We are the team of Avocados. You know, we have the pun, it's avocados and coders together. Yeah, okay, clever, right? Okay, so we are called the Avocados out of inspiration for our clients who promotes a plant-based and eco-friendly lifestyle, but also because avocados are really awesome. Woo! So, meet our Avocados team. So, first we have Vanessa. Hi, Vanessa. I'm an application engineer for the automation industry, which means like a machine's popular kind of automation. Hi, I'm Alice. I'm actually in HR now, but I'm actually going to find a new job. And I'm going on that. I'm currently doing a few things. I'm a YouTuber, but I'm also a part-time freelance coder. I just fix random bugs on people's websites. But I dropped out of my computer science degree for after two years, but after this coding bootcamp, it's inspired me to actually finish my computer science degree. So, yeah, I'll be grateful. Okay, so the three of us, we met through tech links and we bonded over our mutual interests for coding and solving problems together. And while I'm talking, I'm going to play this little montage that I filmed from the very first class until the very last class. Now we got together on the day one and we got a lot of interactive lessons. And yeah, that's how first looked like our website. It wasn't very beautiful, obviously, but yeah, so we built this app to promote more sustainable living. And what's really cool is I'm actually a vegan myself. So this assignment was really exciting for me because I'm just really excited to promote veganism. So, Earth-wise goals are to educate and increase awareness on sustainability and personal actions beyond the best. They also want to build a community that is committed to sustainability in their daily lives. Earth-life also wants to provide resources on the six components of Earth-life. Plant-based diet, zero waste, biofilia, advocacy, minimalism, and CO2 positive. Earth-life also wants to provide tools for self-assessment and suggested actions. So current challenges that the organization is currently facing are having a single page website dedicated to EarthBest. Traffic to the current site is mostly during the period before and just after EarthBest. And also, there is no dedicated IT or web development stuff because it is managed by a group of volunteers. So as the Albuquercer team, we present to you the Earth-life quiz. Thanks, Brianna. During the live demo, we've been much easier now that the audience is actually pretty keen to look at what our work at is about. So after weeks of much hard work, frustration, and after fun, we have a responsive single page app. What this simply means is just that you can view this application on different browser sizes. Like you can view it on Tagline, you can view it on mobile, you can do it on desktop. And single page links that just run as a page and all the contents are with updated dynamic. So let's start. So this app is actually divided into two parts. The first part is the quiz itself and the second part is the actions that is generated based on the quiz responses that it puts in.  So let's choose the fun-based ballot. So for each of these categories you can see used a lot of common elements which has been repeated. First, we'll have an image associated with the category. The title of the category is still as to contain a structure solution of what it is about. So for the plant-based ballot, it's about choosing to get most or all of your nutrients from plants instead of animals. Again, you see a lot of common elements, drug, design, they're all used. This is part of it. This is the quiz question itself. You can see that there is a progress bar at the top and it shows like it's 30%, around 20% really done. So this tells you that you are probably the first question of a total of three questions for this category. So the next part, you can see that there's a question and the options that's available to you and the next ballot and the return menu where you can go back to the main running. And at the bottom part, you can actually see another progress bar but this shows you where you are specifically at in the quiz itself. So let's do the quiz proper. Have you watched house accuracy? For myself, no. The second, did you know all plants and mushrooms contain proteins? I know some. And this last question you can see the progress bar has reached to the end. So this is the final question.   Okay, so this, we have tried to learn the next part of it. So choose a really hard answer. Okay, let's view this on the mobile view. It shows you how we did it. So it's responsive as you can see on iPhone. Okay, let's go to buy a failure. So the state content you can see is just better, slightly different, right? And if you notice, there's a turn to menu is actually at the bottom instead of at the top. So this is just part of the design. Okay, let's do the quiz. On average, how often do you really take time to go and spend in nature spaces? Maybe a few times a week. Then on holidays, do you choose trips that give you time to experience nature? Sometimes to just to interrupt at the bottom part you see the icon is colored, so it shows that you actually completed the cloud-based category. So next, do you grow clouds? No.  A few options, but for myself, it's the second one. Ten times and push it all gently. Then third, okay, this is the last question. This is the last question. How many babies in Singapore's babies can be named? It's a bit small, so I'm going to open it up. I can't really name them, so let's put them. Okay, now you need to put them in. Okay, now the dozen are reached the end of the second part. So I can actually go on to click another of the living habit by the time the screen is picked to results. So for this results page, you can see that this image has been generated. So it's generated based on the response of the quiz that I did just now. So I can actually choose to share, okay, I actually go much higher in five days, as you can see, versus the value of a year. So you can actually share this with your friends on Facebook. So it's a bit slow. Yeah, so you can share it high and post it. That's the tester account, so it's right. Okay, or you can download it and share it on other platforms. Okay, so next it will be on actions between the testers, we will take this to you. So after you answer the questions, then you can actually click this button to get the actions. Basically, we will generate some actions that you can choose whether you want to. For example, you answer that you have not watched conspiracy. So we suggested that you watch conspiracy. So you can choose whether you, yes, you want to watch conspiracy or no, you don't want to watch it. So let's pretend that you want to watch it. And whether you want to learn more about plant-based nutrition. So you can also drag the card to answer whether you want to do it or you don't want to do it. Start cutting back on meat, dairy, and eggs. I can't do this. Spend time overcoming any fogears of insects. Maybe not now. Start running in Singapore's park or, no problem, or join nature walks. Okay, sounds good. And by the end of it, a tool is to be generated for you. So these are the actions that you pledge yourself to do. So what you can do is you can send this to your own email or you can print it out, but we encourage you to be Earth-friendly. So please just save it as PM instead of printing the whole thing. Yeah, and you can see what are the things that you pledge yourself to do. And after the whole thing, you can even go back to the main page and maybe you can visit the quiz again and you can see maybe the rest of the quiz that you haven't done and you can redo it. All right, so that's the end of our demo. So let's go back to our presentation. Okay, our stories. So let me start with our journey. Before we start coding, we actually set up scopes based on the NGO