Hey guys. The United States Postal Service is selling your lost items. Yeah, let's get into that in some more detail. Shea Bear 1000 here. Today we're going to talk about a couple things. First, about a package that I ordered for monkey for Christmas that never arrived. And I'm going to show you some of that here in just a second. But also, we're going to get into the United States Postal Service selling your lost items. Okay, it just doesn't make sense to me, but we're going to get into that. But first, okay, so I ordered a, I'll bring it up here on my PC and I'll show you you guys this too. Ordered an item for monkey on eBay. Okay, I ordered it on November 24th. Okay, and it was supposed to be here, estimated delivery by Monday, November 30th. Okay, so I'm going to show you all this here. But what happened was the seller, excellent seller, wasn't their fault. They did ship the package and they were in constant contact with me the whole time. If I had any questions, they got back with me in 10 to 15 minutes tops. They were, you know, and they went above and beyond to try to find this package. Now they did their job, right? They shipped it like they were supposed to and everything. Well, package never came, never came. And finally, they put in a, it was, it's called a package research case. They created that on December 8th. And they couldn't find them. They didn't hear anything or anything like that. So December 15th, they went ahead and closed that case and just refunded me my money. It was only $18.  And so I'm going to show this to you here. I'm going to get you off the stand. Well, I'll put the stand up here and I'll show you what I'm talking about on here. It's totally ridiculous. Then we'll get into what's happening in these packages that are lost. Okay. So let me get you up here over on the computer screen and I'll show you what I'm talking about. Okay, guys. So this, this is what I got for the genuine Sony BLTH HM won the clip head mount kit for Sony action camera. That was for her to wear on her head. So I ordered that. It was right here. It was $10 and then shipping was eight. So it was $18, which I don't know if you see that or not, which it's totally refunded. It's already showed up in our bank account. But right here, November 24th at 5.14 pm. The tracking, the tracking number was provided November 24th at 8.14 pm. Shipping label created USPS awaits item Lexington, Kentucky. And then here at November on November 26th, 8.31 pm. Origin acceptance Lexington, Kentucky with the same zip code there. Now on a different zip code, it says November 25th at 8.46 pm, accepted at USPS facility 10 Lexington, Kentucky with the it's a different zip code. These two November 25th at 9.46 pm process through USPS facility Lexington, Kentucky at 9.20 at November, November 29th. That's four days later when it was supposed to be here here on the 30th estimated delivery by Monday, November 30th. But the 29th at 7.45 am, pre-shipment info sent USPS awaits item Lexington, Kentucky. Now like I said, on December 8th at 5.07 pm, the seller she went ahead and put in for the package research case. That was created on December 8th. Then at December 15th, that was closed because she had already refunded my money. Right there it says estimated delivery by Monday, November 30th, 2020. All right, so here's the tracking info. When I tracked it through the United States Postal Service, November 24th, shipping label created awaits item November 25th, accepted you know at the US Origin, USPS Origin facility and then November 26th, 9.46. It says arrived at USPS Regional Origin facility. Now this is, I just brought this up just a few minutes ago and it's still saying November, this is November 29th and here it is. I don't know if you can see down here but today is Tuesday, December 17th. It is 9.55 pm. It's saying in transit arriving late. Your package will arrive later than expected but it's still on its way. It is currently in transit to the next facility and it's the same thing up here. Your package will arrive later than expected but it's still on its way. It's currently in transit to the next facility. Okay, it says in transit November 29th, you know and right here you can see the product information first class package service. Okay, first class and that's what you get. Okay, now that's something there isn't it?  I mean people, come on. You know I know it's only $18 for this person but I've been watching, Monkey and I have been watching YouTube videos where this has been going on for years but where people are losing hundreds and hundreds of dollars because they're having to refund people's money plus they don't have their product no more anymore and they don't know where it is. I think I got an idea where it is. Let's get to that. Okay, so check this clip out and let's see what you think of this.  Now that's not all. Okay, I think in the world this stuff's going. Check this out. So what do you guys think about that? That's not all of it. That's just a drop in the bucket.  Now I understand of course UPS and FedEx. I'm sure they do the same thing but here's the thing. It goes these lost items some as you probably seen they're open. So somebody opened them. Well when they were open wasn't there a name and address on there?  A name and address on there. Okay, it don't get to your destination or my destination but it gets to there. Someone opens it and they put it up for sale.  I can understand maybe some people move or something and it comes back but these packages we're talking about packages that was never delivered to the address they were supposed to be delivered to. They just come up as lost items. They get shipped to this private company govdeals.com and it gets sold through them.  Okay, there's a name and address on there. They can always find you for a bill. They find you for a bill. You don't even tell them where you move to. You move to a new city, a new state. Your bills are going to find you. Junk mail finds you. You get them little keys you know. Oh come to this grand opening of this car lot and you can win a car. Those find you with no problem but an $18 package that I bought for someone for a Christmas gift. Can't find its way here but it'll probably find its way to that facility. Someone will open it with my name and address on it to be resold. Here's something to think about before I go ahead and cut you off here.  You're like us. You want to resell, right? You can buy pallets and all kinds of stuff. I checked them out. You can buy pallets and stuff. Cheap stuff. Okay, but let's say you buy a couple items. Who do you think is going to ship it? United States Postal Service. Who's that didn't make it to the first person? Who's to say it's not it? It's going to happen again to you. It ain't going to make it to you and then what? They're going to sell it again and sell it again and sell it again. It's a multi-billion-dollar profit for the government. Really? And they say, oh, you know, we don't have the money to hire extra people to get these packages out on time. That's why they're getting lost. Now, that's been going on looking up on YouTube. I've been looking them up on YouTube. It's going back four years ago.  It's not because of the Rona. Come on.  It's been going on for years and I think it needs to stop and it needs to stop now, you know, because people's losing money. Thousands, millions, millions of dollars while who's making it?  Like they don't make enough from us. Multi-billion dollars. In 2014, 88 million packages, not mail packages, 88 million packages in 2014 was shipped. 2.5 million packages made it to their destination. That's less than 3%.  So think about it. They're just going to keep losing these packages and keep selling them over and over and over again. Who knows? I was also reading where some places are being investigated because not only the mail carriers, but the postmasters, you know, the supervisors are fraudulently, they're not even scanning the stuff like they're supposed to. You know, they're fraudulently. It's fraud. It's fraud. So who knows?  It's lost. It's lost.  There's your same one you just, you paid two weeks ago for and never got, but there it is in that warehouse. Just to say they even ship them out.   They're stealing from people. What if I stole a neighbor's package, brought it over here, ripped it open and sold it on eBay or sold it through, you know, a third party?  Oh, they find me, but they can't find where my package is.  And I'm pissed off about it. And I think, you know, we all need to stand together and stand up for the government to stand up to the government.  No, we're talking billions of dollars because like I said in 2014, 88 million packages, 88 million packages were sent out shipped. Two and a half million made it to their destination. Less than 3% made it.   Anyway guys, thanks for watching. Stay tuned for more videos and we'll chat at you guys soon. Shea Bear, the myth, the man of legend. I'm going off for now. We'll see you guys soon. Bye-bye.


