Welcome back to this video. We are going to continue building on our plugin and building our widgets from this very setup and I hope that you learned something from our action hooks and filters video that was previously shared. We are now going to get this particular class which I am now going to call widgets, take-a-press-elemental widgets because we want to build a number of them and even here I'll correct this so that we have the right class and this class is using this method of getInstance. Now this getInstance method is just getting a unique version, it's just getting this particular class and calling it once. The only issue we have is that we have not returned the self instance right here of this particular class and I'm going to go into this sample page, it's the one that we're going to use to edit in Elementor, of course it opens up with Gutenberg but I'm going to click edit with Elementor and that will allow us to go into Elementor itself. Now you'll see that we have a number of widgets that are here like in the basic, we have the pro versions and this these are not active, I cannot actually drag them because I don't have the pro and you'll see that one of these menus that I would really like to use in my page as the nav menu are actually not available for me to use so I'm going to build my own custom nav menu from this onset so that will allow us to drag and drop that widget let's say from our panel right here and drop it in here so let me go back to the code and this is what we're going to do so for now we're going to ignore these rules that we are supposed to work with and try to just build something basic and then you'll see how eventually we get to build our plugin and make it a little bit bigger and do a couple of things so the first thing that I'm going to do is that I'm going to come here in our plugin and I'm going to create a folder which I'm going to call widgets for now okay and inside these widgets we're going to create a new widget file which is going to be a PHP file and we're going to call it the nav and dash menu dot PHP that would be our file that will store our widget for our menu so in here we have the widget code for the Elementor nav menu so I'll even say Elementor or custom Elementor nav menu I'll save this that's just a comment to tell us what the file is about and inside that file we're going to have a new class which we're going to call nav menu and what it will do is that it's going to extend the widget base class and this widget base class actually comes from Elementor and it will give us a number of things that we are going to see and use inside this very file that we are working and you will see that on line three my editor has actually added the nav space for me automatically so the first thing that we are going to do inside this class is that we're going to have a public function and the function which is going to be get nav and you will see from my editor that's telling me that inside the Elementor controls stack there's something called get nav it's an abstracted method that we are using here so we're going to add that right here and then I'll add of course my brackets and in here we're just going to return and say the name of our particular widget and we shall call it custom menu or to make things a little bit nicer we shall say take a press shall call it take a press menu that's the first thing we need to do we are naming our particular widget now as we extend this widget class you will see that my editor has already pulled in this class from it had said we need to use the Elementor widget base which is basically saying we need to go into this nav space of Elementor and we're going to get this class called widget base so this is a modern way of working with PHP it's called using namespaces and I have made a video about this if you want to see what namespaces are you can check out the video that is in the description right below and you'll be able to understand how namespaces work in fact we can also add our own namespace right here in our plugin so that we don't have things that are conflicting so I'm going to add a namespace and I'm going to say take a press and I will say we are going to be making take a press Elementor widgets so that will be our own namespace in case we want to use this particular file in any other place so let's go back to creating the nav menu so we have now a name for our widget the next thing that we need to do is we need to get a title so we get a title and say public function and we're going to say get underscore title and inside that we're going to say we need to return and here I'll just get the same thing and say let's get the take a press menu paste it there we can actually use the internationalization at this point because we want people to maybe we want to change the take a press menu into a different language and we want to see people in France having this in French want to see people in Italy have this in Italian we can do this and then we can namespace it with our particular text domain that we already announced here in our first file so I'm going to copy that and I'm going to paste it here and you'll see that I actually made a mistake here when I was returning the get name this is supposed to be more of an ID so I'm just going to put everything in lowercase and put a dash and correct that so that we don't have this breaking now the next thing that we need to do after getting the title because this title is what will be shown when we come here you'll be seeing that name there the next thing we need to do is if you look at this widget is that we have things like icons right here now I'll come back in here and I'm going to say public function and I'll say get icon which is a method coming from Elementor as well from the widget base you'll see that that's available for us to use now Elementor has a number of libraries inside it for example we can use font awesome we can use things like the icon library and that will allow us to have icons that are linear in nature that just more like line art like this or we can actually use something like font awesome so in here we're going to return and you can return something like FAA menu and that will allow it to use font awesome and use a font awesome menu so I'm going to comment this out and we shall see in the near future once we are done we'll be able to compare the two and see which one looks better so in here I'm going to use something like icon nav dash menu and that will give us something that is similar to what we have here in the pro version of the nav menu and I am picking that from Elementor itself now after adding our icon the next thing we're going to do is we're going to go and make a public function and inside there we're going to use the get categories which is a function also coming from this widget base class and we are going to add the name of the category that we want so in here we return of course and here when we are returning we return an array and inside this array we have a number of options we have something like basic we have things like general and that is coming all from Elementor we have basic we have the pro we have the general we have things like site wukamas and wordpress so for now I'm going to choose the basic because I want it to appear right here so I'll choose the basic we can later on just check this out to see what it will look like in the general or in all the other sections of categories that we do have and we can actually be able to make our own category like you will see all these other six options we have here let's say we have a bunch of widgets we can make our own take a press category right here and then we'll be able to add our each widget right there and I will be able to show you that so let me leave here a little to do comment and say to do add our own category in Elementor so for now we leave it in the basic and then the next thing we are going to do is we need to go and tap into the next method so say public function underscore register control it will allow us to register the controls of the particular of the particular widget for example if I go back in here and drag and drop this right here you will see that we have these particular things like content width box columns gaps height and so on so these are controls that we can add to our particular widget and we're going to leave that method there so that when we have our own widget we'll be able to add a number of controls in there and then finally I'm going to just use a protected method here and say we're going have a function we're going to say we're going to call this the render method and that render method will allow us to output the widget on the front end so that's what this method is for and then similarly if we have this on the front end we're going to have another method which is actually called the content underscore content template this particular method allows us to render the widget on the back end inside our elemental right here so for example in the drag and drop this image you'll see that this is being rendered right here and that is because of the content template method that is passed on inside this widget best class now that we have all these things put together what is needed right here I'm just going to make sure that we have this file being called inside our main file so I'm going to come back here to the init widgets class and there are two things that I need to do one is I need to require widget class that we've created then I need to register the widget with elemental so those are the two tasks that we need to do inside this particular file and then we shall pass this method inside our init plugins inside the widget classes we can do all of this inside one function but it will become gigantic so that's why we actually just get this little method and will break out so that we can separate concerns so at the end of the day I will say this class let me pass in this method right here and that will allow me to do the different things that we have here and then pass them to this method so the last thing that I will do is that I'm I'm now going to add our own namespace in this file because we already had this namespace here starting for our plugin I'm going to add the namespace right here as well so I'll add this take a press elemental widgets and then inside that I'm going to use the psr for convention and I'm going to say we are going to go into the file called widgets and inside widgets is what we're going to find this nav menu class so I'll save that and then I am going to just copy this I'll clean this a bit and then I'll come back here into my space and then I'll say we need to use and what we want to use is this namespace of take a press elemental widgets widgets and we're going to be looking for the nav menu class so I'll save that and then you're going to say that when we come down to our init widgets right here we're actually going to use that particular method first things first is now I'm going to require the widget class and I'm going to say let's require once which is a php function and then what we're going to do is we're going to say let's get this directory that we are in and we are going to add quotations and a slash since we are in the root folder we're going to go inside the widgets folder and inside the widgets folder we're going to get the nav dash menu dot dot php file so once we've required that file I'm going to save this let me come back and reload just to make sure we've not broken anything and you'll see it's telling us and code class we have elemental widget base not found in our file so one of the things that we need to do is just go a little bit ahead and we'll be able to clear this so I'll come back here and I'm going to go to register the widget with elemental now the first thing that I need to do is I need to go to the root and I'm going to find the elemental class and then inside that I'm going to look for the plugin class and inside that we're going to get an instance we shall use the instance method on the elemental plugin and inside that we're going to say let us get the widgets manager which is a function which is a method and we shall chain on and say let us also get the register widget type and inside the register widget type we're going to create a new instance of our nav menu class and once we do that and hit the semicolon right here we shall have registered this widget with elemental so let's go back to our front end I'll reload this and this issue actually comes in from a very simple