requirement and the timeline available. We only had three months and we only meet up once per week every Saturday. So there's a limited time available. So we decided on the stack, view for front end, Google spreadsheets for the database, Trello for project management. And then we learned the basic of GIT, HTML, CSS, JavaScript view. All of us usually, we know the basics of HTML and CSS. So usually we focus on GIT and JavaScript. And the process is usually like this. The designer already has the mock-up of the website. So we see their design and then we try to do it by ourselves and usually we will get stuck. So when we are stuck, then the coaches will help us. So usually they will give us like a suggestion or they will give us resources to read or through practice. And then we redo and we try again. So you repeat the loop again. And finally when it's done, then you do a pull request. And the coaches will review your pull request. Sometimes it will get rejected. And they will tell you how to improve your code. So you need to revise your pull request until it gets excited by the coaches and it gets merged into the master branch. So this is how usually the process is like. So what I have learned from this bootcamp, the first thing is find the most effective ways of learning for yourself because everybody has their own preferred way and there are more than one ways of learning. So please try different ways, different methods and find the one that is best for you. Second, have a clear goal of what you want to achieve. A lot of people when they try to do a tutorial, they do halfway and then they get bored, they got discouraged, then they just stop halfway. It happens to me, happens to a lot of people. And what I find works for me is to have a clear goal of what is it that you want to achieve at the end. And please make it motivating for you. For example, if you like dogs, then maybe you want to have a website about dogs.  It's about dogs. So when you get bored or when it gets difficult, you will think about your dog website and you are like, yes, I want to have my website, dog website. I want to show to my parents, to my friends about my dog websites and it actually gets you motivated. And the last one is don't give up. So this may sound cliche, but what I like about programming is that when you spend a lot of time, a lot of effort trying to solve something, and when you finally manage to solve it, that is the aha, the oh, it works on that moment. And actually that joy is what keeps you moving. What keeps you want to keep doing programming. But you can only get into that stage if you don't give up on your problem. So when you feel like you get stuck when you feel like giving up, my suggestion is to ask for help. So you can do that from the online community, like Stack Overflow or the local community. Yeah, get to know your local community, approach someone, maybe they have some suggestions for you. Yeah, so now I will pass to Alice to talk about her experience. So this is the three main lessons that I just want to highlight. Fading first before you go. So this, most of the time we think about this in terms of the JavaScript we write, we seldom think about the styles that we write in CSS. So, because we actually are not using a product and like really like a bootstrap or our project, so it becomes even more important that we actually think about whether should we put the pen into the button element or should we actually put it into the paragraph. So these are some of the things that we need to think about. Another thing is really documentation is not as scary as it seems. Pretty much when we learn new things as a beginner, we tend to actually do tutorials. But I find that actually reading documentation sometimes helps you to actually understand what you're writing, not just copying whatever is on the screen. So, and you also understand better, I think. Sometimes, actually it depends on the documentation of some whether it's detailed enough and whether you understand. Yeah, okay. Lastly, it's another way of using it. So should this bootcamp be actually used is grounded in the place called? It's not in it? It's not street. It's not street, sorry. It's not street. And sometimes it's not street. Okay, so it's quite a useful tool. It makes, I think it makes me write better deep messages and also I learn how to do deep conflict deep conflicts as well as how to avoid deep conflicts The coaches tell us these challenges you need to meet your own, your changes that you might have to go through in the comments. And then, so, thanks, I'll pass that up to you again. I mean, I learned a lot during the last few months, but if I can just pick three, they're the most important, I'm gonna share with you all is learning how to use getting property because it'll prevent you from bigger problems later on. Don't just type randomly commands in the console. You don't know what they do first because the amount of time is I've accidentally committed things to the wrong branch and then having to delete that commit and then committing it somewhere else and just makes a big mess. Another thing is that everyone has a different coding style. So make sure to always leave good descriptive comments and never hesitate to ask your teammates for clarity on their code.  It's better to just be as transparent as possible. And this one is more like a note to myself, but don't use did or spam classes for everything. Now definitely utilize those H1 through H6 classes. Don't just put everything in the did because there's some classes built into HTML already that can do a lot of the work for you. Now the code is supposed to help you. You're not supposed to do all this extra work, right? But here are some misconceptions that I just wanted to address really fast. So one of the most famous misconceptions is that coding is only for boring smart people and specifically for men. That couldn't be any further from the truth because through various female-oriented tech groups I'm a part of as well as tech ladies organization I have joined, I have met some really talented and really awesome women who are also really fun to spend time with. Woo!  I just wanted to say that during this whole entire app that we built I then once needed to take out those calculus skills I learned in college. And I didn't need to know any, I don't think any of us needed to know anything more than just a basic level of math. So I truly believe that this rumor needs to end and that universities should re-evaluate their curriculums when it comes to math. And lastly, this is not a lesson I've learned but this is just a suggestion for those who want to learn how to code but don't know where to start. So how I started was by taking free interactive lessons online. This is before I started studying in the university. And my favorite sites where I got to learn the basics of coding for free are codecademy.com. You can learn how to build a website completely for free by yourself. And I think that's really cool. Or you can go through a site called FreeCodeCamp. Or there's another option if you like to kind of watch people code there are live streams out there as well as YouTube videos of people coding. That's how I self-talk myself job about because like I said, universities will have the best curriculum. So when I was trying to learn Java, I was like, I don't know what I'm doing. So I just literally watched like just dozens of hours of Java online. So the skills I have learned from this bootcamp has actually managed to lend me some freelance work just because I posted my journey of tech ladies in social media. And so I've been working for various clients around the world in clean companies actually based in Silicon Valley. I love being able to work anywhere in the world and gain experience as a developer. I kind of pick up more clients for part-time work while I