What's going on everyone? Sam here with late in sports cards. We are doing a two box break of 2022 Panini prism baseball hobby for Corey S So good luck here, Corey. See what we got just so you know Corey that base does not ship all of your inserts colored hits rookies They all do just know that base. So I'll be organizing them as we go here Snowzilla fireworks a rose rain. There's a Jake burger red not numbered Jaren Duran rookie for a prize illumination Connor Wong a debut signature say a Suzuki there you go, Corey. Congrats, buddy. That's awesome Edward Cabrera red and bachette. That is a great card right there. Congrats, man We just pulled two of those and pull the wand. They're not too bad honestly There's a Suzuki rookie Riviera, there's a Torkelson rookie There's Terry Riedel Lindor Silver Jackson Reeth rookie and shizzle him on the fearless From a moriano an orange old school of Nolan Ryan 79 out of a hundred silver Garrett Cole sluggers Devers Red McGee and rookie class Kevin Smith for the blue jays No, don't all I just don't even have the energy One so to fearless that's 23 out of 75 on the checkerboard This was ten bucks Tuesday, I'd be screaming at you. Yeah, but His not there's a J rod rookie Chuck nasty Miggy Dolis Harper illumination Hilla brew red a Dolis Garcia and Teyaskar Hernandez emerges Ashby There's a wander We saw him like a few times I'll call it out next time I see it Should be in here somewhere though With all Bruhan blue one marshal and Christian Yelich like to have some like retired guys That's kind of cool trade Turner fearless Tess there's a Curtis Terry 95 out of 99 on the red auto for the Rangers Silver schoolball the grom There's an Abrams Mike Trout on Her mom Marquez and Marcus Simeon to go here guys trout each year out Ronnie Thawson 91 out of 99 going to the Astros on the rookie red autograph Red old school Frank Thomas and rookie class Santheon and last pack of box one here for you Corey Fearless Peyton Henry that is Logan Webb on the red mojo 88 out of 149 blue Mike. Yes, and stay in Alright box two Good luck here, Corey Venetian the ground is a vado blue fearless One of 56 out of 199 Marcus Simeon bucks then Arias that Thompson Joshua Vidal Bruhan, where's your Mike trout? There's a Jake burger 35 out of 50 blue wave auto white socks rookie Red Lewis and Maddelson Louise Heal each year. Oh devours. There's a Mike trout green stained glass 18 out of 125 It's not only are they not chart printed now even the numbered stuff isn't super short printed Ryan Feltner Not laughing at the card Corey We're just we Shawn and I pulled a Shoei Otani one of these in a mixer earlier and like freaked out Yeah, I thought it was a super short print and we Yeah, and then we pulled like four of the same car. Yeah Right in laughs. Oh a nice looking car. Obviously. We're still gorgeous Old-school Brian De La Cruz rookie auto for the Marlins Not numbered and non-hollow Glen auto red Rosie Contreras Dang last cheese. That's huge. I don't what had a hobby Retail Even Juan Silver Wow Bobby wit Scrum dust sorry Kyle Muller rookie autograph for the me briefs Not numbered on that one Silver Austin Warren Jaren Duran. I got it This guy's weird.  There he is. There he is. Jake McCarthy read Siri Shrout Scherzer old-school Ken Griffey got an orange. That's Ryan Mountcastle on the color match five out of a hundred JT Real Muto silver Yelich Yanni Hernandez Bryce elder elimination Harper Ian Anderson Santillan Cormac rookie Keltner our footholds is a Dodger God about that era Zack Lothar 44 out of 50 blue wave auto for the Orioles. There you go. Oh Tim Anderson and John Carlos then Stephen Kwan Blade Realist yellow it's red Tyler glass now any merchant Cattel Marta That'll do it for your break there Corey congrats on all the hits buddy. We'll get them right out. Yeah, thanks again


a fyddai gael i'r Government i chi. I'm going to apologize to the road of grant once more. I'm going to Peter Chapman. Apologies, but it's not enough time. I imagine that both subjects will be coming back to the chamber, but we're going to move on to the next item of business, which is a statement by John Swinney, the Cabinet Secretary for Public Health and Sport on an update on P1 standardised assessments. The Cabinet Secretary for Public Health and Sport will take questions at the end. oeddwem ni'n deallu'r diogelio i gyfwitio ddaeth gweithredu a chyfgturio i gwybodaeth Eurovision yn ei ddweud ar gwasanaethon yn fysg, penwys. On 9 September last year, the Parliament debated the Scottish National Standardis assessments and voted in favour of a motion that called for two distinct actions—a halt to P1 assessments and for us to consider the evidence about how best to progress the assessment of pupils I understand the views that are expressed in this Parliament, and I am alive to the concerns that are expressed by MSPs and others about the P1 assessments. In the light of the parliamentary motion, I judged the appropriate response was to reconsider the evidence and that if we were to stop P1 assessments, that decision should be based on independent expert educational advice. I therefore commissioned an independent review of the Scottish National Standardised Assessments in primary 1. The purpose of the review was to take a clear reasoned look at the evidence and provide an informed way forward. The review would have had sufficient scope to endorse the criticisms voiced on 19 September and recommend an end to the SNSAs in P1, should that be what the evidence directed. I set out this approach clearly to Parliament on 25 October. Taking advice from Her Majesty's chief inspector of education, I commissioned David Reidy to conduct that review. Mr Reidy possessed the necessary educational experience and expertise to secure professional credibility for this role. Mr Reidy was, for example, co-director of the Cambridge primary review trust from 2013 to 2017 and has served as both general secretary and president of the United Kingdom Literacy Association. As someone who had not been involved in the debate on SNSAs until that point, he was also perfectly positioned to apply the required objective rigor to the review. Between January and March this year, David Reidy gathered information, conducting stakeholder interviews, inviting written feedback and examining the submissions to and findings from the P1 practitioner forum and the Education and Skills Committee inquiry into the Scottish National Standardised Assessments. Crucially, he visited schools to observe the SNSA being delivered to primary 1 children in real time. The review could not have been fully or meaningfully informed had it not been possible for Mr Reidy to witness children undertaking the assessments first hand and to talk to the teachers involved. The Scottish Government gave clear advice to schools in September. They should continue to implement the assessments as they had been doing, pending the findings of the independent review commissioned to reexamine the evidence at Parliament's behest. Continuing to deliver the assessments was encouraged both for reasons of consistency, guarding against the creation of an information vacuum and to ensure that the independent review was considering evidence based on the second year of assessment delivery. That was also undertaken with the recognition that feedback had already been gathered and acted upon to further improve the system, particularly in relation to P1 following the first year. There would have been little value in examining a position from which SNSAs had already moved on. 142 primary 1 teachers, 131 senior school staff and more than 50 wider stakeholders were involved during that phase. I thank everyone who took the time to submit comments or agreed to meet with or demonstrate the assessments to David Reidy. Their contributions and the sharing of their views was of the utmost importance in helping Mr Reidy form his conclusions. Those conclusions have been published today, alongside a set of recommendations, both for the Scottish Government and for local authorities. Having been asked explicitly to consider whether the primary 1 assessment should be stopped, Mr Reidy's answer in his independent review is that it should not. Rather, David Reidy concludes that it would be beneficial for him to continue, albeit with important modifications and the establishment of additional guidance and support for practitioners, to ensure that they deliver their intended value as low-stakes diagnostic assessments. Mr Reidy acknowledges that the assessments can provide an additional source of objective, nationally consistent information about where a child is performing strongly and where he or she might require further support. I do not suggest that this review has delivered an unqualified green light to the Scottish Government in terms of P1 assessments. Clearly, the review makes important recommendations about improvement, and I am determined to take the valuable learning that is contained within Mr Reidy's review and act upon it to introduce the recommended modifications and safeguards in order to further improve the assessment experience for P1s, secondly, strengthen understanding of the purpose of the assessments, and thirdly, to ensure that practitioners see the benefit of the information that the assessments provide. Fundamentally, however, the key review finding that Mr Reidy articulates in his report and the key message that should be taken away from his report is this. Primarily, one Scottish national standardised assessment has potential to play a significant role in informing and enhancing teachers' professional judgments and should be continued. I was reassured that Mr Reidy identified, and I quote, scant evidence of children becoming upset when taking the P1 SNSA, but I acknowledge the significance of his observation that the attitudes of those delivering assessments can influence children's confidence. We must ensure that practitioners are appropriately supported and equipped to deliver assessments in such a way that they are perceived positively by the children undertaking them. Mr Reidy also considered the compatibility of the assessments with a play-based approach to learning. The review makes a clear and helpful distinction between a pedagogical approach to play-based learning in the early years, which the Scottish Government fully endorses and which is at the heart of curriculum for excellence at early level, and what David Reidy describes as a moment of assessment. The review confirmed that it was eminently possible and indeed valuable to assess children in the early years through diagnostic means such as the SNSA, while remaining true to the principles of play-based learning. The report states, and again I