Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy. The purpose of this video is just to serve as an introduction to the lecture videos that will follow. That will proceed through the OpenStax Astronomy textbook. So what we're going to see is that I have lecture slides and videos that I will be providing that are for use with the OpenStax Astronomy second edition book. Now these are an update to the slides that I've previously used and the lecture videos previously available on this channel. And those were the ones with the purple background. I've updated them to a different background to distinguish them. And I have also gone through and edited to update. Most of those were done in 2017 to 2018. So as you know there's been many changes in astronomy and I've tried to reflect that in the updated slides including some new discoveries and expanding on some areas that may not have been covered very well previously or may not even have been known previously. So they're an update to those and they will be out over the coming months. I am starting to release them now and will be releasing all 30 chapters of the textbook. Each chapter will have between two to five broken down into two to five sections. So there will be two to five lectures running hopefully in the range of about 10 to 15 minutes at the most. So that will be my goal for these and they will be done by summer of 2023 is my plan. I have the lecture slides currently completed and I'm beginning to work on the recordings now. So they will be coming you'll see some appear over the coming months and my goal is to have everything ready and in place for the fall semester. So I try to have them done as early in the summer as I can. But I expect later some of them may not be done until June or July. All the materials that I provide are released under a CCBY license meaning that you are free to use these as you wish and adapt them and or readjust them to fit your class. So if you're using them for another class and some of the things that I have don't quite work for the way you want to teach the class. You can go through and go ahead and edit the slides. I will provide a link to those in the description. Now as of recording this the slides are not fully done. There's a draft of them all and they will be in just in Apple Keynote format. Now I will once they are as they are completed I will be converting them as well into PowerPoint as well as PDF handout style slides that will also be available through the same Google Drive link. So feel free to use and adapt to these as you feel best to fit any class that you may be using. For students feel free to use these and print out the slides or get the slides in the format you prefer to be able to follow along with my lectures. So I will be putting that Google Drive link but again you won't be seeing a lot of the PowerPoint and other slides will not be available until later this summer as the videos are recorded and released. So that concludes this video on the introduction just introducing the lecture slides and videos that are coming. We'll be back again next time to begin our journey through the universe. So until then have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.


Good day everybody and welcome back from the short break. We hope you're still with us or welcome to the closing plenary if you're just joining. Yeah, so as I just mentioned, this is the closing session, the final session of our first symposium. We think was great. We've learned a lot. We have seen great speakers. And yeah, we look forward to hear again from the reporters to bring everything together and from the coordinator of the Phase 3 program, Jelci Kemmering, to see what the program is going to do. So before I'm going to hand over to her some housekeeping. Feel free to use the chat to share thoughts, exchange contacts. However, if you have a question, please use the Q&A, which you can see at the bottom of your screen. You can also raise your hand if you would like to ask your question live. There is French translation. My colleague has just placed the instructions in French in the chat. Also, you can ask your question in French in the Q&A. We will then translate it for you. So as I just mentioned, there will be some time for the reporters to give us the summaries, their reflections of the past sessions. I will keep time, so to the reporters, if you hear about, you have one minute left. So I hope you can help us keeping time as we know that those sessions can all take more time than planned. And after that, there will be a presentation from Jelci Kemmering and some space for questions and answers. So without further ado, Jelci, can I give you the mic? Thank you so much, Nadine, and great to be back with all of you. So good to see so many of you online with us these three days. And we are very glad that we had heard so many interesting presentations, so many interesting stories from different parts of the world, from different projects, from different partners and colleagues. So we are very happy to close off this symposium in this last hour with us. As Nadine already mentioned, we will give all the reporters of the different sessions some time to share with us their key messages from each of the sessions that they attended. So that also those who did not manage to attend all sessions still get a little bit of a glimpse of what has been discussed. Unfortunately, one of our reporters, Murta, who was in the session on advocacy for impact, was not able to be with us today for personal reasons. So in this case, we decided to show the short clip, the recording of his summary synthesis of the session on advocacy and share that with you. Thanks very much, Peter, and thanks everyone for your very interesting presentations. It's a great honour to be able to wrap up this session, which leaves me with the challenge of how on earth to summarise such a stimulating and rich set of presentations in a few minutes. I just want to start with a quick anecdote.  So I now work in the realm of advocacy and making that switch I completely underestimated just how much expertise and knowledge is required to do advocacy properly. I'm still learning. So I know I have experienced this sort of issue from both sides of the spectrum that we've been discussing here. And I just want to quickly briefly refer and because of that, I want to also underscore just how important places like this are where where researchers can get together and discuss these types of issues because, you know, traditionally speaking, academics and researchers aren't really traditionally trained in the sort of dark arts of advocacy. So there's a lot of learning to be done there, a lot of challenges and a lot of experiences to be shared. So I'm really great that this event took place and that you're all brave enough and also to share your experiences. So we saw three very interesting presentations obviously started with the GWS sense presentation from Florence and Bessie in Turkana. And I really, I really, it was a very detailed water modeling research that was also linked to institutional engagement and community engagement. Now you really appreciate the centrality that you gave to the issue of inequality and tackling inequality and also establishing partnerships with the county. And it's great to hear that you were able to actually, that research was able to reach to policy changes at the county level. That's quite something. And then the next presentation after that was obviously the InfoNile project from from Leonard and Annika, very interesting stuff. I really like this type of transdisciplinary, which is what it is essentially collaborations between academics and journalists in this sense, which are not typically used to work together but actually kind of rely on each other, I'd say to reach the types of impacts that they really tend to be working towards. It also comes with all sorts of challenges and I really appreciate that you were reflected on those challenges, including the sort of, you know, the distrust that exists between between between journalists and also between scientists. This is something we I'm sure you could have talked for for a lot longer about how you how you dealt with these these types of challenges. And then after that we had the Wash Gender project from Emmanuel in Nigeria. Very interesting. Also, I mean, you know, I really appreciate that you were able to really share these types of challenges and experiences that you had when when trying to bring your your findings out into the media and then then bring it to the journalists and then suddenly you get caught up in the sort of this, you know, this is the dominoes falling over of journalists taking it going viral politicians taking it getting defensive account and out of being developed. All these types of dynamics that you don't really have control over, but it is kind of the scaring the messy political reality of advocacy so I really appreciate it. And that and I'm also glad to hear that you were ultimately able to bring people together with these processes of public consultation and engagements.  The collaborations between scientists, journalists, also policymakers but also just to speak for from my own perspective civil society and grassroots groups and advocates. I really think there is a lot more to be gained by working together on these issues. Okay, so that was a video that we streamed from the wrapping up of the session on advocacy for impact by Merta. Luckily, live with us right now is Farana who was the reporter for the session on technologies for impact. And I also would like to ask her to give a short insights on the key messages that she picked up from that session. Farana, can you come on stage. Am I audible. Yes, you are loud and clear. I mean, for last few days, it was really intriguing and also different topics has been discussed. I was there for the technology for impact and for me, it was, I mean, we heard two different presentation. But we can understand there is a gap between expert and the people who are working on ground or the people whose problems are going to be solved or is going to be solved. So, so how these gap can be resolved or gap can be bridged that has been discussed with different approaches actually during this session, like how remote sensing data can be used for water management and how this can be translated to the community who will be using it directly. So, we need to constantly work with the people, both who are working there and also the technological expert, and I found it very important like the moderator asked the question, how the technical information is translated for the people, not for the experts, and also few different issues has been discussed, how community can be involved for developing the tool. Also, how can we make technology more accessible. How can we make the data more accessible. And at the same time, how data can be protected. We cannot use it for other purpose. And co creation is also very important also different approaches like citizen sciences has been discussed also. The translation of the technology or the technical knowledge into the ground, different tools has been discussed like how you will pass it to the people like infographics or questionnaire or other things like that. So, it was really interesting I mean more discussions like these are needed. It has been previously like scientists do their jobs, they decided what should be done. Sometimes they don't consider it, what is going on in the ground. Different methods have been discussed different approaches has been discussed how this tool can be developed by involving community from the beginning of the task. So, this was really important for me I mean these all are the things that I wanted to share. So, thank you so much for another for this nice summary of the session on technology for impact. So for the session on diversity for impact we have both the moderator as well as the rubber tier here because it was both the same person. Okay, you are here with us. We are very keen to hear your reflections on your own the session and your takeaway messages or the key points that you picked up from the session. Thank you. Thank you so much. Can you hear me. Yeah. Yes, you are. Yeah, I want to just begin because I will both moderate as well as repertoire. I first of all have to apologize for the misunderstandings that I caused in terms of timing first of all because I allowed the first speaker to go really over time without controlling it. The result was extremely stressed by the second