finish pursuing my degree in computer science. After I graduate, I want to work in a small team of passionate voters and gain the working experience. I need to start my own company one day. All right, well thank you so much. I just wanted to thank, I give a huge thank you to our coaches. So let's give them a round of applause. I want to personally thank Chion, Eshu, Sheldon and even Cherlene. And you know, just thank you so much. We, this app wouldn't exist without you guys. So really, it means a lot that you were so patient with how, I guess, how slow I can be sometimes. But thank you, I really appreciate it. And if you want to try out the quiz to see how sustainable you are, please visit the website on the screen there, earthfestsingapore.com slash earthlife. So please take the quiz. Either of you want the app really fast? No? Okay, just want to make sure they got everything they wanted to say. Yeah, they can come on Q&A when you're happy right now. Got it, okay. Could you all look in the back of the culture? Do you want to join them on camera? I think it's very easy to demand that male coaches are always more awkward than usual. It's okay guys, we love you. We appreciate your confidence. Okay, so, I think like, we're going to talk about touch on a bit about resources. I'm just curious to see, you know, what a lot of people they want to start they have to go in mind. You don't know how to get there. So like, how would you, what advice would you give to people like them or resources that you recommend? Tell people then and go again. I would say find someone that is a developer and ask them to be your mentor and maybe even shadow on their job. I did that one time when I was living in the US, my next-door neighbor was a software engineer and I sometimes shadowed under him and that was pretty cool. And the company I was working for at the time, I was someone's shadow of the engineers as well just so I can see what a day is like. It's an engineering to be like. So, just talking to people is I think one of the best resources. Myself, I think I'd like to actually have, to have a visual idea of where I am currently now and what other things I need to do.  In fact, there are actually resources out there. I'm glad they love the channel, I do love the channel but they have a lot of things that they need to do. I think there are books that they suggest you to read as well as some of the YouTube channels that you can watch. If you want to share the link with your current member of Hannah, I can share that with you. Okay, I can barely speak for myself. So what goes for me may not work quite equally but for me personally, when I know nothing, I learned each channel in secondary school but I know nothing about CSS and JavaScript. I started to go again, people can, because I know nothing and that is a good start. And when I know something, so from there you know what to do but you don't know why you do that. So after that I did a book because book usually will talk about foundations, theories and usually they will explain why you do things like that. And after I read the book, then I joined the book camp because you get to see the professionals, you get to learn their traits of the trade and you actually get to ask them, like why is it like this and why is it not like that? Yeah, and I think this is a very good example. So for example, like this book camp, right? I think it's most effective if you actually have some background. So it can make the most of these resources that you have that you can ask them questions about all, after you've been learning for a few months or years, you have a lot of questions in your mind that you can shoot all the questions for them. Yeah, so this is what I looked for. Let's hear some tips of the trade from the resources. And what resource would you recommend for someone who gets started? I think the best resource would be, I think the best resource for me, for my side, okay. So the way I learn all my programming stuff is like the most basic one, which is Google. So yeah, I think like for me, I, the one thing that you have to learn is how to Google for the correct terms so that you can find the exact things that you want to find. So I've seen a lot of people who like, I tell them Google and then they're just like, Google but can't find anything. But when I Google it, I find a lot of things. So that's like the difference. So you have to carefully choose your terms, carefully choose those Google search tricks and stuff. And then in the end, you still find something to learn. Yeah. And after that, the whole internet is your resource, basically. I think like, you wanna say the best way to learn is to practice it. So, you study with a framework that you react and do, I think nowadays it is called code set box. So it's like, you kind of have an idea of lying all in one place. And I guess the biggest way to do that is to be a prototype something using this team and you want to do that and train to learn. And yeah, also there's code then, and there's CSS and JS and everything. So you actually use all these tools to really just try and instruct them whether they're just really not using it. So I think that's pretty important. I think for me, when I'm starting out, I still dependent a lot on books because I don't know everything. If you know something that you're gonna share, most people would want to be contented for it. I realize that a lot of knowledge has still a lot behind books. So why are you here today? I am still reading a lot. Not so much more, let's say, simple code but more of a concept to how you approach things. And I think one thing that wasn't brought up will be Twitter. The authors of a lot of S&P Act, of you, they're all available on Twitter and they're always quite open to be talked to then.  Just look at what you're sharing and it will sort of help you with more things to be covered up. Because you know what you're gonna look and then they can show you the things that you're gonna look. Okay, so I'm gonna ask one question and then we're gonna open it in the form for more questions. So I'm curious in all of your learning journeys, what is the biggest challenge that you face and how do you overcome it? I think for me, I have to learn how to slow down. I think for me, after a while, I can't use to do things very, very fast because I can't use to it. I do this every day by programming. It kind of reminded me when I was learning how to code in the beginning. The beginning is basically.  So it's kind of like different than nowadays. So last time, I had to learn everything myself. I had to Google everything myself. I had to try logging myself. And after that, I have to learn how to teach or how to explain whatever I learned back. So it's kind of like, there's a lot of people and I have to output everything them out again in a more detailed and slow way because if I talk too fast, then you won't understand what I'm talking about. Yeah, so that's one thing I have learned a lot from this book, actually. And I'm sorry, really, because I think there are a lot of times when you've been doing this for many years, then some things you're just doing completely without thinking so much. And essentially realize that these things need to be learned and kind of go back to the start. And these things school your students. And it seems that actually, I've never really talked in like a structured, formal course before. So I think you can realize that this is testing the time and the teach and kind of do something. So it's important that it focus on every lesson, like what I'm going to teach about the end of the lesson and, yeah, but do it otherwise with a long time for the rest of the lessons. I think most of the time, in the previous years or something like how, when someone approaches you for a question, I think we're very quick to go, okay, this is the answer. Because it happens at work also, when people ask you a question, you're like, oh, can you teach me what I'm supposed to do with, and then you really have to really answer for it. But it doesn't actually help someone they just keep an answer. So I think probably also then, like if you ask them a question, sometimes you can ask that and another question that like, is this the assumption that you made or how are you thinking about this way and not just go straight to okay, I'll tell you, this is the answer. I think the most challenging thing for me is learning to ask better questions and learning to ask the right questions.  