Good morning Jayagruti. How are you? All set for your, what is the date of your interview? 10th of September sir. Oh so you have got just not too much of time no? Yes sir. Not very much of time. So you have specialized in electrical engineering and you worked for two years in BHEL you know? Yes sir. Two years you were there. What were you doing? Can you tell us a little bit about your experience in a public sector and you know? Sir in two years, first year was spent in training and induction program and when I was permanently posted there I worked as a purchase executor in material management for Transformers division. I see and what is your general view because you know these were all the Navratnas. What is your view of the public sector and are they really useful now with all the disinvestment going on? Have they lost their utilities? Is it better to go in for public-private partnership, monetize them, get the money for other development things or are they worth continuing in a limited way? What is your take on this whole public sector management and policy in India as a young executive? Sir in my opinion public sectors and strategic sectors which fulfill certain strategic national interests should be retained in public sector like rural electrification corporation. They have a social interest in them. Sir further in other sectors as the government has said that we will retain their minimum so that national interest dimension can be taken care of. Thus we can have disinvestment, we can invite private participation to improve our rate of return on investment. Our private sectors have immense capacity so we need to improve its utilization and I think privatization can help us leverage that. Also there will be challenges which we will have to address in that disinvestment. I see and what about you know what are the main motivations for you? Which attempt is this? Is this your second attempt? This is my second attempt sir. Yeah this is your second attempt. So what is the motivation for you to join the civil service? You are an engineer, BHEL is a good public sector job and what are the motivations and what do you foresee your role as an IAS officer and what do you think you can make a difference given your background? Sir my experiences at BHEL Bhopal gave me a better exposure to these public services in general. They offer us a platform to participate in decision making and to be a direct part of inclusive development in the country. They have a very diverse scope of their functioning so all the sectors I will be able to touch with my services in the sector. So further with my knowledge of electrical engineering and engineering in general I'll have a scientific attitude. I can also work with the engineering related sectors or power related sectors in general because the government is also focusing upon specialization nowadays. So I think my specialization can I can specifically contribute even in those sectors as well sir. Okay now you know I want to ask you about this long pending and this question of this women's reservation bill. It's been going on and on everybody seems to be for it but it's not being passed. What exactly is happening I mean or is it at all required? Is it really fair to the women to have a reservation in parliament on their own? We've had such women leaders who've come up. Is it required or is it not and why is it? What is this whole game that's going on in the name of this women's reservation bill? Sir women contribute towards half of the population of the country yet their political participation especially at the central legislation level it is very meager around 17 percent. Such reservations will ensure that women compulsorily form that at least 33 percent as it is being proposed at least that much participation will be guaranteed statutorily but at the same time such reservation will not be able to address the grassroots challenges because of which women have not been able to enter the political arena. So we will also have to address those challenges parallelly. Okay one last question on the civil services reform. You know now from the Prime Minister onwards everybody is very worried about the quality the lack of motivation the lack of delivery of the civil servants you would have heard about it. So now there is a new scheme so can you tell me about this new scheme that has come in you know this whole thing about you know that has come yeah could you tell me about it please? Sir a scheme Mission Karmiyogi has been launched by the government in order to redesign our civil services structure to meet the changing needs of the government or the changing needs of governance to be specific. They are moving from rules-based to rules-based approach more ground level training is being emphasised. Regular updation of knowledge with respect to technological upgradations and training for different kind of advancements that take place in the country. So it is a envisage to have a more dynamic system of public service in the country. What I would suggest to you is this is very important and this is a question that almost all these UPSC members will ask you because it is very current and very worrisome about the quality of the civil servants. What I would suggest to you is you must be knowing something about this you should thoroughly go into the DOPT website there is a PowerPoint presentation about 18 or 20 points there on this whole Mission Karmiyogi what is it wanting to do various you know online training it's all there. So you know a question like this comes you have to crack it you know you have to give the info this thing that you know this thoroughly so just an advice you just go through it and this is very useful and you know it'll be important yes I will hand it over to Professor Narasimha now to take chat please. Thank you sir you have studied sociology as one of your options right? Yes sir. Sociology okay so in sociology generally when people analyze the artifacts they talk about two categories etic and emic categories have you heard of these things what is etic and what is emic? Sir I'm unable to recall these terms sir. No sir could you please repeat it once again? Etic and emic etic and emic sir I'm unable to recall it sir. These are very two sociological and anthropological knowledge it's also probably used by anthropologists and also by sociologists these two categories are very important when you look at the cultures that for example cultural artifacts a particular culture has a number of artifacts so how do you probably categorize them and that's when these two categories come into play okay and I think you can read about this. I read on that sir. Right okay okay right and as a person from sociology I have at least taken as optional sociology how do you use your training or your knowledge in sociology to address a social tension in an area where you're going to work? Sir my knowledge of sociology has given me information about various background of social tensions that exist today so with that knowledge of background and the current dynamics so I'll be able to utilize that knowledge also sociology does not hold any prejudices towards any community the study is done in a very scientific manner so sir study would help me placate both the sections where tension is going on so I think without any prejudices I'll be able to handle the case on its merit and be able to focus on these tensions. As a sociologist how do you define culture? Sir culture is the set of practices sanctioned within a particular religion which frames the overall lifestyle of a particular community or a religious sect or denomination. It is related to religion only or is it a social thing? Sir it is a social and geographical concept but usually tied with religious values and notions. Not always see you talk about for example I don't know what you talk about in Madhya Pradesh but here we talk about Tamil culture and people talk about American culture it's not always tied to a religion it is something else. Yes sir yes sir I agree. Religion is also part of culture religion also included in the culture it's not culture is not nested in the religion but religion is nested in the culture. Yes sir I would like to correct myself and yes culture develops on its own based on social geographical and religion plays as the part of it. I agree with that sir. Yes and being a sociology student you must also understand what is known as ethnocentrism. Have you come across this term? Yes sir. That is the very very often that ethnocentrism is the major problem between the administrators and the common people. Yes ethnocentrism is one where one's allegiance to her ethnic identity is more important than one's allegiance to a wider national community or a wider community. Okay I think the most simpler is you judge based on your ethnic identity the others and that is actually the problem in many of the cases when you deal with from lower level to higher level administration anywhere not only here right even in the US it's the same issue in developed countries like US and other places. Okay and Madhya Pradesh is also a tribal state. Yes sir. Right in fact that's one of the richest state in India a tribal population and how do you address the issues of tribal in terms of modern development? The tribal population in Madhya Pradesh is in Madhya Pradesh in general or all the tribal populations. No in general Madhya Pradesh you come from Madhya Pradesh you should know your state situation. No sir tribal population in Madhya Pradesh is not homogeneous we need specific plans for specific tribal groups. Some have been sufficiently modernized like Raj Gones in Madhya Pradesh they have political presentation their literacy levels are better so there we need to integrate them with more technological advancements where they are lacking others like Saharya and Saur especially those who constitute particularly vulnerable tribal group we will have to work upon even the grassroots situations like education, health and then creating a niche for them in technological advancements at the local level itself. We can introduce technology for basic minor forest produce so that they gradually integrate with mainstream so we'll have to take different approaches for different groups. Please correct yourself the term minor forest produce is not currently in work they are called non timber forest produce. Yes sir non timber forest produce. So it's an old British term but they are no more minor now they are in fact they are the major revenue source for any of the forest department. Yes sir. Okay thank you. Thank you sir. This is Arina please. Jagrati what's the progress of the scheme switch sort of survection which has been implemented across the country? What's been the progress? Ma'am such a survection judges the different districts in the country based on their performance in such Dharat Abhyan and they give then they a lot of status like ODF status, ODF plus status. In ODF various studies suggest that around 80% of the country has attained this ODF status but ODF plus status or ODF double plus status which also encompasses what is this ODF? Open defecation free that is ODF is about presence of toilets for all households and in public utilities and those are used regularly by the people. When we talk about ODF plus it also involves the management of that waste which is produced by the sanitary facilities and ODF double plus goes a further way in also addressing the challenges around water management in these areas. So ma'am ODF we have been successful but for ODF plus and ODF double plus still only few districts have achieved those status. Any significant outcomes which this survey