Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. I'm going to talk a little bit about the global environment outlook, which comes out every four to five years. And this report is based on the work of scientists. And they look at the existing literature. So it's basically a meta-study of the existing literature. And this work has been done because there was an assignment from 193 governments some years ago that they wanted to know what the state of the environment was and how it links up with the healthy planet, healthy people. So that is basically the topic of this report. In this presentation, I will run you through a little bit about the substance of the report, the process of the report, and a little bit about the output, the outcome, and the impact. In terms of substance, we use what is called the DPSIR model, Driver's Pressure State Impact and Responses. And this model was then modified a little bit to include a whole section on policy responses as well as a section on outlooks. And we look at air, freshwater, oceans, land, and biodiversity. And then this is all done as part of a theory of change. And this basically means that when the report is finished, we are expecting to mobilize a large number of actors in different parts of the world to try to take these results and make their decisions. So the key message of the report is that a healthy planet supports healthy lives. An unhealthy planet affects human health. The drivers and pressures need to be affected. And actually, if you want to promote healthy people in a healthy planet, these are very synergistic. So why does a healthy planet support healthy people? Well, if you look at nature's contributions to humans, whether it's biodiversity, supporting, regulating, provisioning, or cultural contributions, these are substantially more than the global GDP. In 2007, they've evaluated at $125 trillion, which was much more at that time in comparison to GDP. Now, this is not only important because it serves the business interests of the world, but it also provides clean services to 70% of the world's poor to live healthy lives, eat, and work. So it's really a very important narrative that a healthy planet supports healthy lives. However, we are in the middle of an unhealthy situation. And the drivers of an unhealthy planet are fivefold. First, of course, population, because there are more people going to be here and we are all graying. There is some debate about whether population is the driver or its inequality. Then there is urbanization, which is 6% in 2050. This increases consumption, but can also lead to much greater efficiencies. However, the big challenge is going to be informal settlements growing with people without access to services. Then you have growth. On the one hand, growth is really important for all countries because it enhances welfare. But it is increasingly inequitable. The rich tend to pollute more. The poor face more existential threats. Technology is really good because it helps to enhance welfare. At the same time, technologies can be very risky. And for the first time, we look at climate change already as a driver because we've already passed the 1 degree centigrade mark. And by 2030, we expect to pass 1.5 degrees centigrade if we cannot change our behavior. And this is cascading impacts on all sectors. So if you want to address the drivers, you need to look for policies on education, gender equality, health care, changing consumption patterns, better design of settlements. Apparently, a US $1 investment in water and sanitation can have a fourfold result in terms of health benefits. We need to redefine development, dealing growth from population address inequality. Technology means also adopting the precautionary principle. And of course, climate change requires decarbonization. We also looked in this report at cross-cutting issues. We looked at a whole range of issues, but I've just taken out a few for the discussions. In terms of chemicals, we have more than 100,000 chemicals in use every year. And more than half or less than half have been researched for their impacts on the environment. We have a growing waste problem. Urban waste is between 7 to 10 billion tons per year on the one hand. On the other hand, 2 out of 5 people don't have access to waste facilities. However, the waste market could lead to good business opportunities. If you look at extraction, right now, we are using 90 billion tons of resources every year into the system. And at the same time, we have 90 billion tons of resource-related waste. Now, these two 90 billion tons are not related. They come from completely different calculations, but they happen to be the same number. In terms of energy consumption, we are using 13.5 billion tons of oil equivalent. But at the same time, 1.2 billion people lack energy access and 2.7 billion used traditional fuels.  And on the global scale, it's 1 third of global food is being wasted. And this is a huge amount in terms of loss of dollar income, so $750 billion we lose annually to $1 trillion. And this amounts to a 9% emission of greenhouse gases. So we just stopped wasting food. We can save or reduce 9% of greenhouse gases. So we're in the middle of a very unhealthy planet. If you look at air pollution, there's rising urban air pollution, indoor rural pollution, increasing temperatures, climate change. The ozone depleting substances still have to be fully phased out. The POPs are very serious, including mercury. If you look at biodiversity, we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction event. 10 out of 14 terrestrial ecosystems are already in trouble. Global fish stocks are over exploited, rising from 10% of over exploitation in 1975 to 33% in 2015. 