So I should have taken the time to ask very specific questions because in reality I actually could figure out a lot of the issues by myself but there was just maybe some small areas that I could ask questions in. So like, for example, so just going to approach and saying how do I make a stage or maybe I won't ask it that broad but I guess that's just an example but maybe instead I should ask questions. How would I use JavaScript on this button? Like what is the best approach for that or is it best structured a page with these elements, you know? Instead of just asking someone, hey, guide me in what you should think, I wish I took more risks to try and use myself and even if I wasted a lot of time and I have to throw away the page, I wish I did a little bit more of that because that was kind of a challenge for me because I was just afraid of wasting time. For myself, the biggest challenge I've had is there's so many things to learn out there so what should I be focusing on? So I guess the only way out is actually try to learn through this again. I have a channel, what do you want to learn? Really think about, I guess time management because we only have that many hours in a day, what do you want to really focus on as well as doing a project? For instance, our app really had to focus on what we need to do and so we just picked up the secret, none of us know how to do it with you so we really, because there is this task in front of us so we need to do it, so we really focus on what we need to learn and that's how we do it with them. My biggest challenge personally is to keep myself motivated. So self motivation. So I can have a lot of projects and I can abandon them halfway and nobody knows the way and all I do is, yeah. So this is a weakness of mine and I sometimes I think we can force myself to finish it, to force myself, but of course I, well I'm gonna keep on that, yeah, but I do the work around which I generally can't because now I am actually responsible for something and if I don't finish it, somebody gonna screw me. Yeah. I'm sorry, we don't do that. No, we don't do that. If they're nice people, we won't do that, yeah. But it was so guilty, like, oh, I'm ready to hand you down because of me and now I come to design to work hard, yeah, and actually when I work hard then I learn a lot, yeah. So it's a work around that, because I know what is my weakness and I work around it by doing things like this, yeah. So, yeah, this is my best challenge. Okay, are there any questions from the audience? Things that you're curious about? How can I continue? Actually I finished a quiz together, I'm very engaging. Okay, here are two questions. One was, how much time do you want to spend like to understand more of life? Like, because I thought a lot of content in the quiz itself, like do you need to take some time to read it out or you feel like you better understand the topic yourself? And number two was, how did you divide up your past, yeah, during the project? It's, yeah, we have to show our theory that you're in KTL school, I'm going to run back to your room. Also I'm getting a lot of, like, chapters saying how awesome your app is and what do you think was with me, like, spying out? Thank you. What was the first question? The first question is, how do you get all, there's a lot of content, right, you're saying? And then how do we organize all this content, is it? Oh, okay, actually the content, yeah, there's like, the NGOs have already given us some sort of content and then the designers, every one of us will like, discuss with each other and then try to like, say, which part of the page goes where? So if you look at the quiz, right, there's a lot of things like categories and a lot of like questions and answers. So all these are mostly done by the NGO. So they decide which content they want to show and the thing is, the site actually is, the backend is quite simple or the database is quite simple is the Google spreadsheet. So the NGO can actually go to the Google spreadsheet and change the data. So you can kind of go to the spreadsheet and then change it and it will be affected on the site itself. So it's good for them, like, easy because the Google spreadsheet, everyone knows how to use it and it's good for the site as well because it just updates. Yeah, so most of the content are from them. So, and of course it has to be organized in a way or else, yeah, because, yeah, because everything affects the website, yeah. So luckily we will build it in a way that it can cover a lot of type of content. If you see the questions, right, there's a lot of types of questions. So we have to accommodate a lot of like use cases. Luckily it works for a lot of use cases. Yeah, that's good, right.  How do you put down the cards? Yeah, how do you put down the cards? Okay, so I regret for me that I said we didn't have a strict process. Exactly, the three of us were pretty bare with each other. We just kind of were like, I want to do this page. I want to do this page. And we all just kind of agreed and we all got along and the one was fighting over pages and then worked out. But I imagine in a big company that's not how it works, it was the sign passes, right? But that was really nice that we got to pick what we wanted to work on. And we, I think we did a good job because we all picked what we liked. So, but I'll let Alice do the rest of this. I guess those things that we don't like, we will assign it to them. I don't really recall much of it at some time already, but I'm sure we have to do the things that we don't like as well. Yeah, if I'm not visiting them, we have like a little list. They're coming to like our pictures. They just list on trailer. It's not like, okay, now we're ready to list and then when we're done, then they look, okay, now what's next? What's next to, then we just pick anything from this trailer. And this is the symbol and we just want to give it a chance. And there, thank you very much. See you in the next class. Okay, I think I'll go get it.


Rolling admissions is a process by which you begin to admit students and then give them a certain deadline for when they have to respond and say, yes, I'm coming. And then the rolling process allows them to better manage the admission process overall. That's really what that's all about.


Common misconception about entrepreneurship is that it's really cool, it's really fun, and everybody should do it. It is so hard. It is not easy. And just because you own a business doesn't mean you're an entrepreneur. It just means you're a business owner. An entrepreneur is someone who does it all and more and has a whole bunch of things happening with all different aspects of not only just a business, but multiple businesses, multiple people they have to care about and staff and clients and then building the multiple businesses. By definition, if you are a business owner, you can be considered an entrepreneur, but it's just a word that's been overused lately because of all these influencers and social media gurus. When you get up in the morning, you have problems to solve that you've created or they're created because you've put yourself in that scenario. And there's no one else that can fix them except for you. And that's tough.