hook that we've not added in so inside my construct method right here we're going to come here and add an action and inside this we're going to need to add a hook which is elemental slash widgets slash widgets registered and that's the hook we need to have and we're going to pass in the we're going to pass in that very method I'll copy this paste it here and the method we need to have is init widgets and that means we just need to remove this line right here because we are calling that particular class right here so I'll save this and then I'll come back here and I'll reload and you'll see we have line 33 we need to close this with a semicolon we'll save go back to our webpage and reload we reload here and you will see that now our widget is actually coming out and you will see that we have our take a press menu showing up right here we can drag and drop in the instance here it has nothing to it nothing in the advance but we have our widget and it's showing up so that's what's really important right now and now that we have our widget showing up here I'm going to just click update and then I'll try to preview this and you'll see that we have nothing showing up here because we don't have anything rendered out at all so I'll come back to my editor right here I'm going to go back into our nav menu and then I'm going to go inside the render here and I'm going to escape the php and open up php again I'll copy this as well and just paste it here and we're just going to have something very simple which is a div and that div will say hello widget hello widget copy the same thing paste it here tab it in to just look nice and then I'll come back and reload this as well as reload this and you'll see we have our hello widget here not editable in any case but also we have a hello widget on the front end so I'll come back in here and start doing stuff that is really necessary but before we go to do that I just want to clear out some of the things that we talked about earlier for example when we talked about the categories right now when we go back to the widget section you will see that we have our widget showing up right here but if I change that to the general hit save I'll reload this page I'll scroll down to the general section and you're going to see that we have it here and we can actually drag and drop it here so you can add it to any of these sections and we can have our widget stored in any of these categories by going to our code and changing categories option through the different IDs that have been given to us like we can say pro dash elements we can use the wukamas elements or general or basic and you can be able to do that and by using any of these right here let's say you change this to pro elements and paste it here and save you should be able to get it inside the pro elements category so I'll reload this just for us to see what's happening and when you're going to the pro category section you'll see that we have our widget right there we can try it in the watpress section save this come back and reload we'll scroll down to the watpress section and then we shall scroll down and you'll see that we have it right here and we can drag and drop it so you can add your widget to any of the categories that are available and rather you could even make your own and that's what we're going to do in the next video if you found this video very helpful don't forget to give it a like subscribe to the channel or even share it with your friends I'll be continuing this series to make sure that we can complete it and this is going to take us maybe the next few weeks so I'll be releasing one elemental video every week so that we can complete this series otherwise thank you for watching and enjoy whatever you're developing


Hi everyone, very good morning from the US and then good evening to all my friends in India and Pakistan and welcome to this Davos dialogue on digital equity in India, Pakistan, and beyond, which is brought to you by Future Tents, which is a collaboration of New Big Magazine and the Arizona State University that explores impact of technology emerging technologies on society and by the global shape of Community Bangalore, which is a youth like community addressing civic and social issues related to sustainable fashion, conscious consumerism, mental health, and of course bridging the digital divide. My name is Joshy Saxena and I am your moderator for today. We have a fabulous panel discussion. A little bit about me. I'm a social innovation practitioner and project based consultant out of Bangalore. I serve as the global project coordinator for Hatebase, a central project that works with governments academia researchers to monitor hate speech online. We also analyze the correlation between online hate speech that can result in global violence. But just to give you a disclaimer, I'm not going to talk about hate speech online, although yes, the topic is directly related to it. I'm going to talk about this conversation can is also live streamed on Slate's YouTube channel. So you can also feel free to watch it there. You can also follow the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag digital equity by following Future Tents on Twitter. So now that we've begun, I'd also encourage everyone who's joined in to introduce yourselves on the chat and tell us where you are logging in from and what you expect to take away from this dialogue. To start us off, I'll talk a little briefly about Towers Labs and how it came to be. The Towers Labs is a global shaper community. Perhaps the first and the largest youth driven recovery plan, 10 week recovery plan to address the world's converging crisis after the year we've had so far. We've identified 10 pillars. Some of them are mental health, inclusive jobs, public health, conscious consumerism. This particular dialogue falls into the category of digital literacy and digital access. We're basically looking to inspire, mobilize and empower young people to shape the unprecedented grassroots global responses needed to address during the coronavirus pandemic and some of the ways that we did do it. We launched it on World Youth Day in the form of surveys and dialogues. So if you do want your voice to be heard, all of these responses would be aggregated and these also would be culminated into a youth recovery plan and a report in form of a report which could be presented. And so I think I just wanted to check the chat a bit and see if you're introducing yourselves. So yeah, I'm also going to now move on to introducing our lovely panelists. We have joining in from India. We have Amrita Chaudhary who is the director of CCAOI and representing the interests of the internet users and has been working in this space for over more than 15 years. Amrita is also the president of the internet society Delhi chapter. She's also United, United International Governance Forum Mac member. She's the vice chair of the Asia Pacific Regional IGF. She heads the women's special internet group of Internet Society and is also the nominating committee 2021 member ICANN. She's one of the founding members of the India School of Internet Governance, for which I was also a fellow for in 2019. And curates regularly for the Geneva Internet platform and advises and guides the youth IGF, which is a youth initiative in India and rural communities at the Internet Society. So very warm welcome to Amrita. We have for us Salim from Pakistan, who is a business professional with 22 years of experience in business consulting in emerging markets. He's worked with a number of multinational conglomerates in strategy, execution, marketing and communication, and business technology implementation. He successfully set up an operator of the tea business consulting and research firm and he's a consulting and he's currently serving as the general manager at the Mood Hercules Group, and he's also known for his fashion and driving change and initiating projects and strategies that implement that are looking at implementing from a technological level management change there was and also bringing about corporate branding executions. We have Sarah Morris, who's the director of New America's Open Technology Institute, where she leads OTI Strategic Planning, Fundraising and Management. Prior to her role as director, she's also led the program's efforts on a broad portfolio of issues within broadband access and adoption, something that we're going to talk about a lot here. Online consumer protection and preserving the open internet. She's also a regular contributor to the hill and frequently writes for a variety of other national outlets. Prior to joining New America, Morris was also a fellow with the public interest firm Media Access Project, where she assisted with research and drafting of FCC comments on a wide range of key communication issues. And with that, we're going to start with the opening remarks from our panelists. So, Sarah, over to you. Thank you, Rachie, for that wonderful introduction and I'm thrilled to be on this panel with such an esteemed set of panelists I'm already excited for the discussion based on just the conversations we had in the lead up to to the session. I'm Sarah Morris. I run the Open Technology Institute, which is a program within the broader New America umbrella. OTI focuses on research analysis and advocacy on a variety of tech policy topics. Our aim is to ensure that all communities have equitable access to technology and that they're able to benefit from that technology, rather than be harmed by it. So, our issues span, many of the issues that Rashi mentioned in her intro of her intro of me, everything from broadband access and adoption to government surveillance to encryption, data privacy, content moderation and AI decision making algorithmic decision making, and net neutrality and other consumer protection issues online. So I'm thrilled. Broadband access and adoption is an issue I've worked on throughout my entire tenure, 10 year tenure at OTI. And I'm, I'm, as we'll discuss I'm I'm excited for the opportunity to think about this in the, at a time when there's so much attention to the issue. There's numerous ways that you can approach the question of digital equity, even just thinking about this from the United States, from a United States perspective, to help sort of ground our conversation a bit. I'll start start by providing an overview of some findings from our research project that we've completed over various years, but the most recent iteration we released last summer it's called the cost of connectivity. It's research that compares internet access in on data on 760 internet plans across 28 cities in the United States and around the world. One goal of the project was to see how the United States compared in terms of cost and speeds to countries to other countries and cities, but also to provide a snapshot of connectivity in the United States many over 150 plans I believe were US based plans. And part of that as we'll talk about later is to fill in a gap of data that we're missing from the federal government about pricing information. And our findings were, were really, really telling. Our top finding was basically just that we find substantial evidence of an affordability crisis in the United States. Internet access is simply too expensive. This is one for highest average monthly price when compared to cities in Europe and Asia, the average price for internet service in the United States is 68 according to our research is $68 and 38 cents. It's simply unaffordable for millions of people who either lack access or have access that is not sufficient to do the myriad things that are required in this digitally dependent society. And the other thing I'll note about cost in the United States which differs at least to degree if not in, in, in concept more generally to, to other, other cities is that that that price of $68 and 38 cents a month is an incomplete picture modem fees can add up to 75% to a monthly bill, 75% on average show monthly bill in the United States compared to just a 30% addition abroad. In addition, many US plans use promotional rates, and that $68 and 38 cents average price doesn't is based on the promotional that the immediately advertised price and so when that promotional rate expires. The, the price per service per month can will increase on average by $22 and 25 cents a month, which is pretty dramatic. And but finally we see one bright spot in the research and that's that municipal networks offer some of the best value in the United