has provided us with respect to Madhya Pradesh performance? Ma'am Madhya Pradesh has been always there in the top 10 with Indore having the first position for straight three years. Recently I think it went to second position. Mhopal has also been there in top 10. So Madhya Pradesh has been doing fairly well in Sathya Bharata at the end. Indore is it not the first ranked city? Ma'am I think in the latest survey it's left to second position. Okay so what is the benefits which we as different urban local bodies across the country have to learn from this drink from tap mission which Puri has successfully implemented. Are you aware of it? Ma'am I'll have to read on that. I think last week the vice president of US had a very surprise visit I think I could say to Southeast Asia. So what's the significance of her visit and what's been the itinerary to be discussed about? As USA is leaving Afghanistan now they have started correcting their they have started diverting their attention towards Southeast and Indo-Pacific and also reiterating itself as global leader by projecting itself as a character of rules based order in the Indo-Pacific especially against Chinese aggression. So in South China's dispute it has said that it will stand up with various countries against any kind of imperialistic outreaches of China. So it is an effort to reassert the global leadership status that US enjoys. I think you have your engineering background and the experience at Bell. Have you ever thought of what's the kind of emission and the influence which the sector as per say the electronic industry or a particular industry as such is contributing to the environmental degradation? Ma'am electronics industry? Yes. Ma'am electronics industry with respect to emissions they are power intensive so usually the thermal power which is supplied is consumed by them. Ma'am further environmentally they use many kinds of metals and minerals in their processing which are not treated before they are discharged. So these two issues need to be handled. Ma'am electronic industry in general is a low power industry. So although manufacturing has a lot of power intensive operations the output as such are not polluting in their nature. So the processing has to be tackle for electronics industry. For any kind of any facts related to lead and arsenic have you come across any significant discussions related to lead and arsenic which we should be concerned about or we should be Ma'am the concentration of arsenic has been found beyond the normal tolerable levels especially in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal region while lead concentrations have also increased in the groundwater and surface water as well. So this is now entering food chains as this water is utilized for irrigation and for drinking water purposes which has the health impacts upon the community. Is there any act which concerns specifically about lead and arsenic? Ma'am I can take a guess but I'm not sure about that. Is it environmental protection no resource conservation and recovery act? It's okay just just okay and that's it. Mr Pandiraj, I think you can point him. Yes, thank you sir. Mr Jaaprikeli like it seems like you are interested in music especially the Mandir Gandhi music like can you please elaborate on the evolution of the music? How are you attracted towards that music? Sir will you please pass in? Yes sir, a little louder sir. I could see you are interested in the music actually like can you please elaborate on the evolution of that particular stream of music and what attracted you towards that music? Sir the evolution of music it spreads to the evolution of various dialects in the 15th 16th century. One stream of Brij Bahasa developed into Bundelkhandi in the region of Bundelkhandi Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. The Bundela Rajput rulers of the region patronized this music and various local communities contributed to it. Certain writers like Ishwari and Jaganik they have also contributed towards its evolution. Today it is a source of great sociological knowledge about the region as it solely deals with the social issues. What attracted you towards that music? Sir I was born in that region of Bundelkhandi so ever since my childhood I have heard it and as I said that it has a lot of social issues attached to it especially regarding women. So it is a great source to know the social challenges of the region. Okay and like you are from Madhya Pradesh and the Chattisgarh was carved out of Madhya Pradesh and made it as a state and it is almost at 20 years now. Now it is a 20 years significant period to analyze progress or otherwise whether it has made the objective or not. Like can you please throw some light on it like whether it has made the aspirations of the people of Chattisgarh or it's still the work in progress? Sir the division into Chattisgarh it has helped in fulfilling the political aspirations of the people of Chattisgarh. While it was a part of Madhya Pradesh the positions of chief minister would rarely go to the people of that region. So political aspirations now are being better fulfilled. Sir targeted focus now since Chattisgarh has many marginalized communities. So targeted focus has resulted in improvement in social and health indicators. But at the same time at the same time certain issues like tribal extremism in Chattisgarh is still prevalent and grass root development has not taken place especially with respect to economic indicators. And you are from Madhya Pradesh and it is having a lot of foreign entry and how was it performed in ensuring the implementation of forest rights act? Sir forest rights act has received mixed response in Madhya Pradesh. Certain tribal groups and forest dwellers who were in possession of their ownership rights have been able to benefit. Those who were dislocated from their places of dwelling from forest especially in the Anupur Shahidol region which is coal rich they are yet to get benefits of this act. So tribes who have had their ownership rights especially in the forest rich regions they have benefited but some of them have not. Earlier you were working under public sector undertaking. What is your opinion about Charis coming down and now we are more handing over all the projects towards investment work? What is your call on that? Sir do you please repeat sir? I think some problem with your audio. Mr Pandiraj I think you can switch off your video so that your audio would be with the better. Okay and my question was like earlier you were working in the PSU what is your opinion about this investment of there is a trend that being we can observe it.  Like what is your call on that? Like is it a right trend or like we should continue this investment or we should retain the stake in all these public sector undertakings? Sir your voice is breaking Pandiraj sir it's not continuous and clear. It's not yeah I think there's some problem with your audio Pandiraj and it doesn't matter I think we can now Yes sir I look into that I'm done sir. Okay thank you. So Jagrati we just give you a little feedback Jagrati based on can you hear me Jagrati? Yes sir. Yeah I'll just give you some feedback. I think you've done very well. You come out as a very intelligent smart young person and I don't see any reason why you should not get more than 60-65% in the interview. So the important thing is to see how you can go beyond that you know to 70-75%. So you know one of the questions and easy one is why do you want to get into the IAS? You know this is there are enough answers to this but you have to have something that makes it impactful. So I think one of the things the strong things that you have is you have an engineering background. So you should clearly say that today the entire governance is going on the internet on digital on technology and this is where I can make a great difference because and I think 60-70% are online on government that are using of AI big data. You should constantly give an imprint that you have a tech edge which would you know you have said it but you have to articulate that technology and on women's issues you should read up a little so that that is again a question that you can crack you know on the kind of things and when you are asked a thing about somewhere you must also bring in the thing about your little experience and in the rural areas you must have spent some time in the rural areas like you said Bundelkhand. So you must say that this gave you an exposure to the underprivileged the people there the women's their issues and I had a desire that if I get into service I would be able to do something there. So these two three this is more a very subtle PR but which will go down well with these people. So this is just a few tips which I find that is very important to get the right thing. So these otherwise you are good to go you are just read up the general knowledge things and all the usual foreign policy things which will keep coming up Taliban this China this that the usual ones but try to go behind the news what is happening everybody knows but some discussion on that some conversation on that on foreign policy what is happening and all that try to be conversationalist that's it. Yes, Professor Narseeman. Thank you sir. Jaygurthi I think one of the plus point is that you are very cheerful. So I think that should add to your performance and you have answered most of the questions very well except in your own subject area where you need to probably brush up little more with regard to the basics right and what I asked is a very basic one so you should brush up little more and I think with that probably you should be able to do very well all the best. Thank you sir. Thank you I think you will do very well and wish you all the best. Thank you sir.


Thank you all for braving the tsunami for one of the best last talks of the conference. This is the talk on Sotoshi has no clothes. What about Zabo? So do we need privacy for smart contracts? I sort of started about thinking about this because everyone Sort of understands that you want privacy for money for some reasons that the problem for cryptocurrencies is That they are basically Twitter for your bank account Expose all of your spending details to everybody right your creepy ex-girlfriend or boyfriend your business competitors Literally everybody so this is a thing that was starting to understand these days But it's not clear what the analogy we should draw for smart contracts is it's not exactly clear what we mean by privacy And it's not clear how we could possibly get it, right? So if you know cryptocurrency is Twitter for your bank account You know, what is a smart contract? Well, it could be Twitter for your EC2 account, but EC2 already has that That's Amazon S3 that everyone fails to secure and like leaks all the credit card databases and such So it's not that Twitter for your Tamagotchi clone is a nice description of crypto kitties But doesn't tell you why you care about privacy and similarly Twitter for your Ponzi scheme Well, that doesn't work either so we don't have that kind of analogy But there is an interesting one that I think it's worth mentioning because it's linked to privacy which is you know Smart contracts are like privacy in a different way, right? We have this fail way old problem right so for those of you who you know use Twitter back in the day Twitter broadcasts all your data to everyone and They had the scaling problem where they couldn't handle the massive amount of data that was public And so it turns out that if you could solve whatever it is about privacy in some way for payments And you do it for smart contracts as well You'd actually end up helping scaling in the same way because you'd have less data, right? So something vaguely before figuring out what privacy is these two things are linked, right? If you reduce the amount of information that's out there for everyone to see about you You also reduce the amount of information the network has to deal with So, okay, well, what's a smart contract? Well, okay, I'm a computer scientist I'm about to be a professor at the University of Maryland Next year it's founding scientist Zcash, you know, I tend to try to define things So you can look at a smart contract as a function F on some state S and it takes inputs, you know X and it doesn't update to get you a new state The blockchain checks that all this stuff is enforced. This is really just formalism So you start thinking through this and you start thinking about well, what can we hide? Right, we can hide the inputs that you're calling the smart contract on that's one thing We could hide the actual state of the smart contract That's another thing and then importantly we could hide what the actual smart contract even is so that nobody knows that like Crypto KD's old rock ran, but when we start thinking about it in this way in this sort of dry academic approach We just go what what are we even trying to do here again like this formalism doesn't sort of reflect real life It's not clear what to think about this is not the way you should go about this Right, so the first question is like why does privacy matter for contracts at all, right? And it's hard to give just one reason because unlike, you know payments, right?  