At now, to the talk state of the accessibility, a speaker is Peter Lars, an autistic 3D artist. And he is also working with Blender. Welcome to the state of the accessibility. I am Peter Lars. And what I use in real life is noise cancelling headphones. Technology has improved many things in the last couple of years. But some things are not good enough. This is the outline of the talk. We start with a rough overview. We will look at the different types of disabilities. We will also discuss how accessible the web currently is. I will give you a bit of advice on what you can do as a regular user. And I also want to give you some advice on what you can do as a developer. But first of all, a bit of content notes. I will talk about pandemic, but in a positive context. I will also talk about barriers and ableism. And also about problems with mental health and negative self-images. So what was new in 2020-2021? Well, we got a pandemic and everyone couldn't go outside. And suddenly a lot of things that were previously offline are now happening online. And that had many advantages for people with disabilities.  You are not required to travel anywhere. And it's a lot easier to participate when you are only required to be at home in front of your laptop. It's also easier to be stealthy, to not appear in public as a disabled person. And of course you can also participate from your badge at home. And therefore, online events have less barriers than online events. Not all of them, but many online events are more accessible than offline events. And I'm really happy that the current Congress is online. And I hope that there will be future remote chaos experiences that are equally positioned as the offline event in the future. So that people are also able to participate online. And my big wish for the future is that we should maintain these online spaces because they make it easier for people with disabilities to participate. I want to do a little excursion about the spoon theory. So what is a spoon? A spoon is an unspecific unit for social energy. People with disabilities have on average less spoons than people without disabilities. And there's also the expanded spoon theory, which includes forks and knives. But spoons are basically an energy of a unit of energy. And people have different amounts of spoons. And depending on what your disability is, some tasks require more effort. And then there's also the forks, which make it harder for you to reach for more spoons. And then there's also knives, which are kind of like spoons, but a lot less effective. So if we talk about deaf people or people who have very bad hearing, so we can see that the internet is actually quite comprehensible as text and images. So there's really no barrier. Subtitles also exist for many videos. If it's broadcasted in US American TV, then there's actually a requirement that subtitles exist. There are also automatically generated subtitles. But these should only be considered as a starting point for creating manually created subtitles. Because there are false positives really got to speech recognition. And I wanted to add a very big footnote for subtitles. Because people who have been deaf for life, for them it is not natural to understand text-based language. That's why in many cases it's also necessary to see the sign language of the content. Yes, so basically sign language is the mother tongue and not text-based language. It would be good to have sign language for videos to improve accessibility. There's also blind people or people with bad sight. There are different forms. Some people are really better at focusing on text or focusing in general. Some people are really bad with different colors, with seeing different colors. Text on the internet is relatively well understandable. Podcasts are awesome because these are a lot more pleasant to consume than text. And there are also browser add-ons that increase the contrast or exchange the funds so that they are easier to read. And these tools really make it a lot easier to consume text. Something that I really care about is image descriptions and audio descriptions because these are a really rare thing. So an audio description means that visual content of a video will be explained by a speaker so that people who cannot see the video also understand what is being talked about. And a special category that is very problematic for blind people is games because many games require people to actually see the game pieces. At least there are filters for people who are colorblind. We have the category of motoric impairments. The internet helps because it works in their own apartment. And websites that require less interactions are really pleasant or rather pleasant to use. This is one of the many accessibility features that is being optimized anyway. Sometimes some things are easier to reach with for example just like three clicks but then there's also games and there is some progress. For instance there is the Xbox Adaptive Controller and it enables people with motoric impairments to play these games and there are also some good options for increased accessibility but there are still many games that are very proud to be exclusive. For example the Dark Souls series which I find very problematic. There are many people who want to explore those worlds and it's very fun. And I think it's really wrong. I think it's very wrong to require of everyone to have high motor skills to play these games. There are also cognitive disabilities. So disabilities that decrease the ability of the brain and something that is really growing and becoming more and more problematic are dark patterns. Dark patterns are unfortunately becoming more of a standard or a common side in the web. And for us regular people it's just annoying but for people with disabilities this is extremely difficult and for instance the cookie banner they show you a very big button and yeah it makes it really really difficult to reject those cookies especially for disabled people and this is a really good example of a dark pattern because yeah so this is all about giving the user a choice and enticing the user to make a choice that is actually not in the interest of the user but if you have a cognitive impairment then it's more likely that you fall for these dark patterns and make decisions against your own benefit and another aspect is easy language or simple language. This is language without foreign words without technical words and common words and it's written in such a way that information is presented in common redundant fashion. Okay now we're going to talk about the perspective of now we're talking about this perspective of mob psychological impairments it can have influences on depression on fear situations on on eating disorders and on maybe other things they can make you do things that you really actually don't even want to do and or maybe don't have fun with they sometimes often they often don't really allow you to completely freely decide if you want to be exposed to these things such as also cyber mobbing. All right so let's get to a more fun and easy thing to relax this is a a shark that maybe looks a bit like a dog because the internet is not just evil if you have psychological disorders it can also be very interesting and good to find the communities that have lots of people that are very similar to oneself and I have found a great circle of friends on the internet and also especially in the chaos environment that are somewhat similar to myself and might have my issues and they also give lots of marginalized groups a platform to represent themselves and feel normalized and the youtube algorithm as broken as it is is not really someone who actively decides oh this person has some sort of disorder so I don't want to show this to anyone but you can just upload and if it's clicked and if people click on it then then it's viewed the way one can be seen and feel more normal even inside and outside of bubbles that is that these communities can give give one and that is something that really feels well and also actually prevents that these issues can get developed further and in a psychological direction and now let's get to some constructive ideas so what what could end users do to improve the internet so what could you keep online spaces alive this is something that the internet and also the world really made a lot more accessible and that is something that we should keep alive be informed be give attention follow follow the activists and there are lots of people that are the people themselves know the most what they need and to to obtain this information about what could be done that there are lots of these activists that really have good content and also be be an ally and we're as we we have in German Germany the law that the dignity of humans is unimpeachable and that also applies to everyone including the impaired and there are still in many places in Germany with bureaucracy with the train system in the the everyday jobs there are way too many not even necessary barriers for many people but also have some understanding that yeah not everybody with impairments wants to actively fight this fight and yeah many people with impairments often have less less things they can do and they have to be more sparing and I for example also really appreciate if people mark sarcasm irony and jokes in tweets and such things because it's much easier to understand just the slash s for sarcasm for example something else that you can do that will only cost you two to five minutes per picture is adding image text texts on images will replace image information that only exists visually and ideally are as short as possible just image descriptions that apply some opinion on the picture are not that great they should be entirely descriptive such as like with a comic you shouldn't explain the visual joke but only just explain all the base information from the picture that we need to understand the joke ourselves so another thing that was mentioned to me if you actually write descriptions on the image use the same language as the content maybe you can even translate it in some cases because not everywhere streams will automatically switch to the right language and especially also screen readers and having the screen reader create a different language and having it switched over for one image is a difficult thing so I have another xkcd comic here that I have translated for this German talk so I will write comic in the first line then text column a network tries to be a solution for everything basically a Walmart of the social media then below that there is an image that I call a comic panel it's a sketch of a room with shelves and there's a stickman that is holding a can and has a speech bubble that says hey what an accident that I am meeting you here and then I wrote second figure with messy hair which I only wrote because I don't know anything else about them they have a speech bubble oh hey yeah how's it going and then maybe the the hair wasn't really necessary to understand the comic but it is there so I try to describe it so this is of course a bit a thing of discussion and opinion but describing a bit is always better than describing nothing and then lastly there's a second text below the panel and it says if if it's forced to become the Walmart of social media