In this particular session, we'll dive into an interview that looks at the state of the economy and how you and I can make better financial decisions in 2021. So the coronavirus pandemic threw everyone for a loop in 2020. And as the year winds down, it's time to reflect and reset for proper budgeting in terms of finances and also if you're in a position to invest, this is the conversation for you. So the studio I'm joined by CPA Enok Nyanchoga Munari, he's the managing partner at Nyanchoga and Associates. Thank you very much, Enok, for creating time to be with us. Thank you for hosting me. You were a man of many titles, by the way. I say that earlier, before we start this conversation, and you were very much humble, saying you're not. Yeah, I'm basically Enok Munari, I'm a CPA as you said, I run an audit firm and a consultancy firm and currently delving into a call center business. So truly, I'm an entrepreneur and we're trying to make it in this life, basically that's what it is. Enok, in the holiday season, and in most cases, this time frame, we tend to spend a lot and then hit January, it feels like two months in one. So let's start off by the rules of improving our financial life. What are some of the tips you could tell us? I know we've been through a very difficult year and everyone is crying, looking around wondering what have I done wrong this year that I should be able to change? And as it has always been, December has always been time for reflection. It's time that people get easy away from work and sit with family and probably start thinking through what they have done during the year and how they can be able to improve on those things. So I think it's a good time, people need to look at the financial decisions that they've made in 2020, as much as we've had a very difficult year. What kind of financial decisions have you made, either in savings or in spending, that sometimes you feel probably they were not right or some of them worked for you, you pulled off some of them, and then you can be able to plan for 2021. But the most critical thing that I can tell the viewers today is that financial discipline is very critical. You can work hard and earn so much in salary.  So as people think through what they have done and start preparing for the next year, they really need to think through how they can be able to be very disciplined when it comes to financial decisions and also try to have the culture of course budgeting, trying to look at your expenses, look at your fixed expenses, the expenses that you incur regularly. Then look at these expenses that sometimes you can actually be able to avoid and see which ones, how you allocate your monies for the next coming financial year. If you cannot be able to do that and with very good planning, you will still feel like there's something wrong with the year. And yet it's actually not the year, it is you and the decisions that you make in your life. Alright. Okay. So young people who are listening to this conversation, you are much well experienced when it comes to finance and everything else. So what should we do when it comes to beginning to just designing of our budget? What are the critical things that we should look out for? I think the first thing you need to look at is your income and how regular your income is because we have different sets of young people. We have young people who are in wet-collar jobs who earn salaries at the end of the month. We have young people who are entrepreneurs and only earn when they are able to through their business. That's sure. And we also have young people who are in formal jobs who basically earn at the end of the day. So it all depends on how your earnings are. And once you've looked at your income, then you can be able to project your expenses. I always tell young people that it is always good to live within your means because there's no need for you to earn 20,000 shillings, for example, and you desire to live in a house in Rwaka for 10,000 shillings.  That is a very poor financial decision because at the end of the day, you need to live that life and try and save for tomorrow. If you spend so much without saving and calamity strikes, for example, and you lose your job or your business collapses, you will find yourself going through very tough times. So it is critical for someone to look at their income and look at the kind of expenses that they're incurring and whether they're able to adjust downwards, for example, you are able to adjust downwards without shame because it is your life.  And it comes to, when it comes to us young people, we have been inflicted with the 50, 20, 30 budget route. And you're trying to, you've always tried to understand how to just go around it, probably could help us break it down. No, for me, I don't want people to focus on book experience, basically, when it comes to budgeting. The most critical thing that someone needs to live to is to live to the realities of time. We come from different backgrounds. Some come from different backgrounds where they support. Some don't come from backgrounds where there is no support at all. They're supposed to support their parents, for example. And you try and design a unique budget for yourself.  Exactly. Because I mean, there are people who want to eat meat every day and there are people who are vegetarians. You will find that their budgets will be different. So if you wanted to go down to a book kind of budgeting program, you may end up actually doing things that you don't like, doing things that necessarily you could have actually avoided.  And at the end of the day, also gives you an opportunity to save and to ensure that the people around you are living comfortably. Is budgeting all about paying bills? Because I'm wondering, it's the festive season. I would want to break the bank for my family and friends, just to show them love. Is budgeting all about paying bills? If you broke a bank today, you'll be short. Lara can tell you. Or you'll go in for so many years. And there's no need for you to go all the way to make happy. And this is something that people have to realise. Happiness comes from within. These world things that people feel are the ones that are making you happy, they are actually not the ones making you happy. When you're happy from within and you're comfortable with the situation as it is, you will always live a happy life. You will sleep knowing that I've done my best. This is the reality, this is it.  So budgeting does not look at just spending. It looks at also saving and it looks at earning. So it's a combination of how you earn, how you spend and how you save. Because your earnings should be equal to your spending and your savings. So now the question is, how do you balance the three? Because on the earning side, you may not have so much in terms of what you can do. Because you're probably on a fixed salary and if you have a side hustle that you're doing, it can be giving you some sort of profits. But that is your total earnings. Now, how do you spend the money?  Then when it comes to January, by the 10th of January, you're all over accusing your friends of not being true friends. That you know, you guys have stood for you when you had problems. Now I need 2000 feelings to pay for my bus fare and no one is coming through for me. Why? Because you did not budget properly when it comes to festive season. So something else that I was talking actually on your sister television is that the other challenge that we have as Africans is that we remember its holidays when it's December 20th. And then you start asking yourself, where can I go? Can I go to Naevasha? You're not calling everyone trying to book for a room or something and you realize because it's high season, the expenses are very, the room, it's very expensive to be able to go for your holidays. So if we can be able to have and the young people should be able to lead on this, starting to plan early. I've come from a culture and my former boss is from the UK. There's something he taught me when I was the finance manager there that immediately the December holidays end. He starts paying for his next December holidays, planning and paying. So by mid-January, he already knows that we're going for holiday in June. We have another holiday with the family in October and another one in December. They have identified where they're going, they know how much they're going to spend and they start making deposits for the same. That way you have a fixed calendar for the year that you cannot change because you've made bookings and you work towards ensuring that you go for those holidays. The mistake that we do is that we sit pretty until December 20th. Then you sit in the house asking yourselves, now we have the bonus, where can we go? Then you find everywhere, it's fully booked. So the best you can do is go to some hotel in Nairobi, take photos, swim, enjoy and tell people how are we enjoying our festivals. But at the end of the day, deep down you know you are not because there's something that you're supposed to do that you didn't do. So it is good that people start that culture of planning the year while in advance and saving towards achieving those goals. Apart from just planning way earlier, how can you start the reflection on the money journey? Now considering or putting yourself in a position where we messed up in 2021, how can you start the journey? One person who is again emotional kind of budgeting because when you want to reflect on the year, then you want to plan for the year ahead half of the time you will be driven by emotions. And you're driven by emotions of the things you never did or the things you did wrong or the things you did right. Those emotions can actually misdirect you and think you're planning for your coming year in a good way but you end up doing very poor planning. But it's always good to start earlier the year and start thinking through yourself as a person and what you want to achieve. Look at your achievements for the previous year without emotions. What were your set targets in terms of what you wanted to achieve? That business that you wanted to open, did you manage to open it? If not, why? Can you be able to do it right in the coming year? Or if you managed to open the business and it worked, how can you be able to improve that business? Because at the end of the day, you cannot start talking about spending if you've not earned the money. So we should be taking more time to think about ourselves as businessmen, ourselves as employees, as entrepreneurs and what we can be able to do to improve our revenues or our sources of income for the coming year. Because with so much