Top ongoing mega projects in Tanzania. Tanzania now leads in terms of project value and the number of projects that will break ground by June 2022. The government of President Samia Saluhu is implementing the National Five-Year Development Plan, which intends to foster industrialization for economic transformation and human development from 2018 to 2022. East African countries are competing fiercely to build and renovate infrastructure mega projects in the drive for economic competitiveness aimed at attracting investment and encouraging development. The following are Tanzania's most important ongoing mega projects. In the previous five years, eastern African countries have expanded their infrastructure investment, with Tanzania leading the way in terms of the value and number of projects that broke ground by June of last year. The Six-Phase government has continued to push through large-scale development projects all around the country. Prime Minister Kasim Majlawa took up the baton yesterday, inspecting the ongoing Tanzanite bridge project in Dar-E-Salem. After President Samia Saluhu Hassan completed a successful project launching trip in the Wanzer region earlier this week. The 1.03-kilometer-long, 20.5-meter-wide bridge is being built across the Indian Ocean. The ultra-modern bridge intends to reduce traffic congestion on Ali Hassan-Wini Road, which carries a large number of cars to and from the city center. A total of 5.2 kilometers of roadways will be upgraded as part of the project's implementation to connect the two sides of the bridge. Bagamoyo Port, $11 billion. Outgoing President Jackia Kikwit, who placed the foundation stone, hails from Bagamoyo, 75 kilometers up the coast from Dar-E-Salem. China Merchants Holdings International and Oman State Government Reserve Fund are funding the project. Bagamoyo was the first German colonial city in East Africa, and it served as a significant holding center for slaves before being transported to markets on the island of Zanzibar during the slave trade. The new Bagamoyo Port is being built at a time when Tanzania is losing a lot of trade and commerce prospects as a result of the Dar-E-Salem ports inefficiency. The construction of the Bagamoyo Port will also include the construction of a 34-kilometer road between Bagamoyo and Landisi, as well as a 65-kilometer railway connecting Bagamoyo to the Tanzania Zambia Railway, to Zara, and the Central Railway. The ambitious Bagamoyo Port is presently being created in Tanzania, together with 190 industries erected across a 1,700-hectare special economic zone adjacent to the port, thanks to collaboration between Tanzania, China, and Oman. This massive infrastructure project, estimated to cost around $11 billion, aims to become Africa's largest port. Once completed in 2004-5, the port should be able to accommodate 20 million containers per year. Tanzania will be positioned as a regional economic powerhouse as a result of the initiative. SGR Project in Tanzania As part of the East African Railway Master Plan, the Tanzania Standard Gauge Railway is being built to connect the country to neighboring countries, and through these two, to Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After Kenya and Ethiopia, Tanzania will be the third country in East Africa to receive modern railway services. Kenya was the first country in the region to start building an SGR line, completing nearly 500 kilometers between Mombasa and Nairobi in June 2017 and launching passenger services. The government is building a new 700-kilometer electric railway line from Dar-e-Salem to Moragoro and Idoma utilizing domestic resources. The entire project spans 2,707 kilometers, with three branches connecting Dar-e-Salem to Kigoma, 1,251 kilometers, Tabora to Wanza, 379 kilometers, and Kalihua to Panda, 210 kilometers. The project is expected to boost cargo and passenger traffic along the core route. It is anticipated to cost 14 trillion Tanzanian shillings as one of Tanzania's mega-infrastructure projects. The SGR Rail Project will provide a safe and dependable way of transporting people and freight to and from the Dar-e-Salem port once it is completed. Following the completion of a transmission line, Tanzania has began testing the electrical equipment on the first section of its standard gauge railway, SGR, from Dar-e-Salem to Moragoro, the first electrified line in East Africa. Tanzania plans to open phase one of the SGR, which runs from Dar-e-Salem to Moragoro and is 205 kilometers long later this year. Expansion of the Dar-e-Salem port. The port of Dar-e-Salem, Tanzania's busiest port, handles over 95% of the country's cargo. The Dar-e-Salem harbor number 17 berths reconstruction and expansion project, which was contracted by Czech, will boost the port's yearly throughput by 26% to 17.65 million tons. The berths launch signals that the project's development is nearing completion and creates a firm platform for follow-up work and project completion. The government, on the other hand, is working on a scheme to increase the size of seven berths from 8 to 15 meters. With the development, the port will be able to accept larger vessels capable of carrying up to 19,000 containers. The project was expected to be finished by the end of 2020, allowing the Tanzania Port Authority, TPA, to enhance container throughput from roughly 20 million containers per year to 28 million tons per year. The port will be able to handle ships that are longer than 304 meters, up from 204 meters now. New Likingoma Kinga liquefied natural gas plant. LNG is well-known for being an environmentally benign energy source with low carbon dioxide and sulfate emissions. Green fur can deliver the best skid-mounted solution for the structure of LNG value chain solutions. The LNG project, which is valued at $30 billion, has become the region's most valuable investment. The LNG project is expected to contribute roughly 7% to the country's economic growth once completed. International Airport in Dodoma. The project is part of a larger plan to improve the country's infrastructure in East Africa. It will be built 12 kilometers from Dodoma at Emsalato. A passenger terminal, a runway, and accompanying infrastructure will be included. The new airport, which is expected to take four years to construct, will have a capacity of 1 million passengers per year with a runway that is just over 2 kilometers long. The finance package includes an Africa Development Bank, a FDB, loan of $198.6 million, a 52 million loan from the African Development Fund, and 50 million in co-financing from China's Africa Growing Together Fund, which the FDB oversees. These are Tanzania's current mega-projects. I'm sure it's not surprising for a country to have mega-projects, but those of this country demonstrate how, in the coming years, the country's development will exceed our expectations. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe to our channel, as well as turn on your notifications for new videos if you have not already done so. Thank you for watching, and stay tuned for more educational videos.


Good morning, everyone. I'm so glad that we got to start this morning hearing from Donna. I had the privilege, was it yesterday, of being on a panel with her that we playfully called Money Devas, and I think you could hear from what she was saying that she is indeed a Money Deva. Now I have an interesting task in front of me, and that is introducing a conversation between, dare I say, two old farts. My husband is one of them. That's why I can say it. And the other one is probably the most, if not, one of the most, if not the most successful long-term visionaries in the impact investing world. And he was referenced in Donna's talk. I have no idea where this is going to go, which has been indicative of the last 43 years of my life with Kevin. But I'd like to welcome to this stage right now Kevin Jones and Joel Solomon for... What are they going to do? Thanks. Thank you. We were trying out some of the pips moves from one of Gladys Knight's songs that we know we didn't think we knew it well enough, so you're not going to see that. So why don't we talk about your book instead? All right. So I grew up in the 50s and the 60s, Jewish in the South, a lot of questions. I was diagnosed with a family genetic kidney disease. You might live long, you might die soon, there's nothing you can do about it. Combination of those factors caused me to think a lot about the history of how the world got to how it is, best I could, and figure out what I was going to do as the child of an increasingly affluent family going through the 70s and 80s. And I came to the conclusion that the best thing to do with privilege and power was to use it and not squander it, use it for something that matters. I had the opportunity to work with an extraordinary woman named Carol Newell who inherited a large chunk of money and decided that the majority of it should be deployed toward social and environmental goods now. We worked on thinking about 500 years, how did we get here, a 50-year strategy and an integrated capital deployment of resources in every way you can think of focused in a region and thinking about our personal networks as local and regional. Four strategies invest in for-profit sector that would be do-good businesses into the charitable sector and supporting activism and change agents. Third is the, okay, non-profit sector, activist sector, and inner skills, personal leadership skills, a place called Hollyhawk was a campus in the islands of British Columbia that we inhabited and helped infuse and support activists, entrepreneurs, and just people trying to figure out how to do better and be better. The fourth area was politics and power, essential that we pay attention to public service and power and do not walk away from it. Ecosystemic work, culture changing, social change investing. I was fortunate that one of the founders of Hollyhawk gave me her kidney 10 years ago. I lived through it. I've written a book in which I talk about these origins, tell stories, secondly, because I have been around a long time just due to desperation to figure out where there were people that could talk about these topics and help me out. I've talked about the building of this movement and done a taxonomy as I experienced it of the different organizations that grew out of things. And to make the message clear that this has been going on for a long time, it's still tiny. It will not stop. It is a huge momentum. It's going to grow bigger and bigger. The demand to know if our money aligns with who we are as people. Finally, the third section is the moral and ethical call to action. We know that the world faces serious crisis. We know that $50 trillion is going to pass hands from people our age to younger people just in the next three decades, only in North America. There's probably at least $100 trillion that's going to move. Values can change. We believe, I believe, that there's a new generation that it's our job to support to help do this differently. It's urgent. We need to move capital in every way. We need to stop thinking about how we grow it and grow it and grow it. We need to figure out how we redistribute it, deploy it, change public policy and our attitudes about capital and what its purpose is. We are the ancestors of what's coming. The purpose of capital is to serve them and support them in the best possible way so that they have a chance at some of what we've had. My book is called The Clean Money Revolution, Reinventing Power, Purpose and Capitalism. There's a few left at the bookstore. I'll be there and greet you and talk about it if you like. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you, Joel. That was great. There are a lot of books out now. Some of them are how to think about impact investing, who's left behind, who's left out. Why was the generational focus where you went? Well, impact investing is a really important incremental step, and it's helping raise consciousness for us. The book is necessary, as are the whole set of books that are coming out right now and the things that are getting on stage here, because we got a lot of people to help show the way or raise questions with and ensure that they ask the right questions. So I felt that it was my duty and obligation as an ancestral responsibility to share what it is I've gotten to benefit from and whatever I've possibly learned that can be passed on. That's why the book and the book, The Times Are Urgent. Times Are Urgent. And why was that your message particularly? How long have you been thinking about that book? Because you haven't done other books, but why was that your message? Because I believe that money is a representation of spirit and energy embodied. It is the extraction of human labor and planet. We have forgotten our responsibility and our connection to that money, where it came from. I got some in my pocket right now. I got some credit cards here. There are probably slaves, babies being poisoned, and wars being started with my money a few steps down the channel of where it is right now. Yeah, the cobalt on our phones is slavery on the other end in Congo. As SOCAP and as impact investing scales goes mainstream, you have some big names here that are big funds, what do you think is the risk from somebody who thinks it's a spiritual expression to go mainstream? What's the risk? What's the risk to the movement for this to go mainstream and the Wall Street folks to come in? Well, I've fortunately been involved in things that are usually discounted by the mainstream early on. I've lived long enough to see that change. So there will be discounting, there will be debates, there will be competition just like humans do around everything. But it's crucial that we talk about the deepest part of it, because otherwise it's a game of how much money do I build up and how much do I need. We forgot to consider what's enough. I live in British Columbia where there's an indigenous culture that once you build up a certain amount, you have a big party and you give away most of it or all of it. I think money is an incredible privilege. So the field will debate and it will argue. And if I say this is a spiritual revolution, which it is, we've got to re-figure what the meaning of life is. People are going to debate it and criticize it and poo-poo it, and that's okay. Yeah. And you know, one thing I don't hear enough, I like that, and one of the things I don't hear enough about it is the way I see it. Impact investing changes you existentially. When we first tried to start pitching our fund to an ultra-high net worth tech investor in the Seattle area, he stood up and he said, I have two pockets. One I want to put all the money in the world in, and the second I want to put some money in to do some good. And if you see there's a philanthropic lens around investing, you have to leave. And we got kicked out of two different billionaire's offices. So we created a market so they could see it rather than think about it. It's sadly really limited in simplistic thinking that I do not understand how intelligent, accomplished people who've had access to all the education in the world can separate those two and not see that money is one substance. You can use it in diverse and interesting and impactful and important ways, and you should. You know, nobody's, to me, the existential part is that you're investing in all of us and investing yourself, what we need to do is invest in all of us. It's not just money for your storehouse, you're also investing in the commons. So you're different. It used to be you invest and take it home, and I give and do good. Do impact investing. You're investing in all of us and yourself at the same time.  And none of the metrics seem to touch on the existential change that should happen when you think about your money that way. And to be clear, I'm a pragmatic dreamer. And we manage an investment fund. We call it Mission Venture Capital, Renewal Funds. We invest in organics and environmental technologies, because it takes every step of this ecosystem to help move billions of people. So do that and then also get as rigorous as possible. And also get money out the door into activism and change. And Joe and I are co-investing in a deal that we did, and we're about to exit the first venture backed fair trade company that's in its negotiations. It's going to do well, but it's a company that got better as it went along. It was fair trade and organic, and then it was carbon negative with offsets, and now it's carbon negative with insets. So the groundwater is improved by commercial farming, and the packaging has gone to biodegradable. So you can get better as you get bigger. The ingenuity and innovation that humans can do is unbelievable. Use it for what matters. Yeah. And we're also, as I've looked, we're the oldest guys that have been on stage, and there won't be anybody older than we are after this on stage. So we're two old white guys saying to listen to us. And it seems to me we have a responsibility as old white guys to downsize the footprint of the alpha ego in order to be listened to in the changing world. I wonder how you think about that. Men, it's been a raw deal that we've developed over a few millennial, and it's time for us to look deeper, maybe study a little feminist analysis, race, class, look at all of it, listen, ask questions, lifelong learning. There's a lot we can do. We're quite capable of lots of things. We got to use that to support the whole. And we got to get over ourselves. Maybe a therapist could help. Maybe you could do maybe some support groups, maybe some weird stuff out in the woods, whatever it takes, whatever it takes, do better and be better. Yeah, you know, I did some weird stuff out in the woods and I was 40.  But you know, and everybody had kind of gotten lost in the middle part of their life. And a guy had started out, you know, he'd been at Woodstock and he ended up at lobbyists for AT&T and he said, how the heck did I do that? He said he had an infinite budget to stop anything new that did good.  So again, why should old white guys like us be listened to by folks who are skeptical of old white guys and the patriarchy and all that stuff? Well, I think we ended up coming through with some pride and some sense of responsibility despite all the other stuff. Pride, maybe it's the wrong thing, but I think we have it. So we're going to be, we're being watched right now by future generations. They're scratching their heads in the sense, what was going on? How did you guys let this get carried away so badly and put everything at risk? They're watching. We need to care about that. When we're on our deathbeds, what matters? What we've done on behalf of beauty, love, and continuity of all this? What do you want people to do as a result of your book and are you looking, are there workbooks around it? Is it going to be a practical guide or just a way to think about things? What do you want people to do? I want us to look at our money, think about, track it, know what it's doing to people and places right now, and think about our values, our meaning and purpose in life, and do everything we can to move the money into alignment with what we most believe in and care about for the future and proselytize it. And you also work on public policy things. What do you think is a couple of the biggest rules that need to change? Fair taxation, protection of the commons, long-term thinking, and a whole bunch of other policies that we end up affecting, and particularly mostly old white guys with a lot of money, and we have forgotten the past and we've forgotten the future and we've got to change that. There's a lot of folks, you know, the conservatives and the folks who are libertarians are really long-term and strategic in a way that we're often not. That's right. The BB&T bank has put up about $30 million recently and they're dribbling it out in three to $500,000 endowments of small business schools where $300,000 makes you kind of set for life. And all you got to do is just agree with the principles of Anne Rand and Libertarian and that, you know, the responsibility of a business is to profit. So, they're proliferating in a long-term strategy and they'll, you know, with these endowed chairs, that means somebody's going to be there, not just tenured, but have a little money. We've gotten circles run around us. Systematic deployment of capital to accomplish an agenda is done by people every day and Kevin's talking about it. I have to admit being inspired by Lewis Powell, the memo that he wrote, the Kochs, the Bradleys, the people that have spent their lives to impose and ensure that what they care about takes priority. And I was inspired by that and so the work that I was able to do with Carol was somewhat of what's a progressive version of this. How can we counteract it? We better figure out how to work together also. We need to do viable businesses. We need to create great not-for-profits. We need to pay attention to politics. How many people in here are going to run for office? Okay. Excellent. Two, three. So, we have got to get smarter and figure out how to be systematic now. I did some undercover reporting on the Christian riot when we were trying to get the Episcopal bishop elected, the first one. And in their sessions, they didn't suspect you. What's that? They didn't probably suspect you. They didn't.  But one of the things they said to do was get on all the boards and do the grunt work, like the buildings and grounds and stuff like that and be a good soldier and then take over when there's enough of us and you're not suspected. I don't think we do anything like that. But they're out there in all these institutions doing buildings and grounds, getting up loyalty, and then they're aware of themselves as conservative moles in the organization. I think you built this organization and devoted your career to being a mole in the financial industry. And I did too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do it by waving my hands in public. We need hidden moles somewhere. I don't know how you do that. And thinking long term, how do you help people think long term when they're stuck in short term thinking? Well, we could use a few new global world religions to help us. This is a spiritual revolution that we need. And if we were to think about what really matters and we once a day for five minutes considered, what matters? Why am I here? What is my purpose in life? We'd have a much better chance to have that spiritual revolution. And how do you get the spiritual acknowledged by folks who just want to be bottom line oriented? Yeah. You just, you model and you be what you believe that should be. And you support each other and one by one by one and transaction by transaction and person by person. That's that's one approach. The other is people have got to step into power and change public policy.  