We know what Bitcoin was trying to do Smart contracts are everything to everybody, right? There is no one use case. There is no one privacy story I can tell you right For things like actual legal contracts going back to like the Nick Zabber ideas of these things Right, you have some kind of settlement mechanism for an actual like agreement you made between parties It's kind of obvious that you need some form of confidentiality because when businesses sign contractual relationships between each other They don't publish them to everybody the world, right? And so if you really use Smart contracts as part of business relationships then all of a company's business relationships would be public and no business will do that They just won't use these tools that prefer to pay lawyers $400 an hour to do actual contracts that are confidential Right, so that's one use case, right? Another one if you're trying to do DeFi, right? Well, you don't want trading strategies to be public You don't want all the information about how you you're trading what you're doing to be visible to everybody And I think this is probably one of the more compelling use cases for privacy on the blockchain Because we know that finance firms try to get any edge. They possibly can Right, so if you've used Google Maps, right, you know that there's a satellite photo button that you can get satellite photos of the entire Earth, right? Google is not the one financing all the satellites those companies that do commercial satellite photography One of their principal clients is hedge funds Because they buy overhead and help photos to be able to figure out how much forming someone's doing how much business Factory is making how many employees someone has based on who's in the parking lot, right? So these are guys who are willing to build spy satellites to get information about what they're doing on the market So compared to that downloading your blockchain and doing a bunch of analysis is a really easy thing Right, so you need privacy in that setting If you want to do some kind of crazy global computer It's not clear what you're going to do with this what your access policies are But we already know that you don't want your actual computational stuff to be public, right? This is again back to s3 right Amazon leaking everything mistakes happening things getting breached You just you don't want your computer hard drive to be public to the internet, right? Anybody here want to put up their entire hard drive on like that kind of share link to Twitter anybody can read it Right, nobody wants to do that, right? So that's the use case there the bottom line is that no business is going to use any of this stuff that leaks all this data So you need to have stories about how to mitigate what's going on and to provide privacy options So now we're back to this. Well, what is a smart contract and again? It turns out definition is useful, but the real thing you need to think about is You know, what do you what are you actually trying to do right? So there are four questions, right? Who needs to verify your data, right? Where when do they need to do it? Where is the secrets? Where are the secrets in this system, right? And then finally, what are you trying to hide? So in terms of verifying it? Yeah, it could be just you but if you're just trying to verify your own data Well, that's kind of sad and you really don't need a blockchain, right? If it's the current participants, that's actually a thing we know how to do and that's really nice If you want anybody in the future to possibly be able to verify what's going on Things get interesting and actually we'll get to some research on that that solves it at the end of this talk Right. The other important question is when do you need to verify it, right? If there was a smart contract or you know, you're doing some computation with people Do you just need to know it's correct right now? Do you need to know it's correct as the computation goes on after you've left it or no longer participating? Do you need to know it's correct before you even get started? Like you walk into a room people have been dealing cards and playing a game Do you need to know that the deck wasn't loaded even though you never saw that part of the of the game happen? It depends, right? The next question is where do secrets live and this is actually probably the real gotcha with smart contracts Because if you want your secrets to live with random people off-chain the people are participating. It's fine but Two people can share it can keep a secret if one of them is not a blockchain right block chains don't keep secrets And so the usual problem we run into when people start thinking about private smart contracts as they go Oh, I want the blockchain to hold an encryption key to hold my password to hold some data And that turns out to be incredibly hard to do and quite problematic So you you'd prefer to avoid it And then finally and this is sort of the mundane more low-level putting my professor hat on like What are you trying to hide right? Are you trying to tie the state of the contract? Which the state metadata like which contracts being run that one turns out to be important the inputs or even the actual function, right? So Well, okay, what are these things? How do they break down? Well, let's look at a couple of examples I'm going to go over three of them, right? Which are sort of common things that come to mind, right? One of them is a simple game poker, right? The next one is let's consider something like payments This could also be like custom tokens custom assets any of these crazy d5 projects, right? They all have these like custom tokens that underlie them, right? It's like a video game arcade at Chuck E cheese, right? You built this whole complicated machine But you also have these custom tokens you have to put into it to power it and you might need privacy there And then finally a typical thing that comes up. I'm not really sure why but it's what everyone thinks of is like auctions Right, you want to do a sealed bid auction to price an asset, right? And these all it turns out have some privacy goal they want but they're different Right, so in terms of poker, right? Who needs to verify? What's going on? Well, it's only the people playing the game, right?  And they only care about it for as long as they're playing the game and when they get the money out after that Nobody cares, right? So they'll need to verify it then and finally, right the secrets You know who has what card what hand that's just shared between them the blockchain never needs to know about it Right, you don't need to get them to keep something permanently. So this is somewhat easy, right? The state you want to keep private is you know what people's hands are the inputs actually the bats the actions that like Rays call flip the river card. Those actually can be public So this is one setting In contrast payments get a lot harder because in the payment system Everybody needs to be able to verify what's going on because anybody you might pay needs to know that your money is actually good so This poses a bit of a problem, right? and They need to verify at any time in the future the people who keep the secrets Well, that is simple in this case as anyone who's holding the bag, right? Anybody who has money has crypto tokens those bag holders. They need to keep the secrets, but nobody else And for that you're keeping all the data secret the balance the from the to everything else Okay, and then finally for like a sealed bid auction Again, we're back to the participants needing to just know what's going on only during the auction So this is similar to a poker game But the difference is that the secrets are kept with an auctioneer. Those are the bids and The bids are what you need to keep secret. So what do we do about this? There are a couple of different techniques you can use that can work for various things There are basically three on the first one is a thing that's called referee the computation This came out of academic work in 2009 10 that nobody ever heard of and nobody ever cites But then got sort of reinvented I think completely by happenstance by things like two bit an arbitrary and off-chain labs And no doubt other things I haven't thought of this is sort of like state channels in a certain sense and these provide a certain kind of Privacy the next thing is trusted execution in the form of either SGX or MPC And this is really sort of the holy grail But it turns out to be problematic and then the final thing which is sort of what my research is on and in fact I have a paper appearing this year on is Sort of zero-knowledge based execution protocols and so this starts with Zcash Which does privacy just for a fixed function which is payments It got generalized and some things that say oh you can have multiple different functions that stand alone It's basically different blockchains thing called hawk and then the latest piece of research Which is by me and my co-authors actually so so you can have general computation instead of a composable way Right, so I'll give you a brief overview of these three sets of techniques so referee computation is you know sort of like a state channel and It actually is the closest thing to a will like contract in the sense of what we have under the law Right you have some parties. They agree to do some stuff They do whatever it is off-chain as long as everybody's honest, right? They don't disagree nothing happens on chain. You have no privacy problems if there's ever a dispute though You take it to the blockchain and the blockchain is supposed to mediate the dispute Right and so this works quite effectively quite efficiently It doesn't have privacy Inherently when you resolve it usually when you resolve it on chain everything's public similarly to a court case But if you do have some other privacy solution for doing private computation on chain Turns out you can make this private right and you can use this for something like a poker game quite well It works nicely right and so in this case