What kind of world do I want to live in? I think about this question a lot. For our generation and for specifically my group of people, which is refugees, the circumstances might dismantle any vision of the future that we have. You're trying to rebuild, you're trying to make a future for yourself and then the climate-related disaster comes and you start again.  The first step to understand is that we're all a part of it. None of us are going to be left out by the crisis. We're at a stage where if we don't act now, really there won't be very much left. There are generations that will never see certain things that we grew up seeing in real life. We have to start treating this like the emergency it is to achieve the 17 sustainable development goals. We have to go from an intention to a serious commitment. Business leaders really need to rethink how they conduct their business and invest in creating systems that are climate-friendly. The action I would like to see is accountability. Structures being put in place where countries aren't just asked to do something, but they're kept accountable to the decisions that they make. There has to be that strong collaboration between government, between corporations, between youth activists to drag change forward. The world I would want to live in is a world where imagining the future is not a privilege. I want to live in a world where people do not give up on hope. Hope that a positive change is possible. The fact that you're listening today means that you are willing to make a change. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to all of our panelists and participants from around the globe. I want to welcome you to the Scaling Innovations and Technology for Food Systems Discussion. My name is Tara Nathan. I lead MasterCard Worldwide Social Impact Business that innovates commercially sustainable digital tools to give marginalized individuals access to basic services. I will serve as your moderator for this August panel. Joining me today we have in the first session an all-female panel. I'd like to welcome, we have the Honorable Maria Juliana Ruiz, the Honorable First Lady of Columbia, Honika Faber, President of the Food and Refreshments Division at Unilever. Dr. Purovi Mehta, the Head and Deputy Director for Agriculture for Asia of the Gates Foundation. Welcome to all of our panelists. There are myriad challenges with today's food systems from land use to greenhouse gas emissions to food insecurity. Today we're going to focus on sustainability of food systems, primarily economic sustainability, with the farmer at the center and how operational or other factors can drive to that sustainability. How innovations, both technological innovations, but also pricing go to market, product innovations can transform food systems to improve farmer incomes and drive towards the SDG zero hunger by 2030 goal and ultimately create an inclusive, efficient, sustainable and nutritious food system. I think we all recognize here that a fundamental shift is needed to create sustainable food systems. Governments must improve policies for implementing innovative solutions. Private sector companies must bring their expertise and technology to innovate solutions to food system challenges. And of course donors need to de-risk innovation. Many of these changes are underway from precision agriculture to smart logistics and integrated supply chains. Yet adoption and usage of technology and these innovative approaches that can improve food security at the base of the pyramid has failed to scale. Broad adoption and usage will only happen if innovations are economically viable, especially for the farmers. And one of the fundamental challenges that we want to talk about to here today is the lack of an operational mechanism for collective action. Whilst I think we all have seen there are multiple thought leadership for a for thought leadership negotiation government policy making. We seem to lack a mechanism to coordinate the actual implementation and scaling these innovations and that's why the World Economic Forum and partners like Mastercard and those gathered here today. Are creating country led food innovation hubs around the world. These hubs bring together the myriad actors required to drive collective action and build sustainable food ecosystems. The hubs focus on adoption and scaling of innovation. Today we'd like to deep dive from the various perspectives of leaders in government civil society, private sector and the farmer, most essentially, on what is needed to build sustainable food systems. Critically we want to hear today about the gaps to collective action and how we can enable and scale ag innovations. This session has two parts. We'll begin with an opening plenary, which will be available later for the public to view through the World Economic Forum website. Before moving to a panel where we will discuss how to take this vision to action in the second half. I have the honor to moderate this panel for the opening plenary so again welcome to our esteemed panelists. With that I'd like to turn to our first panelist, the Honorable Maria Juliana Ruiz. You are very well known for your work and passion driving collective action for the well being of children, and especially the eradication of malnutrition. Columbia is also one of the first countries to initiate a food innovation hub. So if you could, I would love to hear more about the opportunities for change you see in the food systems in Columbia, what needs to be solved. How can innovation help, and how can the food innovation hubs facilitate this transition. Sure. Thank you so much Tara. Good morning to everybody it's truly an honor for me to be part of this panel. So to answer your question I will probably start by the roots and is to say that agricultural activities, rural communities, local products and producers as part of the food system have become vital to Columbia's growth, both in economic and social terms, and I would like to share some numbers and an example of this is that nearly 3.3 million Colombians are employed in the agriculture and related centers. So this for us has also become a major target and a specific place to to work with and for it. This also has a specific relevance because this makes the sector as the second largest employment generator in Columbia. So this is truly relevant when we speak about development and sustainable development. Additionally, agricultural competitiveness is a priority for Columbia and innovation takes relevant part on it. You mentioned I've been passionate about nutrition, and I truly believe that if there's a, there's a aspect, a relevant issue where innovation where the youth can take and play a key role is presenting innovative solutions to very old and traditional problems in our countries. So as a personal insight I recognize the need to continue working from a multi-sectoral perspective on improving nutrition, especially of course on women and children. And this is because that for me has been my starting point in the role I'm leading right now, and is working on early childhood but with a specific target. And that has been to burst all the physical capacities, cognitive capacities of the children through nutrition at the same time that nourishing them with love and caring to guarantee that they're going to be able to fulfill and to achieve their goals of happy lives and productive lives in the future. Now in the national roadmap that thrive from the from the FCC national dialogues, we identified some cross cutting challenges and this probably goes straight to your question. And is that I probably mentioned just a few, the ones that I consider more relevant. And is that we deeply need to appropriate the approach of the human right to proper nutrition and do it from a differential and specific perspective, including territories and local capital. The second one probably would be the imperative implementation of the local public procurement law, because we have it, but we still need to implement it all over the territory, as well as a national food waste and loss policy. We, it was launched two years ago, but we still have a good way to work on in order to implement and and appropriate this policy. The third one that I would mention would be the strengthening of school fitting, and this is also related to that concept, probably holistic concept of nourishing mind and soul of the kids. And is that we need to strengthen in that specific period of development of the human being to be assured as I said that they're being able to acquire all the micronutrients they need for proper development. So, we need to put to continue working in that same sense in mechanisms to promote rural family and community agriculture, because this is also part of a very important step on the whole system. And another relevant issue for us would be to to once again from a policy perspective, implement a systems approach on that also promotes high level coordination and collaboration, which is crucial and for me has been proving that is the is the right way to go to work from a multi central perspective on transformation of our food systems. We have done so through the great Alliance for nutrition you have probably heard about it. That's probably one of the, of the topics have been more passionate about, and this great Alliance for nutrition allow us to convene different sectors, and the Colombian Intersectoral Commission for food and nutrition security has been very active in this purpose as well. I would like to share something that for us has been a trigger to continue working in this in this way as a multi sectoral approach. In the last year and 2020. In the midst of the pandemic within the difficulties we're facing. Colombia was able to report a decrease above 40% on debts due to malnutrition or association to penetration for kids under five years old. And this is not the goal, but for us was significant enough to to motivate us to continue working in this in this sense. So I hopefully answer your question. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for that great introduction and I think Hanukkah, who I will turn to next may have a lot of responses to this I think the first lady has clearly outlined the demand right on the government side and the nutrition of secure food systems in delivering what is sort of, you know the basis for not only healthy youth, healthy children but frankly a healthy workforce as she's described right. So Hanukkah with that I'll turn it over to you, the Hanukkah fiber the president of the fruit and refreshments division. Obviously Unilever has had decades of experience, not only in not only are you a leader in the consumer fast moving goods industry, but frankly really a leader in driving social change through business. I'm interested to understand from your perspective. How do you see Unilever playing a key role in the innovation and in the change that is required to accomplish some of the challenges that the first lady has outlined. Yeah, great question. Thanks Tara and things to the first lady as well. It's really impressive. What's being achieved in Colombia, and especially in childhood nutrition so kudos kudos to you. What do I believe Unilever and another private sector companies can do to be agents of change in the food system. Well let me first say I believe we have an absolute responsibility to help change that system because it is broken many of the things were mentioned before on why it's broken. And I don't agree with people like Jeffrey socks who recently said that these companies should just think he said behave pay taxes and stick to the rules. Of course we should do those things. But the system will change faster if the private sector and companies like Unilever do more. So I think there's two things as a company. We need to do and we do it and they are public commitments and then delivering on them and collaboration. So public commitments are really important. You need to go out and set specific quantitative time bound commitments on how you're going to change the food system for the better. And we've done that as Unilever. We've committed to a whole number of things I won't mention them all but to a billion euros in plant based sales. Because the world needs to eat a little less meat and more plans to doubling the products we sell that have positive nutrition, including fortified products, which again the first lady mentioned. We've committed to having food waste in our operations. We've committed to reducing salt, sugar and calories in our products. We've committed to less plastic, which is another big issue. We've committed to more nature positive production to a deforestation free supply chain to a living wage for everyone in our extended supply chain. And of course we've committed to being that zero by 2039 11 years ahead of the Paris agreement. So we work really hard now to deliver on those things to report progress very transparently annually. Some of these things are going great summer going less good so we'll need to step on those harder. And we've also put it one billion euro climate and nature funding place to fund some of the investments that are needed to live on those commitments. So I think that's the first thing any private sector company needs to do. Because if, if we're not going to commit and deliver on some of the things the food system desperately needs, then who will. And then the second thing I think the private sector needs to do is collaborate with others in the value chain, usually was a big foods company but we're not going to change the food system on our own that's clear. We are working very closely with farmers with governments with NGOs around the world. And I think that's where these World Economic Forum food innovation hubs are very helpful. We just announced actually yesterday, a new partnership with the Farm to Market Alliance in Africa. Under the web innovation hub. And that really helped us to get in touch with the right partners. And together we're going to explore ways for African smallholder farmers in Kenya to grow more diverse, we call it future 50 foods that the world's to focus on just a few crops, which is that for soil and for nutrition. And so we're going to work together to see if we can both create a supply and demand of more diverse crops. So that's one example but collaboration is so important we are collaborating on the ground with farmers with governments with NGOs and so many places, including by the way with the Gates Foundation so I'm really looking forward to hearing from them today as well. Thank you so much, Hanukkah. It truly is impressive I think some of the groundbreaking work and sort of that Unilever does not only as an individual company but frankly as a role model for other private sector actors, you know, seeking and looking inside to make a change. Thank you for your participation. I'm going to turn to it's my pleasure to introduce our third panelist Dr. Purvi Mehta, the head of agriculture for Asia at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation needs no introduction, of course, Purvi. And I know you've been actively engaged in investing in technology and innovation for food systems across Asia, especially in India. In these decades of experience. What do you see currently as the gap. I think we're all talk calling for and talking about intersectoral collaboration. I think we know the problems well right. What do you see as the gaps, and how do you see us tactically moving forward towards filling those gaps and addressing them. And I really, really appreciated the earlier comments, of course, from the Honorable First Lady and also from Hanukkah. I think, you know, they've covered quite a lot of things on what is happening. purely from a developing country perspective, I think one of the biggest gap is we have not harvested the potential enough. And predominantly it continues to remain a low input low output system. And I think any innovations, any collaborations, any transformative ideas that that sort of contributes to turning that low input low output agriculture system to more sustainable input and profitable output system is going to be very, very important and when I say profitable output it is not just the question of the price the farmer, for example, or the producer realizes out of that produce, but at the same time also as as the first lady said, you know, optimizing the value of the produced food also to bridge the huge nutrition gaps I think you know we as a world have come a long way in in achieving food security. The next step is to really, you know, think about nutrition security in the context of the of the consumers. As Hanukkah mentioned and as as the first lady mentioned as well. I think one of the also very important aspects would be food security for the food security. World over especially in developing countries the, the, the largest number of malnutrient people also happen to be farmers or the rural population right. And so how do we link agriculture production with the with its largest output which is, which is also nutrition is going to be very important and more and more in developing countries I think there are two very peculiar things. One is the dependence on locally grown locally sourced food. So, so that's where it plays a very, very important role. And number two is a real need and as you as you mentioned Tara in terms of the missing ones. A real need is also to diversify our agriculture systems right. World over and especially developing countries predominantly there are eight to 10 commodities where our investments are efforts have been the highest which is which is usually around staple crops and staple food. How do you diversify that to to sort of enlarge our portfolio is going to be very important and while doing so. I don't think there is a trade off between either you grow nutritious food or you grow, you have more profitability. I think nutrition and profitability for the farmer must go hand in hand to make our foods or food system more accessible and affordable for the farmers. I think the food system hub for example or the food innovation hub plays a very, very important role in sort of decentralizing the risk that the farmer faces right now, and and also bringing in nuances in the way the systems have been operating right. The system which has been predominantly production driven system, what we produce is not just important, how that produce reaches to the consumer, you know so excess affordability, and also absorption is going to be very, very important. Thanks. Thanks so much. I'm just checking on time I think we're doing good on time so I'd love to take it back maybe and ask a question to all the panelists I think there's been a couple of really important themes that have been brought up here one is in this drive for sustainability and run and sort of modernizing or or changing the food systems it's about how do we get the farmer at the center. How do we drive profitability and how do we drive. Well economic viability essentially for that farmer at the center. So I would love to sort of hear from from from anyone, but maybe Hanukkah we can start with you and then maybe Dr metha would be interested to hear. What are the challenges for driving or for accomplishing that economic sustainability today. I think we talk a lot about commercial sustainability we talk a lot about profitability. What are the challenges to getting there from a private sector perspective and then from a donor perspective what are the challenges on derisking that. Monica. It's a great question and one that is very top of mind for us right now because we indeed you know we we we source all kinds of things tomatoes and onions and tea and soybeans and many more things we source them in many places around the world. And we'd love to get to. I think Dr call it about and I'll call the nature positive production on all of those, where the way it is farmed by our farmers actually improves the soil improves the water is CO2 neutral and all of that isn't happening today. So how do you get there. I don't think there's a one size fits all, but I'll give you one example where where it all has come together pretty nicely for us. We're sourcing of tomatoes in India. So in India we sell Knorr tomato soup and Kisan ketchup so we need a lot of tomatoes. Until about 2017, we're struggling with the quality of tomatoes, we can really get great tomatoes year round lots in season the tomatoes were bad farmers were struggling with yield and living incomes. So this just wasn't a great way for us for the farmers and obviously for consumers to get their tomatoes and ketchup and soup. So we kicked off a collaboration with a cooperative with Sayadri farms in Western India. We did a cooperative about 10,000 tomato farmers, and we did a couple of things we actually put a processing plant at their cooperative headquarters so that the distance to our production site was massively reduced. We helped them with sustainable agricultural practices to both be better for the soil, but also improve their yield. And we helped them get to better quality year round. We're now in year five, we're super happy with that collaboration meals have doubled for the farmers, which of course has a direct impact on their incomes, so they are well above living incomes now, we get better tomatoes, much more consistent quality year round. And as a result, a consumer gets a better product. So, that's a good example, but I'm telling you, that's just tomatoes in India. I've got hundreds of more of these combinations, and it's taken five years. So what's top of my mind for me, how do I accelerate this quickly to many more places many more crops many more countries with different coalitions because it requires collaboration. It's time for me but it's absolutely critical to the planet that this gets done in many more places quickly. Thank you. Thank you. Maybe a couple of crisp comments from you. Have you seen examples in India of commercial sustainability of economic sustainability. How was it accomplished, and then maybe after you're done I'd love to turn back to the first lady for some closing comments. Yeah, thanks Tara. I think Hanika gave one example already. You know, there are there are a very large number of those kind of examples but at the same time there are also a very large number of examples where things have not worked out and it has not been economically experienced in so I think we need to learn from both of that right I mean we have large examples like the dairy cooperative moment to we have you know examples from from smaller commodities also. I think at the