this comic is a bit difficult because the sentence is separated between above the panel and below the panel I am not perfectly sure how I would do this maybe one could put those together in the description but I try to be as exact as possible so the next thing that much too many social media networks don't do right but is something that can be done is use links that speak for themselves links are often not great for screen readers because if random numbers and letters are in the link then it's really really really really hard to to listen to and it's also very important that the link is replaced with a text for that reason and the text then accurately describes the content of the link then like if you have a screen reader and to read across a page with a lot of links and it reads you the links then if the links are safe explanatory then you understand what is linked so if you maybe have like a page with lots of videos of cats and you shouldn't write just down the cat in the the url in the in the text and also not a click here with the link but ideally ideally just use the the descriptive text like page with great cat videos and link that sentence a part of the sentence content notes so content notes are sometimes also called content warnings they can help people use make informed decisions on what kinds of content they want to consume so this is maybe about hidden topics that people don't really expect in an article and to just mention those ahead of time the detail details don't really need to get into that but maybe if a content is about screens and the linux kernel is mentioned then this could be a content note these are of course topics that I would not really consider problematic and it's always a question of discussion what exactly should be mentioned and what shouldn't because the future is usually meant to be used to help people that have traumatic experiences with certain topics so I think this is much more important for any topic that is associated with common trauma and the c3rc at some point IOC had a list of content notes for speakers that should be considered okay let's do a little diversion street complete is a great app that with which you can help adding to open street map data it's basically pokemon go but useful you walk around the world and you add data to street that is not tagged sufficiently and you can add a lot more information that can be very useful for blind people people with hearing impairments and stuff such and that is also one example for things that developers can do to provide more accessibility but for now let's do so at some point I was grocery shopping but there is a lot of similar situation there that can often happen from warmth from respect with from people without respect from lots of screens with animations and crazy images in various places on products and that is very very overwhelming and at some point I just asked somebody from the from the store if they can just calm things down when I'm there or could you maybe introduce an hour of calm shopping but the people from the shop told me that they can't even regulate the volume of the cash register systems and so wait like they could maybe buy a new one but I thought that maybe wouldn't the store is it really that much important that the customers are continuously influenced with ads then is that more important than me being able to pleasantly buy things and that's why I don't really buy at Kauffland anymore and of course this is a systematic problem and that's why the developers have a lot of power here so the system has made all the decisions for the people working at the grocery store and there was no flexibility to provide some service to us as a customer and that's of course a bad system so there's a single point of failure here that has been created that could actually easily be avoided if for example there was the ability to adjust the volume and if there were alternatives as well because every single thing can very quickly become barrier that has to be circumvented some people really can't work with text chats some people really can't call so ideally if you have a great support you have both text chat and calls personally I really like self-service checkout registers but for some other people that can be really difficult to use so both self-service and other people's service is having both really provides alternatives and makes the experience for everyone more barrier free let's get back to video games so an adjustable difficulty is great you can often have many balancing variables that can be opened up to the user such as have more health slow down the game more double jumps stuff like that Celet has a great example for that and lots of these variables were shown in this example there are also alternative ways to game that can be provided for example some some games like dirt rally many of them can be played both as an arcade game or as a simulation game and Super Mario Odyssey they're two very different game modes that are much more accessible and are better just from from the game concept and easier to play than if and then maybe also use established standards like more more distinguishable colors and audio descriptions for example there are also some more requests here that we have I think I'm gonna have to hurry up here and half stone the game half stone there is a very patient community that creates extensions for the game but this community always has to decompile um the newest version of the game to develop the community extensions and but that also requires the support at least the acceptance by the software publishers otherwise the development can't continue some advice for web developers um yeah I don't have enough time unfortunately but I have an accessibility guide here that is linked on my slides you can use it as yeah to to know what to do and to summarize web accessibility is improving and there are more tools that improve the contrast and the degree of the awareness is also increasing that there are people with disabilities on the internet and also image descriptions are really really helpful so this is also useful if for search engines so basically accessibility is beneficial for everyone and please do not implement dark patterns they are bad for everyone and as ccc we say really smart especially proprietary softwares are causing a lot of problems okay I am better last and you can contact me if you have any further questions yeah thank you very much beta last this is a very big topic but also I'm very thankful that you took the time to talk about this and told us about us thank you okay let's get to the first question so if there's a statistic that I already have entirely described in within the text do I also need to add a description to the image itself yeah um that's a good point sometimes sometimes an image basically augments an already complex text if that is the case then just write as the image description statistic as described in the text you don't need to write it a second time all right thanks then I have another question from myself so you mentioned the content notes is there a format that should be used there is a feature in mastodon with a specific field for this and this is really good if you write it in there that's really helpful but otherwise you can always have like a small text block that you keep free for specifically that but yeah these content warrants are not that established yet so they are not really any standards yet okay thanks then here's another great question are there good tools that help you estimate the accessibility of websites yes there are automatic tools a simple hack is to look at the website without css because it's like what people who use screen readers see there's also a tool but I don't really remember the name of it I'm trying to yeah okay the tool is linked in the slides yeah you might add that to the notes okay great so what is the legal situation with dark patterns regarding the limitations of some people regardless of the GDPR and cookie laws and stuff like that are there laws regarding that as far as I know so many websites are outside of the general equal treatment law so it's not really yeah so there doesn't seem to be laws but the new german government plans that there will be more requirements for better accessibility in the future and I can very well imagine that dark patterns will be no longer legal some dark patterns could also be be no longer legal because of unfair competition so there are also like cases where there's terms of use with some sections that actually don't make sense legally but people just write stuff in there anyway all right thank you okay so the next question is what about using umlauts in combination with screen readers does for example the umlaut do you work or should one write ui alternatively if it's tagged in the right language then and the screen reader also supports umlauts then then the use and and the other umlauts will be read aloud correctly yeah okay are there um low effort ways to and offers for people with dementia on the internet or is that not really a reasonably use case i have um interacted with a firma recently firm recently a company recently who focused on this problem but spontaneously i can't really say anything about this okay thank you so how well can screen readers work with gender just and fair language my favorite option is to use uh so my favorite way of doing it is to use the german neutral masculine version which you can also abbreviate but um gender formulations are a bit difficult and and i prefer to use the underscore because it is um pronounced as a small pause via the text to speech programs okay okay good to know thanks so one more translation here um in the german text language of the djs is generally a um change of text is for texts that um have some copyright on them um do you usually ask them before um creative commons licenses are really helpful here um creative commons uh uh so creative commons um buy and non-commercial as you can see on my slides but if there is a non-derivative license then you have to theoretically ask the offers if you may adapt the things so if you want to add like an image description to a non-derivative work then you really have to ask the original offer but i also think it's ridiculous if artists sue you because you added an image description i don't think that was that this will happen is there an overview about over accessibility dark patterns to avoid there was a talk uh at devog about dark patterns and there were there were yeah there were several dark patterns that were presented that are in general bad there are also um anti patterns in addition to bad dark patterns but i don't quite remember any examples okay i think that's one more question that is currently appearing in the pad but we are breaking the talk off here so you listed your twitter handle here i think so um that is probably also a place where people can contact you um yeah i'm also on mastodon on chaos or social or on solitude maybe also that is probably where i'm also going to be in the quiet cube that is both available from the world and from the hub thank you for your attention also from the translation booth you just heard the talk state of the accessibility by betalas it was translated by urn and oscar if you have feedback for us please use the hashtag c3 lingo thank you and goodbye