right this works for systems where you know only the participants care about the correctness only ensures correctness well participating because you actually have to be moderating with these people and It hides pretty much everything if you get the dispute process right so that's One option, but it's limited right it basically works for these things where you only care as long as you're in the room Right it doesn't work for money and the reason it doesn't work for money or anything like it is because a Year ago when you weren't part of the cryptocurrency scene or whatever 20 guys could have gotten together and decided they were gonna invent a bunch of Extra money and since you weren't in the room you didn't see them do this So you couldn't dispute it on chain and now you have no idea what happened right? It's the only this only works when you've seen all the state transitions All right, the next thing you can do is SGX right or multi-party computation These are actually very similar from a conceptual point of view They basically both conjure a trusted third party out of thin air right and they either do it by assuming you have hardware that's secure Well by assuming that you have some number of servers one or five of them are honest and then you do some crazy cryptography and Ideally this provides exactly what you would want like a perfectly private smart contract They can keep secrets and do everything In practice, it's a little bit of a challenge Trusted hardware is frequently broken right like Intel has had problems We don't really think you can do this securely if you're dealing with a serious attacker and the MPC stuff is actually expensive And in particular dealing with parties who go offline both for SGX and for MPC is hard because if you have encrypted data on your blockchain and the guy holding the key even if you trust him disappears your data is gone So you have to figure out some way to you know share a secret share the key and have a bunch of people then You know we've refreshed shares when someone goes offline You have to hope people don't get corrupted if you screw this up and someone pretends to go offline and then comes back They can end up holding all the keys and either MPC or SGX and then they have all your data So it's risky right, but it does give you the ideal right so an SGX MPC what happens everyone can verify because they are supposed to trust this mechanism They can verify forever before or after assuming they trust the nodes that are running it The MPC or the SGX can actually keep secrets. It can keep encrypted data on a blockchain and everything's hidden But at a very high cost, which is just conceptually this stuff is incredibly broad So that brings us to the zero-knowledge approach right in any idea is instead of Posting your input to the smart contract and the existing state on chain You just replace all that with a zero-knowledge proof that hey, we did this update and it's totally correct Naively if you do this you'd reveal the actual state. So okay, you encrypt that you hide that same thing you do in like say Zcash But there are two problems with this naively if you do this this way It reveals the metadata of like what program is being run what payments are being made And it we view and it reveals what function you're running So what do I mean by this well consider a basic ERC 20 token right your state is a table of who has what money? The function, you know allows payments decrement one row increment the other and if you naively did this just let's prove This is correct. You'd run into One of two problems either everybody would be able to view this table who was part of the ERC 20 tokens Who would have no privacy or you do something weird where you'd leak which things being updated, right? So what do you do instead why you take this table and you split it up into little mini tables Which are kind of like UTXOs where each person has their own separate state, right? And now nobody can see all this thing necessarily when they're doing an update And so you have this but you still haven't solved your privacy problem because if you want to make a payment from like Bob to Charlie You have to say I'm gonna update this entry this blob and this blob and people gonna know you're updating those Thankfully we know how to solve this right we just do the same thing that Zcash does right we put everything in a Merkel tree We prove that your entries in the tree and we Show that the records are correct and we break this linkage, right? This is Fairly simple it was straightforward to do once you have decent zk snarks The question is and the thing we actually really did in sexy is you know How do you get this to work? What's the computational model? And so in this the computational model is you have a commitment to data on chain And the commitment contains the code that created it and the code that's going to run when you try to like update it And then every time you do a transaction all you do is prove in zero knowledge that The code that created it was valid and actually ran That your transaction is well-formed and that the code that was supposed to run when you updated it actually ran correctly Right, and you actually do this via a layer of indirection where you have multiple different Zk snarks and the cool thing about this is that unlike previous work Which did this is a standalone thing in this system? You can have multiple different assets multiple different custom contracts and they can all communicate with each other privately And nobody will know which one switch right versus in the previous models you had Basically a version which was Zcash a version that was some custom asset another custom asset And everyone could tell which one was moving back and forth So in this model you can verify everyone can verify what's going on because the zero knowledge proofs are correct You can do it at any time The secrets however do have to remain off-chain And so that's a little bit better a little bit worse But this is I think quite effective and so we have you know these kind of options to do all this stuff And I think the zero knowledge one is actually something you could seriously consider So with that I'll take questions also in the off chance that any of you want to study this stuff I'm starting at fall 2020 as a professor and I'm looking for grad students. Thank you


Welcome to our webinar, Tech Trainer Panel. And this is part of the Tech Training for Nonprofits and Libraries 101 course. We are so excited you're here with us today. I'm Susan Hope-Ard. I'm the Training and Education Manager here at TechSoup. And we really appreciate you joining us today and going through the process of creating your training account in our training platform that we work with with Tech Change. And we also are really super excited to present our three experts today. And I'm going to transition to sharing my desktop so that I can go through a short presentation and explain how you can use this platform. Hold on a second. Okey-dokey. A couple things about the webinar platform. As you enter the platform and you see the live event, there are three tabs to the far right-hand side of the presentation. The first is your chat box. And this is where you can chat all of your questions. You can also indicate there if you're having problems with your audio or your visual, we'll try to help you on the back end so that you can both see and hear this event. We are recording this event, and it will be posted on this course shortly after today. The other tab is where you can see all of the other users. So all of your peers that are taking this course along with you. And then the third tab over are links. During the course today, we will be sharing out several links, both to TechSoup resources and to our experts' websites and their resources. Just keep in mind, if you lose your internet connection, you can always reconnect by just going back into the platform and logging into the course and just clicking Live Event. Most of your connectivity issues should be resolved by simply refreshing your browser. And here are our presenters today. We have three amazing, compassionate, and kind expert trainers. And I can tell you how grateful we are for them to be here today. We have Birgit. And Birgit is a web and mobile developer for Poly Systems and Relevanza. She serves businesses, professionals, and nonprofits with websites and digital marketing. She has also founded the Nonprofit NP-Tech Projects, which assists nonprofits with IT strategy, project management, and online learning spaces. She is also a TechSoup Net Squared organizer for Tech4Good Southwest Florida. We also have Danielle Jackson from GCFlearnFree.org, which is an online provider of free technology tutorials. And what Danielle is responsible for is interacting with learners, just like you, across the globe via social media and general support, helping to ensure that they know what's new on the organization's website. And then we have Ben Williams from Tech Impact. And what Ben does is he helps create training plans for tech adoption. He works with large and small nonprofits to adopt technology, such as Microsoft Office 365, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business. And then also here with you today is Becky Wiegand, who is our master of webinars. And she is on the back end helping us with the tech support. We should tell you and share with you that this is our first time using Google Hangouts.  So thank you very much for your patience and advance. Hopefully everything will run smoothly. But again, make sure you chat with us if you're having any challenges or difficulties. And one quick note about TechSoup is we are global. And we provide resources. Actually, we're located here in San Francisco, California. For those of you out there that are on the platform, go ahead and chat in to us where you're from. Tell us your city and state or your city and country.  