So, you've been at the entrepreneurial game for the past few months, the past few years, past few decades, and have been trying to set up a business, get rich, serve a lot of people, live your dream life, or whatever your goals may be, and you've been having some trouble. You've been having ups or downs, things have been good and they're not good, your motivation is waning, you know, you're very motivated one day and then the other day you just quit. If you relate to any of these issues, what I would recommend to you is to skip a mistake that I've made for many, many years in my journey, which was to not try to go big with people. So, I'm a very creative person, like most entrepreneurs. I've always been motivated by growth, I've been motivated by freedom, by creating an amazing life for myself and for people that I care about. And one of the main issues that I've always had was I would start a project, I would start a business and things would usually start really well, but then they'll get tough, I'd have lots of motivation, things would go not according to plan, which seems to happen, you know, most of the time to most of the people in the world. And then I would just give up, I would just get up and leave, or I would lose a lot of motivation and watch everything kind of fall apart over time. And what I did differently with my current business with Primatica, which grew in about seven months to almost 100 clients and at this point we have 20-something employees, was that I actually leveraged people. So, I grew a team almost from day one and started with a partner. And this really made all the difference for me, because what happens is, when you want to quit and you're not accountable to anyone and there's just a couple of clients, it's not that hard to quit. You just stop working with the clients. But when you start really, really investing in people around you, when you hire a VA and pay them a few hundred dollars and maybe it's not a lot of money, but maybe for them that's what pays their bills. That's somebody who now counts on you to keep going.  And now you have people that are responsible for very important tasks and depend on you and want to grow with you. So, the bigger you make your team and the bigger you make your business, the more you cement it from just an idea, something in your head to something that's very real, something that's very solid and cannot just be broken. Another effect that I've noticed, which is almost a spiritual effect, is that the more people you have in your team, the more people that are dependent on you for their income and genuinely care about your business, the more likely you are to survive and succeed. Because there's something about the intention, there's something about the way that people work, that when you get a lot of people and they're all motivated for this to keep going, then people tend to get very, very creative and things just work. So, you know, you've been in a situation where there was an emergency, there was an issue and you had really just, you had to take care of it. There was no other choice. So, your brain did what your brain does best, which is to think and it found a solution. And if you have 20 people in your team, that's 20 people that can help find solutions for problems, which obviously means you want to hire only good people and people that you actually trust that have, you know, good motivations and good thinking and good skills. But that's another topic. So, just to summarize, if you've been having trouble in your entrepreneurial journey, basically surround yourself with great people. That will change everything about what you're doing. So, that's number one. Number two, if you need help with hiring people, I'm actually putting a course below that I made with my partner that helped us hire literally almost 40 people at this point and do it extremely easily, extremely fast. We've actually built a full system for hiring people for a lot less money than you'd have to pay if you're trying to hire local. And it's also a strategy to be able to hire hundreds of people, to attract hundreds of people for any position that you'd like, whether it's a simple position or a complicated one. And then have a filtering system that actually gives you only like two or three of the best people for the job so you can interview them. This is a really good course. Just check the information below, our hiring course for Paramedica, and I'm sure it will change your life as well. Let me know if you have any questions and thank you very much.


Thanks very much and very hard to beat that. We've got such a little time left. Gautam and I are going to ask one question and then take some questions from the floor and then perhaps add a couple more and then collect your answers at the end so we get as much participation as possible. So the question from both of us is for you to think and particularly the panel who haven't spoken yet, for you to just say how you engage with the notion of inclusivity. And I think from me, the question to the panel, is are there any areas of inclusivity we haven't captured or we've missed? Do you want to add a question at this point? No. Athinde, would you like to start yourself? I'm going to start by, throughout the two days, I took notes as we were discussing. And in relation to inclusivity, I think we did talk about a number of issues that could have been expanded but are already in the types of things that we are, we have been talking about. One of the first things I remember, we talked about a city for all by all. And if we kind of dig deep at the meaning of that, it really brings in the issue of inclusivity. But the questions that we haven't kind of gone deep is to say a city for whom, by whom, who speaks for whom, who makes those kinds of decisions, what kinds of platforms, what kinds of spaces do we create for people to intervene? And for example, it was a bit shocking for me in one of the panels, I think it was this morning or I think end of the morning, in which you say, oh, we are doing a city for all, we are doing this, et cetera. But how, how are we doing this? It's easy to just say we are doing it, we want to be inclusive. But what are the specific processes? How do we go about doing those things? And I was happy to see, for example, what Omar was saying about Cairo and the specific things you did after the 2011 events. How do we map out the ways in which informality is operating, the ways in which people are thinking are using the space? And I think those kinds of issues, that's where we have to dig deep. I think no one will come out and say, we don't want inclusive cities, but what does it really mean? How do we operationalize that? And then we talked about endogenous cities, that we have to have organic transformations. What does that mean? We also talked about the incomplete city. Who's going to complete it and how? And Gautam, you talked about temporality. How fast do we go? How slow do we go? And who takes that time and how is the city is built? So those kinds of issues that really help us to kind of reflect deeper on these issues. And we talked also about cities as open systems. What does that mean? And who's going to operate within those open systems, et cetera. So I could go on and we talked about social geographies of inequality. And how do we go about breaking those geographies of inequality and making our cities more inclusive? And also for whom are we doing that? For example, one issue that I'm not going to kind of come back with the issue of youth, you all know what I think about it. But there are specific groups that we need to pay attention when we think about cities. For example, issues of security and protection for women in cities. Issues of violence. Issues of domestic violence. Even when we're thinking about housing, how do we create spaces that are conducive to security, to protection of people? And I remember when we did the visit to one of the projects, one of the condominiums. Women were not asked about how the kitchen should look like to prepare the injera. And then all of a sudden there was this communal kitchen that nobody used because people didn't want to share how much do they cook, whether they eat lamb or chicken, et cetera. It was something more private. But how do we go to people? How do we bring people in? So those are the kinds of processes that I think we need to pay attention to. Thank you very much, Alson. Beth? I'm just going to say a few words to, I think, build on the presentation that Omar gave of our work in Cairo and speak a little to some of the other comments. And I think Raul had made a comment about taking a humble approach to realities on the ground. And as a very small civil society organization working in Cairo, I think that's been of the most important to us because there really is this question of what kind of an impact can we make and how can we operate, especially given the changing circumstances on the ground. So one of the things that