quote, that there are strong examples of schools where head teachers and teachers operate a play-based approach and find no incompatibility between that and the primary one SNSA. It is evident that the need for a shared understanding of the aims, purpose and value of the SNSA drives many of the review recommendations. I am happy to commit today to redoubling our efforts in terms of communications and engagement with practitioners and all stakeholders to clarifying our messages, strengthening our guidance and ensuring wider access to SNSA training. Mr Reidy also identified important reservations regarding the length of the literacy assessment and its alignment to the benchmarks. Again, I accept the recommendation to review that assessment and explore with Acer, the company who developed the assessments, the potential for reducing the number of questions presented to primary one children. Before concluding, I would like to take a moment to reflect on the wider scrutiny of the SNSAs that has run in parallel with the review. As members will be aware, the Education and Skills Committee has now reported on their inquiry into the SNSAs. The P1 practitioner forum that I convened last December has produced a number of recommendations for enhancing the P1 assessment experience. In addition, our annual user review, intended to feed into our cycle of continuous improvement for the assessments, has produced interim findings ahead of the end of the school session. I thank the committee and the P1 forum, chaired by Professor Sue Ellis, for their thoughtful and detailed consideration of the issues. All their reports contain valuable suggestions for ways in which to improve aspects of the communications around and implementation of the SNSAs. Importantly, none has made any recommendation to scrap the assessments. That, I believe, reflects the evidence that Parliament requires us to consider and provides the basis and rationale for the SNSAs to continue to be applied as the independent review recommends. Where further vindication needed, I would direct members' attention to the learner feedback that we have gathered during this academic year from a question within the SNSA system itself. Ninety-one per cent of primary one children who have undertaken the assessments say that they enjoyed the experience. That statistics represents the views of the children themselves. I accept that there is work to be done, but I believe that, with the improvements proposed, we can move forward in the correct direction. Today, I published a Scottish Government's individual responses to Mr Reidy's independent review, the Education and Skills Committee's inquiry report and the P1 practitioner forum, along with the progress report on the SNSA user review for 2018-19. In addition, given the clear overlap in focus and read across between a number of areas raised in the different reports, I intend to publish a summary that draws together all the actions that the Scottish Government will undertake over the coming months. I have published a draft of that action plan today. The draft identifies eight overarching themes for actions to be taken forward in response to all report recommendations. We will take that draft to the Scottish Education Council for review and feedback, working with practitioners to agree the details of our approach to implementing recommendations before producing a final action plan at the start of the new school year. As the Parliament requested, I have reconsidered the evidence. As we approach the end of the second year of delivery, we now have a far clearer picture of the views of both P1 children and their teachers towards those assessments. An impartial review has confirmed the value of the SNSAs. A constructive action plan for enhancing the assessments, consolidating their value and delivering on their potential has been laid out. I hope that members will join me in accepting Mr Reedy's findings and in focusing, as we must, on delivering an education system in Scotland, which raises attainment for all, closes the attainment gap and enables all children and young people to fulfil their potential. I remind members that we are very pushed for time this afternoon. After the opening questioners for each of the parties have had their opening statements, I would like all questions to be succinct and to the point and answers likewise. I call Liz Smith to be followed by Ian Gray. I thank the cabinet secretary for his statement and for the copy of the independent review. The cabinet secretary states that, on 19 September last year, the Parliament voted to halt the P1 test and to review the evidence. Let me remind him why the Parliament and the Opposition parties were doing that. That was because we were listening to the concerns, the many concerns that were expressed by primary teachers, parents groups and teaching unions, who told us that there was not sufficient evidence to prove that the tests were in the best educational interests of primary one pupils. Those concerns were then echoed at the education committee on 30 January by other organisations such as Upstart Scotland and Children in Scotland. My three questions to the cabinet secretary relate to the evidence. What specific educational evidence has the cabinet secretary seen, which convinces him that he is right and others wrong when it comes to promoting this type of formal testing of five-year-olds as being both necessary and appropriate, particularly in light of the fact that the reading review has not undertaken any in-depth analysis of the evidence from other countries that do not start formal testing as early as P1? Secondly, can the cabinet secretary tell the Parliament why, in light of the Parliament voting against those P1 tests, he chose in mid-April this year to announce modifications to the tests before waiting for the review to be completed? Thirdly, he says in his statement on page 2, and I quote, "...there would have been little value in examining a position from which the SNSAs had already moved on." Cabinet secretary, I do not understand why you make this point when in mid-April your announcement was doing the exact opposite. First of all, David Reidy's review has done exactly what the Parliament asked us to do, which is to look at the evidence in relation to the educational evidence on this question. That is the basis of my judgment. I am interested only in whether there is educational value here. The substantive is a lot of information that is covered in David Reidy's report, but one of the key points that I think is there is the important assistance that the assessments provide in moderation across schools in Scotland to enable teachers to be confident about the judgment that they are exercising about the progress of young people, given the fact that the Scottish National Standardised Assessments, for the first time under curriculum for excellence, gives them an assessment that is related to curriculum for excellence and assists in providing them with confidence that young people are reaching the appropriate level that is envisaged in the early level of the curriculum. That is just one example. Secondly, and I would also add to that, David Reidy has spoken to many, many organisations and many, many practitioners, and has seen practice in place many of the organisations that Liz Smith raised in her question to me in coming to this evidence report. The second point was about the P1 practitioner forum. I believed that it was important that I should respond as swiftly as possible to the views of practitioners in a body that I had established to hear practitioners' views, and if practitioners believed that there were ways in which the assessments could be enhanced, we should take them at the earliest possible opportunity. The third point that I would respond to in Liz Smith's question is the important point that I accepted in September of last year that, if there were specific educational issues that had to be addressed about the P1 standardised assessments, we should do that at the earliest possible opportunity. That is precisely why I have taken the actions that I have taken. Iain Gray, to be filled by Ross Gorman. Thank you, Presiding Officer, and thanks to the cabinet secretary for early sight of his statement, the cabinet secretary says that this review does exactly what Parliament told him to do, but, of course, it does not. Parliament told him to stop P1 testing. It may be that the reading review does not say that, but it does say that those tests need a clear rationale. They, obviously, do not have one. It says that those tests must not and cannot be aggregated to draw general conclusions or to compare schools or local authorities, yet the Scottish Government has repeatedly claimed that it can. The review says that the administration of the tests must be flexible, but we know that 80 per cent of P1 tests were administered at the same time of year. The reading review says that the P1 tests must be changed in order to align with curriculum for excellence. They clearly do not. The review may say that the tests have potential, but its evidence says that Parliament's concerns back in September were well founded. What gives the Deputy First Minister the right to introduce those concerns, to ignore that decision and to defy Parliament's will? Cabinet secretary. I have accepted that there has to be a clear rationale about those assessments. David Reedy reinforces the argument, which I have advanced to the committee, that those assessments are with a diagnostic purpose. That is their purpose—to assist teachers and pupils in identifying the progress that requires to be made. I have accepted that there needs to be a clear rationale and for that to be embedded within those assessments. Secondly, Iain Gray says that the assessments are not related to curriculum for excellence. I have to disagree with him on that point. Mr Reedy does not substantiate that point in his report. What David Reedy has said is that the literacy assessment might benefit from being shortened, and that is exactly what we will explore with the company involved. The third point that I would say to Mr Gray is that throughout all of this, I have been interested in the educational arguments for standardised assessments. That is what I have been interested in. Parliament in September—this was the first paragraph of my statement—voted for a halt to P1 assessments, but it then asked us to consider the evidence about how best to progress the assessment of pupils in P1. I took a decision, which I reported to Parliament in October, to encourage the assessments to take their course to give us a second year of evidence. We have looked further at the evidence—I have commissioned David Reedy to undertake that