Joining us on this panel, we have with us Mr. Upan Biswas, Vice President Marketing and Business House Joy, Ajna Tiwari Naidu, Director of Content and Communications at Upgrad, Ajna Satya, Vice President Marketing at Minthra, Rahul Gandhi, CMO India and UAE at ID Foods, Manoj Agarwal, Co-Founder, Chief Product and Operating Officer at Zozo Day and to chair this session, we have with us Mr. Rael Amin, Senior Editor at Exchange for Media. A very warm welcome to all of you. Thank you so much Kelly. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I hope I'm audible. Yes you are. Thank you so much. So our topic is technology in the future of business and I want to begin and I want to go to the question is sorry if you can hear a little bit of noise at the back end if somebody could address it. My first question to you Mr. Gandhi is that we have seen the role of tech in an unprecedented way in the over the last nine months. Tell me how are brands using and evolving to adapt to a new use of tech? It has been used of course very profusely but there's a new way of engaging with tech. Can you tell me how have you been engaging with tech over the last nine months, especially during this period of high dependence on tech? Sure. Thank you. Thank you Rael. You're right. COVID-19 has been forcing consumers, brands, everyone to change their habit and most of the companies are having to rework their marketing approaches. A lot of people are stuck at home, we are seeing models like BigBasket and Amazon experience massive spike in demand. Now businesses have two choices here at such a stage, either be adapt or be left in the dust. Before COVID-19 our everyday life was going to work, going to school, going to the gym, the grocery store malls, restaurant movies but nowadays the consumers are what they're doing is they're adapting to working in front of Zoom, laptops, shopping online, exercising to a virtual teacher and mostly spending time in isolation. The digital experience have abruptly replaced these in-person experiences. However, once the crisis passes I think some of the things will go back to normal but many things will be forever different and the brands that I think will come out on the top are the ones that are ready to meet this new set of demands and new ways of finding where to reach consumers during the marketing, during an economic crisis is something that has been done very well before. Incidentally, the last time the pandemic was as big as during the Great Depression I think the swine flu and the proctor in Gamble at that point of time along with most companies were looking down the barrel and serious financial hardships. Many of the competitors were cutting advertising and essentially going dark but at the same point of time PNG at that time decided to completely change the playbook and while many people were laid off and a lot of people were spending time at home much like what is happening right now, PNG started at that point of time, I think they were radio broadcasts and a new messaging and they were marketing soap at that point of time and that's where SOAPERA as a thing got created. Incidentally, at ID, we have released five films over the last six months so we've done five films in the last four years. We've upped our marketing game as well. We know that at this point of time, the biggest shift in consumer is going to be that the content marketing will have to have a lot of emphasis on digital experiences and the name of the game will be to deliver real-time connection with bigger importance to meeting consumers on the screens that they are spending time on. So we have in fact focused a lot of effort on building content not only to advertise but also to actually address what the consumer need is at this point of time right now. So the questions that we ask ourselves in our meeting, what do our consumers need from us in this point of time? What are the challenges that they need to overcome? So for a food brand, what they need right now is a lot of variety in food. Most people are bored of eating the stuff that they've been continuously doing at home and what are the challenges that they need to overcome? They need to make sure that the food that they're eating is healthy, fresh, nutritious at the same point of time does variety. So a lot of our content marketing effort is going towards creating recipes which are not authentic but also healthy and then we also spend time thinking as to where the consumer is consuming this content. Not only us and I think a lot of brands have done some fantastic work at this point of time. I think I was reading about Viator. Viator has had virtual tours of the world that they are sponsoring right now. I mean talk about being innovative and in a tough market, the hotel and the travel industry is the worst. So I guess there's no other choice but to reinvent like PNG did like Viator is doing and a lot of our industries are down in the dumps but at the same point of time, reinvention is possibly a necessity right now and there's no two ways about it. Right. Mr. Satya, coming to you, I mean of course, I mean there has been a certain seamless kind of connect with customers from your end but I mean the last nine months specifically, was there any kind of new addition innovation from the tech side that you had to kind of consider looking at the way the market panned out, the way consumer behavior panned out? Yeah, of course, actually we have had you know living up a lifespan I would say in the last seven months. So we were at a phase where we had no business when the lockdown started to a phase where we were doing better than what we had anticipated and that was the silver lining because a lot of people actually moved to e-commerce as Rahul also mentioned. And I think, see for us, a couple of things happened where technology created a big role to answer your specific questions. First of all, the whole consumer sentiment around getting bored while sitting at home and finding new avenues to engage in on the platform that they were used to going to. So that was the first sentiment that we picked on. We launched something which was our own content destination with content coming in globally around what's happening in fashion and a lot of Indian content on fashion inspiration and fashion education which was Mintra Studio that we launched on the Mintra app and that became a sort of a good pastime for a lot of users to at least learn about fashion because we are still at a stage where we are very nascent in our understanding of fashion and we look for inspiration from across the world or from the fellow or experts. So we brought in a lot of influences and built that ecosystem and then used technology to provide a seamless experience where people could not just watch content as well as they could immediately shop that look with e-commerce platform available to them. So that's the first big tech innovation and that has scaled up very well for us. The second was I think there have been a bunch of other tech innovations it won't be just one bucket of them but as we expanded a lot of tier 2, tier 3 smaller town India started to come to e-commerce for the first time. And when a new customer or a new user comes to an e-commerce platform or a traditional platform for that matter their understanding, their expectations as well as their appreciation of the consumer journey that you have to go through to make the purchase is slightly more simplistic, slightly less nuanced compared to let's say an evolved metro user or a tier 1 user. So we had to simplify some of these consumer tech flows. We had to think keeping the customer in mind as to how they would start their journey on Mintra and how they would then to go to the purchase. What kind of creative communication that needs to happen? How can technology sort of bring about some of these things in a seamless manner throughout the app journey? So that is a bunch of take innovations that happened there which helped us sort of ride through this 7-8 month period so far. Right, coming to you Mr. Basivas, what has been your story when it comes to the use of tech as far as a new business environment is concerned? Did you also go through a certain innovation or new kind of tech innovation to kind of adapt to this new world order? Thanks Arvail. Yes and I would say no changes did not happen just after Covid. We have been trying to change the way someone constructs their home. That's one part of our business, the other being how people maintain their homes. So that started well before Covid. I would say around one-half year back when we have been trying to change the entire process of how home construction is done. So starting from the sales process where the customer not visit our office, they will get the entire master experience from it. Simple things like earlier was to push customers to visit their office during Covid. If you ask me what happened, what just happened, post Covid, we ensure that all the meetings moved online, all the transactions moved online, all the information sharing moved online. We have started doing AR videos of the homes, how they will look right. So a lot of things have happened on that. On the tracking bit answer, given that because of Covid they must step out of their homes to check how the new construction is coming up. We have ensured CCTV cameras in their where the work is happening. We have also ensured that the entire process, payment, the materials whatever is going to their site is being tracked online. That has given a lot of, has helped them a lot and given them a lot of confidence on the brand and these are few changes we have done recently in the last few months to work around Covid. Right, right. Ms. Naidu coming to you, sorry, you want to add to it? Mr. Viswas, are you still okay? Okay, I'm sorry. Ms. Timari, sorry, Ms. Naidu coming to you, tell me though there is a lot of use of tech, the prevalence in use of tech is very heavy at the kind of business you do. But in the last nine months, if I have to ask you, tell me about the new additions or a new kind of evolution that you saw from the tech end that you had to adopt to kind of continue with the customer connect you had? Yeah, and both are right. It's both Tiwari and Naidu. So you were not wrong at any point. So just say. So at tech and that's where what I represent being in upgrade is generally compared to what demonetized to financial the fintech sector for as as as against the whole demonetization, right? What what demonetization did to fintech is what corona is doing to ed tech. That's generally the the talk in the town. So I'll talk from the first and point of view and the journey that upgrade has taken. So before corona before the pandemic, we were saying the similar thing that lifelong learning is important upskilling is needed. The technological disruption will make you irrelevant, but that was never the scare the way it is right now. So if we thought that technology was a disruptor, here was corona at the pandemic. So from the edge tech sector as a point case in point, and from upgrade as specific, I think we had a great run and we continue to have a great run. The kind of interest and awareness that no money could have bought is here, sadly so, but that's the reality. The other thing is that I don't everybody says that