Hello and welcome to Data Diversity Talks, a podcast where we discuss with industry leaders and experts how they have built their careers around data. I'm your host, Shannon Kemp, and today we're talking to Nick Acheson, the Chief Data Officer at Okara. Welcome, my name is Shannon Kemp, and I'm the Chief Digital Officer at Data Diversity. This is my career in data, a Data Diversity Talks podcast dedicated to learning from those who have careers in data management to understand how they got there and to be talking with people to help make those careers a little bit easier. To keep up to date in the latest in data management education, go to DataDiversity.net forward slash subscribe. Today, we are joined by Nicholas Acheson, the Chief Data Officer at Okara. Normally, this is where we podcast host would read a short bio of the guest, but in this podcast, your bio is what we're here to talk about. Nick, hello and welcome. Hey, thanks for having me. So Nick, Chief Data Officer at Okara, what is it that you do? That is an awesome question because I have found that Chief Data Officers vary widely in their responsibilities. The exciting part of that is normally it's tied to the maturity of the company, and that's no different than my role here at Okara and where we are as a startup. So I'd say this next year, I'm spending a lot of time focusing on how are we thinking about the integrations and patterns and then really enabling our customers to be able to deliver in this new world of data mesh and data fabric and distributed data sources. So I'm working a lot with our sales team as well as with our current customers to really continue to build out what a maturity process and map would look like and how to deliver business results faster through that process. Now, next year, I probably shift back in more internally focusing on platforms and technologies. But for now, I think that's our number one priority right now is really, especially in the environment we're in, making sure that we're setting up our current and prospective customers for success. Like it and to put that framework, to put that into perspective, I should say, so tell me a little bit about Okara and what the company is that you are working at. Yeah, the easiest way to think about us is a dynamic access platform. So I think most of the folks that are probably even clicking on your site are really trying to navigate this in the world we're in right now not having enough people and resources but having way too much data. How do I start thinking about interacting with data as an asset across my ecosystem regardless of where my data is? So Okara, our sweet spot really is if you're in like Databricks and Snowflake and AWS and GCP for your compute capabilities. We enable our customers to be able to create one policy that effectively integrates in every data source that they operate against. So instead of having millions federated and distributed that are very hard to audit and manage, we've got a very simple UI and enable stewardship at scale as data continues to scale, frankly, with less people. Very interesting. And I love that even a data vendor sort of speak has a chief data officer just goes to show that how important data is. Yeah, what's the fun is I just joined Okara about a month ago and I've been a customer of Okara even pre money of Okara when they were a very early startup. I actually brought them in with an idea as we were building out our data mesh before data was kind of a term. So it's a nice full circle to come join this side of the table and it's pretty exciting for me. Very nice. So I don't imagine that when you were very young and you're as a child that you imagine I'm gonna be a chief data officer for Okara when I grow up. So what was your goal when you were a child? What did you wanna be when you grew up? Yeah, that's a funny question because I guess you'd say is I matured into two before I matured into the career that I had. So when I'm younger, right? Like any other kid, I want it to be a professional baseball player, right? And it's just like, but then you start realizing, I don't know if I wanna be playing around in AA and AAA living in hostels and maybe making money and maybe get there one day. So before I got to college that dream kind of became more of the, is that really what you wanna do? And then I'd say as I came into college I was actually a philosophy undergrad major. I read all my philosophy books even actually before I even went to my undergrad first class and my goal was to be a research traveling professor around philosophy of mind and neuroscience and identity. So it's a fun full circle around working for an identity authorization company but yeah, that was my route up until I met my wife, late junior year of college. And we all realized again, I don't know if I wanna eat peanut butter jelly sandwiches until I can get tenure and enough books published. So. Sure. So then what'd you do? How did you get from there to your current role? Yeah, I went to a small and very intentionally a small school for my undergrad so I could just work towards my master's degree in parallel in publications. And I did that right outside of the Northern Virginia area in DC area. And if you look at my profile, you can quickly see I basically worked, I shipped over and started working at NSA right after graduating from college. So as it on the vendor side because most of the folks on the inside are mostly doing acquisition. So it was really fun, those same concepts of philosophy of mind of distributed systems and understanding how brain waves and connectivities impact motions and so forth. Like I love that systems thinking and systems approach. And so it was a very natural movement for me to move into tech at the agency. And right as they were coming into, you know big data before big data was a term and trying to figure out like what is the cloud and how do we leverage it? Those are really fun things for me because I just looked at the agency and the intelligence community itself as a large system. And how do you think about the interaction of those systems and optimize? Very interesting. So I think we're kind of missing a step though like how did you get into the tech? I mean, it sounded like a, were you always interested in tech? Was that just kind of a subtext always to go from philosophy to, you know I mean, you mentioned that you were in the science. Yeah, no, this is where my dad will laugh when he listens to this podcast. He always thought I'd be a weight guesser at Carnival when I told him I wanted to be a philosophy major. So he's in tech, you know 25 plus year Navy veteran moved into tech and then it was kind of always in the background of hey, you could apply those things here you don't have to go work at the Carnival. So I finally junior year was like, all right fine I took a next turn ship down by the agency and next thing you know, I just rapidly continued to, you know blessed to be having great mentors early on in my career that gave me opportunities I probably didn't qualify for. Nice, nice, very nice. So, so then where did you go from there from the agency? Yeah, I did about a third of my career in the agency about 10 years or so back to my wife all things go through family. We had our second kid and I'm spending, you know 18 hours in basements or proposal rooms or otherwise without accessibility. And, you know she just asked me is this the kind of family that we want to raise and is this the lifestyle we want? And obviously the answer was no. So we packed up our bags I folded up my company at the time and literally with like a 45 day notice we moved out West and then I decided to go commercial. So I was kind of like phase two of my career is I really kind of went around as like this hired assassin trying to help companies figure out how do you move to the cloud what challenges are you going to run into? Cause frankly I've come to terms with this I'm not going to see the kind of challenges I saw at the agency anywhere else in the world. So if we can build it there everyone else has a much easier roadmap to be able to get there and then that's where it's just really helping companies connect into mission and business and go to technology is easy part if you know the patterns it's really about how do we unlock the business? So I went through quite a few companies there I was at Phillips basically traveling around building out that integration strategy and migration path. I spent some time at concur fixing some of their hateful eight problems that we used to call it in terms of helping them scale but also adjusting to GDPR. I like to say I did my tour of UNICEF by spending some time at Premier Blue Cross trying to help make healthcare work better by creating an open API ecosystem. So really just working on extremely hard problems but again, more in that like research enablement transformation phase but I'd say I became the leader that I'm still growing into when I went to Nike and ran to enterprise data platforms there. And that's when I really shifted from hard problems to building teams and organizations and really helping an organization transform not just do some really cool products and driving good experiences for a customer but how do you do that holistically? So what then? It's so obviously you work a lot with data and have for most of your career then so what is your definition of data? Oh, wonderful question. I kind of didn't wanna answer this one and I was thinking about like back like talking around it. I talk a lot about like data as an asset, right? And what does it mean to create data as an asset? But I think your question fundamentally goes what even is data, right? And thank you for scratching my philosophy at cheer. But I like to say like classically data was I'd say it used to be a byproduct of the business. And what I mean by that is sometimes it was very intentional to help make decisions but we knew they weren't really data-driven decisions. It was really like looking at, hey, what happened when we did this? And a lot of it was descriptive types of analytics all driven by just open data. And I think the world's making a shift now to go, no, data itself is the asset. Now, how are you trying to use that asset? What am I allowed to use