crux of any of these successful models as Hanika said number one is the collaboration and collaboration throughout the value chain right only working with say for example processing part will not work only working with production part only so collaboration throughout the value chains pre harvest and post harvest is where we have seen a lot of success. Number two is aggregation right I said cooperatives at smaller level also you know farmer producer organizations basically which is which is sort of an aggregation of 1200 1500 farmers together just giving them a larger economy of scale for them to make sense to the private sector they're giving them better agencies and so forth. I think what is needed from those those success stories really Tara is to use Hanika's word acceleration yes absolutely to tap into the potential but at the same time also inclusion. You know the opportunities at large how do we create you know platform for for more number of farmers all sectors of farmer landholder landless women farmer men farmer you know how do we make that very inclusive. And also how do we extend that to more number of commodities and not just very very usual commercial commodities, including say for example livestock sector I think so inclusion acceleration and diversification would be the three key areas in this one. Thank you. Back to the first lady you've heard I think some great examples of both private sector donor action as the host of the first hub food innovation hub World Economic Forum innovation hub. Maybe you can close out with some comments about what you'd like to see come to Columbia and the changes that it can bring. And just a quick thing to your first question, and is just to leave you with three main actions, and is that knowledge, which for me is absolutely connected to real facts. So communication and collaboration are for me also an accelerator in terms of getting to that effect of productivity and efficient and effective ways to come to those sustainable food systems. Now, your question. Towards how can innovation helps somehow, and definitely convince that innovation and technology has tremendous potential for the transformation. And as I said before from agricultural production to market logistics to nutrition, developing food systems that work for the people and the planet are essential. And there's something that I do believe could be also an expedite solution is and is that digital transformation and inclusive innovation are are critical. We need not only to train on digital skills. But we do need to train, especially the youth, if may I say, in how to use those skills, how to use the technology in solving traditional social problems. So, of course, their challenges related to food systems and nutrition, and they cannot be addressed by any single actor, I will go once again towards a multi sectoral approach. And because I'm convinced that that we need even to get to innovation on that co responsible and cross sector collaboration and iteration. So working on this approach to innovation and and foresee the opportunity of putting in motion. What we call the lab, and is a model that consists of three components I will probably just go through them very quickly, but basically is is to have this kind of laboratory of solutions in terms of of all the different steps in the in the sustainable sectors. And first, in that lab, a perspective we have, we're thinking on strengthening the community practices and this is to have different actors once again commit to working towards collective goals, all related to the system and and to nutrition. And this practice should include the national the regional government, the international cooperation agencies, the startups, which lately in Colombia we've seen many startups related to, to all the different steps of the ecosystem of nutrition. The second step will be a pipeline of products. As I was mentioning before, I truly believe that once we have the rude we decided the target, and we work with the heart and with the commitment of coming up with solutions. Things can be done. And the third step would be the consolidation of knowledge and learnings as the two previous components move forward. This is a model that has been implemented in Colombia by our agency of innovation and entrepreneurship which is called impulse. And we've been working together, trying to leave this as some kind of root in the country, not as a government project, but as a state's commitment. Thank you so much. This indeed has been quite a quite an informative panel. Thank you so much for my esteemed sort of all lady panel very proud to be moderating you. It brings us to a close on the first part of the panel. We really appreciate you sharing sort of not only your experiences but your vision for what the future can hold.


Welcome back cats to the breakfast and plastic we have got set for first major conversation the independent national electoral commission INEC which is Nigeria's electoral umpire on Friday January 6th if you recollect commence the distribution of permanent voter cards at the various award levels in all the 36 states of the federation and the federal capital territory Abuja directing registered voters across the country who are yet to get their cards to do so at the various awards however the exercise has had its challenges with some alleging a delay or delay tactics being employed by the electoral umpire for instance an interfaith group on Tuesday raised the alarm over what it alleges to be the deliberate denial of access to the electorate to collect their permanent voter cards based on ethnic or partisan considerations and also leading opposition party labor party raised the alarm alleging some irregularities by officials of the independent national electoral commission while distributing the permanent voter cards the pvc so joining us to discuss this another issue surrounding Nigeria's forthcoming elections we have a nick agole who is a public affairs analyst he joins from Makori the capital of Penrose state nick it's good to have you back on the breakfast thank you very much and good morning to our viewers um do you agree with these uh uh groups i mean we've talked about labor party we've heard from an interfaith group and some you know Nigerian site tenorant uh voters who have gone to pick their cards alleging that there are underhand tactics uh by the electoral umpire in the distribution of the permanent voter cards you feel that is a case from what your observation and experience is i think nothing should be ruled out absolutely nothing because as the electoral law has plugged deep holes that he said to were being exploited by the politicians to re-elections the politicians are going to be looking for avenues to continue with their rigging and the frustration of people from getting their voter card could be one of those uh mechanisms that they want to use so i i am not ruling out anything because i know that elections are high-stake games by politicians they want to cease power by all means regardless of uh what they want to what they do so i would call on i-nec to have their eyes firmly focused on this and if there are people even within i-nec who are actually frustrating uh voters from getting their pvc i-nec has to deal with that you know and and nigerians model vigilant because now they know that they cannot rig elections again at the polling unit why because the electoral law says whatever results that are declared at the polling unit are going to be transmitted electronically to the i-nec central server so the shenanigans that used to happen at the polling at the so-called coalition centers has not been totally viscerated politicians have lost it there so they are going to be looking for ways to prevent people from going to the ballot and this could just be one of those no so is this is this in your opinion uh these complaints of irregularities in the distribution of the permanent voter card in your opinion is this um a deliberate attempt by by i-nec um as alleged as a whole or do you think that maybe one or two individuals within the commission may be acting in the interests of certain politicians i don't think it's a deliberate attempt by i-nec as an institution because if i look at i-nec as currently constituted i have some measure of hope and confidence in what they're doing because the electoral law that was signed in 2022 i-nec was very instrumental to that if they didn't want us to have better elections this year they wouldn't have backed that electoral law and if i look at the i-nec chairman's public outings and the public education that they carried out and all of that i would think that as an institution i-nec is for free and fair elections but if within i-nec you have some elements who are working for the interest of politicians that cannot be ruled out because politics like i said is high-stake game these politicians take it as a business where they invest money and then when they get into office they make their returns and they will be prepared to pay people even within i-nec and outside of i-nec to stop voters from getting their privileges because they know that if voters get their privileges and they go to the ballot that they cannot change the results so they're just going for the upstream in the electoral process so that they stop people from going to the ballot because now they know the votes are going to cut so i will definitely not say this is i-nec as an institution trying to stop people from getting their voters cut but i-nec has a duty as an institution that if they notice these breaches where people are being stopped from getting their voters cut they need to step in and step in and make it easy for people i mean we have lost the game already in the sense that for the 2027 elections i-nec needs to do something better this collection of pvc they need to make it easier for instance i take myself as an example in the last elections i voted in data state but in 2023 this next month i am going to vote here in benewa state so i went online and i switched my polling unit from worry to my local government in vandeka now i-nec actually did all that but my pvc was in vandeka i had to travel all the way from abuja on a very terrible road from makode to vandeka to go and pick up my pvc and then i'm going to travel back again next month to go and vote two things i-nec can do is to say one for a pvc collection should be there the day before the elections that way people who are resident in a different place are voting in a different place can travel once they just travel a day or two to the elections they collect their voters have and then they cast their ballot and then they return back but if people have to travel long distances like i did just to collect the pvc and then i expected to travel back again to go and vote a lot of people might not want to do that i did it because i am very resolute that i want to vote because i know that it's only through voting the right leaders into office that nigeria is going to solve so i-nec can think about something like that but for future elections i-nec should actually make it possible that if i am in abuja better say i want to vote in benway i can go on the i-nec portal and order for my pvc to be delivered to me in abuja so that i can just go there show that i am the rightful