22% of the population look after 80% of the biodiversity. And this is the indigenous people and local communities who are being displaced rapidly through what is called land crabbing. Oceans suffering a lot because of coral bleaching, declining fisheries, ocean acidification, plastics, and marine pollution every year. 80 billion tons of plastic waste enter the oceans. Land, degradation, deforestation, you know it. And water, of course, a large number of issues here. So if you actually try to compare all these different systems, what you see in this graph is that if you look at green to red in terms of irreversibility of systems, then you find that biodiversity is most affected, followed by air, followed by oceans, then freshwater, followed by freshwater oceans and land. If you then look at the human impact, then clearly, air pollution has the highest human impact followed by water, then by biodiversity, oceans, and then land. And then there are also some dotted lines. And the dotted lines are supposed to indicate the impact on the poorest, which is not always looked at in terms of numbers. And all these systems, of course, are interrelated. So if you want to look at the numbers, then one fourth of all health impacts are caused by the environment. Plus, disasters killed about 0.7 million people and affected $1.7 billion at a cost of $1.4 trillion US. And alone in 2016, disasters displaced 26.2 million people, environmental disasters, which were significantly more than civil war. If you look at air pollution, that is the largest cause of disasters within the environmental family. And it leads to a huge amount of welfare losses of around $5 trillion per annum. Land affects 3.2 billion people. This is degraded land. The losses are between $4 to $20 trillion per annum. Water affects causes 1.4 million deaths, but 90% of disasters are slow onset disasters. And water is increasingly laced with chemicals like antibiotics. And we are afraid that by 2050, antibiotics in the water might become a leading cause of death in the human race. Oceans provide huge amount of food security, so the proteins that you get from the cheap fish provide 3.1 billion people with 20% of their protein needs and support the livelihoods of 58 to 120 million people. And of course, biodiversity, which some people value at USD $200 billion per annum, is declining affecting food security. And zoonosis or the diseases that come from the animal world into the human world is now 60% of infectious disease. So what we are finding is that the impacts of the environment on human health are increasing rapidly. And it's not just the health of the rich, which can be measured sometimes, but also the health of the poor, which can often go unnoticed. Then we have a whole section on policies. And I'm going to go fast through it. Basically, what it concludes at the end of the storyline from a scientific perspective, what we learn is that we don't have enough meta-analysis about when a policy works, what policy mixes work best. We don't have that. Governments don't seem to want to get, invest money in that kind of research. This is really a pity. However, the conclusions that come out of the research are that you need to consider policy effectiveness at the design stage, have a verifiable baseline, sounds very logical. Perhaps look at cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness, ensure policy coherence, which is extremely difficult to do because all the ministries and countries have different goals. Conduct independent post-evaluation studies, which is not often happening, engage key actors, and try to identify policy-sensitive indicators. The report basically concludes that the way we are moving ahead, we're not going to address most of the SDGs or reach the targets that we have in most multilateral agreements. However, it also says that even though we seem to not yet be on track, there is still time to make some changes. And so in the outlook section, there's a process where we discuss that if you go and our business is usual pathway, then most likely we will become extremely unsustainable. We need integrated policies, but more than that, we need transformative policies. But the question that we have is, will governments be willing to listen? So is there any good news in the report? So I had to go through the entire report to try to find the good news. It's not very obvious, but you do find that in the report, there is some successes mentioned in relation to persistent organic pollutants and ozone-depleting substances. We know that protected areas are going up, although the effectiveness of protected areas is questionable sometimes. We know that we are able to protect some of our seeds in this world-bought global seed world. We know that in Germany and China, there's more investment in renewables as well as GDP. So it's not as if you invest in renewables, your GDP goes down. Norway is a success story in trying to push electric cars, and they're doing that through state subsidies or reduction of tolls and taxes. Nigeria and China are experimenting a lot with green bonds. Bangladesh, Eritrea, Kenya, China, India, and the European Union are regulating plastics. And that China has just banned the import of plastics, single-use plastics from other countries. Chile is experimenting with territorial use rights for fishing, although some of my students have some questions regarding whether this is a success story. Canada is using also individual transferable quotas on fishing, so that may also be working. And as I mentioned before, apparently, if you invest $1 in water and sanitation, you get a $4.3 return. And there is some research which shows that if you invest in a two-degree world, that will cost you $22 trillion US, but it will give a return of $54 US trillion. And this is mostly in health, employment, and those kinds of returns. If you go for a 1.5-degree goal, then