that asset for? How does that, what happens when I apply that asset to other assets and like giving it the respect it deserves? And I think that's the space I think that we're in right now. And if you think about it that way it's like systems themselves, right? And just the core nature of data. In my mind, a whole ecosystem is data, right? How do we interact? How do we connect to applications? It's through identity of data and individuals. How do we authorize them? It's understanding the tags and the attributes associated with that asset. And so for me, I'd be like everything we interact with is either creating, generating, or foundationally driven by what we call data. But in my mind, it's again, it's like every interaction that we and systems have with each other is creating that content. And it's valuable and it needs to be protected at the same time too. Makes sense. With a robust catalog of courses offered on demand and industry leading live online sessions throughout the year, the Dataversity Training Center is your launchpad for career success. Browse the complete catalog at training.dataversity.net and use code DVTALKS for 20% off your purchase. Certainly appreciate that definition. And do you see the importance of data management in the number of jobs working with data increasing or decreasing over the next 10 years and why? I'm gonna intentionally not answer a somewhat different question. Like clearly it's going to continue, right? Like data is not going anywhere. It's getting more core. What I think is, I think we're gonna see a continued evolution around how do we interact with data and how does that change the jobs associated with data? I had a great conversation with my wife about this as we were talking to our girls. I have a nine and a seven year old. And when we talked to them, I was like, look, everything you are going to do by the time you grow into your career, data is gonna be at the core of it. It's either an enabling function or it's an output that you can think about as an asset and how you interact with other organizations. So regardless of what you do, even if you wanna do ballet, like understanding and optimizing your jump and so like there's so much science behind all that. So I think we're gonna continue to see a churn in how we interact with data, more specifically much more natural language processing, right? I think you've seen ThoughtSpot for example, blow up because how do you create more citizens analysts that are trusted and protected because they don't know the rules, they don't know data ethics and things like that. So I think we're gonna see more technologies continue to abstract out those hardcore data roles like data engineers and so forth. And more so go like, how do I put the right tools in people's hands that I can make seven data engineers feel like 700 and not treat 700 people like data engineers. So I think we're gonna see that change. And I think that's gonna continue to evolve the workspace, but everybody's gonna have to have some kind of STEM or STEAM type of background. Very interesting. Yeah, so you see a good place for data engineers any other data roles types that we'll see need more of or be creating more efficient rules for? Yeah, I think we're gonna continue to see those other peripheral roles get closer to data. And so that's where I think data is gonna be a foundational need for every role. So even as a lawyer, right? And going, you think about data permissibility and its impact on our products and how we think about and protect our customers as much as we protect the assets that we have. So I think we're already seeing that. But yeah, I think you even see roles like analytics engineer, right? How do you, can you describe the difference between analytics engineer and a data engineer if you're not in a hardcore data organization? So I think these are the ones are like, we might see roles shift, right? And see more data engineer shift into that because now we're thinking about the enablement of data versus just the acquisition of data. So I think we're gonna keep seeing those roles shift out. We continue to see the blurring lines between BI analyst and insights analysts and the data scientists, right? They continue to walk up the maturity path. So that's either gonna be career progression or it's gonna be hyper focus and then go, great, now what's the interaction with that with all the other data assets we have? I love it. So what advice then would you give to people looking to get into a career in data management? So I think we still see two differing paths in data management, right? There's the one side which is just the hardcore, can I, how do I get data? How do I enrich data? How do I protect data, store data and then enable the use of data? That's just the basics. This is how you operate an ecosystem. Now in there, I would put in the analytics teams and so forth, but we've seen this massive explosion on the business side with data. And that's not just your sales people shouldn't be SQL experts, like put that aside we're gonna mature out of that soon, right? But like true on governance, right? Everybody's talked about for years of how do I create data contracts? How do I get governance in the business? So my data engineers aren't providing data access requests and so forth. But the tools before never really enabled that for most governance folks that you meet frankly like they've come out of project management or program management or they're really coordinating with the business. And I think those kind of roles are gonna continue to expand like mentioning the legal part. I think every large enterprise organization now has a council tied to data. And so I think those are gonna be really interesting to see is like as you drive your individual careers do you wanna be on the technical side? Do you wanna be on the business side? Or is it on the enablement piece? And there's fungibility between those but there's a massive need especially on the business and enablement. Did you know Dativersity offers free monthly webinar series and online conferences throughout the year? Stay in the loop when you follow us on Twitter at Dativersity or on Instagram at Dativersity underscore edu. Get podcast extras and bonus content when you subscribe to our channel at youtube.com slash Dativersity. Very interesting. We've heard still a lot of companies resistant to the word data governance. They think it's, it is just following the law it is just the things something that you have to do and it's kind of a dirty word. So what advice would you give to executives who are not quite there yet or what is it about data governance that is so important on the business side? Yeah, I think so one of my headaches as running data analytics teams and priorities and so forth it was always, I take for example, Zendesk. When I was at Zendesk, we had over 250 SaaS applications powering Zendesk over seven of them were processing data and enriching and serving your own insights. And like, how do you protect all of that? How do you maintain visibility of all of your data assets across that full spectrum? Let alone somebody's publishing a report out there and I'm the data analytics organization everybody's gonna assume that those reports are coming from us certified by us or otherwise. And I have no way to even authenticate any changes that we make in that logic. So just the simple things like business terms and glossary who owns the definition of sales in North America? Who owns the changing of that definition of sales in North America? Like a Nike when Footlocker data was coming back depending on where it came from they changed the colors definition and in Texas they called a basketball shoe a lifestyle shoe but in California they called it a basketball shoe but in New York they changed the colors and the definition and it came back different enriched who owns the actual decisioning on maintaining and normalizing that. And that's the simple piece of like you gotta get your financial data, right? And that's where I think we're on the trend right now is you still have a lot of governance folks in the finance org because that's where you start, right?  But I think on the other side is yeah like how do you manage that at scale? You know, if you're especially an enterprise organization like a Pepsi how do you do that across all those systems maintain consistency even as the data moves in and out that's definitely on the enablements and business side and those business owners are accountable for what those metrics actually say. So there's no better place to have that in there. So even if you like don't have engineering teams in the business or you do or otherwise there still has to be consistency across the enterprise and we all know things now are fully connected end to end whether we want to admit that or not. Very, very sound advice indeed. Well, Nick thank you so much for this great interview and information. So I would be remiss however I didn't ask how people find out more about Okara. Yes, there's the obvious one is the okara.com. It's if it make it easy it's ok era. So we're here to make things ok and trust and build with our customers and yours. So I'd say check out there. I also just published a white paper on there too on the role and evolution of ABAC versus RBAC especially folks who are getting into the space to see and I really broke down the history of like how did this come out from data lakes to distributed to mesh and where's the space going and frankly called a couple cool companies out there that are really driving and enabling. So I think the first part of this is really just education understanding where we really are and then go great. Now how can we make an impact on that? I like it very nice. Well, Nick thank you so much and thanks to all of our listeners out there. And if you'd like to keep up to date on the latest podcast and the latest in data management education you may go to dataversity.net forward slash subscribe. Until next time. Awesome, thanks Shannon. Thank you for listening to Dataversity Talks brought to you by Dataversity. Subscribe to our newsletter for podcast updates and information about our free educational articles, blogs and webinars at dataversity.net forward slash subscribe.