owner of the pvc and collect my pvc i-nec should do make it that you must travel to the world where you are voting to go and collect your pvc so these are some of the the learnings that i-nec can take on board for future elections but for this immediate election they can actually extend the deadline for collection of pvc to the day before the ballot so that people can travel to collect their pvc and vote but you know wouldn't this be a recipe for chaos looking at the fact that i mean i-nec needs to get its acts together for the election proper um ahead of that election if we go to how people collect the the pvc's at the various you know places where they are managed to collect those pvc's um up to a day before the election maybe i-nec cannot be able to adequately prepare for the election and and focus on it you know because of our last minute attitude of course many people are going to wait till that last minute to go for it you know and then if i-nec has to wait up till till late in the night maybe they may not be ready for the election next and wouldn't you say that i mean they started this collection of the permanent voter cards on the 12th of December 2022 and it's going to end on the 22nd of January 2022 they move from the local government areas to the wards uh on the 6th of January they'll be there till 15th January where from Wednesday they'll go back to the local government areas um so isn't this enough time for people to collect their cards i mean you went back to bernard state to get it or can't every other person also go back to where they're going to vote and get it well it is very difficult for everybody to do what i did for various reasons number one it will cost you money to travel such a long distance number two uh if you don't have the time you might be at work you are not able to to to take time off from work which is again something i-nec can do that the pvc collection center should be open seven days a week seven days a week they should it possibly even open 24 hours or at least 18 hours a day and i-nec has to do everything possible to make people collect their pvcs i-nec should be the facilitator of people collecting their pvcs i'm not a blocker and let me say something to what the very value remark that you have made that if i-nec opens the pvc collection centers to a day to the election whether it's not a recipe for chaos well it's probably not going is not going to be why because and on the day of the ballot the number of pvcs collected is not one of the criteria for determining the outcome of an election what is required on the day of election to determine the election is the number of accredited voters so if people are allowed to collect their pvcs up to a day before the ballot they will only just show up at their very off polling unit and i-nec will still be able to accredit them there is nothing that says a pvc that was collected a day before the ballot will not be read by vivas it will be read by vivas so once i-nec accredited the voters that is what begins to count the number of accredited voters then the number of votes cast and then the number of valid votes the number of the qualified votes and then we now know who has got the number of votes which candidate has got x number of votes that's what is called the qualification the the deadline for collection of pvc is not a criteria for determining an election and i make you open up those centers to a day before the elections that people and travel pick up their pvcs and then vote the next day all right interesting um um some people have said you know it's not necessary to go uh uh votes in in your village you know vote where you reside vote where you live vote where you pay your taxes you know uh what do you say to that and if that is the case if that is done then it may be easier for people to to retrieve their cars so if you live and work in a teosa for instance or you live in a teosa uh you pay your taxes in a teosa uh in legos and if you registered in maybe in calabar you it's better to ask the commission it's okay i'm not going to go to calabar to go vote i want to vote in a teosa bring my card here then it's easy for you to collect maybe we're facing these issues because people have refused to heed to the advice of biotech to vote where they reside i think that's a very valid point uh uh yes there are several reasons why people are no longer residing where they register for some persons after they have registered where they pay taxes where they reside and all of that over the time i mean i i make stopped uh voter registration some months ago within that time uh circumstances of life would have taken them away from where they registered that's so that's one case then for the other case some people are passionate about the development of their state and that is the basket that i belong to where we now go back and register in our states because if i register in abuja now i won't be able to vote for the governor of benway state so i have to come to benway to register for some people that is the reason and uh for all of this i agree with the point you have raised that if that is not your reason that is you didn't vote i mean you didn't register and now you have moved away from where you registered or you are not passionate about voting for a particular state then register where you are you know these are the kind of things that will build us as a nation wherever you are as a nigerian you should take it to be your state of origin and it is one of the things that the next national assembly has to deal with this whole issue of state of origin we're nigerians dividing us into 36 states and the fct is just geographic demarcation it doesn't remove our nigerian citizenship if people are residing in the place they should be taking as indigenous of that place because we are nigerians if we get to that point where people feel a sense of belonging to where they are residing where they are working or doing business where they are paying taxes i think what you have said will begin to happen where people will now begin to register to vote in those places without not having to go back to their states and it's something that will have to do very urgently in the next national assembly that will put loss in place that removes this whole concept of state of origin it should be state of residence as a nigerian it should no longer be anything as state of origin wherever you are residing in nigeria that should be your state of residence and we should begin to see people stand for office in those states where they were not born because where my father was born doesn't necessarily have to be my own state i can say my father was born in benway but i am now an adult resident that is where i can test for election i can vote in election and i can do all of my things it's national building and it's a critical thing for the next national assembly to do all right yesterday we had enough time to talk about election security especially uh with uh the statement by the head of training at inec saying elections could be postponed or cancelled because of insecurity in in parts of the country the commission uh all the the federal government came out counter that and of course we're hoping to have some from the commission this morning to address that so we'll leave that but i think what what is major is the fact that the independent national electoral commission has released uh the final list of uh registered voters in the country i don't know if you've had a chance to look at the statistics but we're generally speaking what are your thoughts on that because we hear uh we have 93 plus million registered voters as we speak yeah yes uh before i answer the question let me let me touch briefly on the election security that you have mentioned i think the government should not be coming out to defend and you know the government should not be coming out to counter these allegations i expect the government to investigate these things the fact that the electoral law has not strengthened the hands of inec has not empowered the voters has not cleaned up the space such that rigging elections will become very difficult we know that politicians are going to go on to other games and one of those games is to bring a sense of insecurity in the hands of the people so that on the day of the ballot they sit at home to fear of their life it is something the politicians will do so if these kind of allegations come forward instead of the government entering the defensive mode the government should actually take this feedback work on it deploy intelligence and actually check if anything like that is happening and if it is happening they need to nip it in the board so that's my advice to government let's not be defensive about this anything is possible when it comes to elections so we should not take anything for granted now going to your your question in terms of the number of voters that are on the register yes i next aid is 93 93.4 so over 90 million Nigerians are on the ballot i mean or the register what i don't know is if that includes Nigerians who have already passed on you know we don't have a system in Nigeria of registering pets and pets because if we had that such a system i think we'll be able to use the death register to clean up the electoral register such that it is only Nigerians who are living that are being counted but that's that aside 93 million or over 90 million Nigerians are on the register the last presidential election the total number of votes cast for all of the candidates were just about 30 million so what we are appealing to Nigerians in this electoral cycle is that 30 million people cannot decide for the 90 million let the 90 million come out let the 90 million also have their say let the 90 million the part of the leadership recruitment because we are all going to suffer it whether on the election day you sat at home or you came out if the road is bad you will suffer it if there is no water you will suffer it if there's no electricity you will suffer it if there's no head care you will suffer it if there's no education you will suffer it if you're a student and you're sitting at home be prepared that when the 30 million elected bad leader for you you'll be at home for another year on astral strike so this is the time for us to make our voices heard we know good people who are in Nigeria there are Nigerians who can do this we know them let's vote for them so that they can take the reins of power and move this beautiful country to where it should be this is a country that we shouldn't be suffering i mean on my way coming here to this office that i'm speaking to you now i saw a lengthy queue on the nmpc mega station nigeria slept there overnight so that they will backfill at the normal price that is terrible my heart bleeds want to see that one because nigeria is one of the largest producers of good oil globally this is a commodity that nigeria should have implanted for and we should be supporting to others because we're not coming out to vote for the right people to do this for us we keep having charatans there who cannot convert good oil into petrol and other petroleum products and we are all suffering for it so this country belongs to all of us and we must all come out 19 million people must come out let me say one thing in the last american