States. There's a little bit more when we think about solutions and the way that we, the models that we use to try to solve the connectivity and affordability crisis. But there were there were sort of three buckets of beyond those takeaways three three primary areas of focus when we think about where we go from here or how we define the problem. affordability transparency and competition. I've already talked about the affordability component, but also there's this dramatic transparency problem. Internet users in the United States and often and in other locations as well, simply don't have a good understanding of how much internet service actually costs so it's very difficult to make a an informed decision when it comes to subscribing to various platforms. And so we've advocated for a broadband nutrition label that essentially provides all of the relevant information about quality of service costs, including any policies around overage fees any data caps etc. As a consumer as an as an internet user facing tool to assess the, the, the actual thing that's being that's being offered in the market. We also urge the FCC to collect better data on pricing so that organizations like the Open Technology Institute don't have to bear that full burden of doing, of doing the research. So that's affordability transparency and competition as I mentioned, community networks municipal networks can provide incredible competitive benefits and in areas where they operate serving to drive down costs and improve services, where there are insufficient competition and connectivity already. And so we'll talk about this, this potential solutions and how they play out in the context of a policy, as we go through the conversation but for now I will stop there. Thanks. Thanks. And now I'll move to for us and for us is going to cover one of the most important core elements of digital access which is infrastructure. Over to you for us. Thank you, Rashi and Sarah that that was a great explanation or detail about what you do so definitely not as exciting as what you're doing but I come here representing a group of dreamers into words and I bring today I bring a dream. But before I share the dream let me just set the stage a little bit and coming from Pakistan, a country in South Asia, where there's an opportunity to connect the next billion Internet users. Let me set some statistics about Pakistan itself. There's 84.2% of tele density. And 4G penetration is at about 44%. Broadband stands at 45%.  We end up thinking systems and we end up wanting to design for humans. So, and somewhere the math doesn't add up because, you know, some component is needs needs a little more attention. And why do we say that, because out of a in a country with where there are 220 million people. There's only 1 million freelancers that that are registered and they're about half a million estimates and individuals that are part of the digital economy. So, and so I'm going to repeat that this region has the opportunity to connect the next billion people. And it is vastly different from the unconnected population of the world the average is about 40% of the work is not connected to a data network. So, if we were to talk about digital digital exclusion, or inclusion so to speak, it happens by giving access to infrastructure data connectivity and personal technology. And there's no secret that for developing countries, mobile broadband is directly proportional to high macro and microeconomic benefits. So, and then since cities in most developing countries enjoy a decent connection, I'm going to, I bring a dream for the rural population. And the dream is, imagine there's a remote village up in the hills that has barely 2000 people and imagine how it would be if they were on the network, had access to data, had power to to to electrify a small school, had the enough ability to not only connect to the network, but buy and sell connect with other people buy and sell, and also learn and teach. And this dream is, I think what what of recent has started really, really resonating with me. So, and the group that I belong to started their, you know, their journey in this in their humble effort to set up a tower sharing business, a tower sharing where you have in areas where it doesn't make sense for one mobile network operator to set up a tower and then make it feasible for them. This entity within our group sets up towers and puts up, you know, antenna for multiple mobile network operators, and it's some suddenly starts making financial sense for not only us but of course for the mobile network operator. But but the beneficiary of that commercial thought process is the person who has not been on the network so far. So, and our spirit has been very simple, we make things first available then affordable and then sustainable. And with that, I can, I can say for sure that that we wouldn't have been able to do this without partners, and partnerships are what are going to make this happen. So, and, and, you know, the Professor Schraus is clear stakeholder capitalism says designed for all of your stakeholders, not just your shareholders. And it's not just about return it's about return to society it's about return to shareholders it's about return to employees it's it's it's a plethora of people. And interestingly, a little while ago in an event I was attending a tech mind as Chandraprakash, the Ronnie also mentioned that public private partnership is what is going to make all of these things happen. But I'm here to like just leave this for everybody to, you know, look, look it up there's something called the Edison Alliance, and it intends to prove that partnerships are what are going to connect the next billion people. And, and, and I think there's a great model out there to the sustainable markets initiative. And there's a charter and they're called Terra Carter, and they propose that public private and philanthropic partnerships are what are going to solve the most pressing problems of our time. So, with that, I need the floor. Thank you so much for listening to me and I hope my dream has been conveyed our dream actually. So, thank you. Thank you so much Amrita for that discussion. We now move on to Amrita but before that, I also wanted to tell the audience that you are allowed to ask any questions. And please feel, we will address them towards a little bit towards the end. So if you have any questions, and also feel free to share any resources that you think are interesting and we'd love to see the chat being as animated and as as discussion is at the moment. So now we move on. Amrita and Amrita is going to talk a little bit about her journey in the policy space, like from starting with cyber cafes to what the landscape is now. Over to you Amrita. Thank you Rashi, am I audible because I was having some connectivity issue. Is it okay? It's okay. Okay, thank you. So, I'll bring in the Indian perspective and what we at CCAOI have been doing. If you look at India, we are very interestingly placed. We are the second largest in, we have the second largest internet user population, which is around 767 million broadband users as per the regulators December end report, the However, we have more than 60% people yet to be connected online. We have a huge digital divide. And if you look at what the pandemic has brought in is our reliance on internet. For shopping, health, education, getting the basic government services, etc. Everything has gone online. However, the pandemic has also highlighted that, you know, the people who have internet, the way they have benefited and the people who have not. People have been pushed further back. A study by Oxfam says that 80% of the students have not been able to attend their classes because of lack of internet during the pandemic, and many of them may not be able to come back to schools. So that is the start reality we have. And obviously we have a huge gender divide. While, you know, the government is having a lot of regulatory mechanisms, policies to do it, telecom players are also working. And interestingly, India has the lowest telecom rates, even the internet rates, but still in some places, it is expensive. It is not, you know, the accessibility is an issue simultaneously how people will use what they would be using the demand part is also a challenge. And again, with that is mindset as in, you know, we have a patriarchal society so many places women having a mobile or an internet is something like the families losing control in certain societies that's what we have seen. So these are certain challenges we have, and there are opportunities there are women who have used the internet, and, you know, they have actually benefited their entire families have benefited. We are recently doing a study for for AI, where we are looking at the cost of exclusion and they have had some wonderful stories of how women have actually benefited, you know, even from the remote areas. So we have CC, we do a lot of work. We are involved in the access issue. We are always a proponent that access should be provided to people be it shared access because not everyone are digitally literate, they may not have the necessary infrastructure or skills. So we have access to public health cyber cafes, etc. is something we advocated 12 years back. We also believe in having internet in the local languages with the national internet exchange of India we trained about 2.5 million people on point to 5 million people on digital literacy languages. We've been doing a lot of research on various aspects to build capacity at different levels we have a monthly digital newsletter which we come up to share information about the various issues which are going. We had stakeholder discussion involved people to come and discuss on the public policies which are being discussed via privacy via security via data protection because even if you are using the internet these things are important. We are doing some work on training senior citizens on safe literacy, because you know they have the pandemic has pushed them into the internet, but they really don't know how to protect themselves, as well as look at big news misinformation, etc. So we're doing a lot of work, but what I have seen in my 15 years of experience on in this skill is it is not something which one stakeholder can do themselves. If we want internet to be the same for everyone. We need to empower people and all stakeholders in the government business civil society have to work together and only then can we achieve some level of you know what we are aiming at the universal access. So actually that's my initial comments I'm happy to comment on any of your questions. Thanks. Thanks. Just some food for thought for the audience. We have a few questions for you and meant to meet us. So we have around three to four questions and we wanted you to answer it. I'm going to share it on the screen at the moment. So you need to go to meant to meet up.com met he dot com and use the code double six to eight eight to seven two. The first question is what do you think the term digital rights means, and you have one minute, the 39 attendees have one minute to answer that. Maybe I could be a little clearer. So we're trying to understand what do you think about the term digital rights and you think it should be equated with human rights, because we've seen most of our essential services especially during the pandemic that require the use of digital services and perhaps my friends and my neighbors in India and Pakistan would agree that we used to talk about roti kappa kappa and McCann but now it's roti kappa McCann and data. So the, you know, how how essential has it been for you so yeah that's see knowing your legal rights human right proprietary access. Does anyone think that digital rights or the internet should also be seen as a public source. Perhaps. Okay, we'll move on to the next question. So who do you think should be responsible for educating citizens about their digital rights. Is it government is a tech companies citizens themselves. It's free to answer that. Yeah, when Omar Omar says that we have a charter of human rights and principles of the internet, the internet, internet rights and principles coalition at Omar please feel free to share those resources on chat. People get us. We do have a combination of all of them or people say government or people say tech companies nobody saying citizens themselves. So are we trying to derive the fact that citizens can't take matters in their own hands. We do basically. We