review—to give us that evidence, and I present that evidence to Parliament. The evidence says that there is an educational benefit for those assessments. They should have their purpose clarified, but they should be maintained, and that is the Government's intention. Ross Greer will be followed by Tavis Scott. Thanks to the Deputy First Minister for the statement and accompanying papers. Given that the Government's primary objective for those tests is to inform teacher judgment, Parliament has still not been presented with compelling evidence that the P1 test usefully informed that judgment. We have heard concerns from teachers, parents, education and child development experts about the negative effects of the test and the confusion surrounding their introduction. In giving evidence to the Education and Skills Committee, the Deputy First Minister first claimed that the tests are formative, not summative. Later that same morning, he stated that the tests are somehow both formative and summative. Given that he has been unable to clearly explain the purpose of standardised tests himself, how does the Deputy First Minister expect teachers and parents, who have posed P1 testing from the start, to have any confidence in a policy that this Government seems to refuse to drop? The first point that I would make is that I am accepting today that there is a need to strengthen the rationale for the assessments. That was a point that came out of the Education and Skills Committee's inquiry, and I am happy to accept that point. The second issue that Mr Gray raises is about the nature of how those assessments are described. He accurately reflects the exchange that he and I had at committee, but I want to put it into a little bit of context. I was asked whether the tests were formative or summative, and I said that they were formative for all the reasons that I have just explained to Ian Gray. I also accepted the point, and it is just an acceptance of reality, that if you add up all the numbers, they inevitably become summative, but that is not their purpose. It is simply an honest answer to a question that I was asked in the committee. Let me be absolutely crystal clear with Parliament that those assessments are formative assessments to inform teacher judgment, and I believe that they add a valuable component, particularly on the question of moderation that I replied to Liz Smith about, to support teachers in their professional judgment. I thank the cabinet secretary for his statement. Can he explain to Parliament why he hired an academic from the English educational regime that nationalists condemn from a country where high stakes testing is the norm to produce the arguments that he wants? Can he illustrate how many more reports Parliament is planning to see when teachers, unions, parent groups and this Parliament all said halt the testing of four and five-year-old boys and girls? Can he tell teachers in primary one what their workload will now be, given all the more guidance that he has now produced and the new action plan that he has announced today, what is the increase that is going to be in their workload and in the bureaucracy that they face every day? If parliamentary democracy is so important, why is the Government so determined to press on with those tests when Parliament said, do not do it? I simply offered David Reidy's independent credibility as a leading expert on literacy and questions of literacy as justification for recruiting a man of significant independent educational expertise who has not got an axe to grind on Scottish education. I simply invited an individual who has an academic track record to provide us with some independent evidence. Let me place on record my thanks to David Reidy for being prepared to do so. Secondly, in relation to the points that Tavish Scott raises about primary one teachers' workload, what I am trying to do is to make sure that teachers have the ability to rely upon a substantive assessment that will assist them in the crucial role of moderating the educational performance of young people. The steps that we are taking are to make that as convenient and as straightforward and as accessible as possible for teachers in primary one. Thirdly, Tavish Scott supported a motion that called on us, yes, to halt the assessments but also to consider the evidence. I have considered the evidence and the evidence says that our assessments are perfectly valid to be taken forward as a rational contributor to assessing the progress of young people, and that is why I believe that it is important to implement the view taken by Parliament in the fashion that I have set out this afternoon. Thank you. All the parties have outlined their positions, so just questions from now on, please. Jenny Gilruth will be followed by Alison Harris. Given that the standardised assessments replaced what was already used in 28 out of Scotland's 32 local authority areas, can the cabinet secretary explain how the Scottish Government will ensure that they are not used in addition to those that existed previously, many of which were not benchmarked against curriculum for excellence? This has been a project in which we have had excellent co-operation with our local authority partners. Our local authority partners have been involved in all the preparation of the standardised assessments. In a limited number of local authority areas, local authorities are continuing with the former assessments that they undertook to give them a consistency check for future years. I think that, on a temporary basis, that is an entirely reasonable proposition, but the Scottish national standardised assessments are relevant to curriculum for excellence and provide an opportunity for local authorities not to use other assessments that have not been related to curriculum for excellence. Obviously, we will work with our local authority partners through the actions that I have set out in the Scottish Education Council, where local government are full partners with us in taking forward those issues. Alison Harris will be followed by Tom Arthur. Thank you. Despite the independent review, a survey from February this year revealed that 41 per cent of teachers disagreed that the tests were beginning to inform teaching and another 17 per cent were unsure. That is nearly 60 per cent of the teaching profession—disagreeing or unsure. In light of that, are the standardised tests really capable of delivering their intended purpose of informing teaching? I am not sure whether Alison Harris was one of the members of Parliament who took up the opportunity to see a demonstration of the assessments, but what she would have seen in that was the diagnostic information that is generated on every child. The feedback that I get from individual teachers is that the diagnostic information is quick and simple to consider and gives teachers an opportunity to judge whether the prevailing judgment in their view is accurate or whether there are issues that they believe require further investigation. I think that that is the opportunity that the diagnostic assessment provides for teachers. Obviously, it gives the reassurance that I raised in my answer to Liz Smith that the teachers are seeing a position that is relevant to what is expected in the early years of the curriculum and that is of benefit to the professional judgment of teachers. The Deputy First Minister outlines how standardised assessments at primary 1 can support teachers in closing the attainment gap in schools in my constituency of Renfrewshire South. Obviously, because the diagnostic information readily identifies areas where young people may well have challenges in their own educational performance, that will help teachers to undertake what is increasingly happening within Scottish education, which is a relentless focus on closing that gap, of identifying the obstacles that exist in young people's education and supporting them to overcome those obstacles. That will apply in Mr Arthur's constituency in Renfrewshire South and, of course, because those are available across the country related to curriculum for excellence, it will apply in all other areas as well. David Reidy concludes that it would be beneficial for these tests to continue, albeit with important modifications and the establishment of additional guidance and support for practitioners. Can the cabinet secretary give the chamber some detail of the important modifications that are required and the timescale for implementation? Perhaps the most important modification is in relation to the length of the literacy assessment. That is something that we have to discuss with the company involved in the design and delivery of the assessment. We will do that as a matter of urgency. I will be very happy to keep Parliament informed on that specific point. The other important modifications will largely relate to the description and outline of the purpose of the assessments. I think that Mr Reidy gives us a really strong framework with which we can operate to ensure that at no stage could those assessments be viewed as high stakes and that they are, in fact, low stakes, diagnostic assessments. I am determined to make sure that that is the characteristic that those assessments have. Can the Deputy First Minister outline how the Scottish Government can ensure that all local authorities, including North Lanarkshire, integrate the standardised assessments with a play-based learning approach for all primary ones? I am really anxious to separate out two issues in this question. I think that those issues have become somewhat conjoined. One issue is about the importance of a play-based curriculum for young people. That is at the heart of the early level of curriculum for excellence. There is absolutely nothing in the statement that I have set out today that compromises that play-based curriculum. David Reidy helpfully makes the distinction between a play-based curriculum and what he calls a moment of assessment. At some stage, assessment will be undertaken for children who are involved in a play-based curriculum. David Reidy correctly characterises how that can be undertaken with the Scottish national standardised assessment, but I want to make it absolutely crystal clear today that the Government firmly believes that a play-based curriculum in the early level is an absolutely vital foundation of how young people acquire their learning at that stage in their educational development. Thank you very much. I apologise to Johann Lamont, Oliver Mundell, Rona Mackay and John Mason, as I am afraid. We are just too pushed for time this afternoon, and we have two bills to get through. That concludes the statement. We are just going to pause as we turn to the next item of business.


Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us. Another episode of The Nonprofit Show. I'm Jarrett Ransom, your nonprofit nerd, but most importantly, Sharice Floyd is with us and Sharice is the CEO of Witness My Life and here to talk to you about storytelling for your cause. So we are so grateful to have these continued shows. Thank you to Julia who created this wonderful platform and for allowing me to play alongside with Julia each and every day as the nonprofit nerd and CEO of the Raven Group. We're also extremely honored day in and day out to have the ongoing support and the trust, the backing from these amazing presenting sponsors. So thank you to Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, Be Generous, Your Part-Time Controller, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Thought Leader and the Nonprofit Nerd. We encourage each and every one of you to check out these companies because their mission is your mission. They wanna help you do more good in and around your community. Hey, if you missed any of our previous episodes or you wanna go back and listen to what Ms. Sharice is going to share with us here today, you can find us on Roku, Amazon, Fire TV, YouTube, Vimeo, as well as podcasts.  Again, our guest today, I'm so excited to have you, CEO of Witness My Life, Sharice Floyd, welcome. Thank you, I'm excited to be here as well. Yeah, we're thrilled to have you. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Sharice, and then tell us a lot about Witness My Life if you wanna know. Well, I am Sharice. I am a former director of communications, director of marketing for nonprofits. I've been doing nonprofit marketing for over 20 years. So I was the girl who told all the stories that got everyone paid. And so I'm still doing that, in a sense. Witness My Life is a company we partner with corporations, universities and nonprofits to license our programming, women's leadership, nonprofits, storytelling, all of those things. And it really is, Witness My Life is really about helping people and individuals get noticed. And so we do that with our storytelling products and services. Fantastic, it's such a need. I was actually just talking to a funder this morning because I said I was running a little bit late but I was talking to a big funder in our community sharing the story of a client of mine. So it's so important. So today you're really gonna talk to us about the storytelling and your tip. We have many tips, but we're gonna start off with the number one thing that donors want to hear from nonprofits. So what is that number one thing? It's really very simple. They want to know why do you need them? Where do they fit in the story? I've been, as I've been doing this, as I like I said for 20 years now, it's always, what can they do? We talk at them sometimes instead of talking to them. And I'll just tell you this there, we did an annual campaign for a nonprofit. They was a domestic violence nonprofit. Everything was centered around kids. Kids where they serve more kids than adults. And so they were just used to just doing an annual appeal. We just write it, we send it out, we do whatever we want. This particular appeal, we decided to write it from the point of view of a 17 year old girl who had been in shelter, who had witnessed violence upon her mom from her dad. So we wrote it from her point of view. And in it, we were able to not only share her story, but to also show why donations were important because it was helping this young woman who was at the crux of her life, 17 years old. And that particular strain of domestic violence is one of those things where people, you're either with it or you're not. As an adult, you kind of sometimes end up blaming the adult. So we send out this appeal and then we get this letter from a donor, a letter and a check from a donor for $25,000. This was a donor who had never given more than $100. He was not on any of the major donor list. And so he sends in a check for $25,000. And his note was, now I see how my money is used. And I was like, okay. So we started to just keep doing that. And over the years, no matter what nonprofit that I've worked with or what clients that I've had, they wanna know how do they, where is their role in the story? Yeah. That is so true. And that was so impactful. I could feel it all over my body. It's like, oh, now I know where this is going. So you also talk about three stories that we should never tell. So what are these three stories, Sharice? Yes, the first one is the story where you exploit the person or the nonprofit, you exploits the person who's actually gotten the services. So that is wanting them to tell their story before they are ready to tell their story. You want their story for your benefit nonprofit versus the benefit of the client. And when a story is being shared, it should benefit both people. And I've seen so many times where stories are shared, the client is not quite healed from an experience and it is a disaster. So that's the first one. The second is the hero story. This is the story where the nonprofit does all of the work. We did this, we did that, all of that. You leave no room for the client to have got who they are the heroes of their own lives. They came to you, but they have to do the work to get to the next level. But if you set yourself up as doing all the things, you leave no room for the client to actually succeed. And then the third one is the happily ever after story. This is the story where people come to your nonprofit and then they leave where all of their dreams have come true. And we know that's not how life works. Sometimes you move people from A to 8.5, that's not, but you have fixed all the problems in the world. And so that is another story not to tell. So those three stories come off very disingenuous and inauthentic. Thank you for that. And I really wanna go back to the, let's not exploit the participant, the client, those that you serve. There's so much right now in our society about trauma informed care and sharing, having the participant share, as you said, maybe they're not ready, but that's, that's going to relive a lot of feelings, a lot of emotions. And I agree with you and I snaps for you for saying that because it's so important. So we don't want to exploit, that's the number one. We don't want to be the hero where look what we did, we, the nonprofit, we really need to give some ownership back to the client, the participant, the person that is doing the work for them for their life. And then also that happily ever after, whereas I always think of like a Disney movie. It's like, you know, life is just rainbows and roses. So those are the three stories that we should never tell. And I really think that that's very valuable as we move into, you know, the end of this year, the beginning of next, but do share with us Sharice, what does make a good story? So now you've told us the three that we should never, ever, ever, ever, ever tell, but what are the stories that make a good story that we should tell? Well, a good story really has five components and one of the main things that nonprofits do often, and don't mean to, I know they don't, is just simply state the facts of what happened. This one thing happened and this happened and this happened and this happened. And it's really just a summary of what went down. So a good story will really have five components, which will be your character, is the person, or the thing, it could be a pet, it could be whatever that we are going to care about. Who is it that we're following through the story? Then you wanna have that defining moment, that's the moment why the person showed up at your doorstep in the first place. Then you need to have the emotion. Without the emotion, it really is just stating facts and without the emotion, you don't turn on those chemicals that we need in order to make people care about the cause. Then you want to put in the right amount of details. The details are what trigger the emotion, but the details are only as important as to move the people to the next step. So if there were five people in the room when something happens, we do not need to know who all five of those people were, what they were wearing, none of that. Right. Yeah, good point. We just need enough detail to move to the next point of the story. And then the fifth is resolution. And the resolution does not mean that it's tied up with the bow. Again, we're not doing happily ever after. The resolution could be the next step of what you need me as the person reading it to do to resolve this thing. So those are the five things that most great stories have without complicating it. I just wrote those down. So for those of you that are seeing the crown on my head. So it's character, the why, emotion, details, and resolution. And I'm curious, Sharice, this is a total curve ball. Could you run us through a storyline real quick touching on those five? OMG.  I know, right? Oh, OMG. Total role play right off the cuff. But I'm hearing the character, the why, the emotion, the details, the resolution. And I love that you said, we don't have to talk about everybody in the room, right? We're talking about the person, the animal, the, like the participant, the client, as I close my eyes and start to think, story, you know? Like that's what we're focusing on, right? Yes. And I will say this quickly. I know you did put me on the spot, so I can't. I'm like, really? But I will say this. If you think about, you know, a woman who comes in to get any kind of service, you want to set the detail of why did she come, but more importantly of the emotion that she was feeling when she decided to come. And as she's going through the service, you still want to touch on how she is changing emotionally. Every story is an internal and an external transformation. And so as long as you are doing that, you'll hit all five of those things. That is really good. And I'm going back to the, I think it was a direct mail piece or solicitation letter that you spoke about the 17 year old girl living in the domestic violence shelter and telling her story. I have a client that they use pets as animal behavior, you know, for children going through, you know, a lot of change. And they, very similarly, they had the animal tell the story. Yes. You know, as if the dog could talk, but it really helped to tell the story of the children that the, you know, the animals impacting. And it was so impactful. And I love, this was like, you know, a goldmine that you said, the person that donated to that story, and they said, now I know where my money goes. They were not on the radar for a major gift. They were not on like, you know, the top tier of donors, but they've been paying attention. They do. And if you've got, if you are in a difficult, some of us think that all of the missions are difficult, but if you are in a difficult mission where there is any kind of resistance or pushback to the type of clients that you serve, then you might want to consider changing the point of view of the stories that you tell. And the reason that you're doing that is because there is always an end for children. There's always an end for animals. If someone sees your client as a victim or as responsible for something that you need money for, then flip the point of view to get in the door. I always say kids and puppies are kryptonite. Yes. Those two, like that is just kryptonite for what makes a really good story. But we all have good stories