This has to be a global mobilization or at least by those of us with privilege. Lloyd Blankford, not a not a sweetheart of a guy, the CEO of Goldman Sachs says the thing that scares him the most is increasing wealth disparity and as expressed in the racial wealth gap. What kind of risk are we looking at by not taking more action to invest around the racial wealth gap? Most of you watched that we went from 80 people that controlled as much wealth as half the world's population and went down to eight this year. We continue to push tax burden to those who can least afford it. We put all the privileges and gains to those who least need it. If we don't pay attention to everybody and start to understand that we are a species, I think we're screwed. And it's not easy to change patterns. You grew up in the south too. I grew up in the south. It was so embarrassing at the time that you couldn't even understand it. It was just the water that was going on. Really hard to understand. We owe everyone that we need to understand these issues. We need to know how the world works and we need to devote ourselves to a fair, safe, just future. Yeah, you know I'm from Mississippi, which is an effective poverty creation mechanism. I once talked to the head of the economic development there and I said, you know, our motto should be on the bottom and built to stay that way. He said, that's not how you lure industry. I said, well, luring industry is not what we should be doing. But they still stay stuck. But there's an amazing movement in Jackson, Mississippi. It's so broken that this cooperation in Jackson is really changing things. And I wonder if the south is broken enough that something else might happen there. There's a huge re-migration of African Americans back to the south, cost, access, who knows all the I don't know all the reasons. Yeah. But there are so those of us on the coasts, we got it relatively easy. We live in our bubble. Some of us need to be there because there's a lot of power and influence there and we need to affect it. Many of us are going back into smaller cities and smaller places and doing everything we can there to help improve things. Do we have a good chance? Odds aren't good. Could we pull it off? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think about that and then I go back and you know the agreement we have is they take down the flag and I don't talk about climate change. That's the trade-off that makes Thanksgiving work. And you know, I how to get a message across like that? I don't know. It's a difficult thing. It's a thing I think about but have no clue. We've created a really difficult pickle for ourselves. Yeah. We need some really smart, sensitive courage and action. Yeah. Thank you Joel. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks a lot. That's good. Thanks.


Good afternoon, ONS! I am so glad to see you all here. It was really great to sort of see where we've come. I was very lucky to be a part of some of those events in the past and I'm happy to be here today in our evolution. So, as Arpit mentioned, I'm Heather Kirksey. I am the VP of Ecosystem and Community for the LF Networking Portfolio of Projects. Previous to this, I was the Executive Director of OPNFV, so I remember some of those scenes that we just saw, and today we are going to go through a virtual central office demo. So, just a little bit about VCO. It's a topic that people have been talking about for a while, and in fact, VCO and EDGE are going to be the topics of a few more presentations later today. But, you know, one of the important things as we've, you know, continued our NFE journey is the importance of sort of getting all these services out closer and closer to our consumers. So, you know, the service providers are looking at using the existing real estate that they have in their central offices and modernizing those and deploying residential enterprise and mobile services to improve efficiency, customer experience, improve cost. You know, when this journey started, you know, when we started looking at the data center and the central office came to be a place that was very important, and when we started this activity, you know, the central office was in need of a lot of modernization. You know, the hardware was very bespoke. It was very monolithically integrated. There weren't a lot of standard interfaces. And over the past several years, I think we've made a lot of progress around virtualizing that, looking at what happens if you have, you know, commodity hardware, regular white box hardware, both in switching and in the servers. And we started the software defining a lot of aspects of that. And looking ahead, obviously cloud native becomes important, orchestrating things in a more efficient fashion. So, we're moving from sort of, you know, a smaller number of data centers to huge numbers of central offices and even more EDGE locations. And so, you know, within OPNFV and many of our upstream partners, you know, we've been looking to look at how we can solve those problems for our end users. So, when we started this journey, we had a lot of our operators, you know, asking us within OPNFV to start looking at this. So, last year, just a little over a year ago, we showed our first version of this journey in virtualizing the central office from an OPNFV perspective at our summit in Beijing. It was focused on residential and enterprise use cases. And we really focused on sort of that first aspect, which was the onboarding of a lot of traditional residential and enterprise use cases onto the open source platform. So, on the residential side, we looked at bringing a virtual BNG online on top of an open source platform built out of open stack and open daylight and other open source pieces. And then we also showed something similar with the enterprise use cases. We showed a virtual CPE and some firewalling and other use cases of that sort. So, looking ahead this year, we wanted to look at mobile use cases. You know, mobile, you know, sort of to round out the trio. But also, as we look ahead at 5G, the residential enterprise use cases, they've got really good business models behind them. But for 5G, it really becomes a necessity to move things further out, to get closer to our consumers so we can meet the latency requirements of the use cases that we're looking to do there. So, things like autonomous vehicles, drones, AR, VR. So, the demo that you are going to see today focuses on that sort of Talcom network edge area and the sort of the access evolution from LTE to 5G. So, we're going to be setting up an end-to-end network with a next generation core. You're going to see some disaggregated access and a full VRAN implementation.  I wish I could say that all of you should look under your seats and you're going to find some AR, VR goggles for that kind of use case. I, however, do not have over one freeze money. So, we will be doing a mobile use case. And then before I go any further, we are doing a live code with a live connection between here and California. So, send us good energy and please be kind. So, with that, I would like to bring out Fuchiao from China Mobile, who's very active in the Opium Fee community. She is on the Opium Fee TSC. And she is going to talk to us a little bit about China Mobile's vision of the next generation mobile network and how some of this work from Opium Fee and the demo fit into that. So, it will be great to hear the perspective from the world's largest mobile operator. Thank you for Chiao. Thank you, Hesha. So, good afternoon. I'm Fuchiao from China Mobile. China Mobile, we try to structure our future network into what we call TICS, Telecom Integrated Cloud. TICS, basically, they are provided and using the cloud technologies, including NFE and SDN, to provide this virtualized environment for future virtualized network functions. We categorized TICS into core TICS and edge TICS, in which core TICS they are located in some of centralized locations and basically support control plane surfaces. And edge TICS are deployed, distributed in large numbers of countries and cities and countries and support user plane surfaces and edge services. So, this kind of architecture actually brings our network like in two ends, at a core TICS, and it seems like that the number of the TICS will be very small, but in each TICS, there will be a huge scale. And in the edge TICS, there will be comparably small scale clouds, but the number will be huge. This architecture actually brings us with new requirements and expectations for the future network. For example, we would like to have the open stack to have management of massive distributed edge cloud. And also, we expect a common deployment models from the core to the edge. And also, we would like to have not only open stack, but also Kubernetes into our cloud so that we could have stacks to support containerized VNF services. And we also expect the stack to be agile and flexible, and also they should have telco levels of service assurance so that we could support all the different kinds of telco services. And to end, orchestration is something very important to us so that we could use one orchestrator from the core to the edge. So we are expecting that OPNFV could provide us with a list reference platform, which have all these fancy capabilities to support our future network. We expect a lot for the VCO demo, especially this time for VCO 2.0, beyond just the residents and enterprise use cases. This time, we have the mobile use cases, which are mobile core and mobile edge. And we hope that this kind of demo can drive some of the work in the community and also provides us more experience and test tools for the integration and testing of the future networks. So with that, let me bring Azor onto the stage with more details for the architecture and the demo work. Please, Azor. Thank you. Thank you so much. So the requirements that FooChile just laid out for you translated into a long list of, you know, things that we needed to do for a demo. And from the different service providers, we got interest in showing VRAM, showing packet core, showing IMS. Particularly, some of the things that were interest was to show the splits-based architecture that's actually defined in 5G but with the 4G radio. And things like network slicing and edge compute. So the long list ran very long, and we started to actually now assemble together a team and different vendors to come together and actually build this particular demo. Obviously, our goal was to try to show as much as we can, but this time around, we were just focusing a lot more on the VRAM demo. We used the exact same architecture that was defined as part of VCO 1.0, so it's the exact same stack. Now, with that stack, of course, because this is a new and different use case, and you have new set of partners that are part of this particular stack. People like XFO, people like, you know, Quartus, and open air interface, which is actually an open source implementation of the radio, is also part of this particular exercise. Again, we used it as part of the open stack platform with an SDN control using open daylight. And we built a complete architecture that actually shows both the RAM elements, the packet core, and the edge compute elements as part of the overall architecture. With that architecture as our blueprint that's to be deployed in a virtual central office, we now started to look at how do we go about actually building the overall demo. So that brings me to the lab topology in terms of how we did it. This time around, Cumulus was incredible in terms of helping us host the entire environment in the California lab. So this is a full data center built with a leaf spine fabric with six leaf switches, two spine switches running Cumulus software on white box switches. And they also provided us complete hardware for this particular setup. What's new and interesting here in addition to that particular data center fabric and the entire setup is a software defined radio. And yes, nothing would be fun without it being live. So we actually bought a Faraday cage and we put some phones inside a Faraday cage. So now looking at the