technology is a disruptor. I feel technology is a creator just like this year 2020 and I really hope 2021 will be a better year. But if you look at it as a year of learning, it has taught us so many things. Look at all of us interacting like this. We never thought if you're going to do our business the way it is, say, sitting in our own homes or comfort of our own home. So it's a big, big teacher. So that that's one part I wanted to kind of call out. The other part is what you asked that how has technology helped us? Well, absolutely 100% right and our content range and because these are the two topics that we are talking about technology and content. If you look at our range of content, right from the brand content to the in-app content to the pedagogy led content, all of this has to be curated all of this has to be developed and all of it has to be delivered on a timely fashion. Right from right from the whole Aage K. Soch, which was a anthem, which we did it with various artists and you know, we had Radhika Aapte and all of them, which again, we shot remotely. That was that was a viral thing to the pedagogy content that we deliver to our learners every single day, remotely producing, remotely curating and remotely delivering through across the team has been a learning of sorts for us. So in short, I'll just for this point, I'll say that for a grad and for the whole EdTech as a segment, it has been a great learning journey as we continue to make our learner sharper, smarter and relevant. But if you look at other companies, other segments, and I'm being part of a lot of webinars, I see so many innovations coming out of this pandemic, which are so need based and our life is never going to be reversed anymore. Things will change, but there are some habits that are formed permanently. So that's my stance on this. Right, exactly. It takes 21 days and we're well into nine months. Mr.  Yeah, thanks. So I am a different company from the rest of the panel here. We are a B2B SaaS company. And I can see most of most of the companies here are from the consumer brands. Now, most of the B2B companies, especially the technology companies and SaaS companies, they have seen this entire nine months as a big boon. Because the entire world is now glued to digital media and forcefully people don't have any choice but to adopt digital transformation in a lot of processes which they do within their company, whether it is within their employees or whether it is with their clients or consumers or whether it is for their suppliers. And then we as a company, we cater to a couple of personas. So we have one of the products which cater to employee motivation and engagement. Another product which caters to sales team, motivation sales team performs. And the third product which is into rewards and incentives. Now, each of the products somehow has been a perfect use case during these nine months where especially when the human motivation levels are ebsimal, because of different reasons in the pandemic, people are not connected with each other. They don't have face time. The motivation level levels are low. And that is when even any small intervention from any digital media or any digital tool, which can help elevate their motivation levels, which can help recognize the efforts which they are putting. So for example, if your employees are putting day in, day out on work, despite all the problems which they have at home, maybe health problems, maybe problems where they don't have the right working environment at home. So even small recognition, yeah, small recognition, small pat on the back, those kind of things that really motivate them. Similarly, each one of you come from brands where sales is very, very important. And doing sales during this lockdown where the budgets are very low with both the consumers as well as the companies themselves is a nightmare. And if you talk to any sales guys, I guess, apart from the healthcare professionals and the public services guys, sales guys are under the heaviest pressure because I mean, people are looking for revenues to run the companies and sales guys are under pressure. So how can you really accelerate sales without kind of breaking them down? And any any such tool has been really helping companies to kind of keep their sales intact despite tough times. And one more thing which we have, one more very interesting thing which is happening in the global scenario, especially from a global perspective. And as Archana mentioned that, that is going to stay is the world has become, the world is disconnected physically, but the world has become flatter and flatter. So today, we had an inertia that I can't sell in the US unless I am present in the US physically, or I can't sell in let's say a small town unless I am physically present there, but that inhibition has gone away suddenly. Both the brands as well as the consumer is now receptive to online buying and selling. And that is a welcome step for any company which is into digital way of selling and buying. So these are couple of positive steps in these tough times and yeah. Perfect. I want to come to you Mr. Gandhi. These nine months have also been a period of deep thinking and kind of introspecting about the way we do conduct business. The strategies have been reversed. A lot of changes have happened. Tell me from your standpoint when it comes to the use of technology and content to target audiences, are there some new learnings? Is there a new kind of science at work, a new playbook at work that you have observed? Yeah, actually more than a technology point of view. I think the right content strategy during the pandemic is very important. I think as a brand ID has always stood for the mother archetype, somebody who's offering comfort food. And our focus has always been on positive brand messaging and positioning because when we do come out of this pandemic, people will have a sense of your business. The sense may be negative or positive depending on the calls that any brand takes during this point of time. What you choose to do as a business right now will actually shape your business in the future and we've seen lots of brands, not lots but maybe a few brands get it wrong during the pandemic. It's very important that while we're disseminating our campaigns or our marketing efforts that we don't look at somebody who's taking advantage. Marketing still needs to happen but to avoid taking advantage of this situation to score a business profit at all costs, we've seen some people get it horribly wrong in the recent year. So while yeah, keeping your business afloat is crucial but it should not come at the cost of a human emotion or a human life. It may get your good boost initially but it will hurt your brand in the long term. And I think also very important is to actually, especially for a brand who wants to embody the caregiver, I was to offer support and help. I remember around, I think it was April 1st or 2nd week when all of us were lining outside grocery shops and we had no idea where we'll get our next meal from because there was a sudden sharp or huge mongous lockdown and all of us were standing outside grocery shops and people were actually looking for food right now. That's the time when ID actually saw a big spike in sales and we got a lot of consumers writing to us that my mother is in Delhi and I'm in Bangalore. I don't know how to cook, where can I find your food? I think it was April 12th or 13th at that point of time. ID was one of the first brands who launched this store finder kind of a thing where people could go on the website and we are a company who actually delivers to the store daily. We have a daily service model and our entire distribution infrastructure is owned by ourselves so we don't have a distributor. What that allows us is that we know each store's stock on hand and how much we are selling to them. We decided to actually offer help to the consumers. We actually started updating all this data on the website. I said go, if you're really, the guys were really desperate and they were and some of them are old also. Some of the old people could not go to stores. Young ones like us could still stand outside stores for us but some of them were not even healthy enough to go travel outside. So one thing we did is we said they're okay in a circle in a radius of one or two kilometers. If you want to find your store, this is the store and this much batter, this much paratha, this much paneer, this much curd, this much coconut, we've delivered to them. Please go find them. And then the second thing we actually started doing is we like, okay, there are lots of COVID hotspots where we actually need to directly go to the consumers. So in some time in May, we started going to apartments directly. Lots of people stopped us from doing that saying that what are you doing?  But lots of people also did not think that when you sell directly to apartments, you're actually selling at MRP, which means that the 20% retail margin is saved and you can actually reinvest into the, so we started doing what a branch should have done at that point of time, which is to offer support and help, tell the consumer where the food is, when you're the short of food, deliver it to the doorstep in case they're not willing to step out of the door. And no matter what content strategy you build, always factor in that there are always going to be ways and help the technology and help you support people. It can come in this form, it can also come in ways of making donation to support your local businesses or offering time to educate them like Upgrad is doing. I think it's important to be empathetic at this point of time as well as balance optimism and sensitivity. Mr. Siddiqui, I want to come to you with a similar question that when it comes to the use of content strategy and technology, have the practices been same? Of course not. I mean, before COVID and now where we are and what were the key learnings of what is the right mix that you have found to target consumers effectively and build that consumer-centric approach in this current milieu we are living in? Yeah, I mean, see for me, the biggest learning has been every content campaign needs to start with a clear objective. Right? And objectives can be different across campaigns. I think one of the mistakes to avoid is to have a common objective of user engagement and just apply it left, right and center across everything. And I think the world is extremely dynamic right now. The contexts are very dynamic. So just to help you explain with an example, content could mean anything. It's not just about great video content coming out, but even simple content where you're trying to sell a product to the user and a very different on the other end of the spectrum, something which is meant to inspire the user to start considering you as a platform or as a brand. And then the purchase decision may happen maybe after a few months or a few weeks. So depending on the objective, I think the content has to be first charted accordingly and inspiration content would look very different compared to, let's say a sale content because both of them have to work at different parts of the funnel and lead the objective. The second part of that is the right personalization and targeting. With digital, it allows us now to really, really