elections donald trump stood with uh john biden donald trump had his own supporters there's nothing you can tell them that even if you say donald trump has killed somebody that will even make them support donald trump the ball what people who do not want donald trump to repeat a term in office did was they went and mobilized people to come to the ballot so donald trump vote 74 million votes 74 million votes on his own is the highest any presidential candidate has ever put in american history but those who didn't want donald trump in office mobilized 81 million other people to come and vote donald trump out that is what we need in a g ria there are some people that support this politician there's nothing you would do about it no matter what you say they will still support this politician and let nigerians good people come out in numbers and vote and overwhelm the numbers of those who are supporting these politicians so that we can have the right people in office 93 million let's see 60 70 80 million come out that's what we need next month all right all right nick i really i'm really interested in looking at the figures the numbers um i mean there's a lot of talk about all you know people have come out to register you know to get voters cards there's a wave a new wave third force rising and we saw a lot of young people coming out starting in lines to get there to get registered to vote um oh you know there's going to be a third force but if you look at the register from the last exercise the last uh c vr uh the continuous voter register registration that was just suspended because of the elections uh 9.5 million voters were added to the register bringing it to a total of um uh 93.5 million preliminary um figure of 93.5 million and of course you had some objections and they took it down to 93.4 million so if you look at the fact that we have just about 9.5 million new voters in addition to what was there for probably about 83 or 84 84 million registered voters it means that those who are the new voters pale into insignificance when compared to those who were there before so question is looking at that will anything change let's say all the people who are coming now want to vote for Peter for instance of the Labour Party all right nothing may change or will anything change because we have those who already have their candidates part of the 84 million that were there before something will change something will dramatically change and I actually think that because of the new electoral law it's not having a lot of faith in this electoral law the 2022 electoral law particularly for things like electronic transmission of results and things like if the beavers doesn't work then that election will not count you must go back and use beavers for me I think that we are going to begin to see green shoots of real democracy in Nigeria why the 80 something million that voted in the last I mean that were registered were on the register in the last electoral cycle like you have already said only 30 million of them came forward so about 50 something million of them never stepped out to go and vote if a chunk of that 50 something million that did not step forward in 2019 step forward next month they can change the dynamics of an election yeah and the nine additional million nobody says that all of them are going to go for a particular candidate anyway so all we need is we need a chunk of the 50 million that never stepped forward in 2019 plus a good number of the nine million that were added and they can change the electoral outcomes in this country and they can change it acts the presidential the the national assembly the governorship and the state assemblies they can change it now the other thing there is that I don't think nine million four years only nine million were added I mean I don't think the that number that number is the number is accurate in terms of the people who step forward to register but that number should have been more so we're still having cases of who are 10 18 years old or who have returned to the country or who were more than 18 years but never registered are still not registering and they have lost it this time because the the voter register is closed but please they need to step forward for the next electoral cycle to come and register I believe that the electoral register in Nigeria should contain at least a hundred and fifty million people so we still don't have enough of that register all right a lot has been made of the the involvement of youth in in the forthcoming elections and like I said the number of registered youth in this current we recently released voter register 93.4 million number of youth there 36.06 million or precisely 30 sorry 37.06 million or precisely 37 million and 60,399 if you want to look at that it's not even up to is it up to half of the 90 93.4 no it's not even up to half of 94 so are we making too much of a the the power of the youth vote ahead of the 23rd elections are we overestimating the power of the youth in determining the outcome of the election everything we're overestimating it first and foremost I don't know what definition that I need to use to determine who is a youth you know but nothing we're overestimating at all because at the last presidential election like I said earlier only 30 million votes were cast for all the candidates and if we have 36 million youth in Nigeria it then means they can actually determine the outcome of an election because I think the the difference between the eventual winner the eventual winner of that election last last in 2019 the the difference between the eventual winner and the runner runner up was just a few million votes I don't have the numbers in my head but I know that the difference is a few million votes and those few million votes would have been changed or the game could have been changed by the youth if five million votes a youth had cast their ballot for one of the candidates they would have made a difference so one thing I advise youth in Nigeria is that you see those countries that we want to jump at those countries that we have our eyes to jump at in those countries it is the youth who are determining the health of their democracy is the youth who are building those nation is the youth who are stepping forward to be to be counted is the youth who are part of the leadership recruitment is the youth who after election continue to accompany the leaders with their protest with their voices with their letter writing with their phone calls and all of that Nigerian youth instead of taking the backdoor approach of that point to somebody in this country let us come together youth and this is where I expect the rise of NARS NARS as a student union they suffered grievously in the past years students have stayed at home for more days than they have been in the classrooms and you expect a union like NARS to be politically aware to be out mobilizing their members to come forward and vote with their consciousness and vote for the right candidates but you are not ever seeing NARS active in any of the political theaters you are not seeing NARS you are not seeing any youth movements you are not seeing youth organize themselves I would like youth in Nigeria to organize themselves in the same way they organize themselves only come to voting for the big brother show you will see youth open voting centers you will be putting their money to buy the airtime buy the data to vote for candidates in the big brother but that big brother show after you have watched it you go home to no light you go home to no job you go home to lack of security you go home to lack of infrastructure you go home to lack of healthcare lack of education so organize yourself it's not late it's not late we still have a few weeks before the ballot let the youth of Nigeria step forward the 36 million youth of Nigeria even if it's a job half of them that decide to vote with a particular candidate nothing will stop that candidate from being elected all right nick very quickly because of time let's look at the the geo graphical spread of the votes and I want your thoughts on whether it will affect the outcome or how it will affect the outcome of the presidential election in particular the northeast has 12.5 million votes voters registered voters rather the northwest has a 22.2 million registered voters they are the leading geopolitical zone you want to call it that in the country the north central 15.3 million southeast 10.9 million south south 14.4 million and southwest 17.9 million so in the order of most the regions with the most number of votes your voters registered voters rather we have a northwest leading number one southwest second number two you have a north central third number three and then south south and so on before you go to northeast and then southeast looking at that it means that the northern part of the country the northeast northwest north central and northeast ahead we're ahead of the southeast south south and southwest how do you think this will affect the outcome of the presidential election very quickly please well first and foremost it is sad that the people in the south of Nigeria are not stepping forward to be on the register because I believe that the southern states are so popular that people actually step forward these numbers would have been different but in terms of electoral outcomes I think one thing that I'm very happy about that is developing in Nigeria is that people are no longer looking at ethnicity now they are no longer looking at where candidates come from people are beginning to look at the candidates directly on their own merit so if that be the case I expect the dynamics of the 2023 elections that will begin this month to be different but that is not to say that there is not a chunk of people who will receive vote because the person is of the same religion with me or speaks the same language with me or comes from my state they will still vote that way but let people of good way vote with their consciences so that whatever the numbers of the of the votes of those who are voting based on religion or ethnicity will be let the numbers of those who are voting with their consciences voting with for the right candidates be more than them that is a democracy once your votes are more like I said in the Donald Trump case we are going to carry today so I am confident that 2023 elections are going to show us very surprising results we we don't have to all the time we actually have overshadowed thank you so much for joining us uh Nikki Gulley public first analyst thank you very much and I will just discuss pvcs please make the sacrifice make the sacrifice like I did go to where you registered and take your pvc if you go and there is a queue even if you register where you reside stay on that queue it is better you stay on that queue call it to register I mean call it your pvc than to suffer for another four years all right nick appreciate your time I hope that viewers will hear your advice and all the best all the best thank you well for now you're one of the 93.4 million Nigerians on that list so congratulations congratulations unique all right that's the much we can take on this part of the conversation we'll look at the housing deficit in legal state and what those in the short-lived business are doing to try and address the issue stay with us