overall topology in terms of how this looks like, let me just walk you through very briefly. What you see on the top left corner of the screen is the Faraday cage with the two phones in there. And you see that picture right underneath that with two phones, this actual antenna, and then there's a software defined radio that's provided by Etis. And then you have the two bare metal notes, the radio unit and the distributor unit. Those two bare metal notes were provisioned by OpenStack. So OpenStack as a controller to actually build and manage those bare metal notes. And then you have the rest of the OpenStack infrastructure hosting a whole host of virtual machines. Those virtual machines, again not all of the virtual machines are depicted here in this picture, but the centralized unit was actually running as a virtual machine on our setup. And then you have the, of course, the evolved packet core, but there's something very interesting in the middle there called the session director. The session director is actually redirecting traffic based on different phones to different sides of the infrastructure. One to the corporate VPN and another one to the internet. And what we have for you as part of this connectivity is actually a branch office that Heather's showing you right here on stage. And that's a live setup and it's part of the live demo that's connecting back to our central office that's in California. And you have now some phone clients that are registering everywhere from California back to here. Now, you will get that information a little bit clear in a moment as you see this particular data flow. So data, what we'll be showing you live is coming from the internet over through the packet core into one of the phones and then out through the other phone back here all the way down to the branch office and we will actually be able to show you something here. But before we actually show you anything, I would request you one thing. If you can all take out your phones, this is the first time in a session that somebody's asking you to take out your mobile phone, tweet with the hashtag ONS 2018. If you can do that now, that would be great. In the meantime, I'm going to call Hanan to actually walk us through the demo. Hanan? So I hope you are tweeting. All right. So I think it's time to switch over to our demo. So what we're seeing here is that I am having a remote desktop connected to the lab back in California and what you are seeing here as well is the representation of these two phones. We are actually controlling the phones on the cage through the app. Okay? And to show you this is working live. So I'm going to switch off one of the phones. I did mention that this is back in California, right? So there is some lag in here. So maybe I'm going to ask my guys, Dave, can you switch off that phone, please? There we are. So we should be seeing the phone connecting. Yeah, there it is. It's attached to the network that we have live in the lab. And the next thing I'm going to ask is, let me see if I can get hold to the... Oh, it's working now. So did you guys finish tweeting? Because I would like to see real time tweet here. Actually, I'm not going to do it here. And I'm going to do it here. Oh, no, not here we go. All right. I say the other one, guys. No blue whales on our stage today, please. There we go. Oh, come on. All right. So let's refresh that. And I hope we are getting much better results now. All right. So we're seeing the tweets update that y'all are sending in. So we are seeing... Yeah, this is good. So we have that phone... Yeah, it's on stage. It's great. We have that phone connected to the internet. And actually, what I didn't say is that there's two phones on the cache connected to the same network. One of them is attached to the same network, sorry, connected to the internet. The second phone is as well on the same cache. But even through is we are using the same radio and we are using the same EPC is attached to a corporate network. And that corporate network is where that PBX and that central office is attached to. So just to show you guys that we are live here.  Of course, this music is playing loud in the cache. We are not hearing anything. It's back in California. But as we are doing a mobile demo, let's try to make a call. And I call back the stage here. Looks like I got a call. So you're hearing something? Oh, I'm hearing something. Let's plug it into this case so we can hear what's coming over the phone. Let's share with everybody that love music. I love it when my friends call me with Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. All right, so... Well done. I am now forever going to refer to that song as Islands of Packets in the mobile data stream. All right. So I just want to make sure that I sort of understood. So this phone, I basically just got a phone call from your phone back in the cage in California. Absolutely. Yeah. So what we were hearing is the music. This phone is streaming music and playing loudly on the cage. And the second phone is picking up on the mic what is what the first phone is playing and back through the voice channel to the call here on the stage. Yeah. All right, cool. So as I said, I would love for this to have been something more like augmented reality, virtual reality, but it's hard to do that in a cage on another continent. But so as Zara, we've had some pretty graphs going back here in the background while those calls are happening. Do you just want to point out what was going on there? Sure Heather. So while you were actually busy taking that call, I noticed that you see the SIP call went through and on this particular graph and you see that it was active for a few seconds because that's when you were listening to the music.  And you can actually see that there was some data that went through that particular SIP session. So you actually see that live here. As soon as the call went up, you see the spike and then when the call goes down, the spike goes down. The other activity that you're also seeing here, for example, on this particular screen is the assurance capability. Now, the first one was through the session director where you're actually looking at what's happening on the SIP sessions. Now, this one, you're actually monitoring the voice traffic. And here you can see the KPIs, latency variation over time. And here you can see the success or failure rates. And you can actually see how many unique call attempts were there, why did they fail, were they successful, what was the delay, average delay. And of course, the cause, what is the error code for that particular failure. So really, what we're trying to do is show not only just a call that's going, but remember one of the requirements that Fushar laid out was to actually talk about full assurance capability end to end with all of the delay and all of the metrics that are assigned to this. So we were actually able to put that in, live monitor the call, show you all the metrics associated with that. Great. Thanks, Hanan and Azar. And if we can go back to the slides. All right. So just really quickly, sort of pulling this together, unsurprisingly, the first lesson is open source collaboration works. We have 15 organizations and 30 volunteers pulling this together. And another point is increasing maturity. So point being, we were actually showing an actual virtual ran and software radio with open source software. We were showing this on commodity hardware built on open source platforms. And there's interoperability between the hardware and the virtual EPC. Certainly, this did take work and a lot of planning around hardware and specification. One of the things that we will be looking to do across a number of projects, like a Kino, OPNFV, LF networking, is to help sort of make that process a lot easier to go from sort of putting together a proof of concept to something that is really deployable and repeatable. And then certainly from a hardware optimization point of view, a fairly beefy hardware was necessary. And we did learn a fair amount about what things needed to go on bare metal, what things didn't really need to. A lot of detail around that is going to be sort of in the white paper. And then in terms of what we are looking for is next steps. So first of all, if you would like a deeper dive into what we did here, we do have this demo running in the LF networking booth along with a number of other great community demos showcasing the work that a lot of our projects have been doing. Hanan and Azar are doing a zero-touch provisioning for edge breakout session during the conference. We also, one of Fuchiao's colleagues from China Mobile is hosting an conference on CRAN. There are also a number of different edge and mobile buffs and conferences and sessions happening this week. Check your schedule. You can join the VCO demo mailing list if you are interested in continuing to evolve this. We have a number of working groups going on in OPNFV, a CRAN group, an edge group. The rocket project specifically is looking at some of that beefier hardware that a lot of folks are looking at the edge so we can make sure we have interoperability with the open source applications and that. We are also, as I said, really looking to operationalize what we have learned here. So start incorporating these capabilities into our CICD, our automated testing. One thing that we have done in the course of this project is we now actually have a virtual EPC as one of the VNFs that we deploy on various OPNFV scenarios as part of our regular testing so that we are able to make sure as we keep evolving the software stacks that these types of applications work. And then, as we mentioned, obviously there is a cloud native, as Arpit and Dan were talking about, a cloud native vision that we have for all of this and there is work going on around cloud native activities across multiple projects in CNCF and LF networking. And I encourage folks who are interested to get involved in those. And then finally, I think the community volunteers who did this, whether it was providing software, defined radio, antennas, servers, racks, switches, getting the stuff shipped here, doing the software, doing the integration. A lot of people playing a part. Here were the ecosystem partners involved in helping us spec this out, helping to find requirements and providing those various things. And then finally, this was a collaboration across multiple open source communities and software from many of them. Just like to highlight open air interface is actually one of the newest associate members of LF networking. And they are doing a lot of really interesting work. They provided a lot of great of the next generation mobile pieces for this. And we look forward to future collaboration with them. And obviously, the hardware that is in this rack is actually open compute project based. So it is open source hardware with open source software running on top of it. Some of it very generic. Some of it very telecom, 5G specific. And this is what I get up in the morning for. This is what I get very excited about is seeing folks from different projects come together to make our ecosystem better, to make these use cases work and to continue to march technology forward. So I would like to ask my wonderful co-conspirators and partners in crime to come out. As I said, it takes a lot of guts to do a live demo, especially one that crosses the ocean. So thank you all for your work and your guts. And take a bow. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. And so thank all of you very much for your time and attention today and looking forward to a wonderful week with all of you. All right. Thank you Heather and team.