around us. And I think too, you know, asking our program staff, asking the participants, they're the ones that can help to come up with these great stories that maybe, I typically, you know, serve in the fundraising capacity. So I don't always see that direct client care, but to get it from other people on the staff, move us into making people care. Move us into, you know, how do we get people to donate to the cause like this great example, you know, of the individual that wasn't on the major gift radar, yet they donated well above and beyond their normal $100 gift. So how do we make people care and also donate? Yeah, it's really about turning on that emotion. And you can't be afraid of it. As I mentioned, a lot of nonprofits simply state the facts. This person came, this is what they needed, this is what we did, and again, that's a case note. Really, it's not a story. So you really do need to turn on the emotion, turn on those love chemicals to move people along that continuum. And I always suggest that you treat your stories, first they're assets, they're not just something to think of beyond. They are assets that bring money and services into the nonprofit, so they should be treated that way. But think of them also like a saga that's playing out. I mean, now we just did, given Tuesday, yesterday, and a lot of the nonprofits, you send out an email, you tell a story in an email, no one's heard from you for like months. And here you go with a story that it may or may not have worked. But if you take a big thing and break it down consistently over your newsletter or in your social media, all different types of ways that you can tell these stories, it really does help people follow you and be engaged with you. And understand, we fall back on this a lot, our board members are important, I know they are, but trust me as a donor, we do not care. We do not care. We don't care, and that's the story that we continuously see, our board did this, our board did that. We don't really care about that. We want to see your mission in action or what I like to call the memoirs of your mission. And so if you think of it as you are telling a true memoir and what a memoir does, you can do these little bite-sized stories that really will engage us. And that's the emotion piece is what we need in order to get people to put that money down for you. Sharice, I'm very visual. So that's why I closed my eyes and I can think about these five elements. Yes. I'm thinking about, okay, it's a weeknight, it's a weekend, I'm sitting on my couch, I turn on my TV, probably Netflix, right? And what I see is new episode on one of my playlist. And I'm thinking if we can relate this into our stories, our sagas, our memoirs, it's almost like carry out that client's story, carry out that participant's story. And what I'm hearing, and correct me if I'm hearing it incorrectly, is you're kind of dripping the story on these multi-channels throughout a series of time instead of just complete regurgitation in one very verbose email. Is that right? That's exactly right. And this is perfect timing because we are moving into the beginning of the year. And this is the time you should sit down to do your content calendars. I know a lot of us work on that fiscal year, but this is the time to really start doing your content calendars, see what kind of stories that you have available, see what assets that you need. And based around whatever events that you have coming up, start dripping the stories along that narrative. And so if you know that you've got a gala in April, do not start the last week of March to start telling a story around the gala. If you know that you need us to buy tickets, start in January to start priming us for what we need to do. So yeah, it is like episodic to do it in that way instead of, you know, this is how we end up telling the same story over and over because we only have two good ones. Right. Right. Telling it. And I just want to call out, you know, you mentioned fiscal year and I kind of want to throw this out just as candidly as you did. I don't think our constituents care about our fiscal year, right? I mean, I thought maybe I'm the only one who thought that but you're giving the information. It's like, okay, yes, we know that's our fiscal year but that's how our budgeting is done. Our donor base, our supporters, our investors, they want to know the impact. They want to know the stories from those that they serve. And I don't think they really care if we start on July one as a new fiscal. They do not. We're basically living, we're basically humaning. So we do not keep up with the people's fiscal years. We're doing the calendar year is what humans are doing that don't work as nonprofit. And so though, you know, you've got to keep that stuff in mind that your new year may start July one but we're all going to start on January one. So get us ready for what you have coming throughout the year. I love that you mentioned the content calendar. And ironically, yesterday, our guest did as well and McCully. And so we talked about, you know, the content calendar, creating it. And I'm curious if you can talk us through when it comes to storytelling for your nonprofit, how far out do we want to create our content calendar? Is it an annual calendar that we need to populate now first January one? Or can we do, you know, Q1, 2, 3, 4 separately? Yes, I recommend that we do, that we break it down in quarters because who needs that kind of pressure to try to do an annual content calendar? Yeah, as I said yesterday, nobody has time for that. Nobody does. So yeah, we could quarterly, even 30 days would be awesome if you can make that happen. But quarterly really helps you to see and to stay focused specifically in that period of time and making sure that you have stories that are priming us for whatever is coming up. So the content calendar, as we think about it, we know what the big events are that are going to be on the calendar is usually the same events that we have every single year. You know when they are. We tend to do last minute planning. I don't know why we do that to ourselves, but we do. But if you can get yourself even 30 days ahead, it will make a huge, huge difference. And when you're thinking about storytelling, understand there are different types of stories that do different things. So your origin story, the story of how you started has a different effect than what a value story would have for a donor. Because when you are asking for money, you are bridging the gap between what you need and what that donor wants to give.  So think of the story, if you do not have this one specific story, you want to tell the story of what happened in this world if your nonprofit did not exist. You gotta be conscious of that because until you can make me believe it, I won't care enough to give money to it. And you have to have that story perfected. So good. Now, what about milestone opportunities? So for instance, a big anniversary, how do you begin to plan telling that story? So big anniversaries, you definitely want to go through your roller decks of people, because you usually have people from all walks of life who will share it. I'm thinking about it in a gala context. It's not always, but you usually have people from all walks of life in your nonprofit. So you want to be conscious of what is the outcome, aside from money, because money is always our outcome. What is the outcome that you need? Do you need more supporters? If you're in workforce development, do you need more employers to log on? Do you need more mentors for whatever you're doing? What is the outcome? And then choose the people and the stories that will push that outcome and understanding that money will hopefully flow if you've done it well enough. But you've got to start with what the outcome is and then backtrack to who was going to tell the best story and how. And again, so we're all focused on money, always because that's what it takes to run our business. And I always like to say, let's put profit back into nonprofit because the more profit you make, the more impact you can serve. The more you can actually do in your community. So making people care and also donate to that cause is just, it's so very important. Sharice, I had no idea that you were gonna be this much fun and passion filled and I've just really enjoyed our time together. It goes by so very quickly, but I'm so grateful to have you on. With our time left, tell us a little bit about how you serve the community and through, you know, witness my life. And for those of you watching or maybe listening at the bottom, it says become the greatest story ever told. So tell us about how you serve your clients. And I know you live in North Carolina, but I'm assuming you work nationally. Is that right? I do, I do, I do. So we work with a lot of nonprofits, basically what I told you today about content marketing around thought leadership for nonprofits. If you're not in that, you need to be over the way of marketing. And we work with them around the stories that they need to tell. A lot of us are so close, we're so close to the story that we can't like take a step back and see it for what it is. And so we do a lot of work in that vein. And then we also work with women's leaders, nonprofit or not. And just, you know, this is a time where we're really wanna hear more women's voices. And it's just been an amazing, it's been amazing to be alive right now in this point in history. So, yeah. There's a lot going on. And we should say this point of her story, right? Yes, yes, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Cherise, thank you again. Please check her out. Tell us your website. How do we find your website? I am at witnessmylife.org and please connect with me at LinkedIn. I'd love to build my network there. Well, fantastic. If we're not connected, you're gonna be receiving a connection from you later or from me to you later. So again, thank you for joining us. Thanks to Julia Patrick for creating this wonderful platform and for allowing me to nerd out with these amazing rock stars like the one you just heard from here today, Cherise Floyd. We also wanna give a big round of applause and express our gratitude to our amazing presenting sponsors. So thank you to Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, Be Generous, Your Part-Time Controller, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Thought Leader and the Nonprofit Nerd. These companies are here to help you tell your story, help you make that profit so you can put it back into your nonprofit and into your community. So check them out and do check out Cherise Floyd. Amazing conversation today. I can feel the energy from you. I love it. And I've learned so much about you and the process. Again, I took notes. I have them on my little sticky notes here. And so grateful. So thank you for joining us, Cherise. Thank you. It was a blast. I appreciate it. Yeah. We'll have to have you on next year. I think we have a lot more to learn from you. So, so grateful to have you join us and grateful for all of you that joined us either live or on one of our recordings. Again, you can find our nearly 700 episodes. We have a lot of stories to tell on many streaming platforms. So thank you for joining us. Please come back and join us tomorrow. And until then, we end each and every episode by asking you to please stay well so you can do well. Thanks, Cherise. And I'll see everyone else here tomorrow.