money at your disposal, you can easily be able to budget. So I think for now, during this festive season, for the next seven or so days, it should not be time to be excited about life. Of course it's good to be excited about life but it's time to be able to take time and reflect on 2020. Look at your life as it has been, the decisions that you've made and look at the things that you didn't do right that you can be able to change and look at the things that you did right that you can be able to improve on for the coming year. Oh, I see. And when it comes to spending, what is the best way to just track like tracking the way you have been spending your money? I have a friend who usually writes everything down like she carries a notebook, like any kind of spending that she does. So what is the best way to just track your spending? I also have a friend who does that and I always make noise at what he does because as an accountant, I look at it from two perspectives. The first perspective and is the bad one is something that we were taught in school of something called a sunk cost. A sunk cost is money that you've already spent. You should not be crying about money you've already spent because you can do nothing about it. That is a sunk cost. Money spent, it is gone. Don't bother yourself with it. But then on the other hand, as someone who wants to advise young people, then I realize it's good to do budgeting and to track your expenses because a budget without tracking, you cannot actually be able to help yourself. You need to prepare a budget and be able to track that budget. So there are two ways of tracking the budget. One good way is you go to an Excel worksheet, for example, prepare your budget. Say this month I'm going to spend 5,000 on food, 2,000 on travel, I'll make my hair with another 1500 shillings and all those things. Then as you incur those expenses, input them in the worksheet so that at any point in time, you should be able to know how much is left for a specific expense item so that you don't overspend because if you don't track your expenses, you will end the month and realize that you spent less on food because you spent more on hair, for example. And the reason why you spent less on food is because you unnecessarily spent more on hair without noticing, then you ended up not having money in your pocket to buy that good meal that you wanted to buy. But if you're able to track your expenses on a daily or a weekly basis, you can be able to know that the amount available for travel is diminished now. I need to see what I am able to do. So if you can then reallocate some money from one expense item to that expense item, then you can be able to finish the month. And something else that young people have to know, you have two sets of expenses that you incur in a month. You have fixed expenses that you can do nothing about. Then you have more variable expenses I want to call them as an accountant that you have so much you can do about.  You cannot avoid that.  But you can avoid going to the bar. You can avoid, I mean, going for a fancy picnic, for example, you can avoid overspending on shoes. Those are things that you have control over. It all goes down to financial discipline.  Yes. As we had to the new year, as a young person probably you got a job and also... From where? Where did you get a job from? We are creating a scenario. We are creating a scenario where you just got a job you still have the school the school debt the university debt then you want to start a new journey when it comes to a financial aspect of budgeting and saving probably your investment. What is the best way to just create a debt pay off plan?   But when you start earning, you don't want to pay off. So what do you do? You hide. And you know every month it's accumulating interest. So by the time you are caught, because you will be caught and you don't help us as a way of catching people. Personally I was caught. I mean I have to be honest. After campus I really did not want to start paying my hell blow. I had so many other things I wanted to focus on. But by the mere fact that my employer was paying my NHIF and my NSF, that data actually caught me and I paid off and right now I'm cleared with the help. So what someone needs to do is to live to the fact that you have that debt. And remember this money you enjoyed when you were in campus. The best thing to do is that the moment you start earning ensure that you prepare a pay off agreement with the person or the money. And when you do it willingly you end up with paying a lesser amount every month which can be deducted from your salary or you can be able to do a monthly payment through your bank in such a way that you don't end up struggling and you don't end up accumulating that debt. Because the biggest fear is that if you take longer to repay the loan it will move from 200,000 to 500,000. Then you start moving around complaining on how the government is not supporting young people. Why? Because as a young person you have actually not supported your fellow young person by paying off your loan to be able to benefit. And something else I want to tell young people is that when you get a job try and live your life. Don't put a lot of pressure on yourself that you want to start saving from month one. Yet you don't have a good seat in your house. You don't have a TV. You're probably living in our single room. Try and invest in yourself first so that you can be able to get to a point when you say I'm comfortable. You'll be able to start investing in other things.  So I always tell young people that just be easy invest in yourself first. That is the most important thing. Buy a good cloth if you want buy a good shoes, buy a good seat for your house. Then when you feel now things are good for you you will even have the opportunity to start thinking bigger but you cannot think bigger when you're sleeping on the floor. That's very true. So you should also budget for that. expenditure. Not being so much tight on it. When you're budgeting you need to be flexible because when you run on a tight budget you end up in a situation whereby you don't have room for variances. You don't have rooms to overspend or to cover emergencies because your friend can be arrested. Your mom can call you for 500 shillings and if you're running on a very strict budget you don't have that room.  So if the emergencies don't occur then you will have money that you can be able to save or carry forward to your next month. So looking at the situation in the country 2020 has been a very hard economical hard time for many people who actually lost their jobs. So what is your outlook when it comes to unemployment? It is grim because that's the reality of this country. We have to sit here and start lying to ourselves that we will work up and I told you earlier it's not like 31st December midnight will be so magical that coronavirus will disappear the locusts will disappear jobs will be created overnight. No. You have to look at the fundamentals of this country and how jobs are created in this country. We are a country that is running on a very huge debt currently. The government is struggling to pay salaries. The taxes are on strike as we speak because of so many other issues surrounding how the government has been spending money. Corruption is on very high currently because of the kind of people that we have with public office. So if we cannot be able to change these things then the kind of positivity that we need towards 2021 and the hope that we can be able to create more jobs becomes a challenge. But one thing I know is that Kenyans are very resilient and 2021 is going to give an opportunity to be able to relaunch their businesses, relaunch their careers because it's always a good feeling when you start the year on a high and for the businesses that have struggled especially in the tourism industry I know that people are going to look forward to a year when they can actually be able to relaunch their businesses and if the businesses are relaunched and they are successful then we will start seeing opportunities for employment coming in which will be a good thing for the young people because I think it's reached a time when you have to advise young people to look away from white collar jobs because the white collar jobs are not there the government is not creating enough jobs especially in the formal sector and the opportunities are in the informal sector so young people coming from campus people have graduated with diplomas people are fresh from high school and they feel that they don't want to proceed with their graduate studies they need to look elsewhere and the elsewhere is entrepreneurship the elsewhere is business of course there are struggles with starting a business but it always has that satisfaction that you are doing your own work you are hustling hard and you are coming up with some coins to spend that is where the young people need to focus on and of course look at the opportunities for example schools have not been open for the last 9 months so I can tell you the supply chain in the schools is completely broken schools consume a lot in terms of food stationery IT infrastructure and all those things so if the schools are opening on 4th of January there will be so many opportunities for new people to be able to venture into business and the old suppliers to be able to see how they can be able to relaunch and get those jobs people should be ready to take advantage of those opportunities welcome to money management what will be your top tips that you will give us I think the most important thing is to be real to yourself to be real to yourself in a way that you appreciate what you have before you can be able to start to spend because if you are one person who gets excited with a paycheck then you end up to be that person who does what we call eating chicken in the first week eating chicken products in the second week then you start eating like chicken in that week because you just get over excited that you have been paid as a net for example people are getting their paycheck this week the next paycheck will be on 30th of January so it is almost 6 weeks away so if you are real to yourself and you are real to the fact that this is the amount you are you are real to your expenses and that means you face the reality that you must pay your rent that you must pay your expenses you must pay school fees for your kids or for your siblings you will not go wrong but if you are one person who has who is financially in this plane in such a way that you have this carefree attitude but you know tomorrow you spend what you have now it becomes a