Let's show you the highlights of this one and it opens up in the second period late in the second to actually at the 1545 Mike Ryan Kupner gets his first of two tonight on a rebound. Oh, yeah tough break right there That puck's getting cleared out and it ends up going right to Kupner here and he just gets it and just takes a shot Didn't even stick handle it Now at the 1843 Joe Grubowski at a defenseman gets down low left all alone great shot just inside the post Yeah, really good shot right here Bitzer want this one back again for sure on that angle on that yep Got a little deep maybe it would be it would be fair now on the power play but you stayed Brendan Harms Yeah makes it a 2-1 hockey game and you're thinking okay. We still have seven minutes to go Maybe we can tie it up after this nice delay there. Yeah, really good patience right there. Yeah, but then it's Really a knife right here is from Max Becker a great rush up ice and then on the backhand Yeah, I was moved his feet all the way through that neutral zone into the zone gets it to his backhand He just throws it to the net you just see it go right underneath that elbow and body of Bitzer right there Top it off with an empty net or two per cuff. He's got two goals tonight for the Princeton Tigers And there you have it from the Sabbath Center tonight


Hey guys, this is Nate, AKA The Foot Accountant. Welcome back to the channel. Continuing our team of the season so far, preparation series on the channel today. Today's a big one. We're talking about two areas of the market that a lot of people are very interested in with team of the season coming, prices being low and when to buy these cards, what to look out for, can you invest in these cards, stuff like that. Today we're talking about team of the season cards and we're talking about icons of all nature, base, middle, prime and moments. I have some interesting things that I think are gonna happen with these cards this year because it's different, right? In past years, the middle and the baby versions have never been out of packs, so that's interesting. But also, I wanna talk about team of the season cards, when you can buy them, when you can look to find them on the cheapest each week because last year it was copy-paste every single week. They were the cheapest on this one day and then they were the most expensive at the end of the week because it all revolved around the guaranteed team of the season SBC. So we're gonna talk about that today as well. We're gonna kinda split it up into two segments. I'm gonna talk about team of the season cards first and then I'm gonna talk about icons second. So I know there's gonna be a lot more talk about the TOTS cards, so I do wanna cover that. But I might spend a little bit less time talking about those, at least at the beginning because we kinda have to wait and see what EA wants to do with the guaranteed packs before we really figure out what's gonna happen with these cards. But this is the prem team of the season from last year.  When is gonna be the best time to buy them because it's obviously when they are in packs because again, team of the season, there's so much hype for these cards, man. Even for some of these guys that were in team of the season most consistent, right? Some of the most hyped up cards all year because their team of the season, they have juiced stats and even from this Friday, when most consistent comes out, these cards are going to rise out of packs. As you can see here, we're looking at Tellez, Allen, Wambasaka. The Suley card was like the big boy from last year. This was a card last year that just absolutely boomed out of packs and we'll talk about why in this video as well. And I also wanna talk about the SBC fodder level because last year in FIFA 19, people thought it was gonna be like FIFA 18 where we had a lot of guys boom in price because of SBC requirements. I mean, they did require team of the season cards in the guaranteed team of the season SBCs but not for the lower league. So these guys were so heavily supplied and there were more and more leagues that came after heavily supplying Todd's cards on the market. So it really didn't cause these team of the season, you know, lower tier or what you would call SBC fodder team of the season cards. They never really rose like they did in FIFA 18 when they were in team of the season. So we'll talk about that first of all, right? This is Reese James. And if you go back and you take a look at like Todd's most consistent and Todd's EFL, a lot of people invested in these cards last year because they thought they would rise when the guaranteed SBCs came and you can look and see what happened, right? People bought these cards up into the midweek, Monday comes and they just continue to fall as nobody really needs them for SBCs, right? A lot of people, you know, they stay, they maintain a price a week one because, you know, they're the only team of the season cards out there, but people start to rack up on tradable team of the seasons. They pack them for upgrade packs, they pack them in rewards. They get them from the lower level league team of the season guaranteed SBC, which were so cheap, it was basically just giving out a team of the season card from that lower league that was in packs. And that's why you saw these cards never really rise on the market. It could be different this year because of course there's so much demand for these guaranteed SBCs, but we're really gonna have to monitor that situation as it goes. Now this is the one really, really scummy thing that EA did last year with these cards. They had a minimum price range of like 19,500 coins for a lot of these team in the seasons. What EA did during the second or third week of TOTS is they lowered that to 10K. So there were people that were buying loads of these cards at discard because they thought, hey, you know what? A right back English decent stats. You know, this guy might go up at some point, right? And they lowered the minimum price to 10K and people lost a ton of coins on some of these cards. So in my opinion, I don't wanna touch any of these low tier guaranteed. I don't wanna touch any of these like SBC fighter team of the season cards right off the bat unless we see something different start to form and then we'll look ahead and start to talk about it. But the most important thing is a lot of you guys wanna know when do I buy these cards if I wanna try them out, right? The team of the season, this is the fluctuation. This is why I don't feel like I have to talk about it a ton because literally if you go back and look through these FIFA 19 team in the season squads, it's literally for the top league, right? Bundesliga this week, La Liga this week. The major league that came out every single week, the trend was basically the exact same every single week of when these cards were the cheapest in that week, right? So Sule came out with team of the season most consistent and he was the cheapest on Monday and Tuesday because the guaranteed team of the season SBC for the major league came out on Monday, without fail every single week. So we had Monday, most consistent. The next Monday we had Premier League because that was the next league. And when the guaranteed SBC comes out, what happens is people panic sell coming out of the weekend because they try the card like sweet. All right, I wanna go try some other cards and they know that probably a guaranteed SBC is coming. That's gonna be the case again this year. So we're gonna have to watch and see if EA does the guaranteed team of the season SBC on a Monday or a Tuesday, you're gonna see some of your lowest prices during that time period. Honestly, it was really good for the market last year what EA did, making that SBC on a Monday because you have the weekend league sell off. Everybody's playing a full weekend of games because they wanna try to get the best rank possible to get the best rewards and possibly get better picks and better packs and stuff because all of these cards are in packs. So you have the sell off really extends into Sunday when usually it would start in kind of Saturday because people would quit weekend league early. And then on Monday, people knew the guaranteed SBC was coming. So this stuff would just get panic sold and because people for some reason think, and we've seen it this year already with the party bag SBCs, is people think that they're gonna pack one of these really high level cards from the set. They think that since they have it in their club, they're gonna pack it. They think the price is gonna go down because EA is