speaker and interrupted her, even though she was ending. So, all of it did lead to some heart aches, including disappointment on my side definitely. So apologies. But I thought that the three projects I learned a lot from them. One of them was completed and I did have access also to a paper that was written on that project, which is the first one the farming in times of crisis. It was not only informed, it was incredibly, what shall I say it was, it really eliminated diverse forms of knowledge, diverse from diverse lives under in a global critical situation, how people found the ways their ways of earning some form of living, increasing their bargaining power, and the groups that were able to do this of course, in both in India and Morocco, the access to women marginalized voices, marginalized farmers was very good. And as a result, we have learned a lot about their strategies for survival in this very, very difficult time. But we also learned about the, those growing dates in on the OS is how, and, and young men coming together actually, and to raise their and cultural workers, raise their wages, etc. In Morocco and in Algeria. So, all in all, we heard from different kinds of people. The diversity of voices was extraordinary. And I'm, I have to be, I'm very happy that I was able to listen to all of this. The presentation was extremely of a project and a project situation which is extremely, extremely interesting and happening the world over the what they call the amphibious project I like that actually the amphibious project, because it's all about the water based livelihoods and the urban development occurring because of these port cities coming up and bigger. And of course there's climate change. And this is all happening in Colombia which anyway has been. Yeah, has had has been in conditions of civil war for almost 40 years. And it's happening primarily to these communities, at least on the Caribbean side to black populations, Afro Caribbean people, Afro Colombian people. So you can see it's really the very marginalized whose lives are that livelihoods are threatened. And we learned from because it's not, it's just right in the beginning, we learned how the project is aiming to include the voices of those who mostly were unheard. So it's that that was the second the third one had more difficulty with, which was a sustainable waterpans, although the intention was clear. That is to build a building managing and monitoring waterpans with local communities in sustainably inclusive ways. The intention was clear but I was not actually convinced by the project design as you know kind of and diversity being intrinsic to it, but from the, from the comments we saw. Apparently, those who are listening to this presentation found it very interesting and learned a lot from it. So these were the three subjects we had. Unfortunately, there were not very many questions from the audience that could be dealt with in the plenary. So we did pick up on issues raised on diversity. Am I going over time please tell me. Okay, but one minute I just want to say that I think we arrived at the two questions that I didn't want to answer. Well, I chose not to address till the end. And the sense of his address to all three presenters, none of them particularly took it up. But it was about this anxiety around inclusion and diversity, treating diversity as always a zero sum game. And it was about every winners and losers. As if, you know, it's a it's a one pie. And if you share it around the those already have will get less. So it's the understanding of diversity obviously as sameness establishing sameness, rather than addressing an inequality is is. Broadly that is it's most people take it like that. So I think that that that was also an issue in the way people reacted and responded with questions. Thank you very much. It was very, very helpful. I learned a lot. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. My three and I must also apologize from our side, we are still learning how to facilitate and how to organize this seminar so some of the stress you experienced during your session was of course also from our site and learning curve. And I think still the session was very interesting and I'm very nicely facilitated so thank you very much for your reflections on the session and sharing your insight later on we also still have some follow up questions but I would like to first give the floor. To the next speaker in the meantime I would like to ask the audience if you have any particular questions already or any main key messages that you picked up from the last three days. Please feel free to enter them into the Q&A session so that later on we can also have a look at that and try to answer some of the questions and some of the remarks from the audience. Before if you would prefer to speak up please raise your hands and then we will try to have the technology in place to allow you to speak as well. But before we go to the questions, I would like to ask Lapo to join us as a reporter on the session on sustainability for impact. So also Lapo from your side, we would love to hear your views and your, your, yeah, the key messages or the key issues you picked up from the session that you attended. I see your cameras going on, still a bit dark. Checking here with the technical. Yes, she has access, she should have access. Lapo. Hello. We hear you do we see you we don't see you yet. Is your camera on. Yes. Thank you so much. Yes, there you are. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon colleagues. Yeah, I attended. Yes, and was there a patrol for the second and last session of yesterday, the one on something of impacts. And it went by a craze beyond reporting impacts. The first learning point came from there, because the general feeling was that just reporting impacts as we always do in projects can actually be superficial because we want to think on what we have done and what we have believed. But according to the way the project was was planned, but then really what were the impacts for real and they sustainable. Anything happened after the end of the project. So we had three interesting and yeah, very interesting presentations. And they were even interesting in their approach in that there was one that was pitched at level, another one that was pitched at local level as in it was a community project. And then we had one that was pitched at a super national level at an international level. So it was very interesting to ease out the sustainability of impact at these different levels. The first project was looking at a project which we had implemented a community of practice for worker operators. And what we learned there first and foremost in that impacts and projects spin offs may not always be visible that they may be there but not always visible that while there was a minimal activity, like when they monetize the platform that was created for sharing knowledge and for exchanging innovation. There was very little activity in there. But then it was there was evidence that information was consumed on, you know, contacts were taken. Innovation was actually discussed. And what was found was that all this information that was taken from the platform, although there was very little action in the platform itself was used outside the platform. The other learning point regarding sustainability was that there was no activity. Later on it was found that there was no activity because the intended recipients or the intended participants in the COPs were field workers who were always busy in the field. And therefore the type of platform that was created was an extra demand on their busy time. And therefore they were not always able to interact in the intended way. And this is why most of the interaction actually seemed to happen outside the platform. And therefore we agreed in our discussions that it is important to seek understanding of those that are to be impacted, that is to check their capacity and ability to embrace the impact, to be able to participate and actually benefit from the impact. So there had been an assumption that the way the COP was created with the... I think you have another minute. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so let me move on then to the next project, the one that was at a community level. And it was found in this one that sometimes you can have unintended impacts. This project which was helped farmers extract water from right by basins of Africa actually was aimed at influencing policy so that such policy can embrace that kind of innovation. But the impact here on policy was modest. And then also it was also at the youth because of the discovery of youth unemployment. Here, again, the impact was very minimal. But the most impact was on older farmers, especially women, who they were impacted more because it turned out that they were the ones who were needing farming innovation more. And also had general responsibility of livelihood for the family and were interested in the innovation that actually increased the production and also improved their livelihood more. So older women tended to be the ones embracing the technology a lot more. It was also discussed, just give me one more minute please. It was also discussed that there is a difficulty in convincing donors not to go for their big funding and funded projects and instead go for micro incremental funding that can sponsor small projects that have family level impact. Because in this particular project, the most impact was on the family unit than it was on the intended big policy shifts for this project. Lastly, what we learned again yesterday was that for impact to be relevant, the project needs to be embedded in the broader local framework that the project must actually be aimed at supporting local initiatives. And that in itself will support the project being sustainable. And also that, so generally, for all the projects, it was found that there is usually impact, which is not necessarily in the planned form, which may not be, which may even be sustainable. So partners may need to have the flexibility to accept that there will be impact, but not in the intended form. But this does not take away from the responsibility of the project proponents to be deliberate in ensuring that intervention is relevant and can be sustained by those who actually are the recipients of the initiatives. And we may sound like broken records when we say initiators need to take the time to involve all stakeholders from the part and make sure that the proposed project is relevant and supporting local initiatives so that those initiatives can carry into sustainability. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for summarizing this session I'm sorry to put pressure on you in terms of time. Maybe one learning is that we need to create sufficient time for these sessions. But we also of course want to keep an eye on the time. In the last session, the final I would like to ask my great to give a short summary of the main points discussed and the main issues raised as being the moderator of that session. Thanks. Thanks. So the session actually just concluded so I'm still feeling a bit warm by from moderating it. It was a wonderful session and I think the purpose of the session it was called a funnel learning from failures, but I think underneath that title, the purpose of the session really was to rethink the terms in which we discuss these kinds of project and their outcomes. And also accepting that what the outcomes are may change in the process of doing the project. The session started with a very nice presentation by Vim and Yeltsche in which they explained a bit about the history and context of the water development partnership program. And what is very clear from their presentations that the is that the program always has been about developing and building partnerships. So partnerships are very crucial to the program. The latest phase of the program, although Yeltsche and Vim don't like to talk about faces. So let's say the the the program that Yeltsche is now leading has slightly shifted the focus on from just impacts on joint learning and the joint learning it's that comes with a new kinds of question because how do you measure learning how do you account for it. How do you do learning how do you create the equal playing ground that is needed for joint learning if while also dealing with deep colonial hierarchies and and legacies. All these questions Yeltsche raised and and also put on the table to say, hmm, these are the questions