challenge because you will end up either being in debt or just cursing people for things that you should have done and you never did financially literacy especially for the young generation we try to talk to young people and the problem with the young generation is that when they are free they are spending time on Netflix and they are not getting enough information from Netflix so the reading culture of the young people completely disappear that's why they always say if you want to hide something from an African just hide it in a book they don't read because the only way to learn about financial literacy is to take time and study what other people do either through watching programs that are people talking about financial literacy or reading books or attending these free clinics on financial literacy so people really need to take time and read the same way you read to pass exams you need to read on how you are going to survive face the reality first but also try and read and read so that you can be able to know where the opportunities are and what you need to do to be able to save that you can only be able to get either by talking to someone who has experience or someone who is world vast in that region, in that area if you don't do that you will be living your own life creating your own fantasies that are away from the realities of life and then you realize that you are not moving as a person and you are wondering why your friends are moving forward and you are not moving because there are things that they have done they have taken time to pick advice from their seniors they talk to their friends when they are having a drink they sit down and talk about their life and know how do you save how did you manage to buy your car how come you live in a bed seat of 10,000 and I cannot afford it those are the things that help you learn from your friends what is your final remark when it comes to budgeting and looking forward to 2021 the only thing I can tell the young people listening in today is that tomorrow always has good opportunities and we don't want to look at the struggles we have gone through in 2020 and want to carry that to 2021 we need to be positive we need to be positive to the fact that the world is moving we now have a vaccine for the Covid virus we just hope that we can be able to resume our businesses in 2021 in a good way so we need to be very positive on how we approach the year we actually have to be cautious as much as we are positive we need to be cautious on how we move forward especially for those who are job hunting for those who have jobs and the jobs are on the line and they need to really improve on performance for those who are starting businesses for those who have businesses that have been successful and they are looking forward to a better year everyone needs to look at a way they can be able to better their life in 2021 and by bettering your life you will be able to have more to spend you will be able to have a better life you can go for holidays and you can invest in your family but as much as there is a green picture of the coming year I can tell you the resilience we have with Kenyans people always have a way of making it even through these difficult periods like we currently have so I can only wish the young people well I wish them all the best let them not over indulge in December and they need to realize that the virus is actually here with us so as you party you know I have seen people saying which police station are you going to sleep in on 31st because there is no way I am going home at 10 on 31st there are also memes on matches of course people need to move away from that and realize that don't over indulge you need to stay safe and the only way you can be able to get to 2021 is for you to take care of yourself between now and 31st and don't over spend if you have rent that you have not paid pay it now if you have school fees for your kids that you have not paid pay it now in fact on 24th as people go to shop for Christmas go and shop for the uniforms for January that way you will have less money to spend on Christmas but you will have a fulfilling January if you do it the other way around you will have a fulfilling Christmas and less money to spend in January very very interesting so what are your plans for the festive season so Enoch we had plans of course to travel but then again the reality is there is so much have very young kids and I don't want to expose them so much because of I mean if you go to swim and you go to a restaurant the kids cannot be able to manage to move around with the mask so the risk is there so for me I have decided to work all the way to 24th go and enjoy Christmas with my parents and stay with them until new year then I come back happy holidays thank you for creating time to be with us today Merry Christmas to everyone Merry Christmas to you so that is CPA Enoch Nyan Choga Munnari Managing partner Nyan Choga and associates helping us conversing with us on matters pertaining budgeting and ways to do proper spending when it comes to 2021 better vision, better outlook when it comes to money, money, management I'd like to offer a channel so you can find us across all our social media handles at Michelle Ashira so you can find me across all my socials and we have much more coming your way right here on Entrepreneurship Tuesday


For example, chromosomal abnormalities seem to be more common in the eggs of older women. This makes the woman more likely to conceive a child with an abnormal number of chromosomes. This might mean having a child with Down syndrome, but in the majority of cases it will result in a miscarriage.


Welcome to Toffy TV, it is the Everton News Daily, but Charleston has completed this move to Tottenham Hotspur from Everton with the fee rising to £60 million, that's including add-ons. It's now the five-year deal with the North London Club. It's been put out as an underscloed fee, but that's the fee that is bouncing around, so that's what we'll go with. He said it's farewell today to Evertonians. It seemed like an understated reveal by Spares for the Charles, and I don't know whether that was because he's in Brazil or whether it was at his request, I'm not sure. I'm sure there'll be a bit more fanfare when he actually gets to North London, but just right now it was a little bit understated. I think we appreciate that as Evertonians. This is what he had to say. It's very difficult to say goodbye to a place that has become my home. Fans who welcome me as if I were one of them, and the club that treated me kindly, and helped me develop my sense of community and empathy. All the love I have is not enough to thank you all. Love you Evertonians with a little heart, and he's posted some pictures of himself celebrating better times at Goddison. It's obviously disappointing. It's upsetting. My boy's not happy at all. He was quite upset. That's the way it is. I think the kids will feel it, but what can you do? It's done now and we have to try to move on and create another ritualism, but not forgetting why we're in this situation. We don't have to sell our best players, but to try to keep the club moving. That's something the club has got to sort out. We've been here too many times and we need to get away from that, but the ritualism has left the club. Everton has today been linked with a move for Jesse Lingard. He's on a free. 29-year-old left Manchester United yesterday's contract expired. Westam United are very interested in them and offered them a contract. Apparently it's not what he wants at the moment. Everton is supposedly very interested. Paul Joyce has tweeted that today that the Blues are after him. He's a player who's been discussed at Goddison for quite some time, really, across a couple of different managers, to be honest. But if he's asking the reporter, he's asking for £150,000 a week and I'm not comfortable with that. It's not my decision, so there you go. He scored the winner in the 2016 FA Cup final for Manchester United, but he's never been able to, well certainly in recent times he's not been getting again at Old Trafford. We had a really good time at Westam and I can understand why they want to take him back. But they're not prepared to pay him £150,000 a week at the moment and it'll be interesting to see who does pay him £150,000 a week. But he has been linked with Everton, so there you go. Everton have apparently made another offer. Well, not another offer. I've reaffirmed their offer to Brentford midfielder Christian Erickson. Well, he's actually free agent at the moment. His Brentford contract expired yesterday as well. He's listening to Everton's offer, but apparently he's still got offers from Brentford. Chelsea have looked at him, Manchester United, Tottenham being linked with all of these clubs as well. The good feeling is he'll probably remain at Brentford, but according to reports that they haven't have pitched their interest to him and he's considering the offer. And finally, Marcel Brand has opened up about his time at Everton. He left the club in December following a fallout after the Massey side Derby Brands left the club. He's been speaking about the club. He enjoyed his time in England. He didn't regret it. It was a beautiful club. He's had a very difficult league, great fans. He said, but the owners are too easily influenced and it derailed what they wanted to do. He talked about impatience, but said it was a difficult job to do as a director of football. He've ever known that path because of that impatience and because of the difficulty of the league, but he said he didn't regret moving to Everton. I think Marcel Brand probably wanted to remain at Everton. There's been a lot of talk about interference from elsewhere in the club, whether that be Rafa Benitez, whether that be Farab Meshiri. We saw players pushed on Everton that Marcel Brand probably didn't want. I still feel he could have been stronger as a director of football in that role. When he got to the end of the three years, if he wasn't given assurances, he probably shouldn't have signed another contract. But it's a problem that we've all seen as blues. We know that. There's been too much influence from an owner. If you put someone in place to do a job, let them do the job. Otherwise, they had accountability. You're making it more difficult to hold them accountable if you keep buttoning. I guess that's what Marcel Brand is talking about. The only hope now is that they let Kevin Thelwell get on with the job they've employed him for. That's got to be the hope because if he carries on and will find out as we move forward, Everton will continue to be in the mess they're in.