giving them out. When in reality, everybody is packing the low tier guys that are in that team of the season, right? You don't have as many people packing the high tier and the reward is untradable. So it's not putting supply onto the market, which then these prices rebound from. And we've seen this a million times in FIFA already this year with like guaranteed party bag SBCs, guaranteed SBCs of all types. You see a panic sell and a crash and then a rebound. And it's gonna happen with these cards this year as well. So whenever that guaranteed SBC is, when you see the panic selling and when you see that drop off, right? Look what happened from Sunday, Tela's was 380 on PlayStation to Monday. My guy was 335,000 coins. You go to Tuesday, he goes back up to 348 Wednesday. And then after rewards into the weekend, my guy on Saturday hits 410K. So he almost goes up about 80,000 coins. Then the next week he goes even higher with the links of this card being one of the best left backs, Brazilian left back. There's a continued hype there. The next weekend he hits 456K. So a 130,000 coin spike from that first week when he was in packs. Now not all cards rise, right? This Allen card last year was very popular. It did hit its lowest point in packs. And he did rise up out of the weekend league, but really not a much, right? When you see a card here that rises up, you know, 40, 50,000 coins, but then you see a Nicholas Suley go from 140K to two and a half weeks later being 300,000 coins, you're like, hold the phone. How do I figure out who this guy is gonna be this year? The reason why Suley went up so much and EA made sure that we weren't gonna have this problem this year was there was a lack of center backs in the Bundesliga, all right? The lack of center backs in the Bundesliga. So again, he is cheapest on Monday, right? He kind of chilled around that price. And then he went shooting up for the weekend league. He actually got sold off. And I'll talk about this a little bit too, because people thought last year they weren't sure if the team of the season most consistent cards that were from a major top five league, if they were gonna get put into the league team of the season squad as well. So people thought that since Suley was in most consistent, he also might be in team of the season Bundesliga, which he wasn't. He was not back in packs. And as you can see when Bundesliga came out, this man absolutely flew because there were more people building Bundesliga squads. And this was one of the only Bundesliga center backs that would link nicely with the Bayern Munich links, the German links in their squads with the new German, with the new Bundesliga team of the season. So we don't have a lack of Bundesliga center backs this year, but who could this happen with? You know, Italian, Syria, right backs could be a possibility. It all depends on who actually gets in to team and season most consistent. We'll look at that situation, see if we have any players that get in, where they juice the stats or whatever. But again, Monday is kind of the lowest time for a lot of these cards. Even a lower tier guy, right? Wabasaka was part of most consistent. He was his cheapest on Monday as well. He stayed low because people thought he might get included with the Prem Squad. Boom, he's not in the Prem Squad on Friday. He immediately jumps up 30,000 coins into the weekend and just continues to stay high as a Pacey English right back in team of the season. So if you go back and you look through all of these cards, I've only looked at most consistent, but I can show you all of these two, right? Premier League, right? Trent Alexander-Arnold, look at this dip, bro. He hits his lowest on Monday and Tuesday, he's 560K on Monday, and the dude two weeks later is 700,000 points. Demir Bey, right? A center mid from the Bundesliga. Not the most hype card, but this is like a juiced statistical version of a beast card. And look how much this guy costs, man. 230K instantly booms up to almost 300,000 coins after that. Another one, Danny DeCosta, right? Only 300 and 30,000 coins goes up to almost 380. So that's a nice weekend rise. And then the top tier cards, if it's a big, like, Havertz had so much hype last year because of the four star skills and the five star weak foot and just the crazy stats that his card had in the major boost in stats that even his future star was a really insane card, but they juiced him incredibly on his team this season. And look what this does, man, 2.2 million coins all the way up to 2.6 million coins two days later. So you're gonna see rises like that this year in this game on foot. I'm promising you right now, you're going to see it.  A lot of the cards did that. I didn't look at all the graphs, right? But for most leagues, if you go back to the FIFA 19 team of the weeks on foot then and look through those leagues, that's what you're gonna see. You're gonna see Monday was the cheapest because that was when they had the guaranteed SBC come out. There was panic selling on that day because people thought prices would drop and then a rebound after that. So we're gonna have to figure out what they wanna do this year with the guaranteed SBCs. But once we have that figured out, we're gonna be able to make coins weekly and also try out those cards and have fun with them in our teams. So that's the team of the season portion of the video. We'll cover a lot of that stuff later in the coming weeks as we figure out what EA is gonna do with these guaranteed SBCs. But let's talk about icons because this is another situation this year where we have out-of-packs cards and we've seen these cards rise already in foot. We've seen many of them just get incredibly increased in price because of them being out-of-packs. And this baby Blanc is an A1 example. I'm gonna look them up on Footbin right now and I'm also gonna look up Baby Eusebio because we talked about this stuff during team of the year and during kind of like the end of Footmas beginning of team of the year when we had a panic selling on some of these out-of-packs baby icons because they went out of packs in December and we saw them getting panic sold headed into team of the year. Baby Eusebio, right? 3.7 million coins for arguably one of the best players in the game Baby Eusebio, 3.7 million coins down here at the startup team of the year ends up being 5.1 million earlier last week. Again, crazy, crazy inflation in price and the out-of-packs nature of these cards really justified that. Baby Blanc, 623,000 coins. My guy's back up at 900K a week later. Last week he was even 822K. He was 650 earlier this week. Right now it shows he's 700 on the PlayStation. Maybe we'll find, yeah, there's one in 695 some of these guys have rebounded already but the biggest thing with these baby and the middle icons are, I think they're going to rise, especially if they're meta, right? So many coins are injected onto this market during team of the season with the rewards that we're, today we figured out we're getting the team of the season cards in rewards. That's huge for this game. But I think that especially a few cards are gonna be boomers out-of-packs. And I also think there's gonna be a plethora of prime and moments icons that are actually going to rise during team of the season. Now, I know that seems crazy because they're in-packs still for the prime and the prime moments and that means they're continually getting supplied. But some of these cards are not gonna be able to withstand the demand because these are still crazy rare cards. Moments, Ronaldinho. I mean, there's four of them on the market right now. If we look at a guy like Moments Rio we've got probably like, you know just a handful on the market. A lot of these guys, when you go and look at them even some of the baby icons now how many pages of Blanc do we have? I think I went and looked at the market for Blanc just a couple of minutes ago before I started recording this and there's like no supply for a baby Blanc card. He had multiple pages of supply earlier in this year and now he's only got two, barely even two pages of supply for this type of card. This is a card that I could see going crazy high back over 800,000 coins after Team of the Season starts ramping up. You just kinda, how do you find those cards that are really gonna go up? Especially in a market where Team of the Season cards are gonna have better stats than some of these icons. But icons are still a huge part of this game. You have to look for drastic price differences and position changes, right? This is the cheapest version of R9 Ronaldo. He's two