move on to the next question, which will be interesting. What are the initiatives that you've come across in your region that promote digital access inclusion. You could mention the links on the chat and responses, and maybe if the panelists want to also chime in and but then yeah we're going to we're going to talk about this in detail and trying to understand what our audience feels about these questions. I work in tech so understand one lap top a child. That's something that is also echoed by the affordable alliance that I was talking about triple helix joint education for your traffic. Community networks, digital literacy from new to NGOs. Let's get some, some more responses for this. Okay, do we move on to the next question. What are the main obstacles and barriers faced by women and girls to access digital technologies and participate in digitalize. Okay, social norms. Privacy violations that's good one lack of literacy also good one most of the devices aren't necessarily designed for keeping women and girls in mind the educational opportunities. Last minute shows yes, a lot of them aren't confident enough, and they also aren't comfortable learning devices for the work that they want to do over studying. Okay, patriarchy wins here is the top answer. Can we move on to the next question, and this is our final question. What are some possible solutions for enhanced digital inclusion. By litigation you mean stronger litigation stronger. I can say at least from India it's better implementation of the laws. Stronger on regulation advocacy welcoming safe space. Okay, all right. Are we going to move on. Just another reminder for the audience that please feel free to post your questions, we would be taking them. This discussion is in the next 10 or 15 minutes. So now I'd like to jump back on the panelists and maybe in stuff for us. You were talking about how private entities and governments need to come together to solve this and might also seem as a very ambitious plan because you'll have different targets will have different motivations. How do you, how do you see that. How do you see that coming together and what are the examples, if you have any successful private and public partnerships that could help us with this. Sure. Thanks. Thanks for the question Rashi I. There are many, many examples of public private partnership being successful. The proposal over here is a little different. What I'm suggesting is that private sector brings its agility and the ability to do things. While public sector brings its blanket approach to populations. Once they define what is required or best for for their their populace and philanthropy actually bridges a gap that is a need unmet. So, and in order to reframe the problem statement. We all need to come together and figure out what exactly is that we're trying to do with I mean the the problem is, is, is, you know, don't give a man some fish, teach them how to fish. So, in order for us to to come together, we need to be able to create a system through which value creation happens, and philanthropy would be in an important partner to bring into the public private sector. So, how does that happen and I'm going to quickly quickly explain this, for example, if an area for connectivity doesn't make sense for the private sector, and the public and government doesn't think doesn't doesn't have an arm for investment, then philanthropy can always bridge the gap because the arbitrage for quality of life improving is is you can measure that. So, thank you. So, we also have a question on the top where, how do you think governments in India, state governments or the central governments are enabling environments that allow us to achieve digital access. Are there any programs are there any schemes we've also seen that during the pandemic, we've also been heavily reliant on e-commerce we've also also seen a rise in digital payments. How, how have you, what are your thoughts on that. Is my audio better now, Rashi, than earlier. It's a lot better. It's a lot better. Right. And maybe it goes weaker, you could also switch off your camera, so that we could hear you. But it's absolutely okay. So, there are various initiatives of the government in India to connect people because the government has a plan to connect all Indians, for example, one would be building the infrastructure, like the fiber optic network to take it to about 0.25 million villages, which we call as gram panchayats. Similarly, this is done in public private partnership using the universal access USG funds. Then there is also something called the common service centers. The rural areas managed by young entrepreneurs to provide the digital is not everyone has devices or are. Similarly, we have just recently the government has announced something called the PM Vani, which is to actually provide private Wi-Fi or public Wi-Fi networks across the country. There are similarly various initiatives there are digital literacy courses, etc, which the government has initiated, which is good but there is more to be done and it is, as I mentioned earlier it is just not the government who has to do so. During the pandemic we definitely saw the rise of use of, you know, the online medium for everything, even a shopkeeper for today, or even a vegetable seller is now using WhatsApp, or using payment modes. That is helping their business, you know, economic strata understand the benefits they get by using the digital medium, they start using it. It is not only affordability access, it is affordable in India, but when a person sees value in using that in their life, they will definitely see. Thanks Amrita. No, but you actually brought a pretty important point there when you said that digital inclusion, especially if you're looking at scaling and scalability, the government does have a much larger bandwidth for that. But you know, digital literacy right now, given how the internet has penetrated into our lives and it affects us from a social level and it can also hamper us economically. It can't be just a one-off course, right? It has to be something more holistic, something more consistent. And maybe Sarah if you could also point in as to what are the efforts that you all have made, what are the policy recommendations you have come in and does net utility really help in this situation of providing accessibility and how do you think you can bridge the divide where there are certain aspects of the community that gets marginalized in this fourth industrial revolution. Sure, thanks Rashi. I'll take with the first question, following up on the digital literacy point. One thing I would add in addition to thinking about digital literacy as a sustained thing, not just a one-off course or interaction, we've also seen the most success with digital literacy efforts that are community driven, that are developed by and for the community or co-created with community partners. And that helps both foster a sense of engagement and ownership of that process, but also builds trust with community members. We often see less successful models that involve the private sector, particularly the internet service providers who the populations that are not yet online are unlikely to trust either because they've had negative interactions with service being cut off or with Bill paying in the past or they just haven't yet found a level of comfort and safety in getting online. And so developing those that digital literacy shared learning at the community level helps foster that trust among members of the community who are already there. That's hard, right? We need partners, we need community organizations in those communities to help support and sustain those programs and those efforts, and we need investment at the federal level and state level in those programs to make, and by the philanthropic sector to make sure that those programs are durable and adaptive. But I think digital literacy is a critical component as we think about, you know, this continuum of availability and access, adoption and affordability and then use and engagement. And, you know, there are, this relates to the question of net neutrality too. So for us, sometimes I think people think that net neutrality is not a question that is directly linked to digital equity, but we really believe that it is that your access to the internet should be unencumbered by the internet service provider who is provisioning the service and that you as the internet user should be able to navigate anywhere you want to go on the internet without fear of being blocked or having certain content that has been prioritized behind the scenes over others. And so the Open Technology Institute has been a staunch advocate for strong net neutrality protections and we're really hopeful that in this administration, this new administration in the United States and the FC, well, and in the new FCC with a shift in leadership that we will see movement back towards the strong net neutrality rules that were implemented in the United States in 2015. But there's a broader question here and with apologies for going a little bit into the US politics and policies, but the same mechanism that made net neutrality possible from a practical standpoint and a legal standpoint was treating the internet as a utility thing. We need to deliver it and oversee it in a way that allows the federal government to intervene directly where there are consumer harms to put in place rules like net neutrality protection. So there's this whole question of authority and what parts of the government are empowered to provide oversight and protect internet users in that context. And what we saw just for a bit of background, we, when the, when the Federal Communications Commission in the United States adopted the net neutrality rules in 2015, they put the internet and the provision of internet service on that strong legal footing, they said, the FCC is empowered in this context they do have authority over internet service providers and can step in when internet, when, when internet users are being harmed. That was true for net neutrality but that also opened up the authority for the FCC to much more clearly intervene on issues of affordability. Access more generally and consume when consumers were or when internet users were not getting the service that they they paid for that they had recourse they had someone an expert agency in the government that they could go to and say we need a better solution. All of that authority was was undone under the most recent federal communications leadership. With the former chairman of the FCC essentially saying, advocating all authority over the internet and leaving internet service in this unregulated bubble, which as we've seen in the context of the pandemic has has meant that the federal government in the United States has been ill equipped to fully step in and ensure that the communities who need connectivity most have it. And so I think, you know, tying that all together I think we need an empowered expert agency to to intervene to be able to intervene and oversee this this market and this industry in a way that puts internet users front and center in the conversation. I think that that makes a lot of sense but moving over for us. What we have realized is that the great park comes to your responsibility and leave, leave each of them or leave the community at their own devices so what given them access and you've given them affordable access. So how do you, how do you help them adopt what are your digital adoption strategies that you have carried out to make sure that the process inclusive, and it's also making sure that they are online for a consistent consistent period of time. You know, for their workforce or for someone who's studying and how does it empower someone on an individual. So, before I answer that question Rashi, if you'd allow me I just have have, you know, a little comment to add to Sarah's comment over here. Actually it's more a question. There is an element of policy and governance there. You spoke about them in in two different layers. So I'd love to understand that a little more where government is the government's job is to create the policy. And the framework through which regulator will implement anything that the private sector and public are doing. Is that what you're proposing. There are some nuances I suppose in the way that federal agencies operate in the United States so there is an enabling statute that is passed by Congress which gives federal agencies the authority