we are trying to navigate. And so this wonderful presentation actually opened up the space for the two presentations that followed by first by Nadia Fauzi from Iraq, who presented a whole suite of projects in the in the Iraqi marshes showing how all these actually, although they they invested millions failed, and they failed not just because they they are projects that happen in a very difficult context that is post war, affected by climate change, drying of rivers because of upstream development, but also because of a deep failure, a deep, almost lack of willingness of the donors and project partners to really engage with local governments and local communities. Those who have who experienced the problems, water problems on a day to day basis but those also will have a lot of knowledge to to deal with these problems and their commitment is needed to make the project a success so Nadia's presentation was a strong plea for for contextualizing for being being much more aware about the specifics of projects sites and people's people and really engaging with these and for true real involvement. And all these pleas of Nadia, of course, come again with questions because they require a different way of of working a different way of operating. And after the presentation of Nadia we went to the presentation of Adele Adele Yassin, who presented a waste water treatment project in Palestine, dealing with an aquifer that is shared between Israel and Palestine. So that was is a very, how can I say, in the current war situation, it becomes even more clear how projects like this are always deeply and intrinsically political. And that and Adele also showed how this this happened and how by by how on the one hand the project is very clear in articulating that having a clean aquifer and treating the wastewater is to the to the benefit of everybody. Yet, of course, there is, there is power differences, there is legacies of war, there is resentment, there is animosities that need to be dealt with, and that also translate in water. This all these two presentations of Adele and Nadia, and Nadia provoked quite an interesting discussion about how to effectively deal with politics geopolitics in supposedly technical water projects with very different positions and some saying, hey, you, there's a danger in hiding between techno managerial solutions, pretending they're not political, because they always are. And on the other hand, using you can also use techno managerial projects and hiding behind their supposedly non politicalness to do something in situations that are politically very charged. It's an interesting conversation that I feel should be continued. Thank you so much for this nice summary of the session that indeed just finished. So thank you very much for wrapping up. I would also like to invite also the audience once again to start answering questions in the Q&A or raising your hands, both if you want to share some interesting messages that you picked up in the last few days some surprises that you perhaps or things that have changed your mind that changed your, your perspective on the issues we discussed in the last three days, but also if you have advice for us as a program on how we can move forward and how can we deal with some of the issues and challenges that we discussed in the past In the meantime, I would like to also ask the panelists or the people who are now here with us, the reporters and moderators. What kind of advice would you give us as a program to improve our work on the topics we have discussed and to also help us improve our understanding of how to move impact beyond reporting. So may I ask one of the reporters or one of the moderators, Moitri perhaps or Farana or Lapo to give us advice. It would be nice if you could switch on your camera so that we can also see several of you if you're willing to of course. I see Moitri. Yeah. Yes. So shall we, can I start or please. Yeah. Throughout, I think the last session was just brilliant. Actually, the, the one with Nadine and Yeah, the Palestinian and Nadine and the questions it raised were actually that question runs through all of the, if you come to think of it. The tech managerial and the politics runs through all of the sessions. Even the title, you know, it's for impact everything was for impact advocacy for impact diversity inclusion for impact, etc. But impact has a connotation and development of progress. And, and it's kind of imbued with meaning, which is technical economic economic mystic, it's, it's not about well being it is not about inclusiveness, and it's certainly not about the politics of inequality. So, how to continue conversations that actually unpack these of these words because they're so central to water projects. Without these I mean, the, the three that we had in ours and at least the first two. I mean, it's the lives of really poor people and marginalized people that we are talking about. And if we cannot shift the meaning of what is impact from what it is now understood to be, because after all is this money is also coming from somewhere to do this project. And so my suggestion would be more, you know, create the spaces to have these in depth conversations. So that we can all I mean so that everybody associated with the project and wider can learn. So there's a whole learning element there. Thank you very much and I cannot agree more I have the same. Yeah, associations with impacts, which makes it problematic in many different ways and I think we need to move beyond numerical indicators and very tangible outputs because often if we want to make a real change and if we really want to improve things for the better it's much more subtle it's not that straightforward it's much harder to capture and but that is where we need to stay with the trouble as some authors say and I think that is what. At least I see as our responsibility as the program to shift not just our program but programs like us because we also try to share our learnings with other programs and also we have very close relations with people at the ministry who are our main contact there and we have regular interactions with them about the challenges we face and I think staying with the trouble I think is something we need to practice more and because I think it's challenging for all of us and impacts doesn't capture that. And I think we need to be aware or at least the way it is understood right now so thank you very much for for sharing that advice and I will try to take it forward for Anna I also see your. Do you have some specific advice and in meantime please and I see already one hand up from the audience we are going to give you soon space to answer questions but also in the Q&A please feel free to answer questions. Thank you for the, I also have similar kind of suggestion I mean it's difficult to give suggestion. It's like we need to we always divide. We always divide as technological person or technical person and who is working in the sector or the people who are working for so how we can create more safe space like these or some other program and how we can. How we can translate the need for the people actually rather than thinking of a donor's perspective or the founder's perspective or a scientist perspective. So that's the thing that you are trying to do and we need to do more those sort of things other than. Working or thinking from outside like what should be done rather than what is needed. And how this can be done. So that's it for me. Thank you very much. And I also see in the Q&A already interesting questions popping up indeed how we can also give more space for communities or representatives of communities to actively participate in this kind of events and contribute we did had some but I think indeed there's a. We need to find ways also to have these kind of sessions more inclusive in terms and more diverse in terms of who's participating and who is who's speaking. Do you have some advisors for us. Just one line actually you just nailed it at the end there. I was going to say that you have really created a special niche on how to report on projects and talk about what project they're doing and what impact really is. I'm just going to say that it would get even more interesting if we actually have the communities where these projects actually speak in such meetings as this, otherwise it was perfect and I was quite happy to be a part of it. And yeah, so we can shift the gear even further because we have now started an innovation of speaking on impacting a completely different way. To get further and have the actual communities help us in showing what unique impact we are talking about. Thank you. Thank you so much lapo I see my gate nodding my gate I'm sure knowing you, you have some great advice is for us as well right. I don't have great advice I just I just want to echo what lapo and partner, and my three are also saying and, and actually I want to, to just express my, my admiration and gratitude for the entire water development and the partnership program team for organizing this and for for do it making this first step in creating this space and allowing all of us to meet in, in very non insulting and civilized ways. I think that is a true achievement. It's not easy. And you have helped us get along together getting to know each other. And, yeah, I think that that is just an amazing amazing feat and indeed as lapo said, she said it much better than I did. This is a is already the changes already starting through this. And I also think we, we do it together right it's not just us on our side and by the way I have a whole team here with me, and also we have a whole team so it's not just the ones who are speaking who are involved, but also we do it together with our partners and and we do it together with all of you. And so I think, in that sense. Thank you very much for this, this message but we need to share it with all of those involved. I see that there's an hands raised by Camille. My colleagues are now giving you access to speak up so if you open your mic, I hope we can hear you. Thanks a lot. Am I being heard. Am I audible. Yes, we can hear you very loud and well thank you. Yeah, thanks a lot. I'm going to take it from where Margaret stopped because creating this space is actually very, very important for all of us in the field. My concern is we just need to take it a bit further because to actually create impact means that we need to get to the rooms because sometimes there is this dichotomy between the advanced the developed world and the developing world. And the way things operate and a bit different. So I'm thinking if it is possible, there is a way we can collaborate across board in order to enrich the policies and laws in all their countries. And in this, in this climb, cold support in engaging the executives in those countries. Because advocacy in those countries will actually help in ensuring that impact is highly created. Most of the greatest disturbances we have been having in this climb is that the, the dichotomy between political class and the professionals is high. So if there is a way we kind of fashion out a plan to ensure that this is reduced by ensuring that similar advocacy to executives and legislative arms in the developing countries, in terms of the laws and policies, you know, broader things like that, you know, concerns and all of us. I think that would very much be helpful. And I'm sure that will also translate into broader engagement. Thank you. Thank you very much Camille. I think this is really one point that was also raised in our session indeed about advocacy, however, I think the increased need for collaborations between scientists, but also activists, journalists and all kinds of others involved in advocacy efforts. Civil society organizations, grassroots organizations is much needed to actually make make a change and contribute to change. So I'm sure this is it is already something we, we are very keen about and we hope to facilitate but this sessions have further emphasized indeed the needs and also that are still a lot of to learn from each other, how to, how to collaborate how to do research and advocacy and how we can let them go hand in hand to strengthen. Yeah, the work we are doing. I'm looking at if there are any other questions raised. I don't see so many at the moment. Oh, and I see here one remark about from fees one not. I'm sorry I'm not having my reading glasses on so I cannot read it very well. But it's about to add to the complexity of things is that there is not such a thing as