So, hello everyone, welcome to our session. This is part of the community track. I am here with a few others from Orlando, Florida, all the way from the United States. We represent the OpenStack Central Florida group. So you'll be coming along on this journey with us and hopefully you guys learn a thing or two about some of the lessons that we've learned that helped us build and grow our community as well as to help build not only our cloud, but also our relationships with everyone that's kind of local to our group. So my name is Luke Short. I'm here from Red Hat. I'm part of the automation consulting team. I primarily work with automating the OpenStack lifecycle using Ansible. We also have Joe Still from Phase 2 Technology. He's a senior DevOps engineer. And also Maria Bracho, who's also from Red Hat, part of the OpenStack product team. And we had one more member of our group who unfortunately couldn't make it. So I just wanted to give a quick shout out to Donnie Hamlet. He's been a big help. He's the leader of our organization. He helped bring this all together and we wouldn't be here today without him. So first of all, a big huge thank you to Hostime, who actually has provided us with Cavespace, free networking, free power, free servers to help us build our community cloud. So this is 100% free, no strings attached cloud, which is pretty amazing that companies are allowing us to do this as a user group. After Studios has also been a huge supporter in this. We needed a very large space where we could convene and meet with each other to have all these amazing talks and presentations from the community, from different members of companies from all over the world, who have come to help give us some presentations. Red Hat has also been a large sponsor of this. From this picture here, Maria was actually able to help us get a meetup, a whole bunch of executives, engineers, consultants, all over from Red Hat to come. They came over, met up with their local community. It was such a great time. We had people who were from our group, who weren't even from our group. We were all able to convene, learn from each other and network. It was such a great experience. So the OpenStack Central Florida group, CFL Central Florida, mainly the Orlando area, so think Disney World, Mickey Mouse. Donnie Hamlet, as I said earlier, was the founder of our organization. He helped bring us together towards our common goal of learning about OpenStack. And it goes much further than just OpenStack. So as they were kind of talking about in the opening keynote today, it's kind of all about open infrastructure. OpenStack is not just a single service. We're talking about all the different technologies involved. So it's written in Python. A lot of services are moving to containers that are managed by Kubernetes. There's all these different technologies that we're all getting together to learn about and share our experiences with each other. So currently, we have over 300 people registered on meetup.com who have either come to previous events or have been interested in some of our events. We've had tons of presenters, which I'll talk about in just a second. But it comes back to this whole idea that OpenStack is such a great technology to bring people together because you don't just have a single focus. You can kind of branch off into wherever your heart's desire is. There are so many other community groups nearby. There's the Python user group. There's Docker user group. And we've already worked with them to help kind of spread the knowledge around because there's so many overlying areas with that technology. So here is a list of past events and speakers. This isn't even the whole list. The main point I want to get across here is the fact that we got together on our own in our spare time and we were able to get all of these great presentations. And all you have to do is go out and ask. So many companies out there, Red Hat, Suse, Rackspace, Chef, they're all so willing to literally fly out to wherever you're at, give a talk to your community, even if they don't fly out, even just virtually. And there's so much you can learn from these experts in the field. So you are learning so much from this. Getting together as a community helps you to build your own skills, helps you to help mentor others. There's so much opportunity for everyone involved. Sorry, before we introduce this video, we talked about building a community. And this is all about people and where we live and where we are. So Orlando, probably the first thing that you think about is Disney and the parks. And I think at least the two of us have annual passes to Disney. And I'm pretty sure it looks as well. And we do do that, but we also have a community of technologists. So we want to tell you a little bit about that with this video. This is Orlando. This is where we believe in magic and fantasies and wishing upon stars and the power of the imagination. This is where we believe in dreams and seeing them come true. This is Orlando, known around the world as the home of happiness. And to those who live here happily, as home. This is more than just a place to stay awhile. It's a place to stay on the cutting edge. Here, innovation comes in every form. Entertainment in every variety and thriving businesses. So if you think you know, all there is to know about Orlando because until you get to really know this place, this community and see all the reasons why it's so magical, rest assured, you don't know the half of it. So we have a great community and we have a lot of different industries that get together to, you know, do some magic. We have a whole set of processes. So we're in really good company. Not necessarily very specific, you know, OpenStack or Kubernetes developers or engineers, et cetera. But we're surrounded by folks that do consume that tons of IT departments starving to get more information and to learn. That's why the goal, the specific goal with which Dany, who's not here with us, but wanted to be, created this user group was to get us together to learn. So the first goal of this group is to be a learning platform for all of these professionals that want to come and share with us. Part of the things that I also wanted to say is, again, it's not Silicon Valley. So obviously we don't have tons of OpenStack operators or tons of OpenStack developers, but we have managed to bring people to come and talk to us and share with us how to build clouds. And we've had a couple of examples of building clouds from scratch, which we will see more about that. So yeah, this is Orlando, big in the simulation and entertainment industry, obviously. Tons of universities. One of the things that we had to figure out, because we're such a small community, we needed to figure out a way of getting together. And one of the things that brought us together was OpenStack, it was open source. But then we're very familiar with building open source software, but here we wanted to apply the same principles to open source software, to how we collaborate and organize ourselves. So I earlier shared with, I think it was Look First, this book called The Open Organization, I've read it years before, and it was actually the reason why I wanted to go and work for Red Hat, and I did apply, and then that happened. And I shared that, and I said, hey, I think we need to work together. This way, I think we need this community to apply these principles so that we can be more effective. Since we're so few of us and we're busy, so organizing meetings, bringing speakers, getting the ball rolling, and getting the community cloud up was being very challenging when you have only two to three hours to really apply to work on this side project. So we started thinking about this and the rest of the group was very positive about it, and we said, sure, let's apply the tenants of the open source way into the way that we work. And those are right here. So from a transparency perspective, we needed to make sure that opens organization works to make their data available to others so everyone knows what is going on and has access to all the information and also to external participants. So we're very transparent in the way that we work and that allows us to work and communicate better if you cannot make it to a meeting or if somebody else cannot come, then we still get the ball rolling and moving. Inclusivity, this is pretty obvious from the word, but it also, it's inviting others with different backgrounds to come and help us. So some of the obvious on this are gender, creed and whatnot, but we have a lot of inclusivity in different technical backgrounds, so networking professionals, storage professionals and infrastructure professionals come together to help each other build a cloud because OpenStack needs all of that. And then also adaptability, so be able to be open to change. So at any time that we started a new cloud, it took us like six months to then get together again and start the new one and OpenStack obviously releases quite often, so we were like, okay, now we have to go start from scratch and figure out which release we're on and try to see which distribution we're gonna try this time, et cetera. So it needs to be very open to change and adapt. Collaboration, again, pretty obvious, but really being open to others coming in and jumping in. It was really important for me working for Red Hat, specifically from a product perspective, not to be very prescriptive to the community, but actually be a member of the community. So the way that I'm contributing is just sort of bringing everyone together and making sure that the resources are available to learn and to continue to do what we do. And also community at the center, so that's pretty obvious. Cool, all right, yeah. So our first attempt at a community cloud was back in 2016 with the Liberty Release. We had the bright idea to perform a totally manual installation. I think that was actually Donnie's idea. I think he said it'll be fun. It was. No, it was fun. It was just a lot of work. So this photo actually is of the OpenStack CFL team. I think there were like 10 people that came. It was a good turnout. It was really fun to have that many people there. Hostime actually even sponsored the food. Thank you, Vicky, if you're watching, she's the director of Hostime Marketing. To get us started, Donnie brought three servers and a C355025 or 24-report switch that'll, you'll see one that's a silly later. Install the CentOS 7. It actually took a bit of time to do. We probably should have done it beforehand rather than be like, give me a sec, let me install three servers with CentOS 7. You'll notice we should have prepped. It turns into kind of a recurring lesson here. After that, a lot of time was set up, was spent setting up the switch, configuring the required VLANs, making sure that everything was configured as was expected for the build. And then finally, we got around to following the manual installation guide, which is linked up there. I think it goes to the latest version. Though these days, of course, as we'll cover later, there are better ways of installing OpenStack than painstakingly doing the manual process. We get better over time. Yeah, no, it's still that iteration, right? The manual installation actually seemed to go pretty