Yeah, it's a line from the workbook and it's more that you go deeper and deeper and deeper and listening to the fall of the Holy Spirit and then that's more at the end of the ride. You can't grasp it from the middle of it during the ride because that's really the whole point. The script is written when we brought it up before this week we talked about. The emphasis was on the last word written meaning the script is the past and that's really what the workbook is designed to do that if you actually follow the workbook lessons and you go deeply into them and into the experience one of probably of all the 365 lessons the lesson that's most clearly leading you to the script is written is is lesson number seven I see only the past and he talks at the beginning of the workbook by saying we need new time ideas the ego has tricked us into believing in linear time and that is I just sent out a music video and if any of you saw it on my Facebook it was that one about the symphony of time it's a beautiful kind of rhythmic music video that's really pointing to this idea that that the small lie the personality self exists in the fabric of linear time and there's really no difference between that we tend to think of human beings as as being part of time and then dying and maybe going somewhere else but the very construct of what it means to be a human being involves linear time and the ego invented linear time there is no linear time in eternity and then part of linear time is is it's a three-part construct it's got the past the present and the future and the present is in between the past and the future like when we go to history class and they draw the big line on the blackboard that's entirely fabricated and the reason that the ego invented time and space in linear time was guess what to keep the mind guilty that you're guilty for what you did wrong in the past the present moment is ineffectual you have no it has no power to change anything it's like this tiny little blip that just gets rolled right over there's a little blip on the line and the future will be more of the same from the past and this is why from that linear construct it's not even surprising that people in different traditions that are very devoted you know Christians and Muslims and Hindus and so forth believe that a concept like eternal damnation hell that you could go to hell because the ego invented this timeline for that very purpose that you're guilty in the past the present moment is completely ineffectual you can't do anything about it and the guilt will continue on in the future and ultimately that you have to pay a price for all this guilt that's how it's designed the ego wants you to feel like there's no escape so the ego will say you surely don't think God's just going to let you get away with all this guilt you know you all this pain and suffering and guilt all this wrongdoing God's not just going at the very end go oh well you really messed up all the way through but I forgive you and let you back in so the even the concept of the hellfire concept Jesus calls it of hell and damnation it all fits in with this linear concept of time and of course the miracles workbook is designed to show you that everything that you perceive everything in the whole cosmos without exception is the past and then to let it go you know to now just imagine if Jesus is right if he's really training us to see that everything's the past then we would start to see that everything's the same because it's all the past so there would be no hierarchy of what is the same there would be no judgment of what is the same there would be no preferences of what is the same there would be no expectations of what is all the same you can see where that is taking us into a trained re reinterpretation of the world where we actually can see the sameness of the world because it's all the past and that's where the script is written when it comes in it's like it's a prearranged script I was saying last night that the entire script spun out in one instant and it was answered immediately by the Holy Spirit so that's why we could say with honesty the past is over it can touch me not even when we go to self-help groups and support groups and whatever everyone is always working at letting go of the past letting go of the regrets of the past the harmful things the wounds of the past the grievances of the past but it's it's like flypaper it's so sticky that as long as you believe any of it's really true then the future will just lay out kind of in a karmic sense of just repeating the past the same error just repeats over and over and over there's one point I believe it was in absence from Felicity it didn't make it into the published course but actually Jesus told Helen one time history would not exist if you didn't keep making the same mistake in the present and that wasn't in the published course but Jesus told that to Helen and if that isn't a Groundhog Day statement you know how on Groundhog Day he he gets caught in the loop of time and he feels depressed suicidal hopeless because he can't find an escape out of it and it's just like the same day repeating over and over and over well we don't seem to have the exact same day repeating over and over but we have a lot of common elements that just repeat over and over and we do seem to repeat patterns over and over it can be patterns over a lifetime where somebody says I I got married four times I married four alcoholics what are the chances you know but and yet then they go to Al-Anon or different meetings alcoholics anonymous and they listen to the story you too and you too hmm something's going on there's like a loop what are the chances of doing that well the mind when it's in its deceived state is just drawing forth witnesses and the same patterns just continue and we all can relate to that in some way or another you know we may have an issue that seems to come up and just smack us upside the head over and over and it really gets our attention you know like okay I need some forgiveness work here I need to heal something it just keeps coming in my face so so that's really what the script is written is about and and I will say as well that that the script is written the very word script is a very linear word and there is an experience that that goes beyond the script is written and I call that simultaneity some of you might have heard of like Seth material or there's lots of metaphysical teachings that teach that time is simultaneous and not linear well boy does that take care of the script is written that's even an experience that would transcend that very idea so the script is written is just another metaphor along the rungs of the ladder in there but ultimately to come to atomic is to come then beyond that into an experience of simultaneity and then beyond that of course is god god isn't simultaneous because there's not many things happening at once in god there's not many it's just pure abstract oneness and love so you might say you go from from believing linear time to the script is written to simultaneity to bliss oneness pure abstract light not with many things happening at once not no parallel universe is in heaven no plural no multiplicity in heaven just pure pure abstract oneness and we all have that kind of look on our face because there's nothing in this world that begins to show us that there is nothing like when I use the word abstract sometimes people think of oh abstract where have I heard that word before like abstract art yeah you're not going to go in a museum and perceive oneness hanging on the wall I'll tell you that much it is just not going to happen that it doesn't work even the words that we come up with in this world like abstract it's just a word for non-specific but what in all of time and space is non-specific nothing there's nothing near this non-specific everything is specific so that's why we just keep we give ourselves over to that workbook and we say take me lord you know the way and I will experience that when I'm ready to experience it and when I'm willing I will experience that so the actual experience of the script is written is is an experience it's not it's not like an intellectual concept that we can grasp so even when ego studies the course and goes to a certain point goes I don't get that of course it doesn't get it the ego's not going to get anything really but but we keep giving ourselves over to the Holy Spirit and saying take me into an experience and that's exactly what you've done with coming here for this week you know that was the prayer of your heart take me into that deeper experience of that connection and and whatever we desire in our heart our prayers are answered you know that's really beautiful to think about that that you just prayed the prayed the prayer and then the Holy Spirit said yeah try this it's beautiful thank you


I knew from a very young age, maybe like four years old, five years old, that I wanted to sing and dance and act. Like I knew that, and then as I got older and into my preteen and teenage years, I had a love of performing. And by the time I was supposed to go into college, I told my mom and dad that I was gonna not go to college and pursue show business. And being in the Bronx, I didn't go over very well because we knew nobody in the business. We had no connections. And so it was a very far-fetched dream for them. And they were really worried, like, what is our daughter gonna do? And where is this gonna lead her? And at the end of the day, I just had to kind of go off on my own and do it. I always wanted to sing, dance, and act. That was always part of the plan. There was never a moment where I was just gonna be a dancer. I just wanted to do it at all. Not wanting to be in a box ever. And so they said, this is gonna be a big movie. You should audition for this. They did this big casting through Chicago, Mexico City, L.A., all over to find somebody to play Selena. And I got the part. Right at the beginning of my career, when I was acting and it was going so well, I had done Out of Sight, I had done Selena, I had done movies with Jack Nicholson and Francis Ford Coppola. And I was just rolling as an actress. And then I told my manager at the time that I wanted to make a record. And he was like, are you kidding me? You're like one of the up-and-coming actresses in Hollywood right now. Like, why would you do that? And I was like, because that's part of who I am. Nobody could tell me that I wasn't gonna do that. I knew I was gonna be a recording artist. I was gonna make music and I was gonna sing and dance on stage all over the world. That's what it was gonna be. Once you're in the public eye and they can kinda take shots at you, then people start trying to tear you down. Well, she really can't sing and she really can't act and she really wasn't that good in that or, you know, and they just obliterate you. It's just hard. There's a lot going on. A lot of people around all the time and they all have something to say about you. Beautiful, low-five, low-five. J.Lo's high-profile engagement to leading man Ben Affleck only added to the public interest for details of her private life. I remember being on the cover of those tabloids for two years straight and it was brutal. You don't bargain for that side of it, but like I say, you learn how to deal with it. I think it absolutely contributed to the demise of our relationship and the love that we had. It was just, it was, there was so much judgment and pressure and scrutiny and opinions and it was just a really, really hard thing to deal with. Jennifer's wedding plans were called off and although it was a tough breakup, J.Lo gained strength in the lessons she learned. Such a learning and growing experience. I'm kinda glad that I went through it. You're not quite the same person you were before. You gotta tap into the positive voice and go, wait a minute, I'm here for a reason. I have worth, I have value. I belong here. And then it's like the second act.