an homogeneous entity called the community has so indeed I think that is something that is very important to emphasize that also communities are not all in agreement with very strong hierarchies often in communities as well related to class class gender race, etc. And that therefore that also influences which solutions or which directions are being chosen. We as a water sector we need to be careful to listen to the people. And we need to be trained on how to listen to them carefully and also take into account this extra complexity before we take action. So that are very nice reflections thank you very much and very good for us all to take into account as well in the work we are doing. I'm looking at the time I wanted to share a few more less slides before closing off this session I'm looking at my colleague here in the room to help me with that. I had prepared a presentation but actually most of the things that I wanted to say are already set so I will try to keep it a bit short. I wanted to summarize a few of the key messages that we on our side as program have picked up. So when I refer to we I mean the program management here with me in the room. As I already mentioned most of those things are already set by the reporters and by the moderator so I won't repeat it. But I think one of our key messages is and that's also relates to the Camille raised issue just now as well had there's a there's a need to blur the boundaries between science and activism much more and to seek collaborations between those involved in advocacy efforts and those research involved in research or in interventions. Because in the end I believe all of us are activists in some way. And we all share our wishes and our aims for a more cleaner and fairer and more peaceful world, even if we do so in different ways and in different contexts, which also was emphasized in the panel on failures. And so I think it's important that we seek these collaborations and collaborate because in that way our impacts might be larger in the new way of understanding impacts. We also touched upon had the issue of diversity and inclusion, recognizing that it's still very differently understood, even though there's more attention for it, but also that it remains controversial, creating this anxiety among water professionals. And actually for us that points to the need for a dialogue about the intrinsic value of diversity beyond the donor requirements, and perhaps even as was also already pointed out by my three focusing on sameness. So I think that's also one point that is very clear from the discussions that we would like to pick up in the future. I think the session on technology was very clear that academics have a role to play in demystifying technologies and to ensure that community perspectives are included. So it's very important that we involve communities or the perspective of other problem owners from the early inception of our projects. And that's the issues that we address and the work we do is clearly rooted in actual problems that they face in their everyday lives, and that they and that their involvement is not just a token, but really in depth understanding by listening to their problems, what the issues are, and what kind of solutions they have because the wisdom they have and the knowledge they have about their own circumstances, their own context is very specific and very valuable. Next slide please. There were quite some messages that we picked up in relation to sustainability of impact. Of course, the issue was raised about that we need to carefully think from the beginning of the projects how we intend to sustain impacts beyond the project and also consider funding mechanisms, perhaps even working towards more programmatic funding instead of project based funding for meaningful initiatives. But I think also what was raised quite clearly in the sessions was that upscaling and outscaling is not necessarily leading to larger impacts as small scale work is often much more context specific and embedded in existing and local strategies to support ongoing initiatives. And I think what I hear again we already repeated a few times but the quote by Nadia that everything is specific is everything specific is specific in specific places is very important to keep in mind so out upscaling and outscaling might not always lead to the desired outcomes. Another very interesting remark that was made in the session on sustainability is that sometimes you need to accept that some activities may never be sustainable in the sense that they will would always need external funding, yet are still worth continue doing. So there's this emphasis on sustainability in the sense of very specific financial terms, but we also need to acknowledge that a lot of work we do and especially the work we do in between our activities and the care work we are doing to maintain relations or to remain interactions are perhaps not easily easily sustainable by itself but are still worth investing in. And then there was a discussion about how to make impacts more visible. So there was discussions about how impacts are not necessarily straightforward that they're often very incremental that they often are very with small steps forwards and steps backwards again. And I think we need to capture these very complex processes of how impacts come about and how to make them more visible, especially also when there are projects that end in multiple new relations new alliances being formed and spin off activities. And one message that also became very clear from the panel, the presentations that we just saw from Iraq and Palestine but also the work we are doing here at IG that we need to remain very realistic and very modest about the impacts we can actually make. I know also for myself we get carried away because we want to present a perfect program and we want to show all the good work we are doing. But in the end, of course, it's about the real impacts that we make in those difficult circumstances in those countries that that suffer from violence and sometimes even war situations so I think we need to be realistic of what is feasible and be open about that. And to present things to be nicer than they are and to be modest in what kind of impacts we can make, because only in that way I think our impacts are really meaningful and unsustainable in the longer term. Next slide please. So what we will do on our side as a program. For certain we will offer more trainings on advocacy and dignified storytelling because that was also highlighted as as neat as lots to learn about how to tell our stories in dignified manners but also how to engage with advocacy efforts. We will organize discussion sessions on diversity and decolonizing water sciences what does it mean to different people how does it affect our work. Where does the anxiety come from how can we collaborate on that and how can we emphasize collaboration and sameness in these processes. Of course we will continue with facilitating learning between project teams, because I think that is something that we really focus on in this phase of the program and that has been very valuable so far. And of course are also the outputs with broader audiences. Next slide, you can maybe. We will facilitate alliances and interactions between women project coordinators to support each other and navigate additional challenges they experience. As mentioned before we have put very talented women and very talented people of color in lead positions as project coordinators. However, some of them still experience difficult situations where they need to deal with persistent behaviors and hierarchies that undermine their, their, their leading leadership, I would say. So we think it's important to bring them together to learn together and to give them a safe space where we can jointly address these issues. We want to continue providing active and pragmatic supports to partner lead projects because we understand and we know that sometimes the things we ask from you, and the things we are expecting are not always easy and and sometimes you deal with very different administrative processes and different circumstances and we want to continue thinking with you supporting you in trying to help you implement your projects, and particularly, we would like to work with partners in focus countries that are torn by ongoing violence and war situations to explore how we can support them amongst other Palestine was already mentioned a few times in this symposium but of course the same is in Sudan there's also a very tragic situation going on and and Yemen Somali are also focused countries, which are already longer in in very dire situations. So we find it important to express our solidarity with the partners in these countries but also to think about how we can continue supporting them and collaborating with them. Not but least, we would also like to explore possibilities for top up funding of projects that make very meaningful impacts to also think about how to sustain financially some of the ongoing activities. And next slide. Oh, and there's another point that came up. We also want to invest in studying impacts, the impacts of our program and find creative ways in jointly monitoring them. I said earlier we need to be modest and be humble in the work we are doing. However, I find it also very important that we celebrate your achievements and that we make them very visible and share them with the rest of the world so I'm very happy that we have launched a program repository where we aim to store all key outputs of the program not just the phase three but also phase two outputs will be shared through this platform. So we're very happy to share this with you we will do a bit broader campaign later on when there are sufficient outputs uploaded but already now there are several of them available. So we are very happy to also show the good work you are doing and share that with the rest of the world. Next slide. And I would like to close this symposium with a personal mode, because I feel very privileged to coordinate this program with a great team, a committee, a sounding board to support me, and with so many inspiring project teams and partners all around the world. I also realized that I am very privileged to be allowed to do this job, and that there are so many talented people in the countries where we focus on that would be much better place to coordinate this program. So I struggle sometimes with my own privilege, and I know several of my colleagues here at IHC and perhaps also in the audience have the same. My dear colleague Vadim, who is our own, who is our spin in the web of our program and who communicate with some of you almost on a daily basis, shared a blog, some days ago which captures very nicely how we can use our privilege to invest in something good. So I would like to read this quote from this blog by Brittany pregnant. So, how can we spend our privilege and invested in something good. Train yourself towards solidarity, and not charity. You are no one's savior.  Watson, an Aboriginal activist and artist once said, if you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bounded up with mine, then let us work together. I want to be free. I want you to be free. And you aren't free until I am spent your privilege. And just when you think you spend enough spend a bit more. With this, I would like to end this session by thanking many people here in in the room and this event would have not been possible with your support and the great audience of 154 countries if I'm correct. All the presenters, the moderators, the reporters, the friends interpreters who are working hard. If we speak too fast to keep up our great technical tech support. Thanks a lot for helping us out and solving all the issues here on the in the room with me. Of course my dear colleagues, the masters of ceremony. Nadine, I'm our communication and promotion team in particular Denise who just joined us a month ago and is doing a great job. And in particular one person. Okay, you please put on your camera and our main organizer and coordinating a coordinator of this event I'm contractor my dear colleague. Thank you so much without you. This would not have been possible. And we can't wait for the next symposium so we are looking forward to see you all again online with us in a year's time but of course also in between in the sessions we will organize. So with that, I would like to thank you all and wish you a nice evening and nice morning wherever you are. And let's remain in touch. Thank you.