well. We didn't get a lot of errors. We followed the guide very, very specifically. But in the end, there was trouble with public networking. We just couldn't seem to ping the VM. It was up and it looked like it was up and it thought it had an IP, but it just no access and it wasn't the security groups. Luckily, we had Spencer Crum, developer-advocated IBM, to guide us through the neutron troubleshooting, another theme, the group in collaboration for the necessary competences to get it done. Network configurations were a pain. This is where a lot of the waiting was. It was like, hopefully Spencer knows what to do when we were all just listening and waiting for Spencer to tell us the answer. There were trouble where we didn't label things correctly. We didn't follow the architecture we planned. We had this whole plan and followed almost none of it. Made a bunch of ad hoc changes that bit us later. It didn't help that a lot of us were missing the required competence to understand VLANs. I know I didn't really quite understand VLANs. I thought I understood VLANs. I did not at the time. I do now, I think. Spencer did get it working in the end. I think we cheered, right, when he got one of the VMs to ping. Yeah. Yeah, it was a very exciting moment when he was like, yeah, it's actually connecting. We learned a lot about the main OpenStack services and their configuration was very interesting, very informative, but it was a difficult process. Though it was quite a long day, it was definitely a fun experience to have everyone involved there. It was very cool to have the community. So after adopting the Tenants of Open Organization, as Maria described, the OpenStack CFL community members were able to operate with a little more autonomy rather than hopefully having the availability of an individual. We were all able to just do what we thought was best. The community itself became open source is the way it goes. Good book. In early 2018, I think it was Luke, actually, that pitched a reboot of the community cloud using Ansible for Networking Management, OpenStack Triple O, the RDO packages, and the Rocky release to get everything containerized and automated. I quickly established a, I did a free private GitLab repo because we wanted to use GitHub, but it's public, and I wanted to use a weird password management, so it's private for now. We hope to open it up later when we have better password management, but got that up for good. Task management, documentation, and task management, it was actually really helpful to have like, what are we doing next? Everyone that was interested, I just gave them just full admin, just to get everyone all the access they needed. Again, open org, if you empower people with access, they can refer to it and add to it. There was a lot of really good collaboration there. I think it'd be awesome. So first up was the Ansible Networking Automation. Luke was able to hook us up with Colin McCarthy, a red-hatter with some serious Ansible Networking experience. Colin shared his GitHub examples with us, and I think I, yep, I put the link there, check it out, and he showed us how to tame Cisco's iOS with Ansible. I thought I had recorded it effectively, but I botched the audio recording, so it's just him scrolling silently through his GitHub iOS examples while I try to get my dog to stop barking. So it didn't quite work out. We tried to record all the sessions. That first one did not go well. I was no longer in charge of recording after that. However, I was inspired after Colin's explanation to give it a try on our own switch with zero switch administration experience. You'd think that the Liberty installation would count. It did not, but with zero experience, we first had to enable SSH on this thing. There was only Telnet accessible, the C3550, which is why I specified long EOL. I asked someone on the Cisco forum for help. Where do I find this? And they were like, go look for it, which is not helpful. I finally, after Googling the exact firm where someone was recommending, I found some sketchy FTP site on some random IP and just scraped all of the firmware down. I installed one of the firmwares that looked like a bigger number, but I found later after some more research that you needed the K9 version for the crypto functionality. That's what gives us SSH, which we needed for Ansible. It doesn't work or it might, but it's not best working through Telnet. I actually don't know if it works through Telnet. Certainly not through the console serial cable. So after installing the K9 firmware and following some guides for SSH, I was able to authenticate with Ansible. Pretty exciting. The iOS config Ansible module worked actually pretty well, but the template, it was weird, didn't seem to quite apply what we were telling it to do. We would be like, oh, you know, port nine should have these configurations, but when we'd run it, it would have like some of the old configurations. So that was kind of strange at this stage of the operation. Another example, like port 11 just would not respond to anything. It was just not changing at all, which made no sense. But it's actually pretty funny. None of us actually knew how to set up a port channel in the Cisco iOS. So in the video, because we recorded the Zoom session, a lot of our meetups for this rocky installation were virtual. We literally, in the video, Google had to do it and we're like, let's learn how port channels work. It only took like a couple of minutes to find just the Cisco official, here's how you do it. We added it to the Ansible template config and we're able to apply it without issue, I think, because there was no extant configurations to try to overwrite. So that worked really well, but still port 11, not playing nice. We cut the recording off at the hour and a half. I thought it was a good sweet spot because I don't wanna just have a six hour video, where I'm like, struggling to fix the networking. But I think I thought that was at least an interesting educational experience. Can we get the next slide? Oh yeah, actually, Luke, do you wanna discuss this item a little bit? Yeah, I'll tackle this. So one of the interesting things about running a free cloud is that a lot of our hardware is kind of ancient and low-spec, so if a port 11 on the switch didn't work, it could very well be a hardware malfunction, we don't really know, so it makes it a little bit more complicated to troubleshoot stuff like that. So right here is an architecture diagram I came up with for our cloud. So the main things here is we have our Cisco switch and for triple O to work, let me just give a brief overview of triple O, it's the upstream version of the Red Hat OpenStack platform and triple O stands for three O's, it's OpenStack on OpenStack, so we actually deploy an all-in-one OpenStack on the under cloud or the director node and that is used to actually install the over cloud, so that's going to be the end result that your users will be using and interacting with. So we have our under cloud, that's probably our beefiest server, because this is running all of the OpenStack services on it, from here it's going to be using Ironic and Nova to provision and manage the controller and compute node, but what we have here is very simplistic, this is just a simple, just one controller, one compute, no HA, we just need to cloud up and running, we're just playing around with it, we're just learning, so this is what we got and we're hoping to purchase and possibly get more hardware donated so we can eventually expand this out and see how far we can go with this. Very cool. So yeah, so the next part of story time here is the under cloud, so to prep it I, and notice we prepped it this time, I did not say hold on a sec and wait in silence while I go install it, I imaged it with the latest NOS 7, I still had to finalize the switch configuration because I didn't get port 11 working which is part of as you saw our diagram, they're like we need port 11, so after the upgrade though, my Ansible playbook would no longer authenticate which was kind of weird, I solved it later, I'll tell ya. I wound up just logging into the switch and doing it all manually, applying the configuration, desired configuration manually, which actually was a good thing because it revealed the trouble with port 11, the mystery of port 11. The commands I was trying to run were throwing errors that were not obvious, right, in the Ansible operation, it didn't tell us, it failed, it was like I applied the config, you know I ran the things you told me to run, but I learned here that I actually need to make sure to be more idempitant about the way the commands are used, idempitancy meaning if I run it twice it'll yield the same result which is what a lot of Ansible is motivated by. In this case, I had to use the command switchport to activate it as a switchport, I noticed in the errors it was saying error cannot do that must be switchport and Google was like you need to run switchport. After I ran switchport, I was able to run the other commands just fine, they all worked well, I added switchport to the automation config which I haven't run yet because I did a bunch of manual config, I was going to wait until after we did our build to break it, but with that up at the top, had I put switchport at the top, my commands would have run without issue, so good lesson and I guess good on the manual process were educating me on that. And then the undercloud install. Oh well yeah, sure, sure, I would like to mention that the authentication troubles are not to be, Ansible 2.7 changed how networking administration was configured, I think it's better the way they did it, but it's way cleaner, it's the way to do it, but I was surprised and confused at first, but you know, one quick look at the docs is like here's how you do it, thank you Ansible. What was it, oh and then the actual undercloud process which is just one command worked without flaw which is kind of boring, but awesome I guess that it's working, but I have no funny story about how it had anything but success, so that worked really well, it's like 50 containers or something based on COLA just up and working, so that was actually really cool. Yeah, I mean it's amazing how big of a headache OpenStack is, but when you come to deploy the undercloud the all in one step, it's the simplest process, like Red Hat engineers in the community have figured out a very streamlined process to just set everything up and just have it work and that's very important considering you want your undercloud to be as stable as possible to then manage your overcloud that it's actually deploying. Yep, cool, so before we could utilize the undercloud though for deploying the overcloud we had to prepare IPMI on the overcloud nodes, so the actual undercloud installation went well but it being utilized needs and preparation. IPMI was prepared from the BIOS and with IPMI tool we learned about native VLANs, untagged packets get treated as in this case it was VLAN 100 per architecture diagram, packet comes in tags 100 and then comes back out untagged so you can use things like IPMI which does support VLAN but in this case we didn't configure it with VLAN DHCP and PXE, when you're booting up it's like it is untagged so we needed the native VLAN. One of the overcloud nodes was accessible over