After a week of reading about air quality, this week I started speaking with people who work on it. I began with conversations with eGov's software engineering team and with a former state official. Having just learned the subject from documents, I was nervous about whether I would ask good questions. I prepared by following the approach I had committed to in Week 1: open with questions about the person's own work, challenges, and goals, explain clearly what my project was and was not, and introduce AI only after I understood the problem it was supposed to help with.

Those conversations changed how I read everything else. Reports describe institutions as they are designed, but the people I spoke with described them as they operate, with competing priorities, limited staff, and data that is incomplete or hard to share. The engineers helped me understand what building technology for public use demands in practice. The former official gave me a sense of how decisions move, or fail to move, within government. Together they gave me a more grounded view of a theme I had seen in my reading, that the difficulty in air quality is often less about knowing what to do than about having the data, capacity, and mechanisms to act on it.

I also paid attention to how I was listening. I tried to ask shorter questions, leave room for silence, and resist the pull to show that I already understood the subject, because I wanted to hear each person's priorities and not simply confirm my own.

The tangible outcome of this week was a first set of grounded observations that I could compare against my reading, along with notes that I began organizing by theme. I also became more aware of whose voices I was and was not hearing. The people I had spoken with so far were close to technology and government. The communities who breathe the polluted air were not yet part of my conversations.

The Laidlaw attribute most visible this week was empathy and active listening, which was no longer an intention but a practice that I could evaluate and improve. Courage played a part as well, because it takes some of it to ask experienced people simple questions. Humility continued to matter, since each conversation showed me how much I did not yet know.

My role shifted this week from reader to researcher. I was still learning, but I was also beginning to gather evidence that others at eGov might use.

Next week, I will continue my conversations, with a focus on the policy and funding perspectives, and I will start thinking systematically about who else should be part of this conversation and who is missing from it.