And we work to empower organizations around the world to help them get the latest tools, skills, and resources to help you achieve your mission. So that's a little bit about TechSoup. Now it's time to really turn it over to the people that are driving this wonderful presentation. And the first is Birgit. I'm going to turn it over to Birgit, who is joining us from Germany today. And I want to extend a special shout out to her for doing this presentation while she is on holiday. Thank you, Birgit. Three strategies to, yeah, it works. Does it work, right? Here you go. All right, so I'm going. Excellent. Yeah, but I'm not seeing it. Now I get it. All right, OK. So for the next few minutes, I'll talk a little bit what I do now and really brief about how I got there. And then we talk about the three strategy tips to manage technology change in an organization. You see it in the first module, but it's just kind of for the question. It would be good to have everybody else on the same page. Working with nonprofits for the last two decades in various capacities, I met a tremendous, a great technology implementers and fellow teachers. And a few of us got together to form NPTEC projects. And we felt that there's a great need in our community to help small and mid-sized nonprofit organization with a strategic approach to technology so they can increase their impact. NPTEC project has two programs. One is a WP for Good Club, an online community for nonprofits using WordPress as their website and making the central hub of communication. The second program is Impact Circles, a local roundtables where executive directors meet their peers and tackle technology strategy and implementations challenges together with our facilitators and subject matter experts. I'm also, as you heard, an organizer of NetSquared Group in Naples, Florida. And that's also a TechSoup program with local monthly meetings of non-profit staff, volunteers, and consultants around the world. We invite speakers on various technology topics and have dinner together, and a lot of time for network and QA. Apart from the presenter lecture type events, we also have socials or peer learning events like Show Off Your Tools, where participants take turns and tell us in five minutes about the new tool or particular combination of tech tools that they use to make their organization more efficient, that save money, time, and headache. It's always a good time hat. Maybe there's a group near you. Check out the netsquared.org website and learn about the next events. If you don't find a group near your area and you think there should be one, click on the Start a New Group button on that page or connect with me via a private message on this learning environment, which is really good to connecting with other teachers and the presenters. So when I started out as a computer trainer, I was an accidental techie. I fresh out of the university, in addition to my director's job, I also handled the office technology at headquarters and also on my visits to the provinces. It's not unlike some of you who are accidental techies too. You have a regular job and on top of it, you are also in-house support staff, hardware technician, and doing training in small groups. When my husband and I moved to the United States in 98, I was able to concentrate on learning more in-depth about internet technology and conducting formal tech trainings for the local free net. We taught residents how to connect to the internet and how to email and how to navigate the web. During my work with the neighbor's free net, I realized that training technology and becoming proficient in learning technology and becoming proficient in it is not age-related. Most of my fellow volunteers on the help desk, on the tech team and in education were 60 years and older. Turns out many people, although lifelong learners in their other areas, just don't want to deal with technology. It's an easy excuse and one that seems to be widely accepted. Believe me, it is not true. And if you encounter the argument, I'm too old to learn this, it is used as one of the many bogus counter arguments in people by people resisting change in an organization. Only babies with full diapers like change. The rest of us have a hard time with it, especially when we don't have a grasp on our skill set that's needed. We don't like to draw blank. When we do things the first time, we are not good at it. And it takes way too long to succeed. In the first module, you find a description of a exercise you can do with your implementation team. It gives people always an aha moment on what change feels like to people involved. Further in the module, you also read in detail about the stages we go through when adopting to change and learning new ways of doing things. And most of you probably have seen the Kubler-Ross curve stages of change. The first stage is shocked and surprised. People go into denial and frustration, reach a low point while learning new things. Then people experiment. With more confidence, they reach acceptance and are able to integrate the new ways into their daily work. For each person, the various stages have different facets. Some linger in certain stages longer than others. And it's your job as a leader and as a trainer to guide people through it. I met quite a few people who had a hard time because they expect themselves to pick up new skills right away and get impatient with themselves. Other people lack confidence in their own learning ability and fear failure. In the end, they all come around no matter what, but it takes time. If you want to lead people through learning new skills, you will have to meet them where they are. Pick them up and guide them to the journey. Another curve I wanted to show you is the so-called J-curve that tracks performance of an whole organization going through change. You might have noticed the resemblance to the Kubler-Ross. Leaders need to be aware that people need time. In the abstract, many leaders know that, but we see quite often in the planning stages that the time allocated to learning and processing is not enough. Some miss in their calculation that the organization itself it will be affected and the general speed in which things get done slows down. Looking at the curve, if your organization performance starts on the left along a horizontal line, then changes introduced and performance suffers. That's the denials. It's the trying to figure out things. Planning takes place. Resources need to be reshuffled. Leadership changes until the organization comes to a dip or the valley of death. With the plan coming together, training has taken place. Through practice and collaboration, the organization gets better and better. Eventually, the organization works on a much higher level of efficiency and productivity. In the jerk, J-curve, you also see a dotted blue line labeled what we expect. And that's the line and the line goes upwards from the point of change to the next level. If that's the expectation, that's sometimes a little hard for change makers and project managers because it's not based in reality but it also might be an unrealistic measuring stick for the implementation progress. Every roadblock you hit and every setback your team has will cause anxieties on the leadership level and on the staff level and maybe even on the funders level. Instead of holding steady, some will lose confidence and trust in the process and instead of managing the dip and everybody going through it, you have to justify why things are not improving. You and your fellow leaders in the organization need to be aware of the downhill path ahead so you can put the brakes on the worry. It's the path everybody will take and it gets worse before it gets better. If your training program is part of our larger technology implementation and you are changing the way your organization process is tasked, you are in a strong position to manage the dip and allow for a faster recovery. Now that we talked through the human nature of going through the change and the jaker, let's talk about the three strategies on how this plays together in your organization and I mentioned them in the, oops, I'm very fast, I'm sorry. Mentioned them in the introduction module of the course. So I'm just gonna go read the headlines. It's communicate and then I will be ready to take your questions and maybe answer them right now. So communicate 10 times more than usual. One of it is communicate failures, learn together, but it's also a reassure people it's okay to go slow. Then consider the with factor, with and means what is in it for me. Motivators are autonomy, mastery and purpose. That's kind of a quote from Daniel Pink, the surprising truth about what motivates us in the book drive. How can your training is part of the mastery, but how can it also, how you can organization organize autonomy of that time and also purpose. And purpose is a strong motivator in nonprofit organization. Your team will identify with the mission. So make that case, what does success look like? And then the last part is keep your eyes on the big picture, what is it for the mission? Don't get kind of bottomed by the minutiae, keep the spirits up. And sometimes of course you need to make hard choices in terms of your team, but that's so much what I wanted to tell you today. And I keep, I come back to not sharing my screen and then we can answer question. If there are some already available. Thanks so much, Birgit. Yes, we do have a question that we received from someone that I think we could apply to your topic of tech training to manage change or organizational change through. It is what are some of the insights that you have based on experiences that you'd call a failure, specifically in implementing tech training, but that you learn from it and the organization learned from it. How much time do I have? About three hours, right? Yeah, we remember the lessons best when we learn from our mistakes or when we make mistakes. So one is certainly not enough. I remember very clearly, and it's when I was in starting teaching how to use the internet and search engine. And my first presentation was how to use search engines. And I went through 40 minutes of show and tell and then open it up for Q&A. And the first question was, what is a browser? And that made me realize that I obviously did not explain the tools people use to surf the internet and use a search engine because the terminology browser was not explained. And a similar thing happened with a Word class when the first question after I went through show and tell was what is a cursor? So it was really interesting. So the pretty much kind of pick them up where they are but also find out where they are. Is really, really important because if you just kind of throw them into, they are like learning swimming to going into the deep end of the pool is certainly a very adventurous one but it can also fail and you need to do a lot of recovery there. Great, thank you. You're welcome. Yes, we also do have a question from our participants today. Learners are asking, Missy is asking about can you say more about connecting with influencers in the context of a non-profit tech project? Well, the influencers in your own organization is meant by that. So those who are opinion leaders, those who are or people resist to change sometimes do it more active in advocating for not changing and kind of sabotaging it. These are actually great opportunities for you to reach out to them because as soon as you are able to convince them that there's something in it for them and they need to learn these things and what would their job be better after it? Once you convince them, they are also the opinion leaders advocating for your change. And that's kind of a, yeah, it worked most of the time, it works very well because people wanna do a good job and if you make the case one at a time but start with them, it kind of gives other people follow you, yeah. Does that answer the question? Thank you. Thank you. And I think Missy will chat more in the chat box if she has additional questions. And we do have questions time for Q&A at the end so that we'll be able to ask the entire panel questions. If we don't have any other questions for Birgit right now, I think we are ready to move on to our next presenter. So we'd like to introduce Ben from Tech Impact, who also has played a part in creating the content on this course. So Ben, and we are ready to turn it over to you. Thank you Birgit. Great, thanks Birgit, thanks Susan. Hopefully everyone's able to hear me. I am in a conference room so it might be a little echoey but it should be all right. So as Susan said, I work here at Tech Impact. We are also a 501c3 nonprofit. Let me go through our little data slides. So we work with other nonprofits specifically around advocating for them in the technology world. So as I'm sure everyone attending knows, technology is oftentimes one really, really expensive. So that certainly presents a pretty big challenge for us as nonprofits with our limited budgets. And then it's also oftentimes very difficult to learn and be able to use in an effective way. So we try to kind of bridge that gap where we're finding a technology that's out there that is catered directly to nonprofits or respects, has an option for nonprofits in their pricing model and is also something that folks are gonna be able to easily pick up on and