Good morning. It's a fairly empty hall, fairly full as well in clusters. I think people are sitting with their friends at this point of time. And welcome to Meta Refresh. And thanks Hasgeek for having this conference. And thanks for putting me up first on the stage so that we are able to see lots of sleepy faces. And I like, but I relate to you guys because I, I, how many of you think that you're like Yoda's? Has anyone felt like Yoda ever? Like every morning I do feel like Yoda. Right? So I always take these little more time to wake up. So let's just do a little bit of a warm up before you write. How many of you relate to being designers? We are going to do a round of this. Like starting the meme. How many of you relate to being designers? Right? So repeat after me. Who are we? Who are we? You have to make sure the people next to you are also waking up. Okay? Who are we? Right? And what do we want? You want more designers, but what do designers want? So designers say coffee, flexibility. Okay. I, if someone asked me this, how many, how many designers agree with this? How many designers agree with this? Absolutely. Some people. Okay. Those designers who agree with me say I do. Thanks. Let's start with the talk. My talk is on architecting content-driven websites. I am Sovik. I run a web design studio in Delhi. It's called Mirange. And we architect information and we design radically simple future-proof websites. That's the work that we do. And I want to start a little bit about setting the context of web. Like historically, web has always been a communication and a publishing medium. Right? We have always wanted to put up information on the web so that lots of people at scale can access it. And that has in turn led to what I would like to define as websites which are informational and content-driven. So much of the things that I'm going to talk about are going to be relevant if you're doing informational websites rather than transactional though it will be applicable very much on transactional things as well. But I'm going to stick to primarily informational websites. And what do I mean by these content-driven websites? It could be media publishing, knowledge banks, resources guides. You might have your organization website. You might have this event website that is trying to give a lot of information about, hey, what is MetaRefresh? What is it about? When is it? Where is it? How do I access? How do I buy tickets? So all that information being given out to you, it could even be your personal website. Right? Now, informational websites need to be designed keeping flexibility, scalability, and how long will it last in mind? And why do I say so? And the reason is simple because flexible because information can change. Right? And scalable because information keeps growing over time. And lasting because information is there to stay. And probably even 10 years down the line, even today, most of the resources that we are referring to for our day-to-day job on the web, there's a good chance they're written over a decade back. Okay. And if they were no longer there present for you to be accessible today, then you wouldn't be able to write your lines of HTML code as well. And the reason the entire context of thinking about architecting a website from a design point of view primarily goes back like three years back, we were doing the website for JS4. And at that point of time, we had done a few websites for events related to Hasgeek. And we had to, we were thinking that we need to come up with a good framework or a solid framework so that even websites can be made, new event websites can be made, and the information can be given following very simple frameworks and paradigms so that information can be swapped or even if information grows, the paradigm still sticks. The architecture still sticks and it goes on to be extended to other events that are going to come up in the future. And that's when we had started thinking of a paradigm or a process. And I'm going to talk about that a little later in the talk. I want to start off with what is how does the information website look at the start? And tell me if you agree with this. Has anyone worked on information websites which at the start looks like this when the information is presented to you? Not on the web interface, but when you actually look at the information where there are 20 different types of categorization of information, there are 20 different forms of content on the website. So in a typical portal, you might have a blog post or article, different kinds of opinions coming in or different forms of news coming in and things like that. And it's all like a mess initially when you're looking at it. And from the mess, if we actually put the same mess onto the web, who does it affect? So we need to know who it affects. And it affects first and foremost, the website users, right? And it affects because they can't find what they want. And findability is something that is more important or it proceeds at least usability, because what you can't find is what you can't use, right? If you can't get to the content that you're after, you won't be able to use it in the first place. There's a second set of people when we are designing that we often overlook completely. And that is what I'd call as content managers are people who are creating the content because they need to understand how they are going to create the content for the website that they're after. And when they don't understand it, they make things messier without even realizing that they're doing it on the website. And that is where there's this concept of information architecture that comes in. It is like a skeleton right at the beginning which will try to organize everything. And this is how it's defined. It's like the information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange parts of something to be understandable, right? And I'll move on to a diagram and there was a talk given by Abby Covert a couple of years back. And you can go to this link and there's an entire transcript of the talk. But more importantly, I want to just focus on this diagram that was there in that link. This diagram has been tracking as a simple way information has been getting really complex over time over centuries. It is no longer something that is a simple list, right? The relationship between information. It's not simple tables. They're getting interconnected more and more. And therefore it's getting more and more complex to manage. And as a result, IA is evolving how an information architecture is done is evolving. And it's more relevant than ever because come to think of it, we have always understood the architecture that we can process. Think of system file folders. It's like a hierarchical tree, right?  There are a few levels inside it. There are a few more levels inside it. And websites also thought of that. Oh, there's a home page. There'll be five sub pages. There'll be sub sub pages. And that's how it gets organized. But you know, the reality is not something like this. And today, if you start drawing lines and connecting information, how, how is this piece of content related to that, that piece of content related to this, it'll look like this. You will have external systems talking to your pieces of information. You will have it end up looking like this.  Any, any show of hands? Would you agree with me? Okay, those who agree with me say I do. Thanks. So this is how it, it ends up. And when we say that we want to do an information architecture, we want to get away from such a mess. And this kind of things that there are just three things that we need to do. One is structure, organize and label the information properly. And what is structured content is something that we need to understand first because in, and this is a Wikipedia definition. It basically means information or content that is organized in a predictable way and is usually classified with metadata. So what do you do is you, if you say that X is a piece of information or a knowledge or say a blog post, you want to classify, break out all the metadata inside it. Say, Oh, this is the author. This is the date. This is the tax. These are the categories. And this is the heading of the post. This is the body of the post and so on and so forth. This is the conclusion of the summary of the post. So you want to break it down into a structured content. And what, yeah, so as I said, it's all you need to do is keep calm and break it down, break down any piece of content and information. And you're trying to make it, give it a more structured shape. And how do you start off? You start off by primarily talking extensively, like whoever you're building the, the, your website for whoever is the audience, as well as whoever is the creator of the content, talk extensively and put everything on the table that these are all the set of information we are talking about. And I'm going to take a very simple example in my talk. And let's, let's just look at a conference website for, for an example. If I, if I have to build a conference website today, the kind of questions that I have to ask are like, what, when, where, who, why, and you'll get, start getting answers like, Oh, it's an event on a certain subject on a certain date and times. And there are when you, there is, there is, there are speakers at NDS organizers who are responsible for it, for it, for the success of it. Why is this happening?  So you'll have things like even name date, when you speakers, organizers, attendees, topics, talks, schedule, sponsors, hotels, policies, we have a great code of contact for this conference and all other hazy conferences. So there'll be blog posts, local information, ticket information, and there are many more. I'm just taking a very small subset. Okay. And when we put everything on the table, there is a new paradigm of, we don't want to immediately classify or it in a hierarchy. A new paradigm is evolving over the last couple of years. This term has come up, which is called object oriented UX. What all it means is you're trying to organize this intentionally around real world objects so that people can understand these as things, as objects. And, and therefore you also can clearly define what kind of things make up the object, what kind of relationships behavior they have with this. And what we need to do with the things that are there on the table is we need to identify these objects. What are objects out of this?  Like, is it real, real world thing? Is it a noun? What are the attributes will this have? Will it make, will it be made up of lots of something? Or will it be, will this object talk to that? Will this thing talk to that? Can they be grouped together? Is it chronological, spatial, tabular information? Does an alphabetical listing sense or should it be a database listing? Is there a hierarchy? How can it be archived? And finally, if to arrive at this answer, are these very good definitions? Do they fit these definitions of being an object in itself? So again, come back to this. We have this entire set of things on the table. And what we are starting is, so there's even name, date, venue, date in itself doesn't probably make an object, but surely some things are clearer. A speaker is a thing. A attendee is the living, moving thing.  