we have done is to look at these small scale interventions and, again, to think strategically about where can we make an impact. So looking at the passageways is one example of working in an interstitial space, which they could be conceived of as back alleys or junk spaces, but to think about them as a network of potential public spaces and then to undertake a pilot design process that is public participatory in nature and is thinking about how can we create a more inclusive, accessible public space and do it on a very small scale. And then we have seen the government since then has done a couple of other pilot redesigns of passageways in downtown. So that's one way in which we are able to operate. And I think also this question of temporal design, so also working in these interstitial moments. So we have been operating in Cairo over a period of time where there's been obviously great change. At one point there was a real openness, and now we're seeing this return to order and as, again, small organizations that are vulnerable to these kinds of changes on the ground. How can we create networks? I think this has been very important and also forums where we can introduce some sort of public participatory process. And I would say forums, even like the ones that we're a part of right now, we've seen that this has made a big difference in Cairo. We have hosted a number of conferences. I know Galtam had come to one of the early ones that we had done because there really is no place for people to find out what's happening in their neighborhoods or to have a say in what's happening in their neighborhoods. So as a small organization, that is something we can do is just to create space for people from civil society, from the private sector, and from the government to sit together and also to open that conversation up to the public. And I think we've seen the importance of that also here today. So I think maybe unless there's anything you want to add to that, Omar, I'll just stop with those few examples. Professor. Having listened to all of these important things that have been said, particularly the abstract and theoretical ones such as the absolute relationship between the absolute and the transitory, and things that things that things are not static, but changing, I feel I have to say a few things about this about my observation. Change is not always positive. Development doesn't happen very smoothly. In Ethiopia's case, in Addis Ababa's case, from spontaneous from a city that emerged spontaneously to a planned city, to a more modern city. But these things, as they happen, there are certain things that we are losing. That is, among others, the inclusivity. That is the mix in functions, in types of people that live in different neighborhoods, and the means of transportation, the mixed types of transportation from the animal hoof to the rather modern means of transportation. All these are being lost. And as we are losing them, we are also losing, together with these things, the solidarity that existed in the communities in the neighborhoods. Now are emerging neighborhoods of the well to do the middle income ones and the low income neighborhoods. Such things didn't exist because of the poverty, because of the underdevelopment of the economy. People were interdependent. They lived together. And there was no neighborhood that belonged exclusively to one ethnic group or one religious group. And all these things were beautiful. They made Addis Ababa a beautiful city. But they are being lost. And now, because of the fast rising rentals and price of housing, people are chasing their tenants. And then they are being chased away themselves. So there is such a mobility in the city that, in some cases, people don't know their neighbors. They live among strangers because of this fast mobility. And what is important is, in spite of even the pro-poor government policies that are practiced, still the market forces are so powerful that the housing and so on and so forth end up in the hands of the well to do. So poorer people are being pushed out to the peripheral areas. And this means more travel time. It means more money to be put for the mata, too, and so on. So all these things is making life unbearable for the very poor, in spite of all sorts of actions taken to mitigate them. Thank you. Thank you very much for serving us. I think that we've done, I think this panel has been really remarkable in putting down some of the core kinds of conversations we hadn't quite gotten to so far. Questions of aspirations and values are now very firmly in place. It's not just about how you do things, but how we, as collectives and peoples, decide what to do and which fights to pick on. And I think that also, Edgar opened yesterday with the idea of complexity and diversity as outcomes in the center of his diagram. And now we've got a sense that that diversity is not, as the professor is saying, always celebratory. It's also conflict. It's also trade-offs. It's also fights. It's also power. And the one good news that we certainly have is that we've held on to our 20 minutes of open audience time. So we're going to turn to the audience, and I'm going to leave my question as the first question and then collect them out. And the question I have, one, is Omar for you and for Ulrich. I wanted to, I was very struck by this idea of scale that you're both referring to. The phrase that you used was, we focused on the corners. And so it's not just a question of a small practice because you have both the mayor and the street-paced architect talking about the small corner. So how do we start talking about the small in a different way where we actually aren't diminishing the scale in which it's producing our fabric? And I think somewhere we're getting into this debate about the big and the small, the massive and the incremental. And perhaps we should take out the massive small that Kessia said yesterday a little bit more seriously. So if you could reflect a bit on scale, I think a little bit in terms of practice. And Mayor Sawa, I wanted to, I was struck by a slight contradiction in your presentation. I wanted to push a bit, which was you very frankly said that politicians tend to look at the informal sectors in nuisance because the formal sector is easier to engage with. Yet in the middle of a lot of your work is the engagement with the markets, the engagements with a lot of the actual work that people in Accra are doing. But in the last slide, we went back to the idea of the underground economy. And so I'm struck by this contradiction. And I wanted to maybe push you a little bit to think about taking seriously what would it take for us to really move our conversation about informality now from these languages of parallel and underground and black to real questions of productive and thriving and again, massive small. And with that, we are going to look for hands. I see one right in front of me and I'll take that here. Hi, I'm Sasha Daz from ETH Zurich from Switzerland. And I would like to address one question that Joe was addressing maybe something, talking about something that we might have missed when we talk about inclusive cities. And this is not only because of my background from Switzerland but also the research we do at our chair, which is the cooperative principle. And I counted the numbers during this conference, it was mentioned maybe two or three times, but we believe that it's a tremendous, tremendous model and opportunity to take on this model because it's basically a democratic, democratically run business model, which addresses a lot of issues that have been being discussed in these two days of about housing, how do you address the issue of housing? We have a lot of cooperative housing that deliver very good housing at a very low price that's happening all around the world, but probably not at its full potential. And it also expands in other sectors. There are cooperative insurances, cooperative banks and they're all driven by the people, they're one vote, one share, they're controlled by the people who run it and who produce the products. So I think we have to talk about the global flows and investments, but addressing the domestic market, the cooperative model, I think, has to be on the table of any policy decision and it has to be enabled from top down so that the bottom up can use it as an opportunity. Thank you. We'll discuss that last sentence, but thank you. My name is Meg Bartholomew, I'm from PWC. I also work with LSE Cities and I just wanted to ask, we've heard a lot about inequality from kind of the bottom up perspective. We've touched a little bit on the kind of excess at the other end and actually Samir actually mentioned it earlier kind of talking about finance in terms of we have minimum standards for space, but we don't actually have any maximum limits. So is it time to actually start thinking about a maximum limit? My name is Chukwa Mekar, I'm an architect from Nigeria and currently a doctoral