that we have a lot of experience with so that we can work with them to really make sure that they understand all the capabilities and be using that technology to further their mission. This is me. I've been here for probably almost two years. I think it'll be two years in November or December. Most of what I do with our clients is actually implementing technologies, but part of that is absolutely training. So making sure, again, that as we're building this technology for you or making it available for you to use, that you actually understand how everything works and that it's gonna be something that you can use and feel comfortable using and maybe even are kind of happy to use to really make sure that you're getting your work done in a way that isn't gonna hinder you and make you super frustrated. Because as everyone knows, technology can be very, very frustrating. So we wanna give you all the tools that we can to make sure that you're able to do that. So we have a kind of a couple staged approach to putting together a training. My slides aren't as pretty as Birgit. She had a lot of nice images in there, but bear with me. Hopefully we'll be able to get some good content anyway. So kind of the first thing that we'll do is just talk to the client, talk to the person who we're gonna be delivering this training to. Generally speaking, we're gonna have a point of contact at that organization, who ideally is gonna have a lot of the needs with that organization on deck ready to tell us. But certainly, they don't always know everything that people are frustrated by with their current technology or what everyone in the organization is trying to accomplish with the new technology that we're implementing. So it is really beneficial to not just talk to one person. So kind of like Birgit was saying, making sure that you're talking to some influencers, just a good broad spectrum of people who are gonna actually be using the technology, because that one person isn't the only person who's gonna be taking advantage of the tech that we're implementing for the organization. So we wanna make sure that everyone's voice is kind of heard as we're gathering some information about what we need to focus on here. So we're gonna work on making sure that we understand kind of people's comfortability level, their tech savvy level, if they have any prior knowledge to the technology that we are implementing for them. And again, all of this stuff can absolutely be applied within your own organization. It doesn't have to just be for implementing technology for someone else. It's the same process internally as it is if you're doing it for someone else. And then just figuring out what specifically they want us to go over. So making sure that they almost definitely have objectives that they want to be covered. Either features or just things that we're fixing with this technology. So what issues have you been experiencing and how are those being resolved with this tech? What functionality are people excited to be able to use that they've heard about that we wanna showcase so that again, we're encouraging adoption during this training. So people actually want to go ahead and use that. And then I also as the person who is the expert on that technology and is implementing this for the organization, there are things that I know I'm going to want to cover regardless of their specific requests or needs or things that they're gonna think are cool. Just things that are essential to the use of that technology that we absolutely need to go over before we probably even get to kind of the cooler stuff that folks are really looking for. After that, we will, oops, slide is titled incorrectly. Pardon me. So we'll do research going over the different pieces of the technology. If it's something that's completely new that we're not familiar with already, we wanna get a demo, make sure that ideally we can work with someone at that tech company to go through all the functionality. Again, focusing on the things that that organization really wants to see or that your organization really wants to see. So having someone actually walk you through that tech. See if there's any things that people know are issues or limitations with that technology that as you're giving that training or giving people materials and asking them to go and do stuff in the technology that you're prepping them for anything that they might run into that might not work the way that they expected it to or might be a limitation that they run into. Yeah, and then just seeing if there's any documentation that's out there already about quick access or quick start, almost every technology company out there now when they release something new, they'll put like a quick start guide out there so that you can vary quickly and easily get right into things. And those are developed for this particular purpose of making sure that people can easily understand this and comfortably start doing some stuff in the solution so they get an idea of how things work. And all of it, you just wanna always be bringing back to those initial discussions that you had with the people who were gonna be using the tech making sure that you're addressing all of their needs and the features and functionality that they're really looking for with that new tech. And then you're gonna wanna develop some materials around that training. There's a couple of different ways that you can give a training. So whether you're in person, whether you're doing it remotely, if you're just kind of walking someone through something on the phone even, all of that counts. So it's useful to have materials as you're walking people through something. So PowerPoint presentation, if that's needed or wanted, we will almost always try to make screenshot it step-by-step instructions that go through each task that we go through in a webinar or in a presentation so that when we're done, we just give them that handout and not everyone's gonna remember every single thing that you talk about in that training. It might be half an hour or an hour, people are gonna pay attention to some things and not others. So for them to be able to have something that they can then reference that maybe I did miss this part, but I need to know how to do this. It'll make them a lot more comfortable. It takes a little bit of the responsibility off of your shoulders as the trainer. And then any issues or questions that they actually have and you can try to provide them with a way to follow up with you. We wanna also make sure, so one big thing, even though it's further down on our list here, we want to be using language that is accurate to the technology. However, jargon is bad. We don't wanna be talking about the 32-bit operating system that is most recently updated and I installed KV article XYZ to make sure that this feature is working. That's gonna go over millions of people's heads, like no one is gonna know what you're talking about. So we wanna be accurate and actually be giving them the correct information and terms that are used around the technology but aren't so technical and scary sounding that people kind of, it just goes in one and out the other, because then it doesn't end up being effective. Videos are always useful as well. Well, a lot of the times, well, not a lot of times, but in the past we've done episodic short little video clips kind of in the same ilk as the step-by-step screenshot of instructions where we just have one short couple minute video on how to open a document. Very simple, easy tasks that people can just go through very easily and I just need to know how to do this one thing and I don't wanna read through an entire manual so let me just go watch this one video. And then lastly, once you're done your training, that's not really where it ends. Those people then have to go and use that technology so if you're able to, and this isn't always gonna be possible depending on the technology or the organization or the situation of everything but being able to give some homework exercises for people to then take with them and accomplish, again, it's encouraging people to actually use that tech. It's got really dark. It's encouraging people to use that technology and also making sure that they're getting more familiar with it and it'll be something that they end up using later on so it's useful for them to start doing that from the very beginning as they're beginning with that solution. And then lastly and probably the most important thing in any training that we do of any kind for any organization is Q&A, making sure that you're addressing questions and concerns that people have preferably while you're going through the training so stopping whenever possible at logical points throughout what you're training on to just see if anyone has any questions about anything or is concerned or scared, just measuring the response that you're getting from the people who you're training and seeing how they feel, how comfortable they are with what you're talking about. So a lot of this, we have kind of a formula that we're using but a lot of it really isn't something that you can formulate. You have to really be able to kind of feel out the room, gauge just from facial expressions or the tone of someone's voice, how they're feeling about what you're saying. And so things like jargon and stuff, I might be talking and think that I'm not being overly technical at all. Like in my head, I'm dumbing things down as much as I possibly can. But I'll be talking to someone else and I'll be able to tell that they're not really understanding what I'm talking about. So that's when I wanna maybe stop and check and see what it is about what I'm saying that they're not understanding, and see what their questions are around that. And whenever possible, we like to provide a way for folks to actually follow up with us after our training for those questions, because not everyone's gonna think of what their question is at the time that they need it, that you're doing that training for them. So giving them a way to either talk to someone on staff who has that knowledge who you've gone a little more in depth with and kind of prepared for that or giving them your email address or phone number, so that they can follow up with you around that is always great. And then, oh yeah, one more thing before I wrap up. Not knowing the answer to things about tech is really not a bad thing. No one is 100% an expert in anything. Being able to say, hey, I actually have not come across that yet before, but I will absolutely look into it and get back to you or can you shoot me an email just so that I know, I have a way to get back to you on that issue or that question that you were giving me is great. Cause features change, things break. You might just not have gone over that part. So you're not perfect and either the people you're training don't be too hard on yourself as well. All right, yeah, so that's kind of it. If folks have some questions that they wanna send over or Susan, anything that you have. Yeah, great. Thank you so much. And you've identified several things as Birgit did that are collateral materials of content in our online course. So we do wanna encourage folks to access those because all three of our experts in some ways have contributed to the content on the site. And some of the tips that Ben just talked about really were like the 10 tips for being a better presenter and for getting better. And what I really liked that you said is we're not perfect. Anyone that's a trainer also has to be a learner. So don't be afraid to make mistakes. You should practice and you should know your content but you can't possibly know