Our proposed approach combines machine learning algorithms and a long short-term memory, LSTM, based neural network to construct forecasting models for short to medium-term aggregate load forecasting. We use wrapper and embedded feature selection methods to choose the best features from the dataset and then optimize the LSTM models parameters using genetic algorithm, GA. This resulted in a decrease in mean absolute error, MAE, and root mean square error, RNSE, for medium to long-range forecasting for a wider metropolitan area. This article was authored by Sula Baoktif, Ali Faiz, Ali Auni, and others.


Hello, everybody. Welcome again to this series of the Stories Women Carry. My name is Karishma Bagani. I am your question asker, the official question asker of the series. It's crazy to think that we're almost at the end of our second season. We have one more episode next week and this will be a wrap for our second season. So thank you all for those that have been tuning in regularly for our new listeners. Thank you for being here and for supporting us and being interested in learning about what we talk about every Monday. I'd like to give a special shout out to the Tabariats Foundation, the Nairobi Musical Theatre Initiative, and Hal Rahn for being co-producers and presenters of this series. Of course, without their support, we won't have been able to make this happen. So thank you. And special thanks to our wonderful ASL interpreters. Thank you, Rory, for being here and for making this a more accessible series to all of our audiences. So today, we're taking a little bit more of a pivot and a shift in talking about creative practice of women on the African continent. Last week, we had the privilege of speaking to Nikkei Jonah, who is Nigerian born and British Britain based. But you know, in when we were having conversations about even crafting the series, it became increasingly important to us to start thinking about what the impact of creative practice in the diaspora, in the African diaspora is as well. So it's with great honor and pleasure that I introduce Dr. Monica Ndunu to our conversation today. Hi, Monica. Hi, Karishma. It's good to see you. Good to see you too. Thank you so much for being here and for agreeing to be a panelist and really encouraging us to, you know, think outside the box when it comes to talking about creative practice. My few engagements with you over the last few months have been so fruitful and nourishing and learning about the impact that you are making as an individual in the field, but also your practice and your work. So I'm really excited that we'll be able to talk a little bit more about this during our series today and educate our audiences about you and about your work. Thank you. I'm really happy to be here. So thank you for the invitation. And the special special shout out to Dean, who's actually part of the HowlRound team who made the introduction between Monica and I. And it's, thank you so much, Dean, because sparks have flown and it's wonderful and such a privilege to know you. So why don't we get started with you telling us, as I've asked every other panelist, a bit about your journey. You know, who are you? And how did you get to being in the arts and the capacity that you are? Yeah, so it's it's been quite a journey, I would say, a journey I'm still on in terms of really learning and growing as an artist and as a scholar. And so I pretty much I started out as an actor, who was always very curious about, I guess you could say interdisciplinary study, I think at the time I didn't necessarily think of it in that way. But now looking back and realizing how I've just been curious about learning about the world and learning about people. And really interested in collaborating with people in a lot of different ways. And so again, I started as an actor.  And the ways in which sometimes people would want to cast me didn't necessarily align with my values or are even in roles that really explore the range and depth of humanity, the ways that I wanted to be able to do that. And so what I ended up doing is, at one point, I was awarded a grant to direct the play because I decided, well, if if I can't find an opportunity for myself, I'm going to create one. Not just for myself, but also for others. And so I applied for a grant to direct the play was awarded the grant and ended up directing for my first production August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone, which is has wonderful roles. But for some reason, where I was located at the time, there weren't people who really stage and work like that. And so in stating that play, I had an opportunity to work with a lot of really wonderful actors. And I learned a lot and decided it was something that I would like to continue to do.  And at the time, I was not familiar with, you know, graduate study programs, I am a first generation college graduate. And, you know, just learning about Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you, but I'd love to just learn more about what that journey was like for you as a first generation college student myself. What were some of these challenges that you're speaking about? Yeah, well, part of it is, you know, even applying to college, and, you know, trying to find out what resources are available for support. I learned a lot about that. A lot of hard knocks, I should say, in terms of just trying to find out what resources you can access, how do you access them? And how do you sustain them, you know, to carry on your academic career? And so I started out at Spelman College, which was a wonderful, wonderful experience. But it was very, I experienced economic hardship when I was there. And so, you know, working multiple jobs and just trying to make it through the process. And so eventually, I wasn't able to stay. And, but I did continue with my education elsewhere, where it was less expensive, but maintained my connections with all of the wonderful people I met while I was at Spelman. And, you know, just continue to do the work. And so it's interesting, because at the time that I'd applied for that grant to direct a play, I'd also applied for a study abroad program because I minored in French. And so I had to choose between do I go to the study abroad program, which I'd received funding to get, or do I direct the play? I chose to direct the play. And I think that was in making that decision that sort of sent me on a very particular path as an artist, because I also began to understand what my commitment was because of the choice that I made. And so, so yeah, in directing that play, and then continuing to direct and pursue a graduate study. I, you know, just continue to gain additional skills as an actor and as a director, but then also started to study more in depth, sort of beyond the practical component in, you know, really exploring theory, and how theory relates to practice. And so I ended up doing a graduate study at the University of Florida, and then also earning my doctorate at the Ohio State University. And Charisma, I would like to congratulate you on your journey as you're about to undertake. And as a doctoral student at Stanford. Okay, so it looks like Charisma, you may be frozen. I'll continue to talk until we can maybe we can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you now. Oh, the internet connection. I'm so sorry. Oh, it's okay. Okay, so I'll get talking about my journey. So let's see. So the next question about the work that I'm doing now. I'm currently an associate professor of theater at Dartmouth College, where I'm also affiliate faculty in film and media studies, and also African African American Studies. Additionally, I am the founder and executive director of the Craft Institute, which is a nonprofit dedicated to curating culturally inclusive ecosystems throughout the world of arts and entertainment. And through our work at the Craft Institute, we do a variety of different things. One of our first major projects was to host the International Black Theater Summit, which we held an event in 2018, which was a celebration of reconvening of the National Black Theater Summit that legendary playwright August Wilson hosted at Dartmouth College back in 1998. And so we basically brought together scholars and practitioners working in theater, film, television and related media, and also invited the surviving members of the executive committee to organize the summit that August Wilson held 20 years prior, and basically came together to sort of assess where we are in this moment and to sort of project what our path forwards might look like if we were to work together throughout the diaspora. And so yes. So Karishma, I feel like I'm talking a lot. So I'm going to take a pause in case you can hear me and maybe some questions. Yeah. Thank you for bearing with me through the internet difficulties. Can you hear me okay? Yes, I can hear you great. Thank you. Okay, I'm going to for a while keep my video off and keep my audio on so we can try and see if I can still ask you the questions. Thank you so much for highlighting your journey, you know, in the field of academia, and also as a practicing artist, and also sharing some of the struggles, I'm sure it'll be really helpful for students or aspiring college students who are tuned in to learn about this journey. And I'm sure as we continue talking, more, more, more of these experiences of yours will come up in our conversation. Monica, when I met you and I learned about your work, I was very fascinated, particularly with the kind of impact that you're leaving through the work you're doing with the create ensemble. I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about where that idea came up from and what is the creative ensemble. Yeah. Yes. So thank you. Yes, create ensemble is a digital platform. And I'm one of the co founders of the platform with Dr. Nicole Hodges, personally, and also Victorian and Dunu. We essentially, Nicole and I are both artists, we're both actors and directors. And we work across multiple platforms. And in the one of these conversations we had, Nicole was sharing with me, you know, this idea of wouldn't it be great if there was a one stop shop where we could staff our projects where we didn't have to go searching for people every time we wanted to do something. And so from there, we really started to build out this idea for a platform that would allow us to invite artists working across multiple platforms like ourselves, folks who have sort of the same desire to actually want to create in a way that is really more grounded in our, you know, respecting and honor honoring our various cultural perspectives. So this platform is really it's artist centered. And it's, you know, designed from our own experiences as black women working in entertainment in the arts, and also as academics. And you know, just creating a space where people can share profiles as individuals and organizations. And I know Karishma you asked me earlier if I wanted to sort of walk people through it, I can share that or you know, you just talk a little bit about it. Okay. It'd be wonderful. It'd be wonderful to see. Yeah. And you know, I also would love to spend a little bit of time talking about the craft craft institute. So maybe we could start with create and then move move there. Okay, great. So I will need sharing privileges. And then I can share the screen with you. Leave our technical guru and master. Leah will be able to help. Thank you. Alright, so this is create ensemble. And I invite people to go to create ensemble.com. If you want to maybe just follow and you can create your your profile here. So Karishma, you can see this. Okay, yes. Yep, yep. Okay, great. So again, create ensemble is this digital platform that we put