candidate at the Department of Architecture, University of Loven in Belgium. My question is on the term informality. We've seen the majority of the economic systems happening in the African city is basically termed as informal. And so I think this is a misnomer. What is this informality? Why is this informal? Whose definition is this informality? So I think I'm trying to ask how could we transcend this dichotomous thinking and to be able to also focus on the hybrid where these two come together because I think it's in the heart of this inclusivity. Thank you very much. Thank you. I found these presentations fascinating, but I'm wondering if we couldn't widen the way that we're thinking about inclusion. The thinking about the way that this whole approach to urbanization is fundamentally shifting the terms of inclusion. And I thought it quite interesting in a benevolent and well meant way of looking at inclusion through the corners, but has our thinking about inclusion been pushed into the corner so we can only talk about inclusion in the corners that nobody wants, the abandoned spaces. And thinking about how power shapes inclusion even in those corners, again, including stakeholders and discussing things and creating beautiful spaces, but spaces that replaced street traders with trees and the livelihood implications that that has in African cities where the street traders are also very important to think about and at a wider level about the way that the whole financial framework is shifting the terms of inclusion. In the last session, we talked about how do we include the private sector? Well, in the old days, we included the private sector by taxing them, but now we're talking about taxing citizens in cities in which 70, 80% of them are working in the informal economy and including the private sector by bringing them in to make a profit. So the terms of inclusion financially have been fundamentally shifted. So I'm wondering if we might think about inclusion at the greater level. How is urbanization and this high capital way of thinking about the city changing the terms of inclusion? You have an excellent set of questions. My best wishes to you all. I am going to ask you because we would love to go back for another set, so I'm gonna ask you just to be tight. Omar? Okay, I'm gonna try to combine some questions. One of the things that was really clear during the discussion the last couple of days is what's so specific about African cities in urbanization? To my view, there's something about scale, you know, the pace of urbanization, number of people, age group, but there's something about governance and I think unlike cities in Europe and North America, which is mostly more regulated and relatively more stable, the cities in Africa with generalization are more in the state of the making, more dynamic and that creates possibilities because these streets as we see it is more contested and negotiated and that creates opportunities for working on the street level that is not necessarily available in cities in Europe. And that means that when you look at informality not necessarily as an anomaly or something bad, but it's actually the main driver of urbanization. So when we look at why we work on a small scale in the loopholes, I think for us it's a political agenda because since the revolution is no longer possible in the long term, at least in our case, the only possible mode of practice is work within the loopholes, within the system, within the cracks, both geographically and politically. So to develop subversive tactics on a street level that could also be politically a measure to introduce change without necessarily calling it a change. And that's also very important. So in the case of street vendor, we're not really replacing street vendor and what we learned during the first research project is that informality has a lot of potential but it also has this problem because it's unregulated. Informality is also, is a very conservative proposition because it's private actors who pursue private interests and without necessarily bringing an instrument to advocate the public good, it could very, we could very much fall into a very new liberal paradigm unintentionally because informality is the flip side of, to my view, new liberal paradigm because it's about the withdrawal of the state. So in the short term, we need to work with it in the next generation or two because this is really the reality of our cities but in the long term, we have to really reclaim a democratic and strong state to advocate the public good and I think that I would like to hear. Yeah, I just wanna add one thing which is that as Omar mentioned, we did an extended research and design work specifically about the street vendors in downtown and we had also made some design proposals to create more inclusive streetscape that might be able to support the street vendors continuing to have space along the, both the main streets and the back alleys but I will say that we are working in a context where also you wake up in the morning, as Omar mentioned, you have the police, you have the military, the street vendors were very much evicted by force in a fairly overwhelming top down manner and there's very little, unfortunately, that we're able to do in this context so we do what we can in terms of our design propositions but the context in which we're working with the garden that we showed in the back alleys, it was not a situation where we were displacing the street vendors, I would like to be clear about that. So I'm gonna try to respond to all the questions in a sense and I think for me listening to the questions, the scalar question is a critical one. We tend to, I think, interrogate questions like inclusivity at one scale and the small scale is where it's demonstrated the most clearly, strategically for all the reasons, Omar, that you pointed out. I think the challenge for us is to see how we can interrogate this across scales which means what is the middle scale, what's the regional scale, what's the national scale and I think you have to do that simultaneously. So therefore one then has to construct a kind of ecological thinking because you can't think of infrastructure or mobility or street improvement separated from each other and so the question is I think for practice, how does one construct a form of practice that can engage with this broader ecology simultaneously, this is a massive challenge and so when we talk about why informal, I mean I use the word kinetic, I call the state of our cities in the majority world a state of kinetic urbanism because it's about incrementalism, it's about elasticity, it's about the appropriation, deappropriation, reappropriation of spaces which is all very clear in what you formulated Omar. So it's also to do with and Gautam speaks to this terminology, how we create the rubrics and then we become slaves of those rubrics and so I think partly it's contingent on us to develop a vocabulary which is much more appropriate for our condition and I think that's also a challenge and so I think I just wanna sort of go to this idea of practice, practice across scales, practice that is interdisciplinary, practice that straddles the small scale with the large scales and inherently creates feedback loops. I think those feedback loops are missing and unless we have that in our practice, I don't think we can deal with the ecological imagination and so I think true activism will come from that feedback loop and the way I would frame it is I think we'll finally have overlap because I think what's happened is our spheres of concern are completely detached from our spheres of influence and how do you make these overlap? I think we have to address scale and we have to create these feedback loops within a broader ecological imagination. Thank you very much. Yes sir. Thank you very much. I think that you spoke about the contradiction in my statement at my presentation on how I perceive informality. I was trying as much as possible to expounce the views of politicians in my city and not necessarily representing my personal view because my personal view was more illustrated in my engagement with that informality and informal communities that we have. Personally, I have worked in an NGO sector for about 20 years, I had engaged broadly and that's what I bring to today. The reason is that in our part of the world and in Accra, a lot of politicians see the informal sector as a nuisance because they are easy prey and they occupy the pedestrian walkways, they live in informal settlements and accessibility is always an issue and it becomes a tough time for politicians who are very impatient in engaging to describe them as a nuisance and that's the kind of thing that I wanted to present to you. And I also was trying to be as much blunt as possible and not to romanticize the issues by coining some words and jargons that would describe the situation because it is important for us to appreciate the contribution of