Or, or the, the, a blog post you can say, oh, it's a very clear, very defined thing. So it can be an object and we can take it. But you have to sometimes group things together to make an object. So you can always say, oh, even name, date, venue, they combine to become the event itself. It's a meter around the event. So we can call even the, an object. Speakers, organizers, attendees are all humans, right? And then you can also break things up. So a schedule is probably something that combines rooms plus time slot plus what talk is happening where room time slot talk itself might be loosely classified as objects and, and a schedule is a combination of this forming a larger object. And sponsors can probably further be broken down in certain classifiers. They go, they're a platinum, gold, silver, silver things. And the next step that we need to do once we have organized these things is basically naming the object. Okay. And this is extremely important with, because you really can't call an object in the system humans, right? It will not be, it's not something that you can use to talk or even to represent and, and reach a common understanding. You'll probably want to rename that as person and this combination at the bottom, you'll probably want to rename it as a session. So a session is basically a room time slot and talk information combined becomes a session and that you can call this an object. A person is an object and so on and so forth. The next step that you'll want to do is you want to define the objects better, right? Now, when you say a person is an object, what does it mean? And again, when I say defining, this thing is going to come up a lot. You have to keep calm and break it down and repeat this over and over. So if I break up an organizer, if I break up an attendee, if I break up a speaker, it's going to boil down to an organizer. Probably you want to show in the website things like, what is the name, designation, bio, contact number. Attendee will probably just be a name, organization and designation. Speaker will probably have further details because you want to give more social contact information. Also probably feature a photo of the speaker, but for all attendees, it might not be necessary or possible. And once you break these things down, you want to probably chunk it together and form a more defined object like the person. And you say, oh, finally we have person as object, which is all the fields where only name and role is essential, and everything else is optional. And the role can be an organizer or attendee or a speaker. So this is the way you can probably chunk it and frame it as a solid object together for the system to understand, for everyone else to understand, oh, we have to create a person in the system or we have to retrieve the person's information from their system. And once you have these objects forming up, you need to organize them better. And how do you organize them is by primarily identifying relationships between them. So if you say a talk is an object and a person is an object, then you might have a connection between a person and a talk in terms of who's the speaker and that's the relationship in between. And this is like a relationship between two different forms of object, which where one is a talk, the other is a person, and you might have relationships between similar objects as well. So how is a talk related to another talk? So you'll come up with something like this, a speaker can be a list of persons. So for a talk object, you can have a related talks to what some talk is being talked about. So that is another relationship that gets established for that object. And you also see for the talk, I've put something as type and you'll always have things like, oh, this is a full talk, this is a workshop and so on and so forth. And traditionally, we always understand these as taxonomies or categorization of information. And here's the thing that I'm suggesting, treat taxonomies as an object itself. And what does it mean when I say treat a taxonomy or a categorization as an object, which means again, this again, break it down. So something like full talk, flash talk, workshops, you can create an object called, okay, this is a session type and it will have a name. The name is full talk or Christophe or flash talk. It will have a duration of full talk is probably for 14 minutes long. It will probably 15 minutes long. It'll have a format. You'll have number of speakers and more information associated with each of these individual types of talks that are there. So yeah, so these, what we understand traditionally as taxonomies or just, we have always been, oh, tag this or categorize this, break the category also into an object so that can completely be understood. The next thing that you want to do is probably review the entire thing. And once you review it, you look, oh, my system looks like this, but I never saw this before that a blog post will also have a relationship, which is like an authors, which is also a person and it may and the author may not attend the speaker, may not be one of the speakers or organizers or attendees at all. So there'll be new things that will keep coming up when you go and when you review the system. And you have to repeat it over and over until you have an aha moment that yes, I can understand the entire set of information that is there on the table. This entire thing can read into a very complex diagram. It's up to you how you want to represent it. But essentially it can be a finally a single list. It can be a flat list of things. It can be an index of things. It can be a daisy chain set of objects. There may be a strict hierarchy or something, a very multi-dimensional hierarchy and it can look like a very complex diagram, essentially. So I'm not going to complexity of the final diagram, but what we want as an outcome of this entire exercise is objects, collections and relationships in a very well-defined and labeled format. One note that I want to put in between is IA is not your navigation. When you look at a website navigation, you might think, oh, this is a structure, but that is not your navigation. Sure, your IA will inform the navigation. It will be a decision taken that how the navigation is through the IA and the structure that you have. But more importantly, a navigation is merely a window into the IA and it's based on completely user needs. You might have something which is deep in the level, but you want to expose that right up front in the navigation simply because users need to access that more frequently. Those kinds of considerations might come in. So we shouldn't confuse navigation with what is in commission architecture. I'll quickly run through this. Watch the role of the IA. It's primarily to focus on the structure of information and sometimes the design of the actual user interfaces, which is the wireframes. You want to understand how people actually use content and how the structure should function and support that. And to grasp the range of content and functionality on a project, how that needs to be structured. So the entire range of content you need to grasp that as well as a part of this. And once you've achieved all these three things together, what you have is a very robust mental model, and that's what we are after. A mental model that the user can understand, that the person who's creating the content that I can understand. As a designer, you can understand, you can talk on the same page. And the developers and people who are implementing the system can also understand. So it's like this blueprint that everyone understands and agrees upon through the length of the project. Through the length of the project, this might change. Things might get added or removed or altered, but you should have this blueprint in place. And I highly recommend you to read the eight principles of IA. There's this link for that. Just go ahead and read this. I want to jump to the next step once you have the IA. How do you capture the content? And traditionally, we have always used the system that we use to capture content is called a content management system to manage all the content that's there in the system. And here's a commit strip. And I really love this because it says, oh, uh, you know, 10 years ago when we wanted to make a website, we just took any old PHP CMS and we used to Google something like what's the best CMS of 2016 2006. And the answer was WordPress, Drupal and Jumla. Right. And the next step is, you know, when I typed best CMS of 2016, what came up, there's still WordPress, Drupal and Jumla. And can you imagine what is going to be the case in 2016? I don't think it can remain WordPress, Drupal and Jumla, because the information is getting so complex. And, and it's, it's, it's real because today if you look at the use of CMS is about 51% of the internet is built on WordPress. And it is so hard to believe this. But I know that there are reasons why this is true. And one of the biggest reason is developers are comfortable with WordPress. And it is an open source. It's there in the community. But from, really, from an information architecture paradigm, you're talking about posts and pages. And that is not the level of structure that exists today and going forward in the world. And that's why you need, there might be simple sites that can do with it, but more complex websites will need more complex CMSs. And when you're picking up a CMS that, what you need to just make sure is that you're able to capture and represent the entire IEA you have as accurately as possible, which means the entire content types, the models that you're talking about, the relationships that you're talking about, it should be represented in the system as accurately as possible. With the minimum amount of hacks that, oh, a post means this, but a post with this category means that. Should be that, that confusion should be as less in the system as possible.  And, and you need to also embrace the create once published everywhere philosophy, which is you make the content once, but you can publish it in different ways and different forms everywhere on the website, as well as release it externally for the external system. Okay. And when you're talking about CMS, what we have to always do at that step is a step called data modeling and well, how is it different? How do you translate a content model into data models? And how are these two different? It's very simple. It's like content models is how a content is understood and used. And data models is how is the content stored in the system? They are two different things. And what this means is another round of keep calm and break it down. Right. So let's look at this. We have the event. That might be the name of the event, but on the data model, we might want to store the title as a string and the addition as a number. Right. When you have the date, we want to make sure that the data model is the day. The entire thing is the day by day and number. I mean day one of the event, day two of the event and things like that. And when does the day one start and end as a proper date time object in the system? And what do you need to do is you have to always separate semantics and style like this. Keep them away. You might represent the 12 13th of September as a presentation, but in the system, it should be stored as the day one starts at this time, ends at this time, the system day two starts at this time, ends at this time. So that programmatically, you can generate any combination. You can present it always as 12-13 September. You can also present in the schedule as day one, this day two, this at some other place and so on and so forth. What it also means is that you need to as much as possible move away from rich text, which is like, I'll give you a big box to create the content and just put in all the things in there because then it's not structured. Right. And you will not be able to reuse information in different ways throughout the system. Taking a look at once you've done these things, how do you present the content? And we have always imagined presentation of a content in terms of pages. Like as a web designers, when a client comes to us, hey, I need five pages designed, please, can you design five pages for me? And we have always scoped things in number of pages. And that's a problem because pages cloud information, you don't know how complex or simple a page is. How many objects does it have? You don't know how to scale pages