together to invite folks to create profiles for, you know, themselves as individuals and also as organizations. So here, if you sign up as an individual, essentially, you can share your information about the work that you do. So something of your background, and your union status, along with the bio and where you're located. Additionally, you can also post pictures, video reels, audio files, anything that supports, you know, it can showcase the work that you've done. So here you can see some images from a production of August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean that I directed a few years ago. In addition to the video reels and audio files, you can post your resume as well. Sharing a bio and, you know, just the type of work that you do in the field. And so here, because I'm a director, actor, educator, writer, scholar, it lets people know the types of work that I'm interested in doing so that they can reach out to me. So again, you can fill in all of this information here that talks about your experience, the different areas that you work in your education, as well as languages. One of the parts of the platform that I really appreciate is the fact that you can list your different work locations. So while I am based in the Boston area, I have connections with folks in, you know, New York and Florida and Tennessee, a lot of different places where even if I'm not based in those areas, I can work in those spaces because I have either a place to stay or other folks that I can, who can help support. Anything that I might need when I'm in those areas. Additionally, in addition to setting up an individual profile, you can also set up a company profile. So I have two, you saw the one that I have there as an individual artist. But this is the one that I have for the craft Institute. And so you would come here and you can learn more about some of the, you know, some of the activities and things that we've done at the Craft Institute. And so you can either follow me as an individual or follow me through the organization. Along with that, one of my social media, sorry, I was saying this is this is like social media for performing arts. And I think it's so cool, because there's so many various ways of connecting from where I see, aside from just creating a profile. And, you know, it's really, it's really great to see that there's also space to centralize this kind of information for artists around the world. Yeah. So yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I just thought I would I would say that. No, that's great. And that's what I love talking talking to you about it, because I know you get it right away. A couple of things that I wanted to point out to and, you know, give you a chance to talk a little bit more about, you know, what what you've appreciated about the platform. But in addition to, you know, posting jobs or, you know, looking for jobs on the site, one of my favorite features is the fact that you can create projects. And so we have like a few sample projects on the platform. But for one of the things that I'm really looking forward to once things open up post COVID is, and even some of the things I have going ahead of that is you can create a project on this platform and staff it through the platform. So all you have to do is fill out the title, the type of project that is provided description. You can list the project is paid or unpaid because some people are not feel that are, you know, they like to barter services as opposed to paying in case they don't have a huge budget in order to do the project. And you can list where the project is going to take place and identify the type of talent that you would need in order to produce the project. So whether it's an actor, director, you need a cinematographer, a costume designer, you can put all of the things you need on the platform. Additionally, you can put the schedule of the project so people can you can identify straight away if you believe in available during the times that you would need them to be available. And also you can specify if there are if there's available housing, or even childcare or elder care, which I really appreciate as a working mother in the arts. Very often when I have to travel for work, it's another source of labor to have to identify if I'm bringing my kids with me. So once you created a project, you can post the project here. And what you do, this is one of our test out one of these. One of the test projects. If they wanted to apply for the position, they would, you know, submit their cover letter, their CV and submit. And all of those applications would go into your project dashboard and you can feel those applications and staff people for the project. So in addition to that, folks can join circles. And so it's a circle. Basically, it serves the same function as a Facebook group, where people can, you know, join the circle and follow different stories, share pictures, have conversations the same way that you would on Facebook. But this is a safe space where, again, you have the same sort of protections of a moderated Facebook group. But then also people who are posting on within the circle, you can also see their profile and reach out to them and connect with them on the platform so that they would become part of your connections. And once folks are part of your connections, you can actually message them through the site. So the whole site is designed in a way to really bring people together to engage folks in conversation so that they so again, we can come together as artists and producers and create work that resonates for us, and not be at the mercy of Broadway or Hollywood or any of the other predominantly white institutions that we've had to, you know, you know, that a lot of folks really are just waiting for opportunities in those spaces when we believe that in addition to working in those spaces, if people would like to do that, that we should also be able to have a choice to be able to create the work that resonates for us within our communities and for our communities as well. So Karishma, I know you wanted me also to talk a little bit about the Craft Institute. So yeah, before I mean, I don't know if you can hear me, but I put it in the chat. Just case, but it'd be great to hear you talk a little bit more about your vision with this platform and also with Craft perhaps in a segue, particularly as it relates to this idea of job security in the arts and access to opportunity for opportunities for folks of color. Yes. So yeah, I think for this platform, though, the one thing that I would really encourage folks to think about is having a space where we can showcase what we're capable of doing as artists and also as scholars. So if you notice within the circles, we have like an academic circle even. So we want folks from every discipline that's related to storytelling and creativity, you know, to come together and for us to really start thinking about how the work that we do resonates in a lot of different ways. And so we have essentially been inviting folks to this platform, you know, not just to, you know, to showcase the work, but then also it helps facilitate some of the activities that we do through the Craft Institute. And so hold on, I'm trying to see what the question is in the chat. Okay, yeah, so in relation to job security. So let me just say one of the things that I talked to my students about a lot is that we all know, and this is something that I was teaching, you know, in my classrooms, well before COVID hit, and we found ourselves in this moment of reckoning in the larger world, but specifically in the realm of theater and film and television, is that these institutions, the ways in which they have been built, have not been built with people of the global majority at the center, and especially black people, many of us are fighting histories and legacies of misrepresentation. And for for generations, I think a lot of folks have felt really powerless in shifting that even though we, when I say we, I'm talking about black people in particular, and people of the global majority. Generally, we have always found ways to fight against and circumvent some of the barriers that exist within the arts and entertainment fields. But I find that we are now in this moment in history, better equipped than it any other moment, to access the resources we need in order to tell the stories resonate most for us, and to connect globally. And this platform is really designed to do that. One of the things that we're really hoping for with this platform, which is, and Karishma, you and I talk about this as well, is linking people throughout the diaspora, so that we can, again, identify what the needs are in our various communities and figure out how we can support each other in creating the work. But then also, serving as our audience, our primary audience for the work that we do so that we're not constantly trying to cross over to a predominantly white audience, which ultimately ends up shifting the narrative in a way that doesn't always bring true for us or our communities. And so that's really one of the drivers of this platform. It is global and shift the paradigm because it encourages us, again, to rely on ourselves and not the institutions that have historically misrepresented us. And so that, you know, the ethos of this platform is really connected to the work that I do with the Kraft Institute. So one of the one of the primary connections between Kraft and Create Ensemble is our mentorship through the Kraft Institute, a mentorship program which is called Pay It Forward. And the program itself was really inspired by my own experience as a, you know, a black woman entering the arts. And I feel like I was, I've been very fortunate in, you know, connecting with folks who've been really supportive of the work that I wanted to do and reaching a certain level in my career, just starting to realize that mentorship is invaluable, but not a lot of people have access to it. And not a lot of people really know how to do it. And so I wanted to create a program that would allow more people to have a similar experience to what I had in terms of connecting with folks who could help me along my path. And so I initially started the program back in 2016 when I was the president of the Black Theater Association. So we started the program through there. And it has since grown and become a part of the Kraft Institute. And again, the program is for folks at every stage of their career because there is no point that you get to where you don't need support or advice or, you know, just someone that you can bounce ideas off of to see if the path that you're projecting for yourself that you can, you know, actually take that path or create that path based on some of the things that other folks may know about how it works. And so we actually run the program. We facilitate the program through Create Ensemble. So if you want it to join and participate, all you have to do is go to the Mentorship tab, click on Pay Up Forward. It brings you to this page. If you want to join the program, you fill out an application. And once your application is approved, and it's really short, it's just an opportunity for you to share what area of mentorship that you would like support in or what area of mentorship that you would like to provide support. And we have people in the program, including myself, I participate in the program and I will have mentees and I also have mentors in the program. So you can do both. And once you sign up and your application is approved, you'll show up in one of these either as a mentee or a mentor. And if there's someone that you're interested in connecting with, then basically you click on their name. You can select match