the informal sector which I think that most political leaders tend to overlook and it comes back to heat assets all the time. And I want to tie in your question that she asked earlier about what are we missing? I think that in all the issues that we have spoken about housing, mobility, urban issues, local economic development and all these issues, we need to appreciate the fact that we are working and operating in a political and environment in a certain governance structure and all these issues must be catapulted by these political environment in which we operate. If the political environment is very oppressive and it's not open-minded, you will get a backlash on some of these things and that's the kind of challenge that we face in Africa and especially in our crowd. What kind of political environment are we operating? For instance, you have four years as a political leader. You come into office, your first year, you are a bit unsettled. You get settled by the second year but the third year you are going for an election. So what drives voter decision is what you are thinking about as a political leader. And because by the fourth year, it's everything that you do is politics and you have to focus on that in order not to lose another election. So we need to appreciate the kind of political environment in a governance structure that we have, that it's also affecting the kind of decisions that we take as leaders and affecting the informal economy as a whole. Thank you, great questions. Just on maybe to start off on what Gautam, what you've framed on the value of the small. I think for Leipzig, although we might appear as the rich guy on the block, I mean, at the time it was a question of focusing the intervention of focusing the resources and also to not think about entire districts but think about that corner house and think about the street artery. And in fact that it's much easier to focus on the district because you have data for the district and you don't have data for the street artery. And so that puts sort of when you wanna sort of justify an intervention along a street artery which might be three kilometers long, you have to pull in data from four districts which creates absolute havoc in the statistical department but which is in the end creates a stable artery and then sort of stabilizes the neighborhood. On the question of how to tame global capital, I think there is sort of a proxy that we could think of East Germany as being in its initial phase in the early 90s as also being subject to inflow of capital, the decision on which we're not made in East Germany. So what did Leipzig do? I think the first thing the new mayor who came in in the early 90s said, we need to have a zoning plan. Sounds mundane but many other East German cities didn't have the same rigor in the zoning plan. And also I think what they very successfully did in the 90s, they enforced the building code. They enforced also the requirement that in the inner city there is a 20% share of apartments in any commercial development you have in the inner city. And so that leads to the fact that the inner city is in fact has mixed use of living and commercial use within the inner city. And of course we disgruntled investors because they didn't wanna take these terms. On cooperatives, yes, fully endorsed. In many times we just stifle ourselves in Germany at least with the regulations we impose on any type of activity, be it in terms of accident prevention or be it in terms of data privacy. So that is again the sort of the rule of secondary rules or the role of secondary rules that sometimes stand in the way. And I'd like to share one observation. We've heard some calls made be from Joe but also from the colleague, the professor, sorry, forgot the name over there, on making inclusivity even broader and making it given it even more aspects and more dimensions and so. And I would really argue and I, if you see sort of the three presentations from the mayors and I very much loved, you know, Ariane's radical simplification on children. It is not about adding dimensions, it is about reducing dimensions because it's in politics or anywhere else, your coordination is my complexity. So we can only deal with so much complexity and we don't know in Leipzig if the focus on street corners and the focus on arteries was the right focus, we could have taken a different focus but we took that one. And so I think it's just as, you know, you could have given your policies a different spin, a different narrative and you chose children. And so I think it's also the question of accepting the reduction in complexity and working with that and so. And in that context, I'm calling actually for yes, inclusivity, but choose your dimension and then work along that dimension. Thank you very much. So I, unfortunately, we will not be able to go back to the floor because we do have to close now and I'm gonna hand over to Joe to have the last word and just the one reflection that I wanted to leave on the table is, I think that one of the people that I learned how to be political from once told me that you have to first actually admit to yourself that you're going to pick a fight. And I think that it is very interesting to hear from this set of table that has such diverse locations from where they practice to each talk about disgruntled voters, upset constituents, itinerant policemen, capital investors, threatening to go take the Amazon headquarters to some other city. And I think that that question, it takes us back to that question of when do we know we're making a difference?  And I think it takes me back to the question that went unanswered on the question of the informal. There is a deep history to how that word was wielded and it was actually not wielded by people from the outside. It is one of the few words that was wielded by workers. And if you look at the history of one of the largest federations of informal sector workers, which is WIGO, Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing, it is WIGO who changed the mind of the International Conference of Labor Statisticians and forced the ILO to conduct and produce the data that it produces today on informal sector work. And it is one of the best examples of massive small that I know. The fact that the International Labor Organization forces every country's labor force surveys to document and measure informality from domestic workers to street vendors to waste pickers to federations is because the word informal was wielded against the invisibilization. Now at some point that word will run its life.  So I think that it may well be time to ask if the battle has changed again, but there is a history to where it came from and it didn't come from the top. Thanks, Gautam, and I'm not going to detain you very much longer, but I just wanted to conclude by saying once again that when we're looking at cities and inclusive cities, we're talking about people, and there are lots of different kinds of people, including around this table. And I think all of us can work within the parameters of our institutions and so on, and our areas to do what we can. I really take on board what you say, or I move from the academy into being a manager and leader, and you do have to narrow down. And I think if I go back to my opening comments about 1996, we were multiplying identities and arenas for inclusion and perhaps unhelpfully. What I've taken from this session and slightly more broadly is that we still haven't cracked the nut of processual and organizational inclusion. It's what Edgar Peters asks, why is participatory development so damned hard? And I think we haven't cracked that. We were grappling with it a long time ago. We still are. I think what I've taken very positively from this session is this notion of both spatial and temporal inclusion, taking from what Omar and Beth have said about spatial interstices and the cracks and the loopholes as a bottom-up way of working with space. And then what we have to grapple with is how you then marry that or contest or collaborate or accommodate or collude or whatever you do with the massive rapid developments that are going on along the temporal lines of what we heard about yesterday which is never ways to good crisis. So I think it's how you marry those two things in the way you think about inclusive cities. And similarly, the interstitial moments linked to never ways to good crisis, how you look at temporality around inclusion and when those moments are going to be more inclusive and undermine everything you've driven for. So I would only disagree with you on one count in terms of adding inclusions and that would be the digital one because in 1996 we didn't even have the internet and now we're talking about inclusion and apps and everything else. So that's the one that I would say is very different from then. But can I ask everyone to join me and Khartim in thanking the panelists and the speakers and indeed all the questions from the audience. Thank you.