million coins right now, just under two mil. The next highest version is mid R9 and he's like 6.7 mil. If somebody wants to play with Ronaldo in this game during Team of the Season, either they're paying six mil for this guy or they're paying two mil for the baby. I think baby Ronaldo gets back to 2.5 mil at some point in a couple of weeks after Team of the Season. Again, there's no supply, there is a lot of demand for an icon like that, for an icon striker, big name, player, meta fits this game. I think you're gonna see a rise. Another example right of a position change is Carlos Alberto. This is a dude that rose a lot after Team of the Year as well for the position change center back version of his card. And also that this card is just insane, right? You always need Brazilian center backs. We might get a Telez Team of the Season, right? You might need to link your Telez with your Allison Team of the Season that could come out with your Van Dyke. So you might need some extra links to Brazilian left mid, right mid. Brazil is a big, or left back, right back. Brazil is a big nationality in this game for linking. So having a guy like Carlos Alberto as a position change center back, I think a lot of people are gonna end up using this card and I think it's gonna spike again. But I think most icons are going to actually rise up from the middle and the baby range, even this Macalely, right? If it's meta, it will rise. I was looking through a lot of graphs from last year for the moments cards, for the baby cards, even some of the babies and middles last year that were pretty meta cards actually rose during Team of the Season just due to the sheer amount of hype. Now it wasn't a massive rise, right? But here, look at this. We have a middle George Best, who by the time Team of the Season comes around, right? This is just an okay card. Middle George Best, right at the beginning of Tots, 596K on the PlayStation, right? Two weeks into Team of the Season, he's up to 693,000 coins. So the dude went up about 100K in two weeks during Team of the Season. And yes, his price does fall back off after that as the game starts to go downwards. You know, the hype kind of dies. But again, as I keep talking about this higher tier market it's going to get a lot of coins. Last year, we even had icon SBCs. Like this Blanc had an icon SBC. Look what happened during May. Start-up Team of the Season, 925,000 coins. Remember, French center back. A lot of French links are needed last year in foot and even this year in foot too. So many French cards that they've been putting out. Starts at 925 at the beginning of Team of the Season, ends up hitting 1.2 million coins and is up over 150, 200,000 coins two weeks after Team of the Season starts. So I think you're going to see rises like that and on the top, upper-tipity top tier of icons. We had rises as well. Now on Xbox, it's really hard to tell with this graph because Moments Real was like a dinosaur there. But with PlayStation last year, he was actually consistently on the market so we can follow this blue line. Start-up Team of the Season, actually during the first lighting rounds of Team of the Season, he takes a hit down in price. He goes from about 9 million on PlayStation down to 8 mil flats or 8.3. And right before Prem Tots, 8.1 mil right there. And then after Premier League Team of the Season, this guy just starts to rebound. He goes from 8.1 mil on the PlayStation all the way back up to 10 million coins during Team of the Season. So some of the guys like a hullet or like this year, I think that kind of price is, that's going to be Ronaldinho. I think last year's hullet graph that we just looked at, this Dino card with the position change with the dynamic image and with just how meta this card is in game, I would not be surprised if this Ronaldinho card goes back over to 10 million coins. I would not be surprised at all. Now some of these cards, it's really tough to tell, right? Because you're like, okay, these icons, people have coins now, they're willing to splash the cash on these. But there's a guy like a baby Eusebio who has been extinct, not baby. Moments Eusebio who has been extinct for a long time in this game this year. But now has had multiple pages on the market. This guy's been like 12 mil in the past week. What's this guy going to do? Is he going to be 15 million coins again? To be honest, I would not be super surprised if he did get back up close to 13, 14, 15 million coins and actually sell there. At least for this week, I mean, I'm pretty sure Eusebio has been in the 11s and 12s. I don't watch this card that much, but I'm sure he's been there. It looks like he's been 13 mil most of the day today. But this is the type of card that once people open their team in the season rewards multiple weeks in a row, it's just going to start causing inflation. People are going to be able to afford these cards again. So I do think you're going to see an uptick in basically all icons in this game. If it's meta and if it's usable, especially for the mid and the baby versions, I do think you're going to see these go up. Baby Blanc, right? This is a Blanc centerback card. People love this centerback card game. This guy could easily be $900,000 coins in a couple weeks just because of the French links that are needed in this game. And the icon, you know, just the icons have like a different feel in FIFA, man. They really, really do moments cards as well, bro. Blanc, Ferdinand, any moments card that is really meta because a lot of moments this year have massive upgrades, right? Even a guy like moments rush who has caught a lot of hype this year for his massive upgrade over the prime. This guy, this might be a dude who continues to drop a little bit this week. You see some undercuts during lightning rounds and then you see them sky. So I think if you want any of these icons for your team, you need to get acting quickly in these next few days. Or be on the lookout for undercuts and snipes when packs are opened this weekend during most consistent team of the season. Or if you wanna wait a little bit longer, you can maybe wait until prem tots when we have lightning rounds and a bunch of packs open then. But if you wait too much longer after prem tots, I think these guys are gonna start going upwards in price because icon moments this year are just on another level compared to last year. And I think they're really meta ones. The ones that you see in a lot of guys' teams and they're very, very popular icons are gonna start to rise up and they're gonna rise up quickly, especially those baby and mid cards just because they're very rare on the market and they're still very usable and still very applicable in this game. And since they have no more supply, I really like these cards rising during team of the season. I really do, because a lot of these icons maintain demand even though we're gonna have team of the season cards with better statistics. The icon links and just the icon, like just that card in FIFA always draws people in. So that's how I feel about icons. Get them early. Look for snipes during lightning rounds if it's an impacts prime or icon moments. If it's a baby card, try to catch them on the weekend, we sell off this weekend. If there is any open bids, get on some of those late nights and just look for undercuts on those because you might not see much because any supply or downturn in price on those is gonna have to be supply driven, not because those cards are getting packed, but from a weekend league sell off sort of thing because these cards are not impacts and that's a first this year for FUT. So I think you might see a big rise on those. Hopefully you enjoyed this video today, right? Lots of information. I feel like I was talking the whole time, which, you know, this is a YouTube video. So I am talking the whole time, but I feel like I talked a lot in this one. Hopefully you were able to absorb the knowledge and we will be covering this stuff on the dot as it happens every single day during team of the season as well. So not just now, I'm not gonna stop after this, we'll be watching these cards very closely during team of the season as well, but those are my thoughts on Tots cards and icons for team of the season and if you guys are looking to buy them, that should give you some insight as we get into most consistent team of the season coming tomorrow. So if you enjoyed this video, smash the thumbs up on it, comment down below if you have any questions and subscribe to the channel if you're new. It's been Nate, The Foot Accountant, catch you guys later, peace, out.