to create rules of the Federal Communications Commission promulgate rules create rules of the road for how a specific sector is is is overseen. We've seen this in phone regulation where there are guardrails to ensure that and and subsidy programs that were predicated on the notion that everyone should have universal access to to phone the phone network as it was as it was being built out. We have rules that govern broadcasters and mobile providers. And so this becomes a question of in purely a legal question of what the FCC has been granted the authority to oversee and courts in the United States have upheld that it is proper for the FCC to oversee the internet service provider market and to be clear in this instance I'm talking about internet service providers as a conduit of internet access so not the internet. There's no content on the internet or the internet itself so the provisioning of service to to internet users and and we had a we had that frame that regulatory framework in place from approximately February of 2015 to December of 2017 I believe. Things were successful nothing broke the markets didn't fail. It was a system though a regulatory oversight and intervention where obvious user harms were occurring. So that's the sort of thing I'm proposing not a fully government run internet by any means or even heavy handed regulation of the markets itself but rather targeted oversight with with protection of internet users at the center of those regulatory interventions. Thank you, thank you, I think the internet will often will now be termed as a basic native it hasn't already been done so. So, if policies and regulatory frameworks are designed with that in mind I think everything will hopefully fall in order. I'll ask you to your your question. So, again, the dream that I bring is all about a specific kind of people right but that the journey of making them aware of the potential of being connected to an entire world outside their, you know, mountain village located in the mountains is so exciting. Opportunities for upskilling and reskilling will come from there. Once once they define, you know the kind of jobs or things that they're interested in people are interested in. And of course, all of the great things that I'm with I said the inequalities that come with this access will show up, but it's a learning curve I think we need to, we need to make this connection available to people. And then fight the good fight to make sure that everything is equitable in that. And this as a citizen I can do it as private sector I don't think it falls entirely under my scope but but this citizen happens to be part of the private sector so I bring both my personal personas to that to that good fight. I do think it is important to mention that scaling upskilling and reskilling is is going to be very important in create continuing to create value. And that's not, that's not only true for the unconnected it is also also true for the connected so there's an entire world is going to get the reference points are going to be redefined. And also, it also might contribute towards the digital economy where you have a lot of people from the rural areas who actually migrate to urban settings for promise of a new future but I think this pandemic has made us realize that we can actually work from anywhere, and we can see, I hopefully see a huge rise in remote work and normalizing remote work especially in our desi culture where you have to have a little more trust. But great points there and I'm on our now move on to the audience questions we have four questions so far but please feel free to send them in. I'm going to move on there's a question for under time it says the reliance networks game changing move years back brought prices tremendously down. I did I did river to it on the chat do you want me to speak about it again because the questions which came I have reverted on the chat. You have. Okay, so the question and have you also reverted how do they make digitization more inclusive and who wants to pick up pick on that. I did mention that. So I did revert to second that on it. I think you know policies when they're drafted need to be more nuanced. For example, the people whom you want to connect should be there in the table. For example, you know if you want to connect women in rural areas or even young people, you have to have them in the table. What kind of internet do they want what is it you are looking at. So, it's important to make it inclusive if you want to connect people from from the minorities or even rural populations, you have to have them so that you know what their ones are what their demands are how they want to use it. Based on it, I think, if decision makers have to make policies, or it would be more nuanced. So, the one of the thing is to have every stakeholder on the table when policies are being devised. To make it a bit more inclusive. But we also see in the absence of of robust policies, what do you think that they are the most pressing issues in digital governance and we just saw the recent IT law with amendments and how do you think the pressing issues in digital government can be tackle, especially in terms of when you have informal communities that get into community networks and municipal networks or as I said I said mesh networks and we have we don't we do have an example in Karnataka that's run by an IT Bombay professor called Sabani. So maybe you could highlight a little bit about what are the issues that you've seen in digital governments. So when the concern at times is government has very good intent when policies are being made. However, many attempts the policies do not take the rights of people into consideration. For example, certain rules regulations are made very, they are made with good intent, but they may be stifling too many communities, they may be, you know, the after effects of it may be when you're connecting people as, you know, you need innovative ways in connecting the community by IT Bombay or even some way the internet society has been funding are great ways in which communities can be empowered to have the connectivity and you know to sustain it which it is good, but then you have various ways in which you can do it there are places where you may have to use a satellite there may be places where community networks work, or even the CSCs or the community Wi-Fi which the government is planning if it is done in a particular way would help. But again, when policies are being made, they are made with good intent but I think there should be more communities involved so that the voices can be heard and all issues can be taken into consideration. And that is something which is concerning at times because you know we have a lot of regulations which are coming up they are good, but certain things are missing at some point of time and that's where our concerns especially the rights of people. How you can protect your, the individuals, what would be the government oversight when such rules come in, what would be the liability of the platforms or the others so those are certain things. These cybersecurity part, the privacy part, those are important for example India still doesn't have a privacy law, though it is in the making, but without that how would the, with so many people coming online generating so much of data how can you protect their legitimate interests and rights which they may not be aware of so those are certain questions I think which are very pertinent at this time. I'm going to now move on to an audience question which says hey I find it really helpful if people could share how digital intrusion and exclusion affects mental health and emotional well-being. I can see it's difficult for people, but is there any research or data that provides some specifics as to someone's talking about the overuse of the internet over here. And is there any anyone from the panelists who wants to take that. I did respond to it in the chat. As in there is no, I have not come across data there may be of how exclusion affects mental health. However, there are researchers being done on how internet addiction can help you know affect mental health, but personally I do feel that someone who is online and is not being able to access internet. Does feel excluded does feel stressed. I'm sure that people who are accessing the internet and those who have not accessed internet may have may feel inadequacy of not being able to access the things which someone is, but I have not come across any such research perhaps. We have still not reached a position where we have everyone connected or, you know, for us to get everyone connected in at least a developing country or emerging country like India is a priority first. No, that's true. I'm not sure if we have time to wrap up for it but from what I understand is that we've, we've, we've kind of come to a consensus that we need to be mindful about the different needs and and look at, look at solving the issue the infrastructure issue which is a technical issue from a humanistic lens and we also need to look at the fact that the current policies don't necessarily account for the social and cultural context and you need to include the communities, especially people with disability or women right right from the technical process to the policy process and also with with access also comes a lot of digital skills where we need to understand what are the ways and measures that we can keep ourselves safe right for example we need we there's so much reliance on encryption for digital payments e-commerce, what are the different password management systems that are there, how do we get rid of issues like cyberstalking, cyber theft, online harassment and gender based violence so these are pressing issues which if we build our digital competencies would be solved, we have over a minute and maybe if we have any last comments or final thoughts and then I go on with the world thanks anyone. I just remind that we have to also while designing this there's a remote population in all countries and let's not exclude them from the table as Amrita said let's have them represented also because they have certain priorities for connectivity and it should always be represented on the table so. Go ahead. Yeah, thanks. I think it is if we want to enable internet for any everyone in the same equitable manner. We need to have everyone working together not no single person can do it and internet has to be on I would say I missed this point. We had a lot of shutdowns but it actually doesn't help. There may be different solutions for it internet has to be available for everyone, just like electricity is it is an essential service today. So it should be available affordable and accessible for everyone. I would just emphasize the affordability point I think particularly in our experience in the United States that this is really the dividing line between folks who are able to connect and those who are not and we haven't done enough yet in this country to to from a policy standpoint to really bridge that gap and we're there's there's good steps happening. An emergency broadband benefit was was passed into law last December that will give households qualifying households of $50 a month subsidy which will go a long way. During this pandemic to to get folks connected but that's not the we need a long term solution as well. And so that will be the continued focus of our of our work in the coming months and years. Yeah, actually, unfortunately this brings us to the end of the year. I like to thank all the panelists for such a lovely conversation. And this obviously wouldn't have happened without the partnership that we have with future tense in the America. Thank you so much for hosting the event. Also, a final reminder that we'd love for you to take the double slap survey if you want your suggestions to be incorporated because we would be sharing the report at the annual meeting happening this August hopefully in person in Singapore. And yeah, thank you all and also like to thank our supporting partners DC and network which is an international network of experts who work on digital communication issues and policies across Africa, Asia and Europe. I'd also like to thank that with capital. And with that, we come to an end my friends. Thank you so much and we should also be sure RSVP for next week's future tense event on how will we learn in the future. Thank you so much, and it's been a pleasure moderating the session. Thank you Rashi and everyone for having us.