micro segment users at very minute levels and be able to smartly give the message basis what you know about them already. So I think these topics have been discussed to death across forums, but I think the beauty of this is to be able to practice that and execute that at scale and create an operational machinery which can execute creative creation at scale because that is where I see a lot of people getting challenged. Eventually you end up having a very limited set of creatives and then you have to target let's say 5000 customer cohorts and that becomes very difficult. So one, how do you use technology to automate a lot of this creative creation? That's where technology plays a very important role. Second, how do you use technology to be able to take quick decisions on what is best for that customer business signals you have received in the recent past and be able to integrate your analytics systems along with your decision-making systems along with your creative systems. So there's a lot of operational work at an organizational level that needs to be done to be able to get to that level of targeting and I think there is still a long way to go for a lot of organizations including the best of digital organizations to get to a market especially in India which is just a collection of multiple continents if I may say. So even within languages there are so many nuances of the context in which you tell the story to the consumer and whether it is a digital brand or an offline brand that level of personalization makes or breaks the case in terms of the final objective achievement. Right, right, right. Ms. Naidu, asking you this same question, what is the rule book, the playbook, the new playbook at work when it comes to addressing and targeting consumers in the right way using technology and content? Is there a new rule book at all and what is it? So it's on mute I guess here. More than the rule book, it's the stance of the organizations across that has been taken. So somebody spoke about what are you delivering during this pandemic in this nine months, right? So the brands have to deliver value, they have to deliver trust and they have to deliver empathy and for them to deliver these three things you have to believe in that and everything else that you do emancipates itself, manifests itself into what you call it content or brand or outreach, right? That's the basis mode point. We all know that content as we knew it has undergone so much of change, but if you add these three, four lenses to the new normal as we call it though I hate the term because it's so done to death. But if you look at the realities that surround us today, if your content is not delivering value, trust and empathy, thinking from the point of view of your customer, it is not going to resonate as they say real resonates. Storytelling that is why is become mainstream, which was never the case. Storytelling is a mainstream. Storytelling today is has been proven to be a art science which delivers commerce. So that's the my stance on storytelling, which is a very human thing. If you add the AR and the VR and the AI's of the world, it kind of becomes our tools or the vehicles to deliver those emotions to your customers. So that is the second point. The third is more from a point of view because you asked what have we been doing. Like Rahul said that during the pandemic, we have done a lot of free courses because we understood that a lot of people are losing their jobs. That's where our empathy comes into play. That we say it's all right. We will make money. But right now, let me help you with some just in time learnings, which will help you to learn and make sure that you're relevant. So for us, like I have been saying, content has so many different faces.  Now, for an ed tech brand, that was a stance that we took.   But have we said it? No ed tech brand has said it. And we did it. If you look at the whole motivational content that can I motivate because you can give everything to everybody. But till the time the person does not have the aspirations, you're not going to move mountains. So what can we do? So the whole thing, I'll give you such where we created this UGC led anthem. If you look at if you look at our pedagogy course, the whole blended learning, we're getting we're doing course with so many international universities, technology comes to our rescue or to ours, BR strength in every possible way. We are doing so many live lectures, we are doing so many webinars, we are doing so many blended learning, we are kind of curating the whole simulated learning as per the aspirational job kind. So it's going hand in hand. And the two, like I said, technology is a is a creator, not a disruptor. You have to learn to live with technology and make it a complimenting factor. So yeah, right, right. Mr. Biswas, you heard the pandas before you talking about the contextuality of messaging and the emotional tone that they took. Tell me, how did you use the content and tech to address that environment around us that we had? We basically focused on two things during the pandemic. Number one being our business model is slightly different from the business models of delivery or business models, where in the customer, the service provider doesn't enter the household, right? For a brand like house job, the service provides entering the household engagement level is far higher. So the trust level needs to be far higher for which we discriminate content around the safety aspect. And we also ensure through our app, our customer gets to know simple things like what is the temperature of the service provider who is visiting their home, right? Is he fit enough to visit the home or just to build that trust. Also around the same time, we also ensured that if the customer, the service provider is not well, it doesn't seem to be about the customer has the right to reject the service provider just to add that level of trust and relevance for the brand. In addition to this, we also around the same time, we realized given that the service providers were not allowed to travel because we'd never, we'd not fall in the essential category. We started doing DIY videos wherein small hacks, right, which makes sense for the customer. So we also have beauty vertical wherein we provide beauty services at home. So small hacks, which a lady or a guy sitting at home can take care of hair cut, how it is to be done, right? Some funny content around that, which also have a lot of engagement. We tried this and this has worked well for us. We tried changing the way we look at the metrics of content and how content is judged, right? Earlier it was only about views. Now, after the pandemic, we are realized for brand like us, we don't believe in spending and just for the sake of GMV revenue, we try building sustainably and we are almost at a breakable level right now. What we believe is content that makes sense for the customer, where the customer is sharing the content with his or her friends. So we look at shareivity as one of the most important engagement parameters for us. And also we have divided content for us into three, four different buckets. So as I spoke about useful content or content that is a customer can, that is kind of changing the world, which is trying to engage the customer inside the emotional man or the product delivery of the customer's life. They divide content with different buckets and try creating content on that and we have seen good response from that. Right, right, right. Mr. Agarwal, you bring in a different perspective, as you said earlier as well. Have there been any new solutions when it comes to contextual messaging with an emotional awareness that brands are looking so far during this pandemic period and which it seems is going to prolong for some time? Have there been new solutions around? Yeah, so Agarwal, I think during this entire pandemic, what has happened for the last nine months and maybe continuing for the next few months as well is that everyone in business has got a pause and a lot of time to kind of look inward. Because most of the times we were generally as brand guys or content marketing guys, we are distracted with the external world. We keep looking outward and we keep looking outward for solutions, whether it is through events or digital media or maybe conferences, etc, etc. But during the pandemic, the only tool which you had for marketing was around content and how you distribute your content. Most of the other things were not really practical. So that was the only choice. Now, but this has led to some goods and bad. So it is kind of a double S sword here because everyone is now having a lot of time as well as content is the only choice. Internet is littered with content. I mean, everyone feels like I am doing great content, but is it the content for Google or is it the content for the customer? That is a question which every brand should ask because there are various ways to hack Google algorithm. Google can always keep a step ahead, but a brand manager will always go step ahead then Google to find those hacks. And that is how this entire push and pull works in digital marketing. Now, the problem is that how do you really break this litter and how do you do more quality and less of quantity? Because everyone thinks like he is a job with doctor. He can write beautiful content and versus, but not. And especially I am talking about the B2B context because our target audience is generally the CXOs of the world, which don't care about content which is very shallow. I mean, the content has to be really, really deep. So what we did in this entire pandemic is that how can we create very deep content which is written by experts? How can we give very insightful content, which is not like my me too kind of a content, but which really adds value to the consumer apart from adding value to Google algorithms? And how can we use the entire philosophy of less is more rather than more is more because you can bring very good impact by doing less content, but very, very awesome quality. So that has been our learning and that has been our differentiator during the pandemic that let's create awesomeness in content rather than just pushing it out. Absolutely. Wonderful words and I have another five or seven minutes to go. I want to fit in as many questions hopefully. My next question is in the world of AR, VR, AI, big data, where does empathy figure and how do brands build that in? We are targeting customers and minutely looking at them, looking at data, where does empathy factor in and how do you enable it? Mr. Gandhi starting from you. We are at a root or a very empathetic brand. I think firstly, the best way to be empathetic is to be true to yourself and to the consumer. Yeah. So if I'll speak like a food company should, if I'm marketing healthy products, they better be healthy. If I'm marketing no preservative, chemical free, all these kind of products, not only should I be true to that, but the safety and hygiene factors that I should be following right from the factory then to the vans that are going and delivering to the way my products are kept in the store, I should be true to it. That's the best way to be empathetic is to actually be true to yourself and be an empathetic brand. The other way to do it is that empathy is not something that is marketable. If