My talk today is a bit different from other people because I'm going to focus attention material science for sustainability. I'll share with you three important numbers. The first number represents the amount of plastic waste drifting in the ocean. The second number represents the annual amount of plastic waste flowing into the ocean. And the third number represents the total amount of plastic materials produced by human beings. And we have recycled only 9% so far. We still have a beautiful ocean and a planet. And however, if you take a closer look, then you will find these particles called microplastics. This issue is serious and certainly break the biological system in the near future if we don't take any action. So what we have to do? Suppose your pair of glasses broken. That happens sometimes. What would you do? Are you going to discard or recycle? Recycle is actually energy demanding very closely. On the other hand, if you are able to repair broken pieces by compression, for example, at room temperature, that would be great. Ten years ago, groundbreaking technology was reported by Professor Ludwig Rieber, self-healable rubber. What is great about this technology is that you can repair broken pieces by compression with the fingers. So many of you wonder if this great technology is going to be expandable to hard plastic with a far better, greater range of applications. The answer at that time was no, because the polymer chains in such hard plastic are frozen to mobile. So re-entanglement that is necessary for the repair is unlikely. So polymer glass is a representative and hard plastic material which cannot be repaired once broken like window glass. On the contrary to this prediction, we found accidentally that this particular polymer, polyether thiorea, is a new type of polymer glass which is mechanically tough but can be repaired very easily at room temperature. So what you see here are two broken pieces of a polymer glass. Once again, this is very mechanically tough as you can confirm by this heating sound. But if you just compress the fractured surfaces together, then even at room temperature, they are merged to recover the original shape like this. So that makes the company very unhappy, actually. But for us, it's very convenient. All we have to do is to compress at room temperature. Then everything is okay. Then I'm going to apply a 300 gram load to this repaired plastic glass. And actually nothing happens. And if you just fabricate a 5 millimeter diameter cable over a polymer glass, then you can lift up actually 15 kilogram even after repair. That's great. And five years ago, Yu Yanagisawa in his PhD work was trying to get this type of particular molecule biomolecular groove. In the course of this study, he accidentally found that its intermediate polymer is non-tucky, but broken pieces can be healed upon compression. We are surprised, but this was the beginning of development of self-healable polymer glass. Well, after five years of research, we published a paper on this work last year. And this material actually was able to be repaired over wide temperature range down to 10 degrees C and multiple times without any problem. So you see that huge advantage of repair before recycle. So what we needed to do further is that one drawback of the current version is it's rather poor water resistance. So if you are interested in developing outdoor application of this material, then you need to enhance further this point. But anyway, by the year 2050, it is anticipated that the amount of plastic waste is almost comparable to the amount of fish living on the earth. So we need to take immediate action. And we hope that our technology, self-healable rubber and plastic would contribute a lot to the solution of this difficult issue. Thanks very much.


Now, we have an entire DevSecOps stage at commit this year, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention security at least once today on the platform stage. I've talked quite a bit about delivering value, but if your software is not secure, it is not valuable. Security is quality, and any DevOps platform worth its salt should be able to automate your security tests into your DevOps life cycle and do that early and often. For our next talk, I'm happy to invite our sponsor VMware to talk about doing exactly that, shifting security left and building it into every aspect of the life cycle. When you're done today, please check out the rest of our DevSecOps speakers on replay, but for now, let's check in with VMware. Well, hello and welcome to our session embracing DevSecOps for modern application. My name is Henri Venenblok. I'm one of the executive technical advisors and intensive value advisory team. And with me, I have Andreas Vega. Henry, great to be here with you today. All right, I'm Andreas Vega from VMware. I'm responsible for product security across the task portfolio. Outside of my work, I'm also a technical leader for the CNCF technical advisor group for security. Love to take the conversation offline. Great place to find us both as on Twitter, you see our Twitter handles on the screen. Feel free to question away any thought or feedback that this presentation elicits. Absolutely. We love the engagement and reach out on the social media. So as the goal of DevOps and modern application is really to have rapid release cycles to deliver capabilities. Security and compliance can often pose a slowdown or critical insight of an organization to achieving this. In this session, we're both very passionate about secure supply chains and DevSecOps. And what we really want to do today is share with you how you can apply those practices with cloud native application development and how you deliver software continuously and maintaining security in your supply chain from start to finish. So thanks for joining us. Why don't we just dive straight in? So according to the 2020 state of software supply chain we're seeing an incredible increase of the use of open source software. Third party libraries are used more and more. Now this increase has been driven by universal desire for faster innovation. More and more we've seen this over the last year during the pandemic as well, a massive increase. Already the other thing that we've seen according to this report as well is a 21% of enterprises experiences open source software breaches. That's a 430% year-over-year growth in cyber attacks or open source software. Now, slow performing organizations really are slowing down their innovation because they're trying to introduce manual processes, compensating processes to deal with the security risk. And they don't really have a good way or a means for stopping updates or making updates in a conducive way. So we kind of pose this way now, how can we increase speed while also increasing our security capabilities? And in the end, as I kind of stated, it's all about creating velocity in your organization. Slow release cycles are not only a disadvantage in the competitive economy, it's also creates a toil on creating security and addressing security vulnerabilities because they take longer in production. So think about a vulnerability staying in production longer because it takes you to such a long time to immediate. And the scary part with this is that in less than 40% of companies deploy software more frequently than monthly. So having a month-long exposure is very significant. So how do we wanna address these things? But before we do, we came across this great quote by Neil Searing, is that at the end of the day, it's all about imposing costs on the malicious actors. Now, classically it would mean put a lot of firewalls, a lot of hurdles in place. But actually our hypothesis is that you can actually impose more costs by continuously changing your posture, what you have in the infrastructure, how you address dressings. And to really solve this, you need to follow some of the DevOps practices. So why don't we dive in a little bit closer on what do we really mean about specific outcomes? And to do this, let's take a look at the DevOps feedback loop that exists and articulate what outcomes are we trying to achieve by the set of personas and what are some of the measures that are being used? And these are critical to really see, are you moving the needles? High-performing organizations do this intuitively. First off, from a development perspective, we wanna build new customer experiences. We measure these things by increasing developer productivity. Now, this might not be congruent with what operation wants, they wanna take advantage of innovation offered by the cloud, creating scalability, simplifying operations, while also maintaining security. And this has been kind of the classical outcomes to meet SLOs, reduce meantime to recovering. However, there's a new actor that also has a set of practices and outcomes that they wanna achieve. And this tends to be the security and compliancy side of the house. They wanna manage this growing volume of software vulnerabilities. And this persona is really looking at another set of outcomes that is securing the whole secure supply chain and applying those practices to DevSecOps. Now, we think in this talk, we wanna also talk about the house and how can we help enable you? But before we do, we first wanna ground ourselves into a set of principles that we found are critical to be able to achieve in these things. So as we look at the key principles on applying some practices, first and foremost, we think that identity and authentication needs to be across the whole supply chain and also your systems. You shouldn't have a lack of identity. This creates more exposure. Second, you need to have transparency in your system so that you can rationalize over what you're putting in the environment, what has happened, what are attestations there. And there's some great examples on work that we're already doing with software build materials, creating transparency in what we have. Thirdly, we need to automate things faster and faster. The human element needs to be removed. Again, making it very hard, increasing the cost for the bad actors also means by creating automation to simplify this.  