We're going to talk some cricket now on the Sportsmax zone. Today we continue to assess the inexperienced West Indies squad named for the test leg of their all format tour of Australia in January and February 2024. The 15 man unit includes seven on cap players to be captain by Craig Bradford with Alzare Joseph named as the new vice captain. Let's have a quick look at the full squad. Craig Bradford captain, Joseph vice captain, Tatian Ryan Chanda-Paul, Kurt McKenzie, Alec Atheneys, Kevin Hodge, Justin Graves, Joshua De Silva, Akeem Jordan, Gouda Kishmote, Kimar Roach, Kevin Sinclair, Tevin Imlak, Shamar Joseph and Zachary Makasky. As we are lined on Wednesday, Jason Holder and Kyle Mears declined selection as they prioritized a T20 format while Jayden Seals is out injured. And at a press conference following our segment on Wednesday, lead selector Desmond Haynes revealed that Darren Bravo and Shea Hope were also contacted. He says Bravo told director of cricket Miles Baskham that he remains on a break while Hope says he wants more red ball practice. Let's turn to Joseph Reds' career for some analysis. Reds, let me offer my personal congratulations to your honorary doctor that you received from the University of Guyana. Mara and Ricardo I'm sure would have said that I was on vacation at the time. So well deserved, Reds. And congratulations.  Yeah. Well, the life work of some of our West Indies cricketers under the microscope at the moment, because some of them are unavailable for this series. And we have a squad going to Australia. That's very, very short on experience, Reds. How does the fact that seven on cap players are in this squad grab you? Well, Lance, if you look at what is maybe a new guard, there is no Oricon, Gabriel, Brooks, Wood, Chase, Bonner, Rifa, Karaya. And of course, we've had a situation with Holder and mayors making themselves unavailable. And that's virtually a team which I think the West Indies selectors have moved away from. And based on the performance of the West Indies A team in South Africa, and I had sent you an initial lineup which indicated that the selectors have virtually gone for those players from the team who had had two good A-tours before. So in a sense, you could say that despite the great Australian team they're facing, they have chosen this tour because of the players they have who are saying, yes, I like to go. They're investing here for the future. Yeah. A quick comment on Darren Bravo, Reds, because on the show yesterday we had suggested that it was shocking that he wasn't picked, but we were not aware at the time that he was approached. What are your thoughts on his declining the invitation to the squad? Well, I can well understand it. I think the whole issue was badly handled after not being picked in the series against England, because he was 34, and then you picked other people who were older than him. To all of a sudden now, looking to try and put together a squad with some experiences, not a lot. He got this call, I think, from might as basketball, and I'm not surprised that he said, I'm not available, I'm still having a break. I mean, psychologically, mentally, physically, cricket-wise, he probably wasn't ready at all, so I think that was badly handled. Yeah. Reds, you just alluded to the fact that some of the players getting an opportunity here showed potential in A-Team Tours, which is the platform for selectors to identify players with talent. But as we had said at the top of the show, they're going to Australia now with a job that a lot of more experienced players in the past have failed to pass those examinations. Is this then a series that the team will be looking to gather some experience and know-how and not so much focus on winning? We know winning is important, but is it that the selection panel feels that, okay, we may not be able to win this series, but let's see what these players have. Yes, I think that's a fair assessment, and I think maybe looking at the Tour to England, where they can use whatever happens in Australia, experience, good performances, confidence, players building a test career. And I'm told by one player, in fact, I can say I spoke to young Joseph from Guyana, and he said Sean Titt was very helpful to decide in South Africa, and he said Jimmy Adams also played a very good role. So I think the backroom staff, and there's a chance after I saw the president, President Shaluu, naming Brian Lara as a mentor, well, why not get Brian Lara up there so he can further us this, Jimmy Adams, about conditions in Australia, about the kind of pitches in Adelaide and Brisbane. You know, I think we need to spend the extra dollar and have the extra personality. Yeah, Reds, you know, I have so much to say on this issue. What I'm going to take you upon today, though, is the contradictory explanations that have been coming from the lead selector, Desmond Haynes, in relation to a number of these selections. First of all, great to hear that Darren Bravo was approached. Again, I completely agree with you, because I think that situation was handled so poorly from the get go that you cannot blame Darren Bravo for saying, well, no, that's fine. I'll sit this one out.  Mind you, it's a risk because he may never be given the opportunity again, but a risk he was clearly willing to take. Here is where I am, though, Reds. When the squad was released yesterday, part of what was said by Cricket West Indies and Desmond Haynes, the lead selector, it was pointed out clearly that Jason Holder and Carl Mayer's declined selection. They want to prioritize T20 international cricket. I want to deal with Carl Mayer specifically, because this is a man who in four test matches for the West Indies in 2023 is averaging just 20. I have a graphic Reds that I want to look at the top batsmen in test cricket for the West Indies in 2023.  So I'm not suggesting that any of these players is the solution to the problems that we currently have in West Indies cricket. In terms of average, that list is led by Tej Narayan-Chandepole. In terms of run scored, it is led by Craig Brathwaite. On this list is German Blackwood in 11 innings, six test matches. He's averaging 26.9. German Blackwood in this hugely inexperienced squad is dropped, although he is the third best scorer for the West Indies in 2023. But Carl Mayer's, who averages a mere 20, whose highest score is 30 in the calendar year, was given a call, and he was the one who had to decline. German Blackwood's career average, test career average, is around where the men who are replacing him, Justin Graves, Kave March, Tevin Imlak, Zakhar Makasky, are averaging in their first-class careers, not their test average, no. They all went on a tour of South Africa A recently. All of these players averaged just 30 or below in that South Africa A tour. So explain to me now, Reds, given all that logic as to why German Blackwood would at least not get the opportunity to go to Australia. Say she hope has declined. Mayer's has declined, but Blackwood has experienced. He was your recent vice captain. He hasn't been terrible by West Indies standards this year. Why does he get dropped? Well, I didn't have, and I mean, want to be very honest with you, I didn't have Blackwood in my side. I never had mirrors in my side based on performance and some of the figures that you pointed out. But you are making a solid point and that with the shortness of experience, and that is why they tried to rope in Bravo at the end. You know, a close friend of mine who played for the Leeuws, he used standby for West Indies in 1983, Leeuws fast bowler. He said he is the one batsman who will attempt to try and attack the Australian bowlers. And when you look at the overall needs, there should have been some consideration for Blackwood. There was some early indicators that all was not happy with him. And hence Ricardo, there was no contract offered. Was that an indicator to you that he was a borderline pick? Listen, it might have been, you know, Reds, but the point I'm making is given all the prevailing circumstances when you sit to select that final squad. And here is what makes matters worse now, because I understand that at yesterday's press conference Desmond Ains was asked whether German Blackwood had been advised that he would be dropped. And the response to that was that he owes German Blackwood a call. If that is true, then it seems to me we're making the same mistake that we made with Darren Bravo, no with German Blackwood. Because in my opinion, once this decision is made as your former vice captain, you should be calling German Blackwood, you should be having a conversation with him, and he should be fully aware of what is about to happen before he hears it in the media or before the squad is released and he is seeing it for the first time. So if that call did not go to German Blackwood, it makes this situation even more disappointing. Ricardo, over the years, you can add many names. We aren't going to go into that in greater name detail. But one of the fundamental things, and I remember talking to Michael Fiddly when he was chairman, he says, as soon as it was necessary to make a call to any players who are part of the squad, you make sure you call that player and tell him as best as you could that he is not being selected. I think it's a fundamental responsibility of the chairman. I also want to say that the time that the side was announced to when the press conference was called was not a long time. I thought that that could have been delayed a little bit. I'm being very honest when I look at the practicality of doing what you're going to do as chairman of selectors. The other thing I would like to point out about the announcement, initially there was no mention about hope. There was a mention of a holder, there was a mention of mayors and there was no comment on hope and it's not until so on specifically asked whether hope was going to a white ball franchise, the chairman of selectors, who by then after maybe talking to hope, I would imagine, and there's not been unrealistic to think that I'm wrong, that he would have known that hope was heading to Bangladesh. As we heard today, playing for the Tigers and that starts on January 19th. I thought that he should have been a lot more open. He was in fact pressured into saying some more and he ended up by saying all I can say, hope is unavailable. Yeah, what was disappointing for me as well and I know you have spoken about this in the past and I must admit that it's not the regular occurrence on the part of cricket West Indies and their public relations and media team. I learned about the press conference at 5.43 Jamaica time and it was starting at 5.45 Jamaica time. I learned about it at 5.50 but the message came in at 5.43 and yeah, by the time I saw it the press conference would have already started. But anyway, let's leave all of that there. This is a topic and a squad that we will be chatting quite a lot about. Of course, they leave on the 30th of December. They will have a warm-up match from the 10th to the 13th of January and the first test against Australia begins on the 17th. Of course, it's West Indies cricket, so we wish the players all the very best because they have not selected themselves. So we really hope that they can go out there and give of their best. But yes, when you see things that don't necessarily add up, you have to ask the questions and that's what we're here doing this afternoon. Thanks again, Rez. I appreciate you dropping by and we'll chat soon. Just a point I'd like to make. Holder and hope not being available to West Indies cricket is a bit of a watershed in West Indies cricket. Let's leave it there, Rez. Let's go to our break. Lance is at the track next.