From your perspective as the professional, as the expert in this field, what are just some three things or four things that, you know, you could just bing, bing, bing, you could really say, hey, if you're, if you're struggling and you're in Zoom meetings all, these are the few things that you can do to find that balance again. So one of my main advice pieces to pretty much any coaching client or any client that I've had is to just take a moment to be where your feet are, to just be where you are, instead of being in a million different places because my goodness, there are so many places to be. And now we have even more places to be, even if we're just sitting in one chair, you know, so it, it, it kind of takes, takes us away from connecting back into our bodies, connecting back into our breath, connecting back into the fact that we are here now, not, you know, at the meeting, not in the future, not, not in the past, instead of being in a million different places, just taking a moment to check in with your body at least once a day. And that is the bare minimum, you know, checking in with yourself once a day to just to actually say like, I'm here, this is how I'm breathing right now. How am I feeling right now? And kind of taking a mental body scan. I'll take you through one of those in a moment here, but it's kind of scanning through and seeing like, where am I feeling, you know, tension or tightness? Is my body feeling tired? Am I feeling sore?  I used to, I used to practice as an osteopath and I had so many people come in with injuries and they'd be like, I don't even know how it happened.  How much time were you taking to stretch and warm up?  So that is definitely number one. And then I would also say to further on from that, just observe your autopilot. So observe those places in your day where you do just go into automatic functioning. And I mean, like a lot of our days are spent in automatic functioning and not really thinking about what we're doing, not really thinking about the intention behind what our, what our actions are creating. You know, and so observing those moments when you are just on auto, you're not, you're not thinking, you're not connecting. Try to connect in those moments.  And that feeds into my next piece of advice, which always do your days, do your, whatever you are, whatever you're trying to do, do it with intention. Come back to a reason why you're doing what you're doing, because that's what's going to help to guide you when things do get foggy, when things do get unclear or uncertain. Tapping into an intention of why you're here, why you're doing what you're doing helps to drive the decisions that you make around what you are doing, helps to really drive the awareness and the focus toward what is actually best for me in this moment from my, from my place of intention, instead of like, it just needs to be done. I just need to be busy. I just need to keep going. Like, do I really, do I really need to be doing this right now? Does that line up with why I'm doing what I'm doing today? So I, I mean, for me, I personally set an intention every day, but some people set an intention, you know, weekly or monthly and allow that to guide them as their, you know, their North Star, to be able to move toward the things that they, that they actually want to create and they want to bring in. It's okay. It's totally okay. Yeah. You're stuck in South Africa. Exactly. Doug just wants to sing the song of its people to the podcast listeners.  Everything becomes massively easier, whether you're starting a company. And the one thing I caution people to is the, the why can't be money. It's, it needs to be something you're solving for, whether it's family related, whether it's to provide a better path for your kids, whether it's to help people, right? To like, like in your business, it's, I would say it's pretty easy, right? You're literally transforming lives by helping people. And obviously there's money in that, but it goes back to money is a byproduct of, of your why instead of if I go chase money, then I'll help people, right? There's a massive difference between those two things. Hey, everyone, thanks for checking out that clip. If you enjoyed it, be sure to hit the like button down below. And if you're interested in hearing the full episode, it's out right now on our YouTube channel. We've had a lot of great guests come on this show before, and we've got a lot of great guests coming up in the future. So hit subscribe so that you don't miss a single episode. And one final note, we're always looking for new ideas and new companies feature on the show. So if you know of someone or know of a company, write us a comment down below letting us know who they are and what they do. We'd be happy to have them on the show. Till then, I'll just be here waiting for your comments. So, uh, see you later.


What's up everybody, Jason here for jazzymanforjazzbeadscasebreak.com. We just sold out 2022 Bowman Chrome Baseball Hobby, 12 box case break, pick a scene number 10, and it is our last break of the night. So again, if you got a little character sign at the end of your name, you need to want that in a team random, which we just finished selling that out. And here we go guys. So, fresh case, let's rip open the case, again we'll rip 6 boxes at a time, and then we'll go through the hits there, and then we'll go through the next 6, and so on. Alright, so let's rip through the boxes here, we got our second hobby case of the day, we've managed to do 5 total cases of Bowman, 3 HTA, 2 hobbies, we did a little hip parade today, so not too bad here on this Friday after Thanksgiving Black Friday, so I think pretty solid.  So again, we're back tomorrow, again 3 o'clock, and definitely looking forward to ripping some more Bowman Chrome. I really thought we would get that 4 and number 5 done of HTA today, but that kind of stalled, so I think for sure we'll get that done tomorrow, and then hopefully maybe work on potentially doing a couple more tomorrow. Maybe another 2 or 3 filler picker team, it'll be pretty solid, I think we're kind of coming out of the website. For Bowman Chrome hobby, I'll text Nick, I don't know if we're going to just continue to put them up one by one, like we usually do after we sell the X amount of cases we do initially sell, or they'll put up multiple, but stay tuned of course, I'm not sure what we're doing there, but we do have more hobby cases though, between us and Instagram we have plenty still. Alright, so if I take me about like maybe 7 minutes or so, about a minute a box to rip, and then we'll go through the first 6. Alright guys, here we go, first 6. Kalia Watson, Henry Davis, and a William Bergola, purple there, purple first, and we got Cooper Bowman, which is in a lot of, a lot of an HTA, Colson Montgomery, we've got Wilman Diaz to 4.99, and Michael Garcia, so it looks like those are the first 2 autos in the first box, Marcus Simeon, alright next box, we got Ezekiel Tovar to 250, we got Errol Vera, and Anthony Guterresado, the first one there, Pico Armstrong to 75, and a Benjamin Cowles, I don't know if they're for the Yankees, that's a Pizzle, Trey Sweeney, more Yankees, we got Victor Acosta for the Padres John D, and Liam Spence to 2.99, Speckle for the Cubs, we got Rossimo Arquintana, it's number to 125, and a Luis Chevalier to 75 for the Marlar, I mean Amerinor, sorry, Greenwich, pretty next box, we got Luis Angel Acuña, a Henry Davis, Shades of Greatness to 150, Atomic, and a Speckle of Junior Perez for the Oakland Athletics, Sean Matic with that one, here's this, Heather Perez, and we have a Red, Warming, Burnable, that is for the Rockies, 5 out of 5, Rockies John D, Red Alert, Red Alert, Simone Juan, Simon Juan, two more here, and then we can go to the next six, came to the League Calcer, we got Dustin Harris, Speckle, those are to 2.99, we got an autographed John D. Mejia for the Cardinals, Dan, we got a Daner, Cleva, and a Bowman Ascension, O'Neill Cruz, that's technically a case it there, Pittsburgh Pirates, that's going to Chad, we got a Mookie, Mookie Betts to 1.99, and a Juan Guerrero for the Rockies, one of John, with a little Pink, Alec Thomas for the Diamond Bags, which is Howard to 2.99, sweet, that was a nice little box right there, and the next one, we have Blaze Jordan, and a Brian Ocunha, number to 1.99, of course Rhonda, then Luis Anhiller, his older brothers, so I'm sure he probably still sells pretty well, Minnesota Twins, Chris with that one, and Jason Shirio to 2.50, very nice for the Guardians, so again he's the younger brother to Jackson, which I believe is a much better player, sorry about that, much better player or per se, you know, just older I guess, because this kid's only like 17, so I mean, kind of makes sense why his older brother would sell for more, but his base cards go for like 1.50, so I assume a color is probably easily what the Guardians probably cost, you know, which was like 400 bucks, so I figure that should be pretty nice there, so there you go, Jose who got that in a team round, then a Neo Cruz, little color match, yellow to 75, what number is he? No, it's just 26, I think he's like in the 80s, number 60s. Alright, let's finish off this here, and it's a Wilfrid Verus, let's quickly just top load all these here, and we'll continue on to the next one, come on top loaders, start getting stuck to each other, alright, so there you go guys, these autos here, and these are some of the bigger hits there, couple of nice cruises there, alright, alright, so now let's go to the next six, alright you guys, let's rip these next six here, and then we'll go through the six blocks here, alright guys, here we go, Francisco Alvarez, and a bonus, first gold, Yendri Rojas, number to 50 for the Padres, and an orange, Jordani, De Los Santos to 25, nice one there for the Pirates, Pirates having a good break actually Chad, couple of nice little Neo Cruz, the Ascension, the color, and a little orange to 25, that's not too bad, you got a young Kenski, you got James Triantos, and it looks like a redemption for this one here, Bowling Chrome Prospects Autogram, Ricardo Cabrera for the Reds, I've got Wilford Verras, Wander, you got Mackenzie Gore, and first of Tanner Medogal, nice, another on Neo Cruz, great break for the Pirates man, a lot of on Neo Cruz colors, I've yet to hit one of those bigger rookie autographs, but I mean I'll take all the colors, I did hit on Neo Cruz Red on Wednesday, seems like I've been a magnet of his in this, Bobby Miller, it's Dodgers, and we have a Edison Polino to 150, Red Sox went to Adam, nice little ray wave color there, then we've got a Denzer Guzman to 250, Jason Moribel, Willie Fanaz, and for the Rangers Anthony Gutierrez to 499, Rangers that is Joe Pizzle, CJ Abrams, we've got a Rosni Contreras, and a Purple West Calf, should be an auto right here, and Speckle Tanner McDougal to 299, alright next one here, you got a Jordan Walker, Blue Rosimar Quintana, we got Junior Sanchez, and a Averson Artega, a lot of Pirates color, Rodolfo Castro this time to 99, and a Jackson Meryl, very nice, 27 to 50 for the Padres, John Dee with that one, it's a nice little color match too, let's take that color there, alright two left guys, here we go, Eddie's Leonard, and a Charlie Welch, Purple for the Seattle Mariners, we got a Cesar Prieto, Garrett Mitchell, and Susanna, Jordan Susanna Atomic first for the Padres, Brandon Marsh, alright folks, down to the last box here, here we go, let's make it a memorable epic one, West Calf, Pink Shimmer, Yendri Rojas, we got Liam Spence, alright hopefully we get a color here in the second one since that one was the base, come on give me a little number of short print color, come on, Juan Soto, it's Nationals Chris Butler, you got Gavin Sheets for the White Sox which is Dan, Purple Rookie, come on, come on, no it's just going to be a base, no, come on, Dillon Dodd, dammit, alrighty guys, still hit there for Chris but I definitely wanted to get a color at least, alrighty then folks, so there you go then, so we did get some good stuff just kind of early on in the first half there but, color there, color, beautiful color there, Meryl, a lot of color actually in this one, that O'Neill Cruise was nice, Orange O'Neill Cruise color match, Jason Cheerio, Acuño O'Neill Cruise, Red, Burnable, I guess quite a few color actually, only 11 there, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, yeah we got more color, alrighty folks so there you go guys that was number 10, look out for some more of your poses soon, jaspyscasebreak.com.


