ask you a few questions and tries to then distill kind of all that stuff into, into that quiz and then tell you what it thinks you're eligible for. So whether that's statewide or local. And then we've got also the, and the rent calculator, again, it's a very simple thing where you just, you can enter your current rent, your, your last rent increase and it will tell you whether it thinks that you are eligible or not for, or whether that, that rent increase was legal or legal. Just want to real quick talk about some of the challenges here. You know, I think research was actually, we really underestimated the research lit on this. And so we worked with an organization called ACE, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment to do that research and kind of take all those laws and turn them into a matrix that we could then spit out into just a file that we could run, you know, run those checks against. And the other thing I'll say about it is that, you know, we ended up with a really simple app here, but I think you can't really underestimate how navigating some of eligibility and bureaucracy, just how a little bit of help for folks can actually go a really long way. And so we've had really, really good kind of feedback on, on this app that it, that it's really helped folks understand, understand the laws.