How do you persuade someone to stop bombing civilian areas? Not to recruit children as soldiers or that they shouldn't raid villages to pillage the only food supply. There has never been a greater need for effective advocacy for the protection of civilians in conflict and crisis. But how do we do this protection advocacy? What skills and techniques can we use? How can we identify decision makers? What tactics work? And how can we manage risks? Welcome to the Advocating for Protection podcast where we bring you the real experiences of advocates in conflict and crisis. In each episode you'll hear from those who are lobbying in the corridors of the UN buildings in New York. Those who are face to face with armed actors at the front line of conflict zones and everything in between. They will tell us about their personal experiences, their successes, but also the challenges and how they overcame them. This podcast comes to you from the Global Protection Cluster's advocacy working group. Please be aware that it contains discussions of violence, abuse and exploitation faced by civilians in conflict and crisis. Good afternoon, good morning. This is the Advocacy for Protection podcast. Real stories and experiences of humanitarians who advocate for the protection of civilians. My name is Vittorio Infante and I'm here representing Oxfam who together with Save the Children is co-leading the advocacy working group at the Global Protection Cluster. Today I'm joined by our guest Gemma Davis from the ODI Humanitarian Policy Group. Hi Gemma. Hi Vittorio, nice to be here. Thanks for joining us today. Before we delve into the topic of today's discussion Gemma, I just wondered if you could tell us a little bit more on how you got involved in protection advocacy. So I have been in the humanitarian sector for around 18 years now. First started with Medicine San Frontier on the operational side of things. As you might know MSF have terminiage which is speaking out or bearing witness as a central part of their identity. So I guess from the very outset even though I was in more operational management positions it was sort of part of the culture of the organization that we would bear witness and indeed if we were needing to bear witness and advocate on the behalf of the people that we were working with that we would do so. I guess since then my career developed into doing more on the advocacy agenda as you said working on policy so directly involved in advocacy. And so when I joined the humanitarian policy group part of ODI there was already a project on the role of advocacy to strengthen the protection of civilians and obviously this is quite central to the experience that I had. So we're now sort of three years plus of doing this experience of looking at a wide range of humanitarian actors and what the role is of advocacy and obviously I could bring quite a lot of my own background and experience into that. Fantastic and that's very good to know as well Gemma that throughout your career I guess you also have witnessed somehow protection advocates methodology and ways of working change I mean in 18 years different geopolitical contexts different ways in which humanitarian leverage has been built by different organizations whether at the CSO level or more at the global level. So Gemma last year authored a report called Complementary Approaches Between International and Local Protection Advocacy. Don't speak for me I'll speak for myself. This is a powerful analysis of how protection advocacy often is the result of combined efforts and collision between national protection actors, international humanitarian organizations and civil society actors. How do you think you know now looking back on the sort of advocacy that you've seen taking place how do you think we're faring as protection advocates? That's a really good question. I think there was a certain point of time where it became a lot more prominent to carry out advocacy in attempting to strengthen protection you know we were in the 90s off the back of two genocides Rwanda the former Yugoslavia we then came out of this Relanka conflict and there was the high levels of criticism that the humanitarian sector were more or less silent and did not live up to their obligations to defend the rights of conflict affected civilians during that there was Darfur where advocacy became quite prominent so I think there was sort of a over a few years a bit of a awakening as to the need you know that advocacy is a core component of humanitarian action and we've sort of committed to promote the protection of conflict affected civilians. I think since then I actually think that we've seen quite sadly a demise in that you know the humanitarian sector at large has become really quite risk averse it's become very projectised and in many ways there's been investments in capacities around coordination etc etc that's I hope promising but I think the overall trajectory has unfortunately it seems to have gone a little bit backwards let's hope that these renewed conversations that are happening at the moment and some of the evidence we're bringing in the conversations that we're having with the global protection cluster and others can reignite some of those conversations. But to me I think one of the central ideas that was in several of your reports at HPG that really resonated with me is about you know this tension that we used to see humanitarian advocacy on protection of civilians as being a little bit of a top-down exercise whilst as you highlight a lot of the around humanitarian reform they bring up you know that human element so the capacity and voices and agency and power of the communities that we work with. I think there's growing recognition of the added value and the critical role that local actors, that survivors, that civil society organisations can and should play. And obviously there's been a lot of conversation over the years around the power dynamics of the humanitarian system but I think what is being spoken in the policy domain is still pretty far from what we see unfortunately at the operational level and you know in situations where people are affected by crisis and conflict. I think the power differentials too often remain. I think where there are opportunities to redress this and rebalance this it's often based on individuals rather than a sort of institutional and system wide redress. But saying that we're seeing we are seeing examples of positive change and I think we've seen some really impressive advocacy often not formalised. So one of the examples that we looked at in South Sudan was the role of survivors, civil society working with international humanitarian actors as well as diplomatic actors development actors etc to develop accountability well recognition first off and second of all accountability to the horrific levels of gender based violence in South Sudan one of our interviewees who is both a survivor and a civil society representative saying that actually the role of the international community should not be to represent the voices of survivors and those affected by conflict it should be to provide a platform and too often though there is growing practice of this again it's not it's not systematic it's not standard practice as of yet. That's excellent Gemma and you offered so many points for reflection there I think if you could tell us a little bit more about you know how do we go from something that's completely say spontaneous or you know where the overlap between interests is so what would be one tip you know for any protection advocate whether at the grassroots level or at the regional level or at the global level or how you bring about people with the same set of values but maybe slightly differing interests I think organisations and the structures the humanitarian structures they work within need to get beyond mandate and they need to go beyond their organisational interests you have to get to a point where you agree on what is the area that we're all trying to influence and use that as your starting point what change do you want to achieve and what do we each contribute to that I remember speaking to one interview and that person said to me just get away all the branding get away all of the mandates and then we might work more effectively together some of it will be reactive you might not always know where you're going with your advocacy objective but you're moving towards something so in the situation I just referenced it was this sort of growing sort of set of organisations and individuals that recognise those horrifying levels of gender based violence and wanted to bring visibility to the issue wanted more accountability of the issue and wanted that survivors were brought into that conversation and varying different sets of actors sort of had a role in them that branded towards a certain cluster a certain organisational identity no it was actually sort of really working much more beyond that and I think hearing you speak about that sort of collective effort unbranded going a little bit beyond each agencies mandate two things that sprang to my mind are one example of collaborative advocacy between different agencies under the banner of crisis action which is I think somehow also reflected in your report that we were quoting earlier but then also some of the work that the GPC the global protection cluster itself has been doing I think over the past couple of years as well picking up on certain situations of concerns where you had I don't know like in Afghanistan very restrictive operational environment and through the global protection cluster agencies were able to gather their thoughts you know around to key demands towards the de facto authorities and potentially push forward a more rights based protection agenda can you maybe expand a little bit upon that you know how are these coalitions perceived by say post government authorities or power holes is more general I think it depends on the coalition and it depends on the issue I think though the main thing as you said in in every sort of advocacy initiative there has to be thought as to who has legitimacy who has credibility and how those advocacy positions are