you're an empathetic brand, if you actually are an empathetic person who's devising solutions for the consumers, thinking and bearing in mind, what are the support and help that the consumers need, the consumers will give you back long-term. You educate the consumers on what healthy food habits are, you engage them in creative ways and you entertain them somehow, the consumer will actually trust you back. So I think COVID-19 is going to stay here for a while and its impact will be felt for many years, but the unfortunate reality as it may be, as a marketer what we could do is we should make sure that we keep the customers like we keep our wives safe, healthy and so forth. We should create, we should be true to ourselves as brands and individuals and we keep customers like our wives and they should be happy. Yes, Mr. Seethe, your approach and how do you factor this in? Yeah, I'll stay away from keeping customers like wives, but I think for us, picking up from what Rahul also said, what is the true value of the brand and the purpose of the brand and how does that connect with some of the human values of the people around you, for us, for example, fashion is a great enabler for a lot of people. It is an enabler for building confidence, it is an enabler to open new doors, it's an enabler to present yourself with a much more, I would say, confidence is one word, but in a much more empowered manner or at least whether you are presenting to others or presenting to yourself in front of a mirror and feeling that empowerment internally, fashion has a big role to play and I think across generations, we have seen whenever there has been a big depression, there has been something culturally which has evolved and led to an evolvement on fashion, right? Lipsticks were evolved like that, short skirts were evolved like that, right? So fashion and culture are so deeply tied to each other. Now, for us, when we think about any piece of content and it doesn't matter, whether it has to go to multiple segments or how we target it, I think the idea and the philosophy is number one, is it being helpful to the customer and different customers have different paradigms of what helpfulness means for some being highly valuable from a pricing perspective is being helpful, for some being inspirational in terms of, okay, just opening my eyes, okay, this is also possible is being helpful and for some very, very coaching or mentoring sort of role where you tell them, okay, with hacks, with DIYs and these are the five ways of creating a budget-free look or a budget look is going to be helpful, right? So you figure out what is being helpful to the customer and then ask that question each time that a piece of content gets created is, does that meet that criteria? Second is, I think also Manoj made a good point is, it's not about volume, it's about making sure that the quality as well as the context in which you are making that conversation with the consumer is very well articulated in the beginning and that's why I mentioned in the beginning, starting with the objective, right? So if you're talking to a CXO, the objective of the campaign is very different. It is right at the last level, they will want to go off the funnel where they would want to move from intent to consideration to actually deep evaluation versus people when you are building a point to talking to new customers, I think awareness is the first thing you will look at and at that time, I think the message has to be extremely simple and very, very high level for people to just appreciate that, okay, you play a meaningful role in my life and at some later point in time, I'll come and sort of talk to you and at that point, I'll engage that customer with a different kind of content which is far more nuanced, right? So those are some of the things that we look at as Mintra, which is how can we be more helpful and use fashion as an enabler for our audience? Right, right. Ms. Naidu, your thoughts on building in a world of deep tech, high tech, how do you ensure, I mean, you spoke about the campaign with kind of voice the emotions, but how do you build it always and keep that mindset of empathy first? Yeah, I think empathy, empathy has to be lived and delivered more than anything else. And once you live it and when you deliver it, it shows, like I said, real resonates, right? So it's a very important aspect while like I said earlier that technology, whether it is deep tech or the any form of technology will only be a vehicle to transport what your thoughts are. Empathy for different brands mean different things. We being in ed tech and we are responsible brand first of all. Like Rahul said that if it is food, it better be authentic and if it does not have preservatives, better not have preservatives. The same logic is for all brands and education and learning is the most sacred and I will use this word with a lot of responsibility because you are dealing with people's future, you're dealing with people's livelihood, their kids and their families, life depends on the kind of education that they will have. So we have to be very, very responsible, along with being empathetic, because we all know that the intent is there, people are being extremely insecure about their jobs, rightly so because it's technological change and pandemic. So lack of time, lack of money are the two biggest problem areas but I have an intent but I don't have time, I don't have money. How do then a brand like us respond to these realities of my TG by being an empathetic brand and that's why all the things that I told the whole three courses, the 10k courses, you know, beatdowns, that's again something that we have penetrated and I did not speak about it but sadly most of the marketeers and most of the brands when they are talking about their product, when they are talking to beatdowns, they don't have customized solution, they just juxtapose the same solution to them but the people in BNC towns do not have similar realities, case in point being during this pandemic and before girls of BNC towns had aspirations, they wanted to go out of their town but they could not go out for various reasons. Now because it's now a, you know, fence less world, suddenly the whole online reality has come to them because their brothers or their neighbors who are boys are also learning online and they say, hey I don't need this limitation in my life just because I can't go to a next district level or a city level office. So I'm saying at so many levels, empathy is at play. You have to understand your TG so well, you have to understand the pain points of your user so well. We talk about user journey and we talk about all kinds of journey but do we ever feel their journey? Do we ever live their journey? So brands need to do that in a real sense rather than make it as a part of their marketing strategy. Absolutely wonderful. I think understanding customer touch points is not just about data but also about emotional, the way they can consume brands. Mr. Biswas, your thoughts on this, how do you kind of listen to consumers if I have to say this and build in a certain connect with this empathetic? I think empathy is not only should be a value meant for consumers, it's underanalyzed the whole organization is empathetic towards its employees or it's a part of the brand system. It's difficult to be only empathetic towards customers. So I would like to sign certain things which we have done internally as well, like taking care of our, because of construction as well as on demand business if they don't fall under essential services. So for those three months of lockdown, we ensured that we tied up with Give India. We tied up a couple of other NGOs to provide for the construction workers who are almost not everything. They are daily wage earners. We also started a couple of other businesses like Outdoor Mart and which also ensured that the service providers get something to earn. So on one side we ensured the service providers are earning something by delivering the groceries. On the other side, we reached out to a customer base and targeted mainly the slightly aged customers who find it difficult to go out of their homes during that time and targeted them so that they can use the service. In addition to this, I think another most important aspect of empathy is not being product or service focused but understanding what benefit that service is providing the customer. So trying to understand what is the customer gaining out of it and talking in that language. So safety is, as I had earlier pointed out, safety was one of the most important factors making that. Previously one of my previous experiences was on the kitchenware segment where selling a non-stick pan versus selling a pan which is not customogenic in nature is very different. So we used to highlight what's the most important aspect customers getting for customer wants to based on say keywords and trying to target those which I think is helps which helps and which has shown the results as well. So that's my take on it. Perfect. Last words Mr. Agarwal, how do you see this? Yeah, I think Esarpan mentioned that empathy has to be lived right from the DNA of the company and then transferred into the customers and your suppliers because then only you will be able to actually leave the value with your customers. If you don't practice it internally, you can't practice it externally. Now when it comes to how you show empathy, there are different ways and especially from a B2B perspective, a lot of things which we do is in terms of proactive support that instead of waiting for the customer to come to you because of certain issues, can you be proactive enough to kind of inform the customer? Because if you look into the Indian context today, I mean apart from pandemic, there are several other issues like somebody seriously ill, there are issues in the family or there is a cyclone out there, somebody's electricity is gone suddenly. So instead of waiting for the customer to get irate and shout at you, can you be a little more proactive saying that there is a downtime for my servers today at 2 to 4 p.m. and please expect some downtime in those hours. Similarly, how can we add a human support to a lot of AI and NLP which we do? And this is something which every consumer would have faced that they are talking to a bot and then the bot is not able to answer their queries and they get stuck and they are running from pillar to post, they do some WhatsApp in some groups that hey, can I get the contact of the HOD of this particular company and I am stuck in a problem. So how can brands add a human touch to their bots and customer support so that the customer is not only relying on those AI algorithms. And then from a B2B context again, how can you make your product so very simple that it is easy to use, it is easy to onboard. There are various ways of onboarding your customers in a very easy way so that again you show empathy right from your product onboarding till the time the customer is consuming that product. And each touch point has to be checked in depth that yes, I am empathetic to the consumer need here. Thank you so much. I think we are out of time and Ms. Naidu has a meeting at seven. Thank you so much Mr. Gandhi, Mr. Satya, Ms. Naidu, Mr. Biswas, Mr. Agrawal for joining us. Thank you everyone.