Hey, hey, hello Hello All right, cool cool just checking everyone's paying attention So yeah, here we go. Let's do it. Let's do the talk So just little hello. I don't know how many people remember. I was here last year So if you remember me like hello, if you don't nice to meet you Maybe you can see your hello everyone greeting there I don't know the languages of everyone here. I tried to pick a nice variety That last one that is the Australian English way to greet plural people in American English The you can be singular or plural so it's confusing But we invented this yas how he is going So that's how you address a group of people in Australian English So the next thing we have to tick off the list is the quote for the conference like every good talk Needs a quote to like feign that you're cultured This is mine. Hello. Hello. Good to be back Which is attributed to the 20th century poet Hans Peter Baxter. I don't know if anyone knows who that is We've got there he is the man himself and a few translations of that quote Need to do a little bit of a spiel about the organization I work for catalyst it This is a fun slide because I can point to where I come from which is So it's a long way Last time I struggled through hurricanes and stuff. There were no hurricanes this time So I had a very relaxed trip here and I'm happy to be calmly presenting today There's a few picks of catalyst stuff you may have met some there's you know Sam there from the catalyst booth Um, so a little bit about me Um, like I said, I was here before and you might remember me as like the double hurricane guy or something like that This is the same slide from before. So just go through it quickly Uh, yeah, that's my favorite shell. That's my development. Sorry my desktop environment That's my terminal emulator That's my text editor The percentage of largest sites in the hemisphere upgraded is 50 outstanding statistic there Favorite integer is 1729 last time I said I checked them all and I found that was the best one I checked them again, and it's still the best one Pay alleles arms Me cam double hurricane ball Um, okay, what's next So Yeah, this is about the talk Uh, the technicality level is is moderate. I'm sorry if you're a dev and he came expecting to learn like Wicked dev spells or something like that. That's it's not really like that Is a case study. Yes Is as glamorous as the title makes it sound probably not the uh, Allure wears off as soon as you realize most of the world is not in the southern hemisphere So I just want to set some expectations for the talk because last time I talked about queuing algorithms And that's pretty much as exciting as it gets So I've got a graph that I want to share Of the how you can expect this talk to go. So Birth of your first child, you know nice 50 excitement level queuing algorithms. Obviously it's 100 This talk, you know somewhere about 75. Okay, so Just don't want anyone to expect too much But I'm gonna do my best to make it fun because I don't like boring conference slides Um, I have a slide about boring conference slides and a picture of a boring conference slide um And my notes say ha ha ha say something funny about programmers and recursion I didn't figure out the joke yet, but yep boring slide. We don't want that Um, so This next part there is a bit of flashy colors and possibly a bit of loudness. So Do you know which knob to turn in case it's too loud? I've prepared a little video to sort of Make it more fun. Um, we've got the party later, which is 80s themed and I like video games from the 80s So if you'll allow me I made a little introduction video That's 80s video game themed about the talk. So Hopefully it works Hey, so I want to point out everything used to make that video was open source software So when catalyst say expert open source solutions, we we mean it Um, so yeah, it's you know, I mean the northern hemisphere come to the southern hemisphere. Everything's upside down for me Um, and that my friend told me that was how to translate the title of the talking to spanish Um, so I hope it was accurate Um, okay, so let's uh, let's start talking about the actual stuff Uh prologue so now we've got video game font. All right. I just want to give a bit of background about how I ended up doing this stuff Uh How it all began was actually this time last year at this conference Um, I have a little bit of a summary. I was having a chat with my colleague And he asked me did you ever upgrade moodle before and um, I said yes Over a hundred thousand times because I was at the moodle cloud talk It was mentioned that you know, kovat was crazy I was the guy that upgraded the moodle cloud sites during kovat So it's like, yeah, I'm all smug like no worries. I got this and it's like, hey, do you want to upgrade this moodle? and sort of A bit reacted like that. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I'll give it a try dramatic Yeah I put that emoji in there and I liked it so much that I had to It just looks funny So I wanted to have a cool slide with little bits and pieces like statistics about this site but My colleague joey already did a really good talk called maintaining mission critical moodle systems at scale And he had a cool slide with stats. So if you saw that just imagine that slide here But I wanted to put the interesting like one number about this site and that number is 5.44 terabytes and what that is is the size of the database of this site So it's pretty easy. This is big So that number is hard to grok like hard to comprehend So I wanted to put it in a bit more, you know meaningful measures So this is the nintendo entertainment system Which has 2048 bytes of memory So if we express the database in terms of nintendo's it is 2,656,256,250,000 nintendo's So that probably is easier to understand, right? I calculated it if you stack that many nintendo's you get like roughly halfway to mars. So there There you go. Now you can visualize how big it is. It's big Okay, so I want to talk a bit about the sort of way we decided to tackle the problem There's two main ways you can do it, okay? One is to run the upgrade script on the largest moodle in the southern hemisphere The other is to delete the largest moodle in the southern hemisphere and start again from scratch And there was actually a secret third approach from the catalyst ai research labs And I have some leaked footage of that that I'd like to share now as well This has some loud noises. So if that affects you just be aware Hopefully it's not going to be too loud Oh, sorry should tell you what is this thing is get ai to do it So that's the approach and here's the video of trying to get the ai to do it Okay, so that's the last funny video for a little while it gets more serious now But yeah, even large language models are aware of the competence and sheer brilliance of catalyst it That really was chat gpt by the way if you can figure out how I did that Like I'd like to hear your thoughts about about what I did to make that happen Um, okay, so yeah time to be serious Um, a little bit about this site We are actually the third vendor to look after it and coincidentally the only one that they've decided to keep looking after it Um, unfortunately that presents a whole host of challenges that I've summarized in a little simulated dialogue here So these are technical considerations. Oh, sorry. Let me just go through this Lots and lots of content lots and lots of db craft Lots and lots of code. We don't know what it does and that sounds bad, but it's big Moodle's big, right? Like it's not like we don't know what we're doing. It's like there's lots of it and it's weird So, oh, yeah, I have this What is it? Yeah, it's a visual analogy of the state of the largest Moodle in the southern hemisphere Um, this is the simulated conversation. Sorry. I got my slides mixed up there So here we go. They come just like, oh no catalyst. It's a it's a bug What can you do? And you know, so oh, yeah, we'll provide you support solutions and solve all the problems In other words, we're gonna solve it. Yeah And later but not too much later because we're on to stuff. We're quick Yeah Wow catalyst you solved it in timely in a professional fashion. Everything is good So, yeah, no problem. Just had some invalid db state and it's a piece of cake when you're catalyst i.t But How did it happen? How did the db get that way and the user response to that is a much more professional one than this Which is uh Uh That's unfortunately, that's the reality right like sometimes the database is just weird and we fix it But we don't know how it got weird or if it's going to get weird again Um, so that's obviously not ideal the conclusion that we came up with is that the existing system presents too many challenges and risks Tech debt has become unmanageable And I have a updated visual and analogy which is This uh An account revised. There we go. So that's sort of where we got to Um, which led us to the decision that we will go greenfield So that's the delete everything and start again Um, that just seemed like the best way forward. So that's what i'm going to talk about now Uh, we decided to go with 4.1, which is of course the lts the previous version of middle. They were on was 3.9 also lts So Um, I would like to take a brief moment to discuss the philosophy of the project So here's a nice word amortization, which is not normally applied to software, but I like to that's the usual definition of that word Um, but I think about it more like in this context where it's like You want to write a script to do something? But actually writing the script ends up taking longer than it would have taken to just do the task Um, and so as as a developer like I like to write code Hey, but I had to keep this image in my brain while working on this progress project to make sure I didn't sort of go down the The rabbit hole of of coding. So put some restrictions on ourselves, which is Only write scripts when it makes sense and you ask what's makes sense Like how long would it take to do it by hand? How error prone is the task? How hard are the errors to fix? How simple would a script be? constraints if I start, you know thinking like oh, yeah script time