IPMI, it worked really well and the other one just didn't. It gave us a strange error that we later found had to do with it's basically not accessible. One of our community members Justin found a great option, apparently sometimes with IPMI even if you've configured it and it looks like it's gonna work you need to turn the machine all the way off and then back on so his idea was to turn it off and on again which worked really well thank you Justin. We actually were like there's no way this is gonna seriously be the answer here but it was. Yeah I think we had to literally unplug the power plug and then plug it back in. Yeah no I turned it off unplugged it power to make sure even the capacitor or whatever like all the power was definitely out and then plugged it back in it worked out immediately so that's working really well. I didn't wanna mention it's really interesting especially with all the people I've been mentioning look at what they helped us with, look at what they helped us with having all of these diverse competencies available to us was super valuable I mean it really shows the value of making sure you have I think it was mentioned in one of the keynotes all of the necessary competencies to accomplish a task so that was really cool. So fixing VLANs and he's gonna control the thing and I'm gonna do like so this event I thought was a lot of fun it was actually captured in one of our latest videos like the hour mark so it's funny that we heard earlier in the Volkswagen keynote that networking is the hard part it's like the hardest part right? It is they're not lying. Right yeah so Luke pointed out the uplink was using VLAN 100 instead of VLAN 10 this is like from our Liberty install we used VLAN 104 you know the access port packet comes in tagged 100 and then anyone that wants to have public subnet access you need VLAN 100 in our case we targeted VLAN 10. Rather than change our desired specification we were like I was like no no we will do it right we'll make it the way that we said we would let me change it to VLAN 10. I boasted about how I can totally switch the uplink without having to get out of my desk. You know I will keep it online I'll keep my access and I'll bring the new one up I'll start using it and then I'll bring the other one down and I won't have to get out of my desk. So I added VLAN 10 to the under cloud trunk and then switched the VLAN 10 on the uplink and Luke can I get the next slide? And it stopped responding right? Cause that's how it goes. And if you go to the next slide actually cause it's kind of a reveal situation SSH isn't responding now. So I definitely had made a mistake. And if you give me the last slide here's a screen cap of my surprise and Donnie laughing at me actually which was a lot of fun that's actually pictured Donnie at the bottom there. I had forgotten the server. The server was not able to accept these VLAN packets. So I had the switch all correct but I did not apply to the server. You need both so and it's funny cause like in this video I'm like no I know what I did. But I mean the rest of the video was me picking up my laptop running into the co-location area setting it like in the cab while I console the server and bring the interface up on the new VLAN which was a lot of fun. They were laughing at me the whole time. All in good fun of course. If I had remembered to add the VLAN 10 to the server I feel like it would have worked and I wouldn't have had to get out of my desk but of course it failed. So I was gonna say so to end that that's a lot of the interesting lessons and experiences we've learned. I mean you can't do stuff about experiencing some troubleshooting. Yeah so to end this off I just wanna say just mention you know these are some of the tools that we're using for our community. I mean up has been a great thing to actually get people together at a physical location. Slack is amazing for communication with everyone to keep tabs and what's going on. GitLab for source control for Ansible Playboats for a triple O deployment templates. Zoom for video conference. This is recent tool we've kind of moved to. It's very important for us to have regular updates. We're wanting to move to having meetups twice a week and even if everyone can't attend we at least wanna have it recorded and share it with the group to make sure that everyone can catch up, see what's going on and kind of learn and see everything that we're doing. So hopefully with this presentation you guys are kind of inspired to create your own community group, build your own cloud because it's such an amazing experience and you can get so much help and support from the community. It's amazing. I'd like Open Slack is one of the most amazing pieces of software and you will find so much help on IRC channels, mailing lists just everywhere.  We got a QR code links to our Let's Talk link. This has a bunch of links to our Slack and different outlets that we kind of push out information. So hopefully we can all kind of work together to build a global presence of a community cloud. So thank you guys very much. Do we have any questions from the audience? Yeah, it's like the next 15 minutes is just Q and A if you have any questions or interest. I believe the microphones are up. So the question was, is there a conflict of interest having different employers working together? Sure, I can answer that. So as part of the, you know, just being open organization and working with open source, this is not part of a company specific but it's part of 100% community. We seem very redhead heavy over here because we live in Orlando but we have members from, you know, other companies also joining us. In fact, we have folks from other companies come and visit us. That's why it was so important to enable us to have virtual meetings as well because not everybody lives in Orlando and can come and virtually just talk to us about the stuff that we're doing. From a company itself, having trouble with the work that we're doing, all we use is open source. So we don't use, although the first one was, we did a SUSE install once with SUSE. Yeah, well that was just to experience and test the technology but that was still an educational experience. Exactly, so it's mostly educational and we do it obviously with full rights to the stuff that's, you know, company specific but the goal is that this community cloud is infrastructure that is, again, some of it has been free, the colocation place is hosted by HostDime which gives us access for free and we work with open source. So it's just really professionals getting together. There's absolutely no conflict at all. Yeah, the entire motivation was just educational. I mean, actually like it's not even majority red hat, although we did have that awesome majority red hat event where they explained like the history of OpenStack. It is, you know, people working in DevOps in other locations or people that are just interested in the technology. Yeah, and most employers like having their folks attend because it's really free training. Yep. So that's why HostDime is pretty much giving us a quarter cab which if you add up through the number of years we've said it's significant money. Yeah, very valid. Actually, it's interesting, I'd like to add to that. So I'd been at HostDime at the time and a lot of the motivation for, you know, well, let's host this cab was, hey, if we host this cab and we hang out with all these people that know everything and we get all of this completely free education and experience, people will just shower you with knowledge. It's amazing. So I thought that was exceptionally valuable and if anything, I think we came out on top getting that value was very, very interesting. And of course it's collaboration and it's a best effort and obviously fun should be part of the mix because a lot of things happen if you don't have, you know, take it like heart elite and it just gets pretty sad. Any other questions? Thank you for the question. Thank you. Yeah. It really varies, like we mentioned, we have about 300 members signed up and some are just, how do I call it, scrollers or they just like to see what we do if they don't come and join the meetings. We've had, when we have folks come and visit us, then we have larger meetings but we get to about 30, max, 40 people. Sometimes we have meetings of 10 or 12 and we have virtual meetings as well. Yeah, we've found the largest turnouts is when we're doing really cool stuff like actually installing OpenSec. That's when everyone shows up. Yeah, waiting for the network installation wasn't as popular and the bi-weekly, I believe you were referring to an interest in rapid iteration on the community cloud. I think we have more infrequent though educational experiences. Docs and stuff, thank you. Any other questions? Because we had used other calls before and this seemed like another way to do another installer. So, and it was really, you know, who we had available to come and help. Honestly, I'd actually like to mention, so we had played with OpenStack Ansible because we were all like Ansible is the future here. Yeah, we pretty much, we played around with like all the different OpenStack solutions. I think we've messed with crowbar, OpenStack Ansible, and TripleO. Right now we're playing with TripleO. And part of that is because a lot of the technologies it's moving towards is a lot of what the focus of our group is, so. Containers. Yeah, Docker containers, Ansible. There's, Kubernetes on OpenStack has been a big thing too. That TripleO has been getting a lot more integration on. So there's just a lot of technologies that have a lot of synergy that everyone seems to be interested in. And I mean, to be honest, when Luke had pitched TripleO, I was like, that actually sounds really cool because I'm very interested in the heat project and ironic. So I mean, that's TripleO right there. Yeah. Which is very interesting. And Ansible. And Ansible, yes. But the, I was really looking forward to seeing that bare metal provisioning. It's very interesting. Thank you. I'm actually curious actually. Is anybody, I guess, raised hands if anyone's interested at all or is experiencing currently making their own OpenStack cloud outside of like a company purpose? What's your use case? So people will buy more services from web app and Susan and others. So we can sell more services ourselves. And we do people we like. Yeah. Because it's, everything is self-made. Awesome. So this is a, sorry because you don't have a mic, but this is a group from Norway that's getting together basically a community of cloud enthusiasts to show that this can happen and that over in the infrastructure is the thing. So I think we have... No, that's awesome. That's exactly what I was thinking of hearing. Very cool. Yeah. Thank you. If you want to visit Disneyland, Disney World, we can definitely talk. Yeah. If anyone is interested in either joining our operation or seeding or starting one of their own or collaborating with us on ours with theirs because you can do multiple clouds and do Federation. I definitely think it would be interesting or at the very least educational to have that experience. So please, please reach out if that is of interest to you. Any other questions? Thank you very much for coming. Yeah, have a great day at summer, guys. Thank you. Thank you.