without creating a mess out of it. It's a very big challenge. And pages, the thing, the manner to think as pages is turning obsolete these days. What we need is broken unit. I mean, our pages is a broken unit today. And we need to take a broken unit and break it down further, which basically means what we need is patterns based on a very solid design system, which will compose a page, essentially. There is a pattern lab based on atomic design principles or design system. You can just go and look up pattern lab. It's a very robust system that's there. But I'll come to a similar alternate system or a paradigm really, which can use the atomic design systems as well a little later. First, I want to also talk about discovering content because when you're presenting information, you need to make sure that the more information is also discoverable. Now, traditionally, we have always thought that how will content be discovered on our websites? Of course, we have the navigation. We always had this, let's give a navigation, which let's say for again, for an event website that what is they went about? When is it? What's the schedule? What are the responses? Talks and things, those things and people will discover content through that. That's what we have always been thinking. But as I've always been saying in this, we're moving away from that kind of a hierarchy. We are no longer in a hierarchical system anymore. What it means that we are moving away from deep drill downs one level after the other to like laterally hop from, oh, I'm seeing a talk. Let me see more about the speaker. Oh, I'm seeing a speaker. Let me see more about the sessions. He might be attending. Oh, I'm seeing some schedule. Let me go and see some other related content. What are the related talks with this thing? And that's how you are hopping and always discovering information today, which basically means that navigation is undergoing a fundamental evolution and we have completely not been able to solve that and reduce down to this, right? So this today in most websites is how navigation comes up. No longer a tool to discover content as well. And then we also had a home page, right? We have also seen a home page as a place where you come and discover all the things that are going on with the website. But you know what the reality is that too is going. People don't land up on the homepage anymore. People land on the internal page and keep going other ways. And I've seen like again, a design studio, design agency website completely drop homepage. Their website is simple. When you land on the page, what we traditionally call home page is about, you can see the projects that you have done. You can contact us for more projects, just three things. So when you are in a contact us or a contact or to hire them, you can see the other two things, which is you can see about the company or you can see what are the projects that they have done. There's no clear homepage anywhere in the website. And the concept of homepage is slowly going away. We need to understand that to different kinds of users, people who know what they're looking for on the system. So they are going to hunt for that. And many such people are going to start at Google and directly land on the content that you have. They've found what they're looking for. The other set of people are exploring the system. So what do you need to know that both set of people are really happy when they discover related or relevant content for them. So once they're at some place, they want to see related and things to go to the next thing, hop onto the next thing and learn more things. And how do we facilitate discovery? It's a very simple points have written over here that you make sure everything is addressable. Make sure there's a URL for every speaker, every talk, every session, everything on the system. There's a URL for that. And you make sure that you aggressively expose all the relationships. So if you're seeing a talk, you should have a link through which you can go and see the speaker and you can see all the other things that the speaker might be doing in the system. And you always show examples or teasers whenever there's intellect content is there, which basically means that you don't say just speakers. Say there's a list of related content. So it's not going to be simply link view related contents. You want to show three of them and see view more and give that teaser right there that they are. This is what you're signing up for. If you go through this link and want to discover more content. So by putting in these small things, you put it together. And what we need eventually is a design system and be able to identify design patterns. And I'm going to talk about this. What is a design pattern and primarily it's derived out of two different things. One of them is purely stylistic. It's like the, what's the color? What's the text size? How will a box of text be shown? The other set of things is the different ways and forms an object is represented on your website. So what are the different ways a speaker can be shown on the website? The same speaker object or the different ways in which a talk can be shown on the website. How will a talk appear inside a schedule, but the same talk, how does it happen on its own page? And these are the patterns that needs to come out. And I think every pattern should be reusable across the system. At the pattern level, it should be recursive. That means you should be able to show a talk within another talk. You should be able to show a speaker within another talk. So a recursive application of the pattern should be possible. And it should be responsive at the post pattern levels. And you make it responsive at those pattern levels, then the entire website will automatically be responsive at the larger level. So here's a simple paradigm. So let's look at what are the different, there are three ways in which broadly we want to represent an object or a collection. This is how is that object presented on its own URL? The other way is how is that object presented inside a collection? So if I have a list of speakers, how will one speaker look there? If I have a page for a speaker, how will the speaker look there? And if I have to present it as an association to another object as a relationship, that means a talk has this speaker. This speaker is delivering this talk. Then how is that association represented? And with this, we have come up with these are the kind of patterns that you need to come up with. And it's as simple as that. How do I represent the object in its own page? And that's a pattern that you create. The other is, how does the same object appear inside another pattern, which I said as recursive use of the thing? The next is, how is a collection represented? And now a collection can be, can be object agnostic. It can be a collection of a speaker and a talk and a post. It can be a collection of three speakers. How are they represented? It can be things like stack one below the other or put it as cards one beside the other. And that's the paradigm that you bring in as how to represent a collection in the system. The next thing is how do I represent a collection of collections? So what if one of the items in a collection is another collection itself? How do you give a teaser of that? So that is another pattern. The third and the next one is that how is an object represented in a collection? So if I have a list of speakers, how will the speaker itself be shown there? And there's one more thing, which is how is a collection represented inside an object? So if a talk has multiple speakers, that means a collection of speakers have to be associated with our talk. How is that a paradigm also? So these are the six things. If you are able to solve it, you have a very scalable system visually as well. And make sure you give labels to all of these views internally at our work. We call these things as the object on its objects page is going to be called the detail view. And we call it embed when there's an object inside another. So it's like, oh, embed a speaker into the talk page or embed the talk into the speakers page, right? The other is we call it a list when you have to show a list of speakers or a list of talks and things like that. We call it a teaser when inside a collection, one thing has to come out. So if you're seeing a schedule, which is a list of talks, you want to give just a teaser of the talks over there and not the entire talk details, right? So we call that thing as a teaser view. So give names to these things so that you can communicate effectively and create templates and patterns accordingly. All right. The other two things to make it scalable is anticipate empty attributes as well as which basically means if you have a speaker and you may have the photo as well as the first and last time designation organization, make sure that your template works. Even if the bio goes away, the organization goes away. The photo goes away. The template should still work. So make these things as optional. And the other thing is have very graceful fallback templates, which can be traditionally opposed to a page page as we traditionally understand it so that if a new object comes up, then it can still be represented in the teaser by just showing the title or something like that have these fallbacks in place.  So this entire paradigm is simple, pretty scalable. But there's one more problem. Content managers and authors want flexibility, right? We want, like as a person who's creating an article or a post, they'll want, I want to make sure that the page looks like this and works like this. And you know, what's the problem? This and that's when we again come and know we will keep the control of how you want to show these things on the page and we won't let you do it. And how do we balance these two things? And this, this authoring flexibility and the way we are going to show things, this needs to be balanced at some point of time. And balancing this means again, keep calm and break it down. And how do you break these down is make sure that the authoring happens in chunks and not blocks, make it granular, make it small, cut things into pieces, don't let them compose the entire post, break it down into smaller pieces so that you can control how visually they'll be represented, as well as they can and extend some of this control to them. So one of them is expose the content types, which is make sure that they are creating a person as a person in the system rather than a page in the system. You expose those details. So you take metadata separately, you can capture them separately. The other things while capturing is also expose some of the visual patterns and make a compartmentalized styles and expose that to them so that they can use switch between patterns if they want to switch. And here's one example. So this is again something that we had done two years back. And I'll just run through this page. Is it for a design studio? And this is a case study of what worked there, a project. There's some metadata. There's a full video there that goes to see. There's a two column background of what gets shown. There's a challenge. There's a pull code that spans across the entire page. There's some bullet points that again spans across the entire page. There's an image that spans across the entire page. There is a two column piece of text, then three columns of videos.  