The floor may not be a robot. Mario, in all capitals, is a Super Mario World rum hackpasta by SMW Central user, Adam. The hackpatch can be downloaded here. The patch itself is made by SMW Central user Mario, all spaces and caps, whose avatar is an SMW Mario without a face. He or she used to not to be seen as inactive one month of no activity makes you inactive on SMW Central, as he or she posted mysterious and eerie things every now and then, just before he or she would turn inactive. As of recent, the SMW Central account has been disabled. You can find the original thread at www.smwcentral.net. Note, this is a true story, and sums up what was going through my mind as I was playing this, and I had no idea I was about to be bullcrapped the way I was when I played this and I can say it is by far the creepiest hack I've played. If you were an IRC you would have heard me talking about it as well, but anyways it's late at night, and I don't have a lot of time, and I need to get to sleep, so this is all I have time for. So it all happened, on tonight of all nights. I was bored, obviously contemplating what I thought I could do to waste time as I chatted with the people in hashtag SMWC. We had good times, and shared a few laughs together. Out of boredom, I decided to patrol the hacks waiting to be moderated section. Seems that we had quite a bit, 33 if I recall correctly. The first few hacks I saw when I sorted them by date were a couple really horrible ones with bad screenshots to boot. Naturally showed these hacks to the centralites currently on hashtag SMWC. We were laughing at how bad some of them were, but then I got to a hack called Mario. Just that, nothing more, nothing less. The description seemed quite odd, as if some Japanese hacker was trying to translate the original plot of Super Mario World into English and failing horribly. I showed this to Kieran and he started laughing at the description. It read as follows. As you play the role of Super Mario Plumber, verify that you are beautiful Kieran Sasuda Zudorou, again Bowser kidnapped the evil king. It is your job to save her. This hack includes six levels of very long. I simply dismissed this as someone trying to act Japanese and release a crappy hack with some edits, or so that's what I thought this was at first. Curiosity got the best of me. I decided to download the hack, not knowing what I was in for, since the single screenshot of the hack was the title screen with nothing but the letters Mario from Super Mario World's title screen. I thought it was a little odd how there were no dates or anything either, as hackers usually place their names and dates on the titles to mark when the project was started. So when I opened the hack, I was greeted by two files. One called 307,014, a simple text file 27 kilobyte in size, and the IPS file, simply named Mario. For some odd reason I wanted to see what the offer of the hack had to say, but when I opened the hack in Notepad, there was nothing but indistinguishable symbols letters and punctuation, sort of like how when you open a ROM in a text editor like Notepad. Seems like the offer just completely copied his ROM to text form, though I could be wrong. Taking a closer look, at the top of the text file next in with the gibberish I found the only thing that looked like English there. Here is a piece of what I found. Find me, find me, find me, find me, find me, find me. To be honest I didn't know what to make of this, and I thought it was to simply waste some of my time by making me find some text in the gibberish file. That I willing to bet, no one will ever be able to make sense of. I decided that, because my interest was growing steadily, I would start looking through my horribly disorganized download folder for a copy of a clean ROM, which I had downloaded a great deal of time before the events of tonight been folded, and an IPS patcher, of course my choice for the job was Lunar IPS. So I then proceeded to move the ROM and the IPS patcher to the folder with the hack. I patched the ROM, not knowing what to expect next, and I quickly hurried to drag it to ZSNES and play what I thought was to be terrible in the form of a ROM image. I noticed on boot up that the offer had taken the time to change the header of his hack. Instead of the usual Super Mario World you normally see when booting up a ROM in ZSNES, it just had the letters Mario there again. At this point I gained a little hope, because normally people who do horrible half-assed edits to the ROM generally don't know enough to change a header title. I thought I wasn't wasting my time with this, and my mood brightened slightly at the thought of seeing what the offer had to offer in his interesting little hack. So the title screen loaded, exactly like it would with Super Mario World, except it had just Mario on the title like I had mentioned earlier. Something else had grabbed my interest more so than the unusual absence of layer 3 tiles on the title screen. Mario's normal bright colored and happy palette seemed, how can I put it? Duh. What was once violet like red was now what seemed like gray with a slight red tint to it, and I'm fairly sure his pants were looking more gray than blue too. I thought this was strange, and I wondered why he had decided to give Mario such a dull palette. Regardless as to what his intentions were, I felt that something was wrong. Not in the sense that the palette was slightly bad, but that the hack was empty like something had happened. Upon pressing start and selecting a new file, like a lot of other countless Mario hacks I have played in the past, there was some sort of intro screen that basically described the entirety of the plot in a short paragraph just small enough to fit into a small black box. I began reading, and for the most part, the message stayed the same, but there was one key factor that made this interesting. Apparently the main antagonist of this hack wasn't Bowser at all, it was. Mario. The message read as follows. Welcome. This is Dinosaur Land. In this strange land we find that Princess Toadstow is missing again. Looks like Mario is at it again. What the? This wasn't the original message from Super Mario World. I thought to myself, normally I wouldn't think anything of this, seeing as how, over my nearly two years at SMW Central, I have played countless hacks and have seen many different intro messages, but this one really stuck out. At this point, I definitely knew there was something odd about this hack. Upon letting the intro level music play, I pressed the start button on my controller to finally get to the overworld and begin my journey into this unknown hack. Upon entering the overworld, everything seemed normal. Same old level paths, same old music, but the level names were different. Instead of Yoshi's house like it always has been every time I've ever played Super Mario World, it was now simply just Yoshi's. The house part was gone. I thought that this was strange, and I began to lose hope in the hack because it had seemed like barely anything had changed at all from the original. I was hoping to see something new. Well, unluckily for me, I got my wish, as you'll see when you read on. I decided to enter the level out of curiosity. When I entered, the whole house that's normally there was gone. No more smoke, no more fire, no more little birdies, no more treehouse. All that was left was the message box. I decided to get it. Upon opening, the message I expected to be there was replaced with what seemed like binary. Apparently it says notepad. At this point I was on IRC telling everyone about how the hack was starting to weird me out, which in itself yielded some sarcastic responses. But hey, I expected it. Anyways after this my interest level in the hack skyrocketed, and along with it my paranoia. Oh boy, was in for a fun surprise. So I decided to head left. Upon reaching what was before known as Yoshi's Island 1, the level was now labeled, Never Come Back. Now I thought things were going to be all KZO death trap, because generally that is what people name their levels in KZO hacks to make sure the player doesn't go there. To my surprise it wasn't quite that way though, I wish that it had been. Upon entering level 105 I was greeted by the insanely loud clown car sound that Bowser's flying vehicle makes right before Peach falls out. Of course with my headphones being moderately high, the sound scared the living crap out of me, which wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been so nervous beforehand. I decided at this time it would be best if I turned the volume on my headphones down, as do not get any more unpleasant surprises such as that one. When I entered the level, other than the music, everything seemed to be the same, except for the fact that the little coop of that slides on the ledges wasn't there anymore, nor was the Banzi Bill. The dragon coin was still there, however for some odd reason, I wasn't able to collect it, or rather any dragon coins at all. The offer made certain of that. I also noticed that there was a brown used blot near the spot where the Banzi Bill normally shows up. I can only assume this was a revisit to the level after I had deeded it like I heard in some half-assed creepy stories in other Mario games. Now I was wondering why things were like this, making me wonder about the intro message. Had Mario done something previously to dinosaur land? Was this in Bowser's point of view?  So that left me thinking that Mario at one point in time in the author's story did something, but what? What did Mario do? My mind was nothing but rushing thoughts at this point. However I quickly dismissed them and ventured further into the level, only to find that all blocks had basically been hit, coins had been collected, save dragon coins, those were still there and unobtainable, that there were no enemies, and that I could no longer go down pipes. What kind of bullcrap am I playing here? I kept thinking to myself. At this point I felt uncomfortable. I decided to keep venturing. Eventually I came across a message box, which I wasn't surprised, was still in the level.  Upon hitting it, I was greeted with the familiar black box once again. The message was edited obviously. As I had figured that this was a given at this point. It reads as follows. Point of advice.  Now I thought things were starting to get the vibe that the author was a twisted and warped individual, and that I was right about Mario having done something. At this point I was basically rushing to get to the end of the level, so I just skirt by, and then I came across another message box. However this one was just a blank box with point of advice at the top with nothing else in it. I quickly disregarded it and headed off further to the right hoping to free myself of the hell that was once level 105. Upon reaching the end I saw a fire flower in the top block where the four-way block intersection used to be, however it was too high for me to reach by normal means, so I just continued onward, like the blind curious idiot I am would do. So I finally beat the level, and as usual the path to the yellow switch palace was unlocked. I decided to head up the path that normally leads to the yellow switch palace, and I found that when I entered the main overworld, every other landmass and decoration decides the ghosts from the ghost houses and Yoshi's island itself were gone. Nothing really changed at the yellow switch palace except for the switch message. All that changed was that switch palace was changed to Mario World. Boring. Anyways just when I thought I was done with this abomination that calls itself a heck, I found that Yoshi's Island 2 has also been edited. Oh joy. I thought to myself, upon reaching Yoshi's Island 2, I found that it had been renamed to Yoshi's house, the original name of level 104. I decided to enter and found that the palette of the level had been changed along with the background. They seem to have been changed to the same palette as Yoshi's Island 3, you know, greenish tan and such, except the background was pushed down some and was now rotting brown color, and that the vegetation on the foreground was now no longer present. I decided to explore the level again and came across the trail of Koopas, that countless players have used a shell to rack free one ups with. I decided to ignore them and go see if any more of the level was changed. I eventually came across the question mark block that calls Yoshi and decided to free him. Upon freeing him, I got this message. Hooray. Thank you for rescuing me. My name is Yoshi. On my way to rescue my friends, Mario trapped me in that egg. This had me wondering what kind of sick and twisted heck I was playing. I had thoughts of all possible scenarios of Mario attacking Dinosaur Land horribly and causing irreversible damage.  