automation And it doesn't work in two hours. Then I just no don't do it. Just find some other way And Here's the slide where I talk about How we thought it was going to go. So this is another nice word I'm sure people know this one. It's like yeah lack of experience wisdom or judgment Which sounds like a bad thing, but there aren't many biggest moodles in the southern hemisphere to practice on So I think you can forgive us, but now now Catalyst it has all the knowledge about upgrading the largest moodle site in the southern hemisphere So get in touch about upgrading big moodles Um, so our expectation was something like this delete moodle So something Yeah, yeah, that's what we thought was going to happen But the reality, you know the summary of the simple three step plan What actually happened was something more like this and what's about to show up is the actual Checklist of things we did like the last final checklist of steps to take to get the site configured It's a lot more than three steps, right Yeah There was over 100 like individual steps that we had to follow in the end Yeah, okay So, uh, this is this is where I start talking about what we actually did instead of silly videos and dumb stuff like that So phase one was the core customization analysis. So as you can imagine, like I said, there were plenty of Like hacks and stuff that were were in moodle core So we had to do an audit of all of them to figure out what was needed. What wasn't what the code did Um, so the requirement as I said for each customization work at what it is decide if we need it the strategy Identify every piece of code which is not part of vanilla moodle 3.9 And we're very lucky that there's a tool for it called git So a bit of an obscure one. I don't know if you've used that before Um, so that's the the magic spell that we used to get the differences. Um, I can't show the output of that But if I tweak it a little bit, I can show you that so there were 1,042 Customizations that we had to audit So last time he shows up, I think Um, so tooling for that operation was a spreadsheet Which my colleagues were talking about before spreadsheets are invaluable when doing this kind of thing Keyboard shortcuts to focus windows. It sounds a bit silly But it was extremely useful to be able to just like quickly toggle between windows and check things And a small shell script And copy paste and eyeballs So I think Yeah, so here is a sort of what the spreadsheet kind of looked like This is the catalyst collaborative documents suite That's largest moodle in the southern hemisphere on middle 3.9.  We backport things frequently and sometimes the mdls just don't get closed So that's useful to know and then finally obviously like is it needed or not? So the goal is obviously to come up with a big list of commits that we need to Put into the new 4.1 codebase So the workflow was select a spreadsheet cell control c the commit hash Use my keyboard shortcut to switch to the terminal Uh, you run the shell script control shift v is how I pasted what was on the clipboard And use use the eyeballs go back to the spreadsheet And you know fill out the fields Check. Oops. Sorry. Check the mdl status if necessary So i'm gonna oh here's an example of the output of that script. So it what the way it works is You show the commit in the largest moodle in the southern hemisphere Then it uses the commit message to see if the corresponding Commit exists in moodle 4.1 because of course the commit hash will be different Um, and it uses the numstat thing Which is useful because you can see if it's identical and in this case you can see it's not So the that server dot php that the real version of that has five changes So something is different about what's in the 3.9 codebase versus what made it into the 4.1 codebase So normally it was okay. No one's just like, oh, yeah, maybe they amended a comment or something like that But that's the kind of thing we were looking forward to see like oh, maybe we need to go and investigate like there could be some subtle difference here That could be a problem I'm gonna I'm gonna try to do a quick demo of that for you so this is Not the real spreadsheet but close to it Oh, it's quite so if I go there and I can bring my Terminal over and I would you that's me using the shortcut. Oh wow, and then I can go check backport Paste the commit hash And in this case it didn't find anything in moodle 4.1 and I know that's because that mdl is still open So in this case, uh, we go back to the spreadsheet Um, whatever commit message doesn't matter the commit in 4.1 is n a the status is open. I checked that ahead of time So that means we Need it. Yay And then we can go to this one and do the same thing again And this time again, it happened that it's not in 4.1 But in this case it was interesting. It's because the commit message is different in 4.1 It doesn't have the full stop in 4.1 for some reason And then the last one is That one is in 4.1 You can see you've got the status there and it's identical So wow well at least in terms of the amount of stuff changed So we can jump back to the spreadsheet and you'll notice it automatically copied the commit hash in 4.1 to the clipboard So I can just paste it in there. And so we just did that Thousands of times to end up. Oh, sorry. I should set that to to know there we go Did that thousands of times filter the list so that we only had the ones with y in that column and and that was that That's what we did So let me try to get back to the presentation And it worked great. It was it was good a bit tedious but Having the shortcuts made it Um go a lot faster Okay Um, I just want to make a comment here. The tiny mce guys have this poster saying that they have 99.9 percent accurate copy paste But with this uh bash script technology Catalyst it has 100 percent accurate copy and paste so They said it couldn't be done Sorry tiny mc guys. I know there's more to it than that Okay, yeah, so when all that was said and done We had a big list of commits and we found some some stuff that was fun We found craft strings. Um, if you're looking for some simple Stuff to work on a Moodle core you could work on removing these language strings because They're just still there and they're not used anywhere and you can see from the numbers the mdl numbers They've been around for some time And generally not much else. It went really smoothly. Um, and Moodle Yeah kudos to Moodle in this case because the policy of maintaining backwards compatibility Really worked to our advantage here Um experience it's a 7.49 out of 10. I'd like to be accurate And I would do it. I would do it that way again Like it was fine. You have to audit the code base and now we had a good understanding of what the code base is like So that was great Phase two is plugins analysis. So of course they have their own plugins some work on 4.1 some don't Um, so the requirement is a way to manually audit every plugin in the code base for each plugin Work out what it is Decide if it's needed And the strategy was get a bunch of humans to do it So we just you know, made a spreadsheet and got four developers on it and you know, just whatever we worked with the spreadsheet Uh tooling a spreadsheet Zoom calls with the client uh because we needed to know if they actually needed that plugin anymore Collaboration there's what the spreadsheet roughly looked like. I'm not going to do the same thing like I did before You know, it's like the path of the plugin on disk the type The, you know, what branch it's on all that kind of stuff. So Um, we did have to have some tough conversations with the client, which is like, hey, we identified this plugin Can we leave it out? And the answer was always. Yeah, you yeah, you can And we'll come back to that later Um, so contributions this was cool in doing this we um We're able to fix some stuff in various plugins out and about Um q type stack was the main one that caused us grief I don't know if anyone's familiar with that plugin. It's a question type plugin where you can specify mathematical equations and stuff like that It's very cool. Um, we fixed their github actions because we needed that to work for our continuous uh integration continuous deployment pipelines, so They were grateful for that And this is I did not expect to be doing this. We wrote a patch to our unit tests to pass Using different maxima's maxima is a thing written in the lisp programming language that actually does the computer algebra stuff um So that it works compiled against any lisp So there's different flavors of lisp whatever you want to call it and as an emacs user It was a joy to get paid to play with lisp Um, and we also improved this project called maxima pool docker It's an abandoned project, but we have our own fork of it and we still use it. It um makes a Process pool of these maxima things and it speeds things up a lot and if you're interested you can That's a link. So when these are online, you'll be able to click it. You can check out our docker file improvements branch We just made that a whole lot easier to work With different versions of the q-type stack plugin. So that was nice. Good Good feeling giving back to the community There is a commit that I made in the q-type stack plugin, which is the highlight of my professional career Just look at that commit message better normalized floats for cross compatibility between sbcl and gcl maxima like And it gets better. I changed a comment in the project from the base of the natural logarithms to oiler's number And you can look at the commit if you want and Euler was thrilled I get little e would be more appropriate maybe but whatever And you know just give credit where credit is due functions super useful And even 18th century mathematicians know that catalyst it is the place to come for all your expertise Okay experience 7.71828 subtract e Out of 10. That's five out of 10 It was okay, but I don't really know how to make it much better e is oiler's number Phase three Oh, man one minute left. That's not going to happen configuration migration We had to manually audit every single config value from core and plugins work out what it is the site if it's needed Bring across other