request. And if they match with you or accept your match request, then you're put together. And our administrator will be in touch and let you know about a lot of our different activities, different events where we bring together the mentors and the mentees to work together on or basically just go through different panels, programs, sessions, activities that are relevant for that particular cohort. So it's on applications are accepted on a rolling basis. So if folks are interested, they can you know reach out to me and or they can just you know join the platform and sign up here. So Karishma, are you still there? Karishma's next question is what advice would you have for a young person trying to enter the arts? I would say for someone who's interested in entering the arts, do it. I think what's most important is really assessing what your interests are, like what are your goals. And a lot of what one of the things I'll say too in terms of my own journey is that everything I do is purpose driven. And so I generally ask you know and when I'm speaking with my students or mentees and just you know ask like what do you feel is your purpose on the planet? You know why are you here? What are you here to do? And if you feel like the arts is the space where you can fulfill that purpose on the planet? Go for it. You know talk to people who are doing the things that you would like to see or the things that you would like to be doing. You know study, study is really important. There are you know a lot of people who are you know sort of born with a gift where they're capable of you know doing whatever artistic practice that you know they're interested in doing. And I think it's important even for those with gifts to study because there are ways in which you will learn even more about the craft of the area that you're working in artistically. And you're also going to learn a lot more about yourself. And so you know identify and when I say study I'm not necessarily even endorsing study in you know these predominantly white training programs. I think it's really important to you know research a range of programs that might be of interest to you. And look for you know instructors. Some place where you can go and really explore the craft in a way that's going to amplify your voice through the lens of your cultural perspective. And in a way that really aligns with your values and how you want to what you want to project into the world. Sounds great. Can we ask you how we can follow you and your work aside from the platforms that you have shared with us today? Yes so um well I'm on Twitter. I'm not happy about it. I'm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram you know the usual places. You can find me as either Monica Whiteham doing a PhD or you can follow me through the Craft Institute's social media platforms again Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and also Create Ensemble same same social media platforms. And yeah and I'm really interested you know and open to hearing more about the work that everybody's doing and hopefully you know folks will sign up on Create Ensemble so we can amplify your work on that platform as well. The platform is actually about to undergo a redesign and so I'll be sharing more information about that in the near future but it's operational. We encourage people to sign up and look forward to actually highlighting the work of a lot of the folks that are on the platform soon. So if you're not on there yet definitely sign up soon and if you are on there make sure your profile is complete so that we can go ahead and highlight some of the work that you're doing as well. Thank you so much Monica for taking the time today to talk to us I'm not sure if I can be heard can you hear me? Yes I can hear you. I'm so sorry for these internet difficulties at my end and for the challenge of having to try and be interviewed without an interviewer who has a stable internet connection so I'm really really sorry but thank you so much for your grace and for being so willing to to lead us through this conversation and share the craft institute and create ensemble platforms and also how we can connect with you. Since I do have the internet connection I'm so eager to ask you some more questions if it's time for us to close out. This is more of a philosophical question that I have related to what you feel the importance of art education at different levels of people's careers is and I ask this not only in the context of people that want to become artists eventually but just in any sort of training what are your thoughts and what are your experiences with with the field of arts education at the various levels at which you've interacted with it you know whether it's as a PhD student yourself a professor and you know a mentor to young young people through the platform as you've talked about well first I want to say you don't have to apologize for anything we are still in the middle of two converging or say multiple converging pandemics so and we're all doing our best so no worries at all there in terms of arts education I think again as I mentioned before the importance of study you know it can't be overemphasized but I also want to sort of expand even the notion of study you know so there's you know formal study and then also our informal ways of studying as well and I think practice is an important part of study and you know documenting your process when engaged in practice and sort of revisiting like what is that like how your process works you know what's effective about it even what may be harmful about it is that there's anything that that you can adjust and ensuring that we're taking care of ourselves first and foremost as human beings as we're doing this work as artists as educators it's really critical that you know we can't be here on the planet if our instrument isn't in shape to be able to be here if our minds and our spirits are not you know in a space because as artists and even as educators we give a lot so we have to find ways of pouring back into ourselves to make sure that we're healthy in every possible way I also think community is really important so you know in ensuring that you yourself and your instrument are in good order part of that I think is finding ways to be connected with other folks who are who also sort of who who feed you and your that you can exchange healthy energy amongst one another and so ensuring that you are around people who are not toxic you know but are actually encouraging for you and then I think also identifying the types of work that again aligned with who you are and the messages that you want to put out into the world and that doesn't mean that we we only put out uncomplicated work that everybody agrees with which I don't even know if such a thing exists but ensuring that whatever it is that we put out there is something that you know we can stand by and want to be doing and so I think that's part of the arts education that you know very often we think of it as earning a degree you know taking classes and getting credentialed but that's only part of it you know the other part of it is really I call it spirit work you know it's something for me that's very much rooted in you know it's a very spiritual thing for me so hopefully that answers your question yeah absolutely and I think that's such a powerful note to end on such a wonderful way for us to leave with the thought of reflecting about how to you know cannibalized and use all of our practical experience to to really teach us and guide us and show us the way and it's so refreshing to hear you say that despite and after also having a degree yourself like you know despite being a doctor the emphasis that you place on on on practice is so important and so thank you for sharing that part of wisdom with all of us oh thank you and again I really appreciate your time and really appreciate all of our audience members patience and grace with me in my internet connection and thank you for understanding but really really thank you for talking to us and sharing your work with us and hopefully we'll be able to find our folks joining the platform with various platforms and connecting with you to learn more for sure thank you so much for inviting me Karishma and I'm so excited for you in the journey that you're undertaking and look forward to staying connected I really appreciate that and yes I can't wait to meet you in person finally very soon when I'm in the US so thank you for that for sure and once again thank you so much howl around to all of our producing partners and to our two wonderful sign language interpreters for being with us through all the technical difficulties so thank you we'll see you next week hopefully I'll have a more stable form of connectivity then with for our final panel session and yeah we'll we hope to reconnect you know through the through the waves so thank you everybody and see you next week thank you have a great thank you


Hey guys it's Leana and I'm here today to talk about Born to Crime by Trevor Noah. I know it's non-fiction and uh it's really not the kind of thing that I normally read or talk about on this channel.  I mean this sounds like such a hipster but since before he was famous that yeah that's obviously not true. But um he I first saw him because I watch a lot I'm on Anglophiles. I watch a lot of British panel shows and British comedy and stuff like that and I first saw him on a British panel show where he kind of just was a British commie or was a comedian from South Africa who was being featured on British television and he mentioned his upbringing and he he spoke some tasa which I can't even the name of the language has a click in it so I can't say it right but he spoke some of that and was utterly charming and so well spoken and then when he joined The Daily Show as like one of the cast I was like oh that's Trevor Noah and then he became the host of The Daily Show now everybody knows who Trevor Noah is. So obviously I listened like his friend in high school. I obviously only came to know who he was when he was at least somewhat famous because he was on British television. All that to say I've been a fan of his for a while and when I heard he was publishing this book I pre-ordered it. I got it immediately and I have had the physical book and the audiobook for a long time because the book came out in like 2017 I want to say. 2016 maybe? 