Planning is an integral part of monitoring interventions in health or any other similar setting and tracking actions and activities with your plans shouldn't be difficult. With the Action Tracker apps, you and your team can keep track of specific actions in DHIS2 with ease. There are two different Action Tracker applications in DHIS2 that you can use, the BNA Action Tracker and the Standalone Action Tracker. The Standalone Action Tracker can be used for tracking any action, whilst the BNA Tracker is specifically designed for the bottleneck analysis app. Let's take a look at how the BNA Action Tracker works. You can download the Action Tracker from the app hub and once it's installed, you'll be able to access it straight from the search menu in DHIS2. Once you've opened the BNA Action Tracker from the application menu, you'll see the dashboard. Once set, you'll first see the Action Planning table and here you can see actions that are directly pulled from your root cause analysis in the BNA app on the left, with actions set on the right. So on the first row, we can see the results of the bottleneck analysis for the DPT3 immunization in this particular district. Here, the availability of trained human resources has been identified as a priority bottleneck for action and follow-up. During the analysis, it's been discovered that the district's health workers have not received training in the latest best practice guidelines for treatment and staff have large caseloads resulting in a high turnover. The Action Tracker app allows us to follow this up with suggested actions. We can see the action description, start and end date, and then the person to whom the action is assigned, along with any budgetary amounts and targets. The action description can be expanded by clicking on the text. So here we can see that a possible solution is to consider the use of e-learning to deliver training on demand and at a low cost. There are then numerous action descriptions to follow up by. These have then been assigned to different people to follow up and take action on. You could add more actions to suggested solutions by clicking the plus button on the right, filling all of the different sections out. If you just want to view the planned actions, you can click on the Action Tracker tab. You can also download the planned actions in different formats, like CSV, allowing you to share your actions outside the DHIS too. But what if there are other situations where you want to keep track of action plans developed without using bottleneck analysis? Then you can use the standalone Action Tracker with similar functionality. You can keep track of the implementation of actions you and your team are working on. And that's the Action Tracker apps. Use them to keep on top of your actions and share your progress with your team.


The BAS figured out how to turn breadcrumbs. To have breadcrumbs on a piece. So, there's a lot of missions set. Five foot wide, 7,000 pound vehicle. It's going to trip whenever. Additionally, you guys are asked to do a DV day. And let's be 100% honest. Good. Let's do it. So you have pot points, right? You're just going to short halt for a moment. That's all there is. So, keep that in mind. First, if you have a heavy weight on it, that's awesome. What do you guys need to be concerned about when you're building this mission set up? We're just talking about it in and out of park. I'm Lance Keegan-Walters. I'm with Victor 1-2, Charlie Company. I'm a team leader and I'm from Middletown, Maryland. Out here today, we were testing a new UGV, which is an unmanned ground vehicle with the Marine Corps coming from Marine Corps Warfooting Lab, Quantico. And so, basically, we're becoming skilled operators of these vehicles and hopes in the future with the 2030 Marine Corps infantry plan to employ them in future battle spaces. The events we covered today, we did a box reconnaissance mission with an autonomous setting on this UGV. It decreases the danger for infantry Marines possible, like IEDs or just enemy in the AO. This is doing kind of that job for us. And then, also, the casualty evacuation, which is obviously very crucial for us.  I expected, by trade, I was an assaultman, so I'm very happy to see that like we did, the EMAP has breaching capabilities and makelicks, so a lot of big explosions you can shoot rockets, all sorts of weapon systems with the crow system that will be put on it. So, 50 cows, Mark 19s, 240s, Bushmaster, chain guns. So, there's a lot of exciting things coming to the Marine Corps with the EMAP system that we're all excited to see. I definitely feel that we met our goal today. Just getting hands on and feeling comfortable with route planning and just operating the machine as a whole. Everybody's become extremely confident with it. Yes, 100%. Especially by 2030, this is just the crawl phase we're in right now. So, moving forward, there's going to be unlimited capabilities with UGBs and really reduce the in-person troop footprint and fire superiority and also just going to save lives too. I'm Dr. Matt Vogelsong. I'm the robotics and autonomy branch head for the science and technology division at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. So, the vehicles that we have behind us are the EMAPs or the Expeditionary Modular Autonomous Vehicles. And they were really designed from the ground up, probably starting in about five or six years ago to begin to represent what future tactical unmanned ground vehicles could look like and to give us a common platform to build off of to begin to develop TTPs and new technologies. So, TTPs are tactics techniques and procedures and SOPs are your standard operating procedures. So, robots are going to operate differently than humans and so we have to begin to understand what that means for the Marine Corps of the future. So, the EMAP is a it's a 7,000 pound vehicle it's 5 feet by 12 feet it can carry 7,000 pounds it's a series hybrid electric so that means that it's actually an electric vehicle with a diesel 10 kilowatt generator essentially inside of it that charges that electric battery. So, it can operate as a mobile COC it can operate as a litter carrier to autonomously evacuate casualties it can operate as a fires platform it's really no different than any of the Humvees or the other trucks we've had in the past, right? So, the vehicle itself is important but it's less important than what we're actually putting on it. Those war fighting functionary things that we're going to put on it are really what's going to matter and change the battlefield. We're doing all this experimentation as part of Infantry 2030, right? That means a few different things for the Marine Corps it means that the Marine Corps Table of Organization, right? Or what how Marines make up units is going to change the TE, so the Table of Equipment so the equipment that's in the Marine Corps is going to change and that means that the way that we've operated in the past and in OIF is not going to be able to be the same way. The technology is new Marines are thinking in new different and innovative ways and so that means we have to start now to make sure we're in a good spot in ten years. So, we've got it down really to a science. So, for just a base vehicle operator for the vehicles we have behind us we can really do in about two and a half days. So, the Marines that we have here from 1-2 have been operating the vehicles since Tuesday and today, Thursday they're really doing full mission profile planning. The past couple days they've really just began to wrap their brain around what the operator control unit looks like so that is literally a tough book tablet that they plan missions on and that was yesterday and they got some basic vehicle fundamentals of just how you drive this thing and what it feels like to operate it remotely and then today really began to focus around real world potential missions of this vehicle to do. So, this morning they did a box reconnaissance of an LZ as part of an advanced party they later on did a casualty collection so patrol was out and they took a casualty and they autonomously sent a vehicle out there to collect a casualty and then bring it back to a casualty collection point and then we began to move in some of the more confined space around the woods in Camp Lejeune to understand how dense can you really operate this vehicle in. Marines always manage to surprise me we're an innovative group of people I spent 15 years in the Marine Corps as an enlisted Marine so I like getting back to my roots and training other enlisted Marines and their ability to pick things up, be innovative be inquisitive and just want to do things in a different way to get better and faster and smarter and safer and more deadly they surprise me every single time it's always better than I had hoped it was going to be


Ysgol yw gennym yn ymgyrchol 8589.1 yn y byddwch yn yr ydwch yn ymgyrchol 8589 yn y byddwch yn yr ymgyrchol Shirliam summerville. Rwy'n byw i'w amser, yr ymgyrchol tenonai yn ymgyrchol. Rwy'n byddwch yn ymgyrchol. Rwy'n byw i'w amser ar y byddwch yn ymgyrchol 8589.1 yn y byddwch yn yr ymgyrchol 8589.1 yn ymgyrchol 26. No 84. There were three abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed. The next question is that amendment 8589.3 in the name of Paul O'Kane, which seeks to amend motion 8589 in the name of Shirley-Anne Somerville, be agreed? Are we all agreed? No. We are not agreed. There will be a vote. A member should cast their votes now and the vote is now closed. The result of the vote on amendment 8589.3 in the name of Paul O'Kane is yes, 17. No, 94. There were three abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed. The next question is that amendment 8589.2 in the name of Alex Cole-Hamilton, which seeks to amend motion 8589 in the name of Shirley-Anne Somerville, be agreed? Are we all agreed? No. We are not agreed. We'll move to a vote and member should cast their votes now. The vote is now closed. The result of the vote on amendment 8589.2 in the name of Alex Cole-Hamilton is yes, 20. No, 94. There were no abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed. The next question is that motion 8589 in the name of Shirley-Anne Somerville on supporting Scotland with cost of living and reducing child poverty, be agreed? Are we all agreed? No. Parliament is not agreed. There will be a vote. A member should cast their votes now. The vote is closed. The result of the vote on motion 8589 in the name of Shirley-Anne Somerville is yes, 67. No, 30. There were 17 abstentions. The motion is therefore agreed. I propose to ask a single question on two parliamentary bureau motions. Does any member object? No. The final question therefore is that motions 8615 on committee membership and 8616 on substitution on committees in the name of George Adam on behalf of the parliamentary bureau be agreed? Are we all agreed? That is agreed. That concludes decision time. We will move on shortly to members' business. I have asked members who are leaving the chambers to do so as quickly and quietly as possible. There will be a brief suspension before we move on to members' business.