Next, we think that the infrastructure really truly needs to be treated as immutable, same as with the applications as well. They are declaratively defined so you can create an identified drift inside of your organization for security, but you can always go back to a particular state because you've declaratively said what that state should look like. And last but not least is also we wanna create zero trust. And this is notion where instead of thinking of assets and resources, you really create implied, that have implied trust based on location. But there's no implicit trust between those entities and rather trust must be established based on dynamic evidence and we'll be walking through that as well. So now we talked about some key principles. Now let's dive into some house on how we're gonna be able to do that. Andres. Thank you. It's important to underline that these principles do not exist in isolation from one another. They're tightly interweaved. In order to arrive at zero trust, we must fundamentally be able to ingrain constructs into our system that will help us determine with certainty their trustworthiness. And fundamentally it starts with a strong foundation of identity. So let's look where we're going back to the left of identity and authentication. Clearly there are keys and certificates we've been using for quite some time. Now, high profile attacks in recent times, we see the entry point as an excellent credit credential. An attacker gains this key material and then reuses it to perform lateral moves to do code injection. Now, if we change this embedded secrets or this embedded credentials or shared material to be short-lived, it significantly reduces the utility time in the event of an exfiltration. Short-lift here means typically an hour or less. This could be configurable on a paradigm basis and the requirements of the environment. But it does help eliminate a very large range of web application attacks. Now, a problem with short-lift keys is how do you provision and deliver this credentials to every workload and environments that are dynamically scheduled, elastically scaled? How do you do that across technology boundaries and platforms and machines that are common go and scaled up and down? So starting off the premise that if we're reasoning in a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment and we have a complex distributed system that spans some of these boundaries for any two components to trust each other, they must be able to confirm each other's identity and that ensure that the messages exchanged in between them haven't been tampered with. A great example of an implementation that codifies this key attributes we see on the screen of being, well, short-lift credentials, make it platform agnostic, give it to any workload, regardless of its form factor, that this key material has been cryptographically signed and can be cryptographically verified, that it's programmatic, and that it gets us over the hurdle of, well, I have an API key or I have a certificate, but in order to protect the certificate, I must encrypt it and now I have a decryption key. I should store this decryption key elsewhere securely. How do I do that? I encrypt it again and it's turtles all the way down. So we must move from the paradigm of proof of possession onto recognition technology, what would be analogous to a fingerprint or a readiness scan. And with that, so for credential zero, wherever a workload pops up. So the Spiffy and Spire projects, both at an incubation level from the CNCF are a set of APIs and associated tooling that provide uniform language for describing a service identity in a wide range of workloads, a wide range of orchestration systems, a wide range of providers and different layers of abstraction if you have confidential computing capabilities, if you have T's and TPMs as examples of those, if you need to introspect the different layers of like your provider, I am, your container orchestration framework and the kernel itself in order to verify those identities, only issue them if workloads meet the shape and size you expect them to be and providing that workload with that identity and the key material that it can cross authenticate to other systems. Now, this is done at multiple layers. I'd encourage you and we'll have references at the end of the presentation of, there's attestations within the ontology of the projects for doing verification of the infrastructure a workload runs, ensure that it's trustworthy, it's not rogue, it is infrastructure that does belong to you and it hasn't been tampered with as well that as the workload as be it a container or a function, so there's two layers like node as well as a process level introspection. Now, this is fairly general purpose. Once we have this in place, it solves beyond, well, we talked about that credential zero. So you're not only cross authenticating between workloads, you can authenticate from a workload to a secret store. You can authenticate from a workload to a database without using any username or password but doing direct authentication using the certificate. The framework support supports both jobs as well as X509s. It can do secret less authentication to your cloud providers. So if you're talking to AWS, to RDS or a Lambda function you can use your SPIFI identity to have an eye in binding and receive an exchange, a STS token that you can talk to any third party service outside of the infrastructure identified and you can have trust boundaries and trust domains modeled accordingly to that. So that's not the SPIFI inspire. Hope that's picked your attention but let's look at the next level up, how we start to model once we have that strong bedrock of identity. It lets us start to reason holistically around privilege and performing least privilege which is for every function in the system or every user in the system that initiates the task as well as the task in itself should operate with the least amount of privilege necessary to complete the job. So supply chains are complex, software factories are complex. More cloud adoption means a proliferation of cloud native solutions. More cloud native solutions means more moving parts and producing software. And more moving parts and tooling and picks and shovels. So we can agree that supply chains can be overly complex but it can help as engineers to break it down and discernible parts and implement the fence and depth that's measured with an organization's level of risk and assurance. So at every stage of a logical pipeline or a logical supply chain extending a little bit further there are some key things to think about. So we got to think about securing the source code. Know who's in your get repo and force MFA, sign your commits. Next up you want to look at securing the dependencies you want to scan the dependencies, generate software builds of materials that can be ferried along the artifacts. You want to harden and secure the pipeline itself. Move away from well, RHEL release engineering came up with the system and it's being handed off to security to come and harden it. You want to make sure you make it intrinsically secure from the onset. So leveraging state of the art technology to ensure that you preserve the integrity and confidentiality across every single step, constructs like identity and others that we're going to talk a little bit more come into the picture. You want to secure the artifacts that are going to be well produced from source and go along and like the byproduct of the pipeline itself you want to start moving towards reproducible builds and ultimately well, what goes into production? That's crown jewels, geese to the kingdom. You want to gate what makes it into a production based off the metadata and all the insights and telemetry you have around your artifacts. If you see that a particular artifact has a severe risk vulnerability off its S-bomb, you might want to enforce some gating criteria at that point. There's different ways to do binary authorization but well, something we want to put in your mind for you to think about and strongly consider. So let's look next at what other supply chain tools that you want to assess and evaluate to make part of your toolkit. Ultimately, DevSecOps is about giving developers the autonomy and the agency to develop as fast as they want but to do so securely and be able to give them a range of options, give them the technology they want to be able to secure applications up front. So there's several screenshots within this picture things we have on the left side of the slide. We showcase a screenshot of the hardware repository. We have VMware's carbon cloud black which leverages a considerable amount of open source. There are some other great tooling like Google's not pictured here, open source vulnerability database, OSB.dev. And it's all driving towards creating experiences that reduce the noise to signal ratio and boosting those signals by leveraging insights, laboratory and having actionable insights. There are a number of other considerations within a pipeline, what we see on the right hand side of the greatest and the latest around Linux foundation and CNCF projects such as the update framework for signing and verification and total around supply chain logs having clear understanding of the inputs and outputs and expected steps to be carried out and make sure that there's high fidelity and confidence that there hasn't been any deviations from architectural intent. There is the umbrella of projects under six store which leverage tamper proof transparency logs and tamper proof ledgers. So in the event of a compromise, it's readily apparent known to the world that something off has occurred but during regular business knowing that, well, everything is tight and as expected to be trivia as a scanner. So these are some of the noteworthy products we wanna highlight that we want you to start looking into. This is by no means an exhaustive list but helping make all this innovation consumable is our primary goal, which takes me on to the next slide, which is you've done quite a bit within the development and tying it all together as we were gearing up to the right doing that admission control and doing policy as code to be able to declare your organizations, compliance and regulatory objectives and be able to use gatekeepers. So rather than blocking applications from scaling, based on often a scaling event, you know upfront whether something should be allowed because it meets the bar to run in production through the use of like, we look at mutating admission webhooks and gatekeeper and being able to write regular policies around these so you can reason around different risk levels if a workload has an S-bomb and the absence of an S-bomb if this particular environment is not highly regulated, that's fine but maybe there's this PCI so this shouldn't without the absence of an S-bomb or without a detailed understanding of the composition of this workload, it shouldn't be present here and turn it down and this is a feedback loop and sub-incentivizing and driving for better development outcomes. Henry, if you would take me to the next and last slide before I pass it to you, something that I mentioned briefly was, well, there's great technology, part of the problem is it's hard to use, it's hard to consume, there are certainly end-user organizations that are doing a great job at it in lighting the path for others. We have partnered with many of these end-user organizations, our customers, to make sure that we codify these principles and best practices and much as we have done with Kubernetes to externalize, generalize that and make it applicable to the outside world so we drive to a world where our applications are safeguarded. We're putting a lot of effort around the production of templates and code examples where progressively you can arrive at what's modeled in this picture and a model of like crawl, walk and run. This is entirely modular and pluggable. Some of the parts you see in the picture are optional, but they're at the time the most mature and the ones we advocate for, but all the way from source to production, the different steps, triggering off your testing, handling metadata, handling the references between an artifact and its metadata, handling the reference between an artifact and its signature and helping you, helping your reason about it in a very logical way and giving you also the constructs to be able to realize the benefits from it. So we're here from the MRTASU once again helping you make supply chain security approachable and consumable and happy to help you get started. And Rhi, with that, I'll pass it back on to you to close this up. Great, that was very insightful. And maybe to kind of echo as well, we're really on this mission of making things composable, like creating the builds materials, be able to continuously build your software, providing gatekeeping mechanisms into what you get deployed and reason over things what should really be running. So I'm also very excited that in the Tanzu portfolio and with our partnership with GitLab as well, you can actually come check things out on our website as well. We provided some key links on some of the individual projects. A lot of our projects are actually open source available as well for you to start experimenting with and really creating a thread of building a secure supply chain. With that, I wanted to thank everybody for attending this session. We're looking forward to the engagement after the session and reach out to us. So with that, thank you so much and have a wonderful conference.