then framed often in the humanitarian sector is international actors leading an international let's face it are perceived as global north or western actors they're often framed in international frameworks referencing international humanitarian international refugee law whichever body of law is most relevant but often disconnected from both the context and towards the target and those these days they fall on flat is frankly I mean I think in everything you have to think of as we said who has credibility legitimacy understanding that as you referenced before in the geopolitical environment the global north and the west increasingly less perceived as legitimate actors so there must be consideration and intentional consideration around the diversity of actors that are represented in those voices secondly I think it's who is that advocacy message targeted at what are their interests and where are you going to have leverage with them so you know and where is there going to be acceptance and at times national actors have greater credibility greater acceptance and greater understanding of how to influence national advocacy targets than international actors and I'll give an example following the influx and humanitarian response of Syrian refugees into Jordan back in 2015 Jordanian national actors highlighted how the international humanitarian community came in with those standardized messages you know of upholding XYZ law and said that the international humanitarian communities overreliance on those generalized approaches had a negative impact and rebuked from the Jordanian government and a real risk of closing down dialogue and then you know through the years there was growing collaboration between national and international organizations and national organizations really then worked with international organizations on how to frame those messages grounded in Jordanian culture in language the Jordanian government would have traction with the Jordanian government equally when you're trying to you know change behaviors of communities for example and then started to see progress on that so one sort of win that they had when advocacy positions were framed in a culturally and context relevant way was progression on for example refugees access to work so quite strong evidence there of you know when grounded and when working strategically in collaboration what can be achieved I wonder to what extent you know is the humanitarian system still thinking for example local actors are great to lead on an operational point of view from an operational point of view whilst you know for the advocacy there's still this doubt or misconception around neutrality impartiality independence and I think we've seen a lot of that coming to the fore with regards to the conversation in Ukraine but I wondered yeah what you thought about that yeah I think it's interesting isn't it I mean I think first of all as you say part of the problem of the humanitarian system is that national actors are still seen as downstream partners to an extent generally practices are still extractives and of course there are a few different conversations on the one side you hear conversations around whether national actors can and do uphold principles and some of the risks involved in involving them with that on the other side we sometimes see this almost paternalistic approach of let's not involve national actors in advocacy at least at the forefront in case of risks with either end of that spectrum it's a little overly simplistic the biggest part for me in that is that these need to be broken down and they need to be broken down while working in an open dialogue and communication with our sort of national regional counterparts so often these perceptions of it might breach neutrality because you know if you're talking to civil society or right groups then we're on the political side well I think frankly the humanitarian community needs to challenge itself as to how neutral the international humanitarian community are quite often the international humanitarian community itself has lost a lot of legitimacy in how neutral they are so let's also be aware of perceptions on ourselves I think also one thing we seem to forget as the humanitarian community is what survivors are asking from us sometimes humanitarian actors take a more reserved position or even a silent position but we've got to remember that silence in the face of atrocities is a position and that also can lead to some perceptions that the international community can be complicit in abuses that's what's just happened in Myanmar it's what happened in Sri Lanka back in 2009 so I think we have to really reckon on how neutral we are I think also we need to remember that neutrality is a tool but also the objective of humanitarian action is humanity and if survivors are asking us to stand with them then maybe that's what we need to do I think from my side when you talk about the kind of requests and support that INGOs can give to survivors of atrocity crimes or human rights violations on a large scale that's for sure that the advocacy and the kind of agenda setting that we could have in certain markets as you want to call them is actually something quite important because we have access to say I don't know the media we have access to donors, diplomatic actors whether it's multilaterals or influential governments bilaterally the question to me is how can we rebalance you know how can we make sure that this kind of sound dynamic that we usually have been operating for decades can be rebalanced how can we build that there needs to be effective collaboration requires trust it requires open dialogue and it requires partnerships that go beyond programs you know when dealing around issues of advocacy it can't only be based on partnerships through programs it has to be a much longer term and policy oriented discussion you know I think recognizing as well that there is naturally power and balance in the system is asking INGOs and international actors we have to be humble we have to listen more and we have to have that open dialogue another interview he said to us through the course of this research that you know trust can take years to build and seconds to destroy which is so true and I'm sure we've all got experiences within that so I think it's you know making sure that that dialogue is there it's taken out of this sort of power imbalance approach and then working on that really a partnership level on what is it we're trying to achieve what platforms do we have open to us what are the most effective ways to make change and then you know coming back to that conversation around risk what is the risk how can we collectively mitigate it where you do have collaborations between national and international actors that in itself can mitigate risk because you know you have a range of actors working towards one advocacy objective or a range of objectives so I think it's redressing some of that and then ensuring that decision making is based on that it sounds simple and straightforward but unfortunately you know a lot of humanitarian organizations and certainly the system is not there yet I couldn't agree with you more in terms of how the system is not really built for that type of consensual collaborative decision making because more often than not these things depend on I don't know political will and the CSO strength so I don't know if this is something that you have thought about whilst you were doing your research I think every advocacy agenda has to be based on what is it you're trying to achieve what's the context you're trying to achieve it in and what are the opportunities open to you know so it's going to be based a little bit on the dynamics that you're finding yourself in you've got to be working a bit with the momentum that there is you need to create momentum where it doesn't exist but I think as you say I think international organizations and INGOs need to recognize that they need to give up space they need to move beyond their own agenda and as you say so they're outside of this projectised approach I think increasingly if we're really wanting to make change we as we being the international humanitarian community need to perceive ourselves as playing a facilitation role that can be allowing local organization survivors facilitating access to international platforms it can be also things that seem quite simple but really are quite complex such as working around navigating the complex structures at regional mechanisms such as the AU at the security council etc these are very complex spaces they're places where it's national organizations and survivors civil society might not have had exposure to before so it's really sort of giving that role a little bit more but I think it then really has to be based on the circumstance the situation as you say sort of what is going on what can every actor involved in this from survivor to national to international actor bring what are the opportunities what are the risks and then sort of really working in a truly collaborative but also iterative way you know but just to say you know I can't emphasize enough how much I think international actors just really have to consider their role as giving a platform and facilitating and you know when we say capacity building it's not that it's more sort of working with organizations and with individuals on how to navigate these incredibly complex regional international mechanisms where you may be able to affect change that's excellent to hear in terms of also how renewed role for an NGO could look like I think again there's been no shortage in policy papers and you know donors initiative around humanitarian system reform but I think what you're suggesting Gemma brings it down to the nitty-gritty and some real concrete operational asks that we could implement within each agency coming back to what you were saying as well or one of the advantages for the collaboration between different humanitarian stakeholders risk management I think is one that has drawn our attention quite a lot of late I think we're a little bit on the back foot as humanitarians on how to collaborate say with civil society