and you should get a notification. This is searching 101. My name is Carissa Powell and I use she, her pronouns and I work with the first year composition classes. So if you are in English, 101, et cetera, I am your librarian and you can email me about anything related to those classes at Carissa at utk.edu. And my name is Makayla Wood and I am the graduate teaching assistant in the teaching and learning programs department. So starting off today, we're going to do a Slido poll and we're just really interested in learning what you're hoping to get out of this workshop. So you can either access this poll by scanning the QR code on the screen with your phone or you can go to Slido.com and enter that code. And as you guys answer, the words that you or whatever you respond will come up on the screen. So we can all view that. So I see somebody put best search terms and or not searching tips. I like it. Awesome. Thank you so much for responding. These are great answers. And I think we're going to go for some of those and some other stuff. So we're excited to talk to you guys today. All right. So we're going to be going over how to figure out the best keywords based on your research question, how to brainstorm for synonyms based on those keywords, and then a fancy library jargon, which is some search strategies using Boolean operators. So we're going to kick it off by starting to talk about some keywords. These are basically words that represent the main concepts in a research topic. So searching in library databases is a slightly different than searching in Google. And that in Google, you could potentially put your entire research question and hit search and still get back some results in library databases. We really recommend kind of pairing down the most important words so that you get better search results. So the most important thing for this is taking some time to think about what your topic is and what the main ideas are from that topic. So I really recommend taking out a piece of paper, opening up a Google doc and just doing a little bit of brainstorming. Maybe that's writing out your research question and underlining the most the words that really stand out to you. And this doesn't have to take a lot of time. Usually this takes one to two minutes, but I find it to be really helpful to kind of center yourself before you jump into a database or a catalog to start. The other word we want to define is synonyms. And these are basically words that mean very similar meaning to another word. So it really helps in a library database because sometimes the word you're using is not the word that's being used by other authors to write about this topic. And so it can really help expand your search results to get more options. And we have time later on in this workshop to practice coming up with keywords and synonyms. So this is just a little preference before we get into that. Something that I wanted to show for folks who might have trouble thinking about synonyms, because I do as well, a few places I really like to start is credo reference, which I will show in a second. But sometimes I will just Google the word and synonym and see what pops up. And I have found this to be really helpful sometimes because if you're so deep into your research question, sometimes it's hard to think of a different way to say something. And so I strongly recommend just going to a thesaurus, typing in your word and just seeing what else is out there. You are also always welcome to reach out to a librarian for help. This is something we all really love working with students about. And so we'll show at the end how to get help. So I am going to demo credo reference, which is a tool everyone has access to through the University of Tennessee libraries. If you get to this from the library's homepage in your off campus, it will ask you to log in with your net ID and password. But this is something you have access to 24 seven wherever you are in the world. So does anybody have a topic they're currently doing and want to pop that into chat? And I will do a little demo search on your topic. Oh, we have one child policy. Thank you so much. All right, we're going to do one child policy. Credo reference is kind of like a very academic Wikipedia and that it's a reference source. So it's not a secondary source, but it is a really good place to start in brainstorm. So you can pop your search terms in right there, but you could also come down here. Like maybe you don't even have a topic yet. This is a great place to come and be like, oh, I'm really interested in like the coral reefs or grasslands and national parks. And you can kind of brainstorm from there. But because we have a topic, we're going to hit enter. And this is what your search results are going to look like. I'm going to zoom in just a tiny bit. So it gives you this is from the Encyclopedia of Environment and Society. So this kind of gives you a definition. So if you do have to cite a definition in your paper, this is a really great place to come to. And these are some key concepts. So when we're talking about keywords and synonyms, another place to search is maybe one child policy, only child, birth order. The other aspect of this tool I really, really love is this graph word cloud over here, brainstorming cloud. And so basically you have one child policy in the center here, but it lists other areas that are researched about and so maybe we could go over to zero population growth. You could click on that and the graph will change again. And it will then bring up a definition of zero population growth. So and it will also save all of your search at the bottom here. So you can always get back to one child policy, but this is just a tool I find to be incredibly helpful in the brainstorming phase, which will lead to really more productive searching. So this search tip is basically do a lot of brainstorming before you even get into your searching. All right. And thank you again for the person who volunteered their topic. That was, I hope we find some great stuff for you today. Awesome. So moving on to some Boolean operators. So Boolean operators are conjunctions that can be used in between search terms to help either expand your search or narrow your search. And they're important because they help make the search more, the search process more efficient for you, the searcher. And they allow the searcher to customize the search in a way that gives you the type of results that they are looking for. Like databases can be really intimidating because there's so many different articles and resources, but using Boolean operators can help searchers find more relevant information. And I think it's particularly useful whenever you're wanting to expand or narrow your results. So for example, at the beginning of your search, when you may wanna get as many results as possible, you would use the or Boolean operator because that would give you this or that. So you would have more search results. And then on the other hand, if you were nearing the end of your search process and you wanted very specific results, you could use and or not Boolean operator because that would limit the results. And then on the next slide, that's kind of visualized. And it has like the Venn diagrams. And I'm a really visual person, like I learn better whenever I can see things. So sometimes whenever I'm doing research, I will literally draw Venn diagrams and shade in things to help me figure out what Boolean operator I need to use. So for example, if you're looking for peanut butter and jelly, it would be that middle portion that shaded in that would be the results that you would get. And peanut butter or jelly would be everything. So like I said, that would expand your search results. And then peanut butter, but not sandwich, you would just get peanut butter as your search result. And then here is an example of like search strings that you could use. So peanut butter and jelly, peanut butter and jelly and sandwich. So in that case, you would only have results that have peanut butter, jelly and sandwich in it. And then peanut butter or jelly. So now that we have talked a lot about the whys of some of these things, we want to let everyone get a chance to practice. And so we have a padlet available for folks to brainstorm in. So the link is in chat. Take a minute or two to write down what your research question is. And this can be very drafty. This is not your final research questions, but what you have so far. And then in the other column, write down a few of the keywords you think would go with that. Awesome. So we have a research question. Should college athletes be paid? And then it looks like the keywords they came up with were college athletes and paid. We've also got how are handicrafts culturally important. And then we've got for that crafting and culture. That's awesome. For these, Michaela, what would you think of as synonyms for some of these keywords? You could do maybe for college athletes and paid. You could do something like reimbursement or I know like NIL deals are a student, yeah, student. And then crafts, you could maybe do hobbies, perhaps. Very nice. So this is just a short example of that brainstorming activity. Something I also like to do for this is to exchange this with a friend and have them come up with some keywords and synonyms with me. So we've got down here also craftsmanship. And so if you're really in that stuck place of not being sure what to enter, what search terms to use, this is a great place to kind of start. I also realize that we could come over here because I wasn't I wasn't thinking of a really great thing for like like handicrafts, so we could also come back over here and see if there's anything in here that would be so we've got also. Yeah, also some examples of. Types of crafting to like knitting activism. I'm very intrigued by all of your topics. Like this is one of my favorite parts of teaching is just hearing different topics that are happening. Yeah, this sounds super interesting. Thank you, everybody for sharing. That is the very structured part of our workshop. We would love to have everyone fill out this survey. So in chat, there's a very short survey to go to. This is also how you would get your proof of attendance. If you're watching this on YouTube, the link to the survey will be in the description box. So everyone take about a minute or two to fill out the survey and then we would also love to see you next week on Thursday, February 10th at 1pm. We're going to be going over secondary sources. And so we'll be drawing on all of the kind of skills we talked about today and putting that into how to find those secondary sources.