2016. This is the first edition. Anyway all that to say this is a memoir of his childhood and growing up during apartheid in South Africa and some of it I was like a little bit familiar with because he talks a lot about his background, his childhood, his upbringing in his stand-up comedy and he weaves it in when he's discussing politics and whatever that's his experience so it's obviously relevant to the way he perceives what's going on presently in America or all this kind of thing. He's always come across as very well-spoken very uh even keeled I want to say that's one of the things I like about his comedy and his personality on The Daily Show. He's not one of those like in-your-face type people that's like really aggressive all the time and really you know what I mean like he's not he just he comes across very calm and collected and well-spoken and like he's put a lot of thought into what he's saying and so I imagined that his book would also reflect that and it does and the audiobook is read by Trevor so if you like audiobooks I recommend audiobook because for one he reads it's a memoir so he's telling his own story so who better to tell his own story than himself but also there's so many instances where people are speaking like a various uh African languages which I would have no idea how they're supposed to sound or how to read them and he he speaks them all so fluently so it just I mean it's not like you couldn't read this book not knowing those languages and like you couldn't read this book it's not like it's written in those languages but hearing him speak those languages I've very much enjoyed and I think added to the experience and it's not something that I'd be able to understand or experience reading it myself because I don't know um he doesn't just also he doesn't just speak African languages he speaks German he speaks Spanish he speaks a bunch of different languages so he's um not just well spoken but he's internationally well spoken this book was too short that's my only complaint about it but that said brevity is its own art and that's one of the top things I praise Neil Gaiman for is his brevity and so Trevor Noah this isn't filled with like a bunch of fluff and unnecessary filler it's really to the point and he tells the stories that he wants to tell and they all kind of connect in some of it it's not entirely chronological it's largely chronological from young very young childhood to young adulthood but he just jump around a bit because he kind of organizes things by theme or where their appropriate or brings in anecdotes that later become relevant or he organizes it in a way that makes sense according to theme as well as his age and this is just such a good book I expected to like it I thought it would be good because I really like Trevor Noah knowing what I know about his life I figured it'd be interesting to hear about how he grew up knowing that being half black if you don't know are partied it was illegal for for black people and white people to marry and to have children or anything like that and his mother is black and his father is white so his existence his very existence is illegal that's why it's called born a crime so I knew that about him and I knew that about his sort of origins so to speak because I'd heard him I don't think that joke but he had referred to himself as being born as having been born a crime before someone I heard that what's what he named his book I was like I don't make sense that's really appropriate but there was just so much more to his I mean I imagine a story about somebody living in impoverished circumstances and having to hide from the law and that's all I really anticipated going into this but there's just so much to what South Africa was like and I don't know anything about it this is pretty much my first experience learning about it which I mean brief aside America's school education system is is so inadequate because I don't know anything about South Africa because it wasn't taught in school it wasn't even taught in university I'm ashamed that I don't know about it but also it's not my fault and I think more people should know about it be taught about it and the things that I was taught in school I just I that's a whole other conversation for another day basically there's just so much to his experience that is just so informative and educational because I know nothing about South Africa I know apartheid was a thing that existed but that's it I didn't really even know when it started how it started when exactly it ended how it ended I just kind of vaguely I'm aware that apartheid is a thing and kind of vaguely what apartheid was about but that's it and now I wouldn't say I'm an expert on it but so much of this was so illuminating and there's a part in the book where you put this down he talks about a friend of his whose name was Hitler and he's a black guy in South Africa his name was Hitler and he is going to be telling a story he's about to tell a story that has Hitler in it but it's important to note that his name is Hitler so he takes a moment before he tells the anecdote to discuss one yeah his name is Hitler and two that's not at all uncommon in South Africa that there's a lot of guys named Hitler and why that is fine or it's actually a great it's really indicative of your western view of things that you would you would gasp at that and if you think of it from their perspective it isn't actually strange that that's occurred and they are not Nazis there and then they can't be white supremacists they're black so he talks about how the the way that people would be naming their children how they would choose their names and how the government's role and how people would choose their names and how they would often revere and want to choose from names that were strong men from history and as far as they're concerned as far as their awareness Hitler is just another strong man from history I don't know I mean they kind of know but not really not and they're not taught about the Holocaust in schools just like we're not really taught about apartheid in schools so like they might kind of vaguely know that Hitler did some bad stuff but Hitler was a big powerful dude that scared the shit out of people and so like that's a strong name and so it's a good strong name to give your kid and that's really all there's to it they're not pro-Hitler they're not pro-nazi they're just choosing a name the way that you might choose you know a name like Thor it's just oh it's just a strong name so his name is Hitler and a lot of people's name is Hitler but then this duck did come up and I mean this became relevant because they don't think of the name as being anything out of the ordinary unusual and they he and Hitler were deejaying at a bar mitzvah and you can see where this ended up going stuff like that just the fact that yeah I of course hear someone's name is Hitler and I'm just like oh my god that's awful but that's because I am taught in school about extremely western events extremely western atrocities and of course the Holocaust is awful but again Trevor Noah makes the point of okay but think about how many black people were killed in Africa when Europeans came and went all the times that they came and went and is that I mean is the Holocaust worse than that I mean it's debatable but we don't talk about those atrocities the way that we talk about the Holocaust like it's the end all and be all have historical atrocities of course the Holocaust is an atrocity there are other atrocities out there and the Holocaust isn't regarded or hasn't affected people in other parts of the world and in their education in their memory in their personal experience so why should they think the Holocaust is worse than the atrocities that they experienced you know and it just that perspective shift I just yeah and I always bring up the fact that I studied anthropology but it did remind me of studying anthropology because part of anthropology is taking the familiar and making it other and taking the other and making it familiar so taking myself out of my own experience and trying to see the world through the eyes of somebody who was educated differently experienced life differently experienced a different part of the world where the things that I just take for granted as being relevant as being important as being facts that you just know the way you know that gravity works and turning them on their head we're like yeah why would they know why would they care that's it's really um arrogant to think that people in Africa would think that Hitler is the worst thing that happened to the world why should they so anyway um this book isn't just about a guy named Hitler there's a lot of I mean his the stories he tells about his childhood they'll have you laughing they will have you crying they will have you shocked and amazed they'll have you it'll warm your heart his oh I came away from this I knew his mother was you know quite a bold woman and quite a strong woman and I mean she raised a half white kid during apartheid like just knowing that about a person is enough to tell you that that person's probably pretty incredible the stories that Trevor tells about his mother she's an amazing woman he really owes a lot of who he is and his success in life to her and I don't think I mean he'd be the first to say that that's true so it was it was incredible I legitimately I was laughing and I was crying and it's an emotional roller coaster that's well worth it Trevor reads it so well because he's it feels like he's just like having a conversation with you he's just chatting with you about his life and it's kind of amazing that somebody how far he's come how high he's risen but also that he's never really forgotten his roots and he's he doesn't tell a story where he's going you should pity me and you should be impressed and you should be amazed at how I have pulled myself out of the misery he doesn't tell it like that he tells it like this all these experiences shaped him and I don't think well I wouldn't say he wouldn't change any of it because a lot of it is very tragic I'm sure he would have preferred not the girl that way but it's not a pity party I guess is what I'm saying he experienced things that that rival pretty much any sob story anybody could ever offer you his his childhood was it's not an easy one but he's not the book isn't trying to like make you feel guilty or or make you again pity him or or anything like that it doesn't feel like that at all it feels very honest and very raw and very it's just really good he tells it well he tells it briefly he tells it anecdotally he tells it in a way that has you laughing and crying and and it's just so good it's so freaking good I was so sad that it was over so quickly because it was so so amazing all right I guess that's all I have to say about it um if you have any interest in all in reading a book about an incredible person who's lived an incredible life then then read Born a Crime and again I'm sure reading it as a physical book would be fine I'm sure it would be enjoyable and great but it's just so much I think it just adds so much to it that he's reading it because they're his memories and because even if you've got a narrator that could speak all those African languages and could read it just as accurately as he does they're his memories so it's just adds something so much more personal to it when you know that the person who's reading it to you right now he lived it he's it's not a story that's his life so I highly highly recommend the audiobook because it feels like a privilege to hear him tell his own story and to share it with us let me know in the comments down below if you are a big fan of Trevor Noah like I am even if you're not a big fan of his comedy I think the book is is still worth picking up because it means stand-up comedy is something so different from an honest examination of one's own life so if his this isn't a humor book this isn't filled with his stand-up and jokes obviously there's some humor in it because some of the circumstances of his upbringing are just humorous in and of themselves in a dark way so there's naturally just as life naturally has comedy built into it but it's not it's not a comedian's book it's just a memoir so pick it up it's what I'm saying I just I can't imagine anyone not getting something out of this book whatever your feelings are about his politics or his comedy or anything like that I highly recommend it if for nothing else it will just open your eyes to a completely different perspective and make you question all the things that you just accepted and took for granted as as positions as knowledge as facts not that those facts aren't true but just their their importance their significance or where they are they're bearing on on your world view yeah okay let me know in the comments down below your feelings about Trevor Noah about memoirs in general about apartheid if you want to tackle that in the comments I guess go ahead let me know anything and everything I post videos on Saturdays sometimes Wednesdays so like and subscribe and I'll see you when I see you bye