Somewhere not far off from the Yoshi block, I found a message box, in the same place I remember that it always had been though, if I've learned anything at all from playing this, it's that whatever had to be in that message box was not going to be even remotely normal in the slightest. This made me hesitant to get it, but I ended up doing so anyways. I wanted to find out more. The message I was greeted with was as follows. But, is there anything I can do to change your mind? What the fudge? I thought to myself.  Change my mind. What would I change my mind about anyways? Was this about Mario and whatever he did, and about how people were trying to convince him to stop? Was Yoshi talking to me through message boxes? Or was it about me? About me playing the heck, asking me, as if the heck was trying to talk to me through message boxes. Either way, whether it was for more backstory on what Mario had done, or if it was questioning my decision to keep going, I decided to keep progressing despite the obvious signs that I should have quit playing the heck a while ago. As I progressed further, I found that I was right, all agitation was now gone, and nothing was left at all. Save a few enemies, like chucks, bulls and such, even the pipes were gone. I came across another message box. Like all other times before, I decided to get it. I was greeted with yet another cryptic message. Point of advice. This is the selfish way out. The selfish way out?   Had Mario made some kind of selfish decision that only benefited him? Was Yoshi still trying to talk to me?  At this point I was creeped out to the point that I was shaking slightly, a mix of anticipation, fear, and the fact that my room was terribly cold last night. I closed the message box and once again proceeded further. The area with the moles seemed the same, except for the fact that the block next to the vine block was gone, along with the happy clouds and dragon coin the vine allowed access to. This made me feel gloomy to say the least, not so much frightened as I was depressed. It's a feeling I couldn't really explain well. From this point on, it was basically just a big empty stretch of land to the end of the level. I proceeded quickly, I wanted to get the fudge out of there, as I felt that I had spent enough time looking around. Sony and Yoshi, I still had him at the time, opened up the next path on the overworld. It too was changed. What was once Yoshi's Island 3 now read as Yoshi's Island 7. Memories of Superbobito world flooded my mind how the levels would take giant leaps in number order which made it seem ridiculous, though at this time I didn't quite find it as humorous due to common sense and obvious reasons explained earlier. I entered the level. As I entered, I was welcomed by a solid black background and a blue and gray colored floor. The place seemed frozen, lifeless and barren. There was nothing in the level at all, save the goal point. Just a clear stretch of land with nothing else at all. I quickly lost interest and finished the level. This was what seemed like the most empty and creepy level in the game, though as you'll read on, it gets far worse. With the level beaten, a new path opened up. Yoshi's Island 4 was now just, leave now. Now I hesitated as to whether I would stop playing, but my interest kept me going further. At this point, hashtag SMWC was nothing but me posting findings and messages from the heck, so others could experience what I was experiencing. The channel sadly wasn't usually inactive, seemed like no one really cared, or wasn't around. I felt alone. I proceeded into the level. For the most part, everything seemed the same, save for the fact that there was now no water at all to keep me from falling in pits without using Yoshi as a sacrifice. The level was also void of all enemies as well. Whenever I got to an area that seemed too far for me to jump, I found that I could just walk right across on the air, thus getting rid of the need to use Yoshi as a sacrifice. It's apparent that the heck wanted me to keep him, I could tell that much. I was able to get to the pipe that usually leads to the exit level. I went in and found that the room was exactly the same, everything in the right place and nothing edited, or so I thought. The message box once again broke the mood of that brief moment of relief I had gained upon entering the pipe. At this point I was questioning whether I should keep going to see how it ends, or quit now while I still have a bit of common sense left. The message box was sort of indistinguishable, and I couldn't really make sense of it. You get if you cut the at the end. If you can collect you can. For a moment I tried to figure out what the box meant but eventually I just gave up and beat the level. I figured that box wasn't worth the time anyways. With the level beaten, the path to the first world castle opened, now renamed from number one, it used castle to number one, go back. I sure did feel welcome here. I decided to completely ignore the level name, as I just wanted to get this over with and to be done with it forever. What seemed like a normal castle intro was made especially creepy, given the fact that I had to dismount Yoshi. I felt for the first time that I was actually abandoning him, and I wish I had taken him with me. The inside room of the castle looked strange. There was this darkish blueish greenish black love on the ceiling, and there were goal points that looked like pillars. Aside from that, next to each pillar, there was an increasing amount of message boxes next to each pillar the further I got. The room was basically just a big hallway with no enemies or anything of the sort. Every message box I pressed either gave me a blank box with Yoshi's signature at the bottom, or the message that read as follows. Another cryptic message, though at this point I wasn't surprised, not in the slightest. Don't you think you've caused enough trouble? Again the thoughts in my head started circling. Wondering what exactly Mario had done, why he was here, and why everything seemed to hate everything about him and wanted him gone forever. I was feeling more depressed than scared at this point to be honest, and I had no idea what to expect next.  It's like they were telling me to stop playing, or something. Obviously I ignored them and kept going. I eventually reached the end of the hallway. There was a door, which I entered. I was welcomed by nothing but a small section of land, and at that, the level was auto-scrolling. So I figured that this must be the end, that the offer wanted me to jump in the pit and commit suicide or something, thus ending my journey. I was wrong, the auto-scroll pushed me over the ledge, and I was still walking, unfortunately.  The auto-scroll came to a stop, and I prepared for the worst. I gathered my composure, swallowed some of the spit in my mouth, and took a deep breath. I entered. Nothing but a normal iddy boss, I felt cheated in a way though. I was happy to think it was finally over. I defeated iddy with two jumps effortlessly, which was actually the quickest I'd ever beaten him before. After he fell in the lava, the course clear message popped up as usual. It ended and I was brought to the rescue egg scene, though instead of the usual message, I was shown something disturbing and vastly different, like a profile for the scene of a crime. It was as follows. Victim number one. Eyeballs were unable to be found. The victim was found lying on her carpet. Causes of death and known, hand marks with an identifiable fingerprints were found all over the corpse. What the fudge is wrong with this guy? I said as I read the disturbing message. I mean, it was a heck, but still.  Why were her eyeballs gouged out, and just what could have made those an identifiable fingerprints that were found on her body? Was this Mario's doing? Is this what the offer was trying to tell me? And furthermore, was the girl princess told still? It took me a while to see if I read the message correctly, then I proceeded outwards, though I was wondering what happened next, since the main map was completely gone and there was no trace of it anywhere. To my surprise, it still showed the path marked for Donut Plains. The eventiles still being there, marking the path to the lone level on the giant map that was once the main world. It was still called Donut Plains 1. I thought we were finally done once more, but when I entered the level I could see that like the previous times, I was once again wrong. Upon entering I saw two message boxes. They said as follows. There is no way out of here. Fly away. I found it quite strange that both message boxes were contradicting each other. One was telling me that there was no way out of this accursed hell, and the other was telling me that, if I could fly away, I could be free, though I saw no feather or enemies to grab one with.  Did I need a cape to proceed? And what happens after this? Is the whole game like this? I began to create more thoughts in my head trying to figure the message boxes out, but to no avail. I proceeded to walk to the right. I made a jump, but I found that I was stuck in the area, there was an invisible wall, and I had thought I had a dead end. When I landed I tried moving right again to see if there was any way to go on. All of a sudden I heard the pipe sound, and I was making the pipe animation, except there was no pipe present, so it looked quite odd.  I was immediately given a mushroom to prevent me from entering it, so I proceed further to see if there is anything else in the level. I found that the room was nothing but a long stretch of concrete blocks and doors that were too small for me to enter because of the mushroom I got. It's obvious that the offer didn't want me going through any of them, or I wouldn't have gotten the mushroom in the first place. As I proceeded I found myself at a dead end. Since there was nothing left for me to look at, I tried to go right again. It worked, I went through the brick wall. It acted like a pipe, and I did a pipe animation that looked like I was going into the darkness. I was then taken to a small room, with what seemed like a pit, and a wall. I jumped down the pit seeing as how there was no other option, though I found that the bottom of the pit was solid. I tried pressing down in a bunch of areas, until I came across a pipe. Mario slowly did the pipe transition downwards off the screen. Expecting another level, I waited, but there was no more. Just a black screen. I wasn't able to continue. Unable to pause or exit the level, or move. There was nothing, nothing at all. This was the video game representation of death, a crash. Mario had died. After playing, I think I finally understand what was happening. I believe Mario was atoning for his actions, eventually being plummeted into a hell that looked exactly like Yoshi's Island, where he was lost to the grip of death, forever. I was finally done playing and quite relieved at that. The nightmare was over, activity on the IRC seemed to be back up again. I quickly shared my tales with the rest of hashtag SMWC, and typed this documentation of it. If you feel daring enough, you too can witness my tale, first hand. Remember guys, it's only a hack, it can't hurt you. Or can it? This hack, being the first of its kind to get SMW central, of course gained a lot of attention, even the site's founder and administrator Kieran, currently Kieran Minner, who then immediately recognized the text file that Adam mistook for the SMC, rum image, converted into text, as a JPEG file, due to its header. He tried manually converting it back into JPEG, but the result was barely viewable, the only recognizable part was the very top. He then continued searching Google for images with his attempts resolution, 327x277, and the second result struck him as relevant. You can find Kieran's post here, his original attempt only displays a broken image now. This hack's novelty on SMW central wore off however, and it was removed from the hack database after being accepted for being the first of its kind, a creepypasta hack, maybe linked to username 6666.