everything. You're sharing that cause that hopefully will alleviate some of the folks on this presentation. Like a lot of people get very anxious before they give a training for the first time. And we have a couple of questions that I think are applicable to your presentation. The first is talk a little bit about simple and effective ways that you could train people in a spread out organization. We've identified some tips for some of the in-person trainings and you also identified those little micro, micro learnings, little videos. But what do you do if you have a national organization and you need to train a lot of people in various locations? Yeah, absolutely. So we actually do this all the time. Most of the organizations that we work with are spread out all across the country or have locations even in other countries around the world. So we do what we're doing right now. We'll have an online meeting. There's a ton of free screen sharing solutions that are out there. Join.me is one that we use all the time. Skype for Business, if you're in Office 365, is a great tool that we use all the time as well that is very similar to Google Hangouts where you can do voice and video as well as sharing your screen or sharing a program. If it's a massive amount of people who are attending, make sure that they're all muted, have a chat like we do right now so that you're able to monitor questions and still have that interactive aspect of things while making sure that you don't have a million different sounds happening at all times during the training. And then, yeah, I mean, in those situations, we'll often record the training since almost definitely not everyone is able to attend that training that we're doing. So we'll record audio and video that we can make available to that organization after we're done. Yeah, it's just making sure that everyone is kind of able to attend in some form so that they can get all that info. Great, thank you, Ben. There are a couple of questions in the chat box. I think one of the questions is testing the knowledge of the group that you're training. And I believe if I'm interpreting this correctly, it's kind of like what you talked about, assessing your learners from their facial expressions. And sometimes if you're training people remotely, you can't always read their facial expressions or their body language. What is a great interactive testing tool? Gotcha, so there's a couple ways that you can kind of handle that. One is making sure that you are stopping a lot of the time when I stop for questions. If no one's asking me anything, if it's completely silent, I'm gonna be like, someone needs to say something. I need to know that you're all still here and alive and listening, just actively engaging the people who you're talking to. So it's not just like, oh, do you have any questions? It's, hey, I'm still here. We're still talking, this is real. And then so checking in occasionally is a really good way because then you can be like, hey, is everyone feeling comfortable? Am I, is everyone still following me? Have I gone over people's heads? Do we need to circle back and talk about anything? And then also being able to, so certain tools will give you audience attention, like monitors that'll show you if someone is paying attention or not. So you can try to use one of those if that is something that's available to you, as well as, yeah, I mean, just, it takes practice. It takes a lot of time to do this, but a lot of the times I'll just be listening and I can just kind of, even if I'm also, most of the trainings that we do are remote, but after you've done enough of this, you can start to kind of, it's really weird. It's like this weird super human sense almost, but you can like just kind of hear in the air how people are feeling and what it is. And it's totally, I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's totally just that you have to do it enough times and really kind of get that feel for that kind of vibe, I guess, that people put out as they're confused or concerned or just completely lost. Thank you, Ben. Excellent. Well, we do have, it's time to move on to our third presenter. Ben, thank you for sharing the way tech impact both assesses and builds and delivers content for your customers. And now what we're gonna talk about, Danielle is going to be sharing with us some information about how GCFlearnfree.org creates their instructional designers, create their content. So I am going to share my desktop as Danielle gets queued up to speak. All right, thank you, Susan. I am with GCFlearnfree.org. We are also a nonprofit. We are an educational program of Goodwill Community Foundation and Goodwill Industries of Eastern North Carolina. And as part of this, we offer 125 plus and counting free technology focused tutorials. A majority is focused on technology, but we also offer reading and math programs. We offer some learning English programs and other various technology related resources.  We offer a combination of written lessons, videos and interactives and infographics. And I'll touch on that a little bit later when I talk more about kind of things to consider when you're developing your own curriculum as a kind of a way to give that broader appeal to a variety of learning types. We've served 58 plus million people since 1992, originally in a classroom setting, and then we moved online. And now everything we offer is 100% online. So I wanna talk a little bit about our process. And you'll see these here, I apologize. We have some transitions that I wasn't able to get rid of. So we have a kind of a three step process that we usually use. The step one is research the topic. Look at similar tutorials from other sources when you determine what you wanna teach and use Google and YouTube as much as possible. Our curriculum designers are on those two sites pretty frequently just looking to see what else is out there and how we can, of course, avoid duplicating it, but also looking at what they're doing right and what we'd like to do a little bit better if we can. Step two for us is to create an outline just like you would do with any research paper in school, just kind of lay out the plan of what you wanna do and in what order. We always, with every one of our lessons, we start with an introduction. You'll see the introduction on the top rate of this slide. Each of lesson we cover, whether it has to do with getting started with PowerPoint or using a web browser, talks about this is what you're going to learn here and that we feel like kind of alleviates any tension learners might have about diving headfirst into a particular topic. That maybe they know nothing about. Then we like to work through that topic based on our research and kind of take an outline-based approach, as you'll see in the tiles on the bottom. This is what most of our tutorials look like. It'll have a tile listing each individual lesson and we break it down as much as we possibly can to avoid cluttering or piggybacking on a particular subject. Our third step is to write those lessons and revise, revise, revise a whole bunch. We analyze what to leave in and what to exclude. We determine the level of difficulty for the subject matter. We sort of have the luxury, I guess, in a way of all of our tutorials are designed with beginning adult learners in mind. So it's very basic, very much a starter program for people who maybe have no familiarity with computers or very limited knowledge of computers who have never been on Facebook, who have never used Microsoft Word or who have used it a little bit but really don't know how to navigate it. So for us, it's very easy to say, okay, we have to treat it like nobody's ever been in these programs before, but you need to determine that difficulty level where your learners are. And then, as Ben kind of touched on, create practical examples that they can use to get that hands-on experience. And then, as I mentioned, review and revise as necessary. We go through a pretty lengthy process of kind of paring stuff down, making changes when needed. So realizing that we're not perfect, we don't always know everything either. So a little bit about our style. Got sort of six things that we focus on as our curriculum team. We are accountable, we meet our learner expectations whenever possible. There was a question in chat earlier about feedback. We ask for feedback from learners and accept feedback from learners consistently. We always wanna know what they think, good or bad, so we can improve upon it. We are instructional, we teach ourselves first, so we can help manage the learning curve and it helps in some cases, for instance, Microsoft Access is a program that really nobody in our office is that familiar with. It's extremely specialized. If you're a database manager, you know Access. If you're not, you probably don't know much about it. So they kind of had to teach themselves Access and in some ways that tutorial is extremely helpful to people because we were beginners too and we started it. We are user friendly. We use an approachable friendly tone rather than instructional or technical, something Ben also touched on. You know, we strip it down even though we're talking about technology, we strip it down and we take out that technical jargon every chance we get and if we have technical jargon, we will define it before we keep using it. We are experimental. We kind of like to think of ourselves as a think tank in that we're able to test something out. If it's not working, then try something different and keep going back to the drawing board. If it's not, we've used Vines to create a tutorial on Vine, which was an experiment. We didn't know how well it would go over and it did well, but that was something we'd never done before. We are basic. Again, we use step-by-step instructions and the simplest of terms, really just bare bones, breaking it down. And we are multidisciplinary. As I talked about earlier, we utilize multiple learning modalities, video, text-based instruction with step-by-step listing, literally one, two, three, four, five. This is how you do in this order. Interactives and infographics and the interactives are very helpful for people to practice what they've learned as well. And on the next slide, this kind of gives you an example of that multidisciplinary approach. On the left-hand side, you'll see that there's text instruction, but then there's a video that people can click on if they're like, listen, I can't read all these five pages of text. I'd rather have somebody tell me how to do it. So we realize, again, learners learn differently. So on the right-hand side, you've got an interactive that kind of breaks down what an Excel workbook looks like and the various aspects of it down to how to save, because some people don't know how to save. They've never been in Excel before. So we just make sure we start from the beginning and just be as basic as we can. And on the next slide is a couple other examples. Again, an example of some text instruction and underneath a video that they can play. On the right-hand side, we've got an interactive where, in our computer basics tutorial, people can literally connect cables using three different types of technology so they can practice how to plug something in, how to get their headphones plugged in, how to use that computer as effectively as possible. And then lastly, we've got some things to consider. I've got six of them that we kind of put our heads together to think about. The first consideration that I would say would be to always think about your audience. Assume that they know nothing about the subject. That's what we do all the time. We just assume