activists when they face backlash but I also had any insights on how risk is being managed at the moment what could we do to make sure that when someone speaks up to raise the issue of protection of civilians and the rights of civilians in conflict they're not facing unmanageable unintended consequences so I think it's a really important point as I said before we face this dichotomy where either national actors or survivors can be you know the risks are not being adequately assessed even though they often face much more risks and far fewer options to manage them than international actors or just paternalistic role that international actors sometimes play in saying okay let's not put national actors at risk so let's exclude them from a process but again this is where collaborations can be highly effective so for example there was another situation also in South Sudan but different to the sort of GBV situation where a range of international and national actors were working together including international humanitarian human rights and national civil society collaborated so then when human rights actors are much better equipped by the nature of their work but working with human rights defenders and then you know trying to help them manage risks as and when they play out including through trying to get them to a safer area out of the country if that's necessary and so we did see the situation in South Sudan play out and by nature of that sort of informal coalition it meant that there was some support that could be given for the national civil society actor and the individuals that were then targeted and we anticipate this so that if and when these risks do play out they can be acted on because often they can escalate quite quickly so you need to be prepared and ready to respond but again I think all of this speaks to the necessity of working in coalitions and with a range of actors be on the humanitarian community Yeah and I think I'm packing a little bit that point in terms of how you build bridges for example with human rights actor somehow human rights defenders even when it comes to I don't know information security management they seem to be a little bit more proactive whilst for humanitarians the understanding of risk is often you know very much dictated by the context and reactive so thinking going to operate in such and such environment so I will sort of future proof my operations in a certain way whilst I think deliberately human rights defenders sometimes think a bit more carefully on ways in which information could be transmitted the course of the politics behind it I don't know what could be done to ensure that different humanitarians consult and collaborate with their human rights counterpart but I also know that this is another topic that you have explored extensively throughout your time at HPG and also before but I think sometimes I am left wondering whether we can learn something from other organizations that deal with information security like tactical tech and others who do for instance training to human rights defenders on how to create information how do you build bridges without experts in those kind of realms sometimes this maybe should be the role of the UN country teams on making sure that those dynamics happen but I think more often than not it's down to INGO's and CSO's activists isn't it? Yeah and I think look there's always been there's been this long-standing discussion on the extent to which humanitarian and human rights actors should and could collaborate and the barriers going back into issues around principles predominantly and the fear of retaliation and we know that the fear of risks associated in carrying out advocacy is a major barrier for organizations and humanitarian organizations to more strategically use advocacy as a tool to strengthen protection but when a situation escalates particularly from a security perspective the first thing that closes down from humanitarian actors international humanitarian actors specifically is a de-prioritization of protection a de-prioritization of raising protection risks i.e. advocacy in any and all forms but I would argue that that's exactly the point that you need collaboration with human rights actors it doesn't need to be visible a lot of what we do is behind closed doors but it's exactly then that you should be looking at where do we have leverage and where can we collectively push because in these situations human rights actors can be prepared to say more they will only do so with evidence which by the way most humanitarian actors cannot give them they will always have to go and verify but they can do more about this so when humanitarian actors feel they can't there's a space for them to fill so I think we've really got to be a lot more strategic a lot more cognizant and frankly a lot less reactive the reactive and go to point seems to be close it down do not collaborate we've got to think about this and again always bring it back to what to effective people need from us I could bring an example if you wanted to I personally would love to hear this one example you know as we know in Tigray when you know the violence escalated there and obviously that situation in terms of the human rights and humanitarian violations escalated dramatically and the levels of abuses were huge I spoke to a human rights actor who was there just after the violation of Tigray who said that trying to have any information sharing from humanitarians was first of all very very difficult we know this between human rights and humanitarian actors as I say particularly where humanitarian actors feel like there could be retaliation or their position could be jeopardized or their reparations could be jeopardized but second of all the information that they were given was actually quite a lot perception based rather than the evidence base that person and that felt strongly that if they were to bring out the evidence and work a lot more collaboratively and a lot quicker they could have done a lot more in terms of advocacy rather than waiting until there was retaliation on the humanitarian community by which time the leverage of the international community was perceived to have minimized rather than doing this at the height so I think again thinking around when could we have leverage which is the comparative advantage of each of our organization and how do we all work towards an objective of trying to strengthen the protection of civilians right I think always keeping that in our mind. Indeed and I think if I'm taking something out of this conversation in addition to all the sort of suggestion that you've done and given to INGOs on how to be more equitable in their partnership more humble as well on how we navigate some of the protection advocacy spaces it's actually that around you know thinking in clear terms what the comparative advantage of each protection actor is how to use the information and when and where the pressure points are so I think this example that you just gave Gemma encapsulates that very neatly and the final question for me if we may is about looking a little bit at how protection advocacy sometimes is challenging it's a very slow trek sometimes you go one step forward and two steps backwards what would you say is something that motivates you to keep going what gives you hope for the future in carrying out this important and crucial work. Thanks and I think this is too often the issue isn't it I think first of all as you say sort of to change in the face of sort of such intractable difficult complex issues will never happen overnight so there's a need for us to be persistent as an international humanitarian community collaborating with others we need to take the long view it needs multi-year engagement build the evidence base but sustain investments and I think this is also too often where humanitarian organizations fall short with our short-term program cycles but really if we want to create change we have to take that long view and we have to keep trying but I think also adaptability to flex approaches according to external events according to external moments continue persisting in the face of obstacles but I think also being realistic of the change that you're trying to be make be prepared for setbacks believing that change is possible and then celebrating with small wins I think just always keeping that in front of you and often that can be support from leadership but often you can also achieve that by working in collaboration and in coalitions and even if that is that one small step forward that one small step forward can often mean a much greater leap further down the road. Those are very very encouraging words Gemma and thanks for sharing them with us I'm sure a lot of our listeners engaged with protection advocacy will agree with you and I certainly agree with you on that front in particular because often when we're looking at advocacy strategies one approach that some of my colleagues and I are trying to go for is not looking at you know very ambitious and bold objectives that would take us I don't know three years to achieve but trying to break it down into smaller steps that would ultimately contribute to the greater good so that resonates quite a lot with our experience both at Oxon and at the Global Protection Cluster Advocacy Working Group. I think we wrap up the first episode of our podcast now thanks again Gemma for sharing your insights and your expertise on such a sensitive and fascinating topic such as protection advocacy and multi-stakeholder collaboration. We look forward to having you back on the podcast thank you very much. Great, thanks Antonio. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Advocating for Protection podcast. It's produced by the Global Protection Clusters Advocacy Working Group which is co-led by Save the Children in Oxfam and includes members from national and international NGOs and UN agencies. You can find out more information about the Advocacy Working Group on globalprotectioncluster.org Look out for the Protection Advocacy Toolkit whilst on this website and if you have feedback or suggestions for future episodes email us at protectionteamatoxfam.org