things like profile fields roles web services grade scales schedule tasks Automation was the solution here Naivety again We had this idea that we would with our nice new shiny code base run upgrade dot php on it locally on a smaller database Restore it And then everything would be great in reality. It didn't work out that way because Of things that are really good about moodle and have never caused headaches a lack of referential integrity in the database and back up and restore So the tooling there was this report customer scale plugin which the open university makes a shout out to them php scripts and eyeballs So for basic cases If it's feasible We simply looked at the ui for the 3.9 site click click copy copy paste paste into the 4.1 site Grade scales good example. There's a few grade scales. So that was easy to do If export import functionality exists, we'd use that so roles is a good example And if a core API exists, we use that to make a script. So cohorts is an example of that There's some code like the script is small. We used the Custom SQL plugin to generate a JSON file of all the cohorts in the db and just run the script makes the cohort easy peasy a complex case is Comparing the configuration values across different environments. So obviously they've set things and we need to figure out if that's a non-default setting And whether or not it needs to be set that way in the new environments Um, it's not important, but we wanted to compare these different values the value of 3.9 ui t staging production The value here here here Does does it matter? There's a coffee break. Is anyone want me to finish? Okay Thanks very much, sorry, it's too fun. It's too fun And the value i'm going to slow down now so the value after upgrading from 3.9 to 4.1 So we use the ad hoc db queries to export the fields of the relevant tables mgl config and mgl config plugins Then we use the magic script The magic script has these great features. It had the ability to create placeholder values and the ability to create variables For example, exactly what i mentioned before when you need to specify id's that could be different in the new system versus the old system The ability to just stop and resume because there's like several thousand configs to configure so You know, you want to go make a cup of tea or something just stop it and come back and it picks up where you left off Um, the ability to intelligently skip irrelevant configs that was pretty pretty useful Like if it's just the default value, for example, you don't need to look at it. It's fine And a beautiful ui fully compatible with antsy escape sequences And it fit into a very satisfying 250 or so lines of code So it's pretty easy to write ticked off all those constraints that set for ourselves in the beginning And i'm gonna try a quick demo of that one so So you run the script it's a php script and then you tell it the name of the file you want it to make So it makes a shell script And i mean look at that ui that is outstanding So this one it's see found cfg 15 out of three seven 60 it wants us to tell it what to do So it's like hey, this is this is different. You need to figure it out And so i can pick any one of those so for fun in this case i'm going to add a variable Just called hello And then we go to the next one and we can see what's happened here This one has that value in 4.1 ui t and staging so it's likely that they want that in the production environment So i'm going to go ahead and pick a And you know you can keep going this one they've done this one's weird They had something in ui t then in staging it's different And then in prod it's back to what it was in ui t So who knows maybe we want to come back to that investigate a bit more so That for that one we press ah Okay, so i'm going to close the script here and show you the what it produced So i produced this plug-in cfg thing It's it's just a big old shell script that you can give to your friend this is admin to run And you can look at it and see what's going on And if i start this script to generate that again, you'll see up the top it says 113 It goes back down to 40 because we said skip that one and come back to it so it knows And maybe i've decided okay, just going to skip this entirely and then we jump back up to 113 where we left off So this script was awesome. I got so good at just sitting and be like Getting through all the configs. I really liked using it So back to the presentation Interesting case was the role matrices. So these are like what roles can be as other can assign other roles They had a lot of them And Maybe there is some cool way to do it. I came up with my own cool way to do it I'm not sure if it's the best way but We'll go through this is what I was doing. So If you're sensitive to that kind of stuff That was dumb. That was a really dumb way to do it and I did that like four times Um before having this thought so oh no if only there was a way to write code in the browser that ticked boxes And then I remember this thing exists And I had like a I had a really interesting revelation which was we can just do something like this In javascript get the state of all the boxes and then just spew it out as a json string And then on the other side read that string and apply the state to all the boxes on that site Um, so I'm going to attempt to show you that real quickly So if I just go back to here and copy This So this is this is the 3.9 site got like this interesting pattern of of stuff in the matrix and I paste my code here. I get a nice string nice json string that tells me the state Of every box Then I can copy that Over to the 4.1 site actually I should copy The code here first So I can copy that Go to here where it's different paste that in This is quite challenging because I can't easily see What I'm looking at Then Didn't work, but whatever it does work That's too too hard for me to see I totally did No, it's not working. So at least one of the demos had to fail, right? And it's that one But yeah totally works. Um, and was a Cool solution to that problem. Um, because the cool part was once the checkboxes are all set You can actually like just visually look at it and before pressing the save button So nothing's happening until you press that save button And you don't need like a sysadmin to run a script or anything like that. I was really pleased with Coming up with that weird hacky solution that definitely works Um, so experience 8 out of 10. This is probably my favorite part of the whole thing The config migration script was a joy to write news and I would definitely do that again I would not do the click click thing again. That was ridiculous Um, I hope the boss isn't here because he might be happy that I was spending hours of the day clicking checkboxes Phase four quality assurance. We're getting close to the end now This is the part where we triage issues and fix the real ones Strategy keep fixing things until they're fixed Uh, so the tooling was a spreadsheet surprise patience And that's it. Uh, this is the follow-up to the tough conversations It's like no catalyst the plug-in we want to remove has stopped functioning. It's like, yeah, because We removed the plug-in But we need the functionality from the plug-in So it's like, okay, so you want to install Yeah She like all the configuration migrated Yeah Even after we finalized it and when we said, you know, and it's difficult to do it now Yeah And so we did it the you know, whatever it's the biggest mood in the southern hemisphere. You only get to do it once And they were happy Um So enterprise grade patience from catalyst it here Um, so we made some discoveries bugs You can quickly read them some backwards compatibility breaking stuff was found during the qa So most of these are fixed now. I think so This one Tim, did you know if that got fixed? This was that one where the dom nodes would duplicate this one's bizarre Yeah, and we have a look at that one. It's fun. You set up filters in a certain way And questions just start duplicating themselves in in the dome. It's wild Some minor issue with selectors in that project Honorable mention to debugging curl headers and proxies So this mdl sets this curl opt thing And this is what it affects it affects the header size attribute Because this this header size thing includes the suppressed headers So even though the headers aren't present in the response The header size attribute Like is as if they are there. So if you've got any code that's splitting headers, which you shouldn't be doing Um, that relies on this header size thing and you have a proxy It goes just all busted like it chops the headers in the wrong place Um, and so I filed this mdo. It's not really a core problem It's the problem in this penopto plugin that shouldn't be doing what they're doing if you're using that just something to be aware of Um, and so that was a really great experience that I can summarize here. So yeah debugging curl requests pretty good debugging curl requests with proxies even better Reading the lib curl documentation is a bliss obviously and then reading the source code of lib curl That's what we had to do to figure out what was going on Um, and I'm a serious person and I'm never sarcastic catalyst is just Overjoyed to go to this level of pure dedication reading lib curl c libraries to figure out what's going wrong with someone else's product Um experience five out of ten. You know, it's not the most fun thing in the world But qa never is right. So I don't really know how we could improve that Epilogue very close now Um have another silly video of the state Yeah So it's fixed forever until it's not right Uh, what's next? We've got content migration to do because there's some content in the old site They want the new site. We didn't really delete it. It's still there Um, we've got to update integrations. We'd like their student management system Uh, some plugins that we're developing are in the works. I don't know if they're going to be public They might be but they're going to be cool either way. That's just who gets to appreciate them me or you Um, and that's it. Uh, thanks for listening. I'm really sorry that went over but it doesn't seem like you mind