that people, this is their first time with this information. Even think of a specific person like your grandmother, who maybe doesn't know anything about technology, and pretend you're talking to her as you're developing this curriculum. It'll help you come across as more personable. It'll be more natural. It'll be more approachable and friendly. And it'll help those people who may be completely intimidated by what you're teaching. And then evaluate what you're doing as you're going along. Think, would you wanna learn this way? Is this something you would get something out of? If your subject matter is technical, break it down in the most non-technical terms that you possibly can, or again, defining things whenever possible. The second consideration would be be upfront about your limitations. We're a nonprofit. Most of you are nonprofits, if not all. Understand, let your audience know you don't know everything. Again, like Ben said, we don't know everything. Feel free to ask us and we'll get back to you, or we'll develop a tutorial on it and teach ourselves. Use that introduction lesson to explain what that tutorial class is about. Don't dive too far into specifics because it may intimidate some of your learners. And then use external resources whenever possible. I'm gonna do a, I'll send a link here to, we have, in terms of use application, if any of you who are ever interested in using us, sometimes to compliment or supplement, we know educators, libraries, career centers across the globe use us to help fill in the gaps of maybe something they're not able to offer. So we just have that link there. If you're interested in using us in any way, everything we offer is free all the time and we do know a lot of educators use us to help people with technology as well. But use those resources wherever you can find them because there's a lot of free stuff out there. And that brings me to look for existing tutorials and courses, teaching what you're teaching, analyze them, get ideas, learn what to do, learn what not to do, use that Google and YouTube, use them as resources to figure out, to familiarize yourself with the topic as well as to see what else everybody else is doing. And see what software options you have. I know there's a lot of budgets in some cases, no budgets, but some software is free. Your computer may have some built in stuff like taking screenshots. We use screenshots consistently on our website for that visual elements to show people. It's one thing to explain something, it's another thing that they can actually see what you're doing at that time. So see what's on your computer that you're able to use that you might not have to pay for. And determine how you'll teach. At this point, you probably know how you'll be teaching, but if you don't, figure out if it's gonna be a classroom or online setting, it'll be discussion or will it be just straight up instruction? Will you need handouts? Will participants use their computers? How will that look logistically? And even consider using a blogging platform to teach. WordPress is very popular for this, as are Sway and Tumblr. They're just easy ways to get disseminate information and their platforms for chat and other ways to communicate. And lastly, keep it simple. Break the course or tutorial into digestible lessons. Make it as easy as possible. Even we have lessons on how to save in Word and that will be a three page lesson, really breaking down how to do it and what people might encounter. So don't be afraid to break that down as much as possible. Also start slowly, use that introduction as much as you can. Take the less is more minimalistic approach so your audience doesn't get overwhelmed. And lastly, strip unimportant information to keep those lessons or whatever you're teaching to keep it uncluttered. Keep it as simple as possible and so hopefully people will come away retaining just that information, just what you've taught. So that's all I have for you. Great, thank you so much, Danielle. Hi, I'm just going to stop sharing for a moment. And we do have quite a few questions. So, and I did wanna piggyback on some things that you and Ben said that are also reflected in our course. Some of that is the process that you take for creating your content and each of you identified that analysis doing the search on the web. Finding things that are already out there that might work for you. Keeping it simple for yourself and also understanding that you may not have all the answers. So for all of our potential trainers out there, you understand that you have a lot of resources here. You have tech impact, you've got Birgit and we also have GCF Learn Free. So, and here at TechSoup, we also can provide you with resources for delivering content and training. Danielle, a question that we did get was about how can you draw insightful questions from your learners in an effective manner? And since you deliver online content, primarily asynchronous, right? So folks do that independently. How do you, I guess, get that feedback from your learners so that I guess both that informs how you modify what you have online and also engage with your learners. All right. Well, a couple of different ways. One is we have a feature for support tickets on our website which is used quite a bit. So we connect directly with them that way. I also mentioned in the chat earlier, the Google Forms. We use those a lot to survey our learners and to see what they would like to see. And we also have a request a topic link on our website that is another Google Form, which basically gives them a list of potential tutorials and then a box that they can fill in and tell us exactly what they'd like to see. But social media is really where we get a lot of feedback from people, good, bad, indifferent, but we're very in tune with our users that way because we don't have a way to connect with them otherwise. We're pretty, none of us have phones here. We're all pretty sheltered as far as being online, but we make sure to connect with them via social media as quickly as possible on all the major platforms. Thank you. One more question that we have from our audience is from Mike. Are you aware of any tools for tech skills assessment or resources to create surveys that probe for specific skill sets, such as Excel? So like a pre-screening tool? We actually are in the process of creating assessments. It's something that we're just diving into because we realize that there are more advanced learners who are accessing our site. We're hearing from a lot of them too and they're saying, listen, I understand Excel, I've learned from your site, but how can I take it to the next level? So we're doing that, but as far as I know, I don't know of any other sites or organizations that might already have those assessments in place. That's something we'll be working on the next year or two. Thank you. Let me open that question up to the rest of the panel then. Mike, to see if either Tech Impact or Beurgut have any ideas of resources where there are tools that would run those skills assessments or things that you can kind of hack to make work for you. Ben or Beurgut, maybe we'll start with Ben. Any ideas? I think Ideal Rare might have... Okay, go ahead. Ideal Rare might have some Ideal Rare.org, might have some worksheets that you could use and kind of... But I'm not quite sure. I might also be on the TechSoup website, actually, some, at least articles about it. And then you can build your own Google form, which is a very good tools. Another one is Paul Dady or SurveyMonkey to do online assessments. Thank you. Ben? Beurgut took the words right out of my mouth. So Ideal Rare is one that we work with as well. They have a lot of really great tools for all kinds of different kind of assessments. I don't actually know if they have one for TechSabbiness, but that would probably be a good place to start. And yeah, I mean, most of the assessments that we do are either through feedback around the trainings that we're giving or just those initial in-person, a person, not necessarily in-person, but person-to-person conversations. Surveys are great. They're super helpful, but you can only get so much information from a survey. I personally don't like relying on a piece of paper or a form to tell me kind of where people are with that. But again, that's me personally as a trainer. There's obviously merit and value to all of the different approaches that folks can take, so. Thank you. Thanks to both of you. We have one more minute left, so if there are any other questions, and we wanna make sure that we answer all of your questions because you guys have taken the time to join us today. And before we completely wrap up, I'll give folks another minute to chat their questions and also for you to keep in mind that you can continue to connect with your fellow learners on the learning platform you're on right now with us here at TechSoup and with Danielle, Ben, and Birgit. So there are lots of ways for you to get additional information. It's not just relegated to this one hour. And I am gonna switch very quickly to share my PowerPoint again. And like I said, we're learners too. So this is our first time using this platform. And as we're doing that, we're learning too. So a couple of things, as you log off, if you will still be in the learning platform, you can go back to the tab that has September 15th, expert tech trainer panel live event, and there is an event survey. I will also be sending you an email with a link to that survey so you can tell us what you thought. Please give us feedback because just like Birgit, Ben, and Danielle said, the most important thing you can do is give us information on what you need so what we can do better because we also reassess our content and make it better based on your feedback. And just a quick note, this is our training platform. For those of you that just signed up for this live event and that may not have accessed all of the course content, I just wanna point out a couple of things in the top menu bar. You have a link to the live events. You can also click on members and see your fellow peers from libraries, other nonprofits, or other locations that are sharing this learning with you and you can connect with them. Also, our course is broken down into modules and then into tabs. We have, pardon me, short videos, activities and downloadable assets. Upcoming webinars and events, please do check our upcoming webinars and events. The first thing we have coming up is a GrantStation special. We just had two extraordinary webinars that you can watch on our TechSoup site. We also have some upcoming library webinars and you can go to TechSoup.org to learn more. A huge thank you to all of you learners that are on this course platform and that joined us today. We know the most valuable thing you can give us is your time so thank you for this hour out of your day and for the hours that you spend in the course. Next, I do wanna extend a huge thank you to Birgit, Ben and Danielle, who are all volunteers who took their time to develop content and think about what you needed to learn as new trainers or in your libraries or nonprofits. So thank you, all three of you have been amazing and we appreciate your time as well. And another huge thank you to Becky who is here on the back end doing all of the tech support and trying to queue up questions. Again, this is our first time so we appreciate you being patient with us. And we hope that you have a great rest of your week. Please do reach out to us if you have any questions. My email is on the course platform or webinars at our alias email. So thank you and have a great rest of your week.