Again comes down to again two columns, a single big image comes in. There's a two column text where one text is bigger than the other. There are three columns with one icon there, one piece of image. And that's the three of them repeated. And there are two columns of images as well as some text over here, some dark background text, some related resources being pointed out, some related projects. And this is what I call as a teaser, which a related project will show some metadata. This is a case study. There is who is the client? What is the project like? There's an imagery which makes it look attractive rather than simply say click here to see related projects and things like that. So how do we make sure that people author this well? And just to highlight on this a little bit more, what we make sure is you capture very small pieces of content. You ask them to put in the body of text. You can let them choose what you want, large, small or big fonts or what you want, multiple columns, and you let them stack one below the other, these contents. And for every piece that gets added to the stack, you ask them, do you want to add a one column content above it, a two column content, a three column content or a pull quote above it? And like this, at the authoring level, they can compose this stack by stack in small chunks and the entire page renders out as a one piece of content, giving them some control over when they want a two column, they want a one column, when they want a big piece of text, when they want a small piece of text, whether they want a pull quote at certain points of time and do they want to switch certain things here and there? It gives them some control over this entire thing. And that's what gives us a very tight visual guideline as well as some flexibility extended to the authors to be able to come up with multiple case study pages. Some have videos, some don't have, some have three videos, some have multiple pull quotes and et cetera, et cetera. And so the same form of content can be represented differently, giving some control to the authors. So IA is presentation agnostic that way. Once you've created a very solid IA, information can be truly a very living thing, right? And everything like, for example, JS Food 2016, like the one that just happened, might be represented like this in the system at some point of time. It's like, oh, 15 to 16 September, MLR Convention Center, JP Naga, JavaScript conference in Bangalore. But you don't store this in the system as 15 to 16 September, you have the proper dates. You don't store this in the system as just conventions in JP Naga, you have the location coordinates. And therefore now you can make content living. So today you show it like this. And then you realize, hey, there's someone from outside India who's seeing it, you can change the location to it's in Bangalore, India, because no one cares where MLR convention center is. You can switch it to Bangalore, India, if you know that the person is viewing it from some other country, if you know that the person is viewing from the Bay Area, Seattle, you can drop Bangalore. They'll just say, oh, India must be Bangalore. They'll probably recognize that. Anyways, then if there's someone from Bangalore, you might want to show number Bangalore. Or I should have made it number Bangalore. Anyways, and then if there is someone from MG Road, you might want to change it to it's just 10 kilometers away from you, right? If the date of the event is coming close, you can change it to a two days to go. And if you, if the person from where you are sourcing the information has a great information architecture, that person might be able to tell you that it's from MG Road or say Silk Board. And if the person is in Silk Board, you can directly see, say, well, see you later in the next year. You're not making it this year, right? So you can make it living that way. Well, that's where information is. Everything I've told you is comes in from a solid information architecture background. And we need, we have a very solid mental model. That's what we want. The information architecture is like a bridge between design and implementation, so that we are all talking about the same thing. And a good IA is robust, extensible. It can get your system talking to other systems and vice versa makes information findable, understandable, living as I talked about, powerful, timeless, so that it can just stay on, take on different forms of content, future friendly. All you need is basically a free mind to approach an information architecture. And well, that's all. Thanks. Questions? So the section where you mentioned that, say a speaker's bio is there, like his photograph, his name, his designation, some other details around that. And you mentioned a great point that okay, either of these can be taken out. And still they can live standalone on the page. That definitely is a great point. But what I usually observe with like an editorial driven websites or content websites is that they don't exist on their own. They are in a part of the collection, which are the, your next slide, like a piece of jigs opposite. So what are like, you know, usual strategies that you will suggest when you have content, which is tightly intermingled with some other sections of the page. Okay. When you're doing a pattern driven design and development, what you'll realize is the strategy that I suggested, think of something as an object. How do I represent that in different forms? And how can, and when I said a collection, which is what you're talking about, that it doesn't exist on its own. There are other things around it. How does that collection paradigm work? You have to make sure that the way in which you show collections, that is either one below the other or one beside the other and things like that, does not break even if the content is gets optional. So separate these two things out. How does, how do two content, how are two content or 10 different content shown one beside the other has to be separate from how does the content look within itself? So if the content that looks within itself doesn't have the image, doesn't have that thing, your paradigm of collection still should work. So just separate those two things out. Okay. Thanks. So when you say navigation is not information architecture and it's not necessarily findability. In your own experience, how much do you find content managers getting this point? Most of the things that I'm talking about, in my experience, I don't get, I don't have content managers getting the points, which is why I'm talking about it. I want you all to make sure that people under, people who don't, who are purely focused on creating the content, understand why we are saying these things and then don't demand a Microsoft word like experience where you can write a line, something, and you can add photos wherever you want, however you want, and they don't have to go through, go through and honor a content model, essentially. This paradigm, the fact that navigation is no longer information is not an information architecture, I think is understood by people. But the fact that navigation or the homepage is not something that like about most people like 50 to 60 percent people don't even enter your website through a homepage today. And the fact that from whichever page they enter, every page becomes a homepage for them to discover content for the other parts of the system. While content managers understand that, they still put the homepage right up there at the level. Oh no, that's the entry door to our website, which no longer is the reality. So those are the things where I feel content managers are yet to understand that well. And purely from a navigation perspective, I think that is okay. They understand that the navigation can be simple, has to be simple. But it may not always translate to the fact that what is the advantages of a simple navigation versus a complex navigation? That's something that we have to talk to them a lot to make them understand that. Hi, great talk. Thanks. Yeah, hi. So it works. The things that I mentioned work well when the user is the traffic is mostly first user where he doesn't need to know what was the previous one. But consider a situation like Netflix type of content where users come repeatedly. So how do you communicate this change in information architecture effectively to the user and make not make him lost in the new design? Okay, as I said, first, information architecture stays the same. No matter, it doesn't change when the user context changes. As a matter of fact, information architecture cannot be perceived by people on the website right at the beginning on the first screen or even on the 10th screen. The thing that comes closest to explaining the information architecture of our system is probably a site map if you have created one. And if you want to give that to Google and things like that, that's and but that's an extremely complex piece of thing. And so users don't get it. So information architecture stays the same. The things or the philosophies that you follow what changes in this case is how is a object represented or how is a collection represented that will have many forms. A same object can be represented differently for different users. And therefore you'll need two different templates. Sometimes use the repeat user template to render an object and sometimes use a new fresh user template to render an object. And within that you would and a page level IA when you do that page level IA is something that can be different for different audiences. So when you come create a homepage or a dashboard page as an example over there, the objects that make up the collection or the list of videos or the list of information that you want to show will be very highly contextual and relevant and different for different users. So you might have to employ two different collection or two different object templates and split them into break it down, break it down and break it down further. But the core information architecture doesn't change. How many slides did you have? About 160. Okay, that's all the question was. Yeah, hi. So I want to know how we can make it really easy for content managers to change content quickly on the site. Okay, and just going back to your slide about this admin interface where you add one column or two columns and so on. Have you experimented with a more direct editing interface where for example, if I'm a content manager, I go to a site and I click on a section I hit edit right there and I edit in line. So I just want to know if you're experimenting with that. The admin interface that I showed a disclaimer here, the admin interface that I showed is not something that I built. As a part of when we are doing web design, we are mostly working on what the public facing side of the website looks like. We reuse a CMS and therefore we are restricted to the admin interfaces and the capabilities of the CMS. This was a CMS called Kraft that we had used and we are restricted to the admin capabilities of that and that's what you have seen there. Now, if we are to theoretically design an authoring interface, at that point of time, you can always have, you can always go, these are the multiple approaches that you can follow where there is the main content is there. You see a section click on there and that started hitting over there. That's a perfectly valid paradigm as long as the pattern cannot change. If the pattern can change, that means that at the point where you're editing the content right there, you want that out and want to put in a two column image over there. How do you bring that in? And that's what this thing solves in a way in which it slices into sections along from page into sections and you can insert a section between two sections and choose. I want a two column, three column, four column or something like that. And that too, we had architected. How does a person choose that? This system gives a very generic. So I'm not saying that the interface that is there is the most usable interface, but it's within the constraints of the system. We have tried to give out the options to the content authors. You have the capability now to choose between some font, some columns, as well as whether you want to pull code or not and things like that. That's all. Okay. Thanks a lot here.