there are huge benefits for China and India. But for the European Union, the net benefits maybe not so much. So financially, there are good reasons to take action, but you need to think long-term. The good news is industry can innovate. That doesn't mean that they will, but they can innovate. Solar industry provides twice as much jobs as coal in the United States. The recycled waste market is growing. Digital technology and smart meters can help save a lot of money in avoided electricity infrastructure. There's a lot of innovation taking place in the supply chain. There's increasingly greater comprehensive reporting. And there is a lot of work being done on dematerializing, decarbonizing, and detoxifying. And everyone wants to move towards a circular economy, but whether that's really possible is still a challenge. Then if you look at what's happening bottom up, all kinds of projects are taking place worldwide. We have a whole series of projects that have been listed in the report, which tell you about how bottom up processes are trying to create social movements. For example, there's a plastic waste footprint calculator, urban farming, the green roofs projects. There's a youth key avas, which is talking about storytelling to convince people there's something called Swapaholic to exchange clothes, DIY waste management systems, et cetera. So there's massive amounts of things happening at the local level. The question is, will it all add up to change? But basically, the narrative is that the society, as we move into the 2050, 2100, our demand for energy goes up, while our need for fossil fuels needs to go down drastically. But there are huge co-benefits in terms of reduced depths from air pollution. If you look at food, we need 50% more food by 2050 to feed 10 billion people, but we have a global waste of food of 33%. And so maybe that could reduce a little bit. The environment impact of food production is huge. The impacts of such food production may have to be reduced by 2 thirds. So you need a whole lot of actions, like reducing food waste, drip irrigation, meat light diets. And the co-benefits are reduced health risks from antimicrobial resistance, but many, many other co-benefits are also possible. If you look at waste, then again, we have a huge amount of waste, and we use a large number of resources. So the need to move to the circular economy and the co-benefits is reducing extraction, waste related pollution, and related health impacts. So basically there are trends, and we need to deal with those trends. And so the report says we need to talk about transformative pathways, and this needs a vision. It needs social and policy innovation, the phasing out of unsustainable practices, policy experimentation, and engaging and enabling actors. And in the last part over here, we're talking still about the fact that two degrees can be in the long term, significantly financially viable to society as a whole, and that 1.5 is a good reason for the developing countries to start revising the way they think. Having said that, what the report doesn't really do is talk about the equity component. Although equity is running through the report, and we do mention statistics on this, what we find is that there is an increasing concentration of wealth in the top 1%, and that top 1% has also a large environmental footprint, not just because of their direct consumption, but because of their pensions, or because of their savings, et cetera. And so what you find on the right side is that the privilege of polluting significantly more, whereas those who are marginalised are worse affected in terms of existential value, not in dollar value. In dollar value, it's possible that if you are very rich and you have a house near the oceans, and the sea level rises, then of course you make a huge loss. So this report does not look at how do we actually deal with the equity component, but it has the equity component covered in every single chapter. During the presentation of the report at UNEP, there were a lot of discussions and there were some terms that came up, such as unpack less, feel more, use what we can reuse, buy light, pedal more, drive less, sunlight. So there was some kinds of slogans to mobilise people. For business, I was thinking we could say something like innovate more, sell less. I don't think that will work with business, but we have to think in terms of how do we move people around? Let me tell you a little bit about the process. It's really complicated, this process, because you have a high level intergovernmental and stakeholder advisory group telling you the kinds of stuff governments want to hear.  And then, of course, you have the UN Secretary that's trying to say what needs to be done and what's in line with the rules of the UN system. For the first time, they had two co-chairs, so that was myself and Paul Aikins, and the two of us spent some time trying to figure out what our role was, and it was only towards the middle that we actually figured out that we could take some initiative. But it's very difficult to do an integrative story once the contents page of the report is set by governments or by the agencies that are involved. You cannot change it. A little example of that is that when we wanted to integrate the results, we were not able to integrate it in the report. So ultimately, we had to come out with the messages from the co-chair which tried to do the integration. And then you have a number of different authors and cross-cutting issues in this process. If you look at the process and how it functions, then basically you're writing the report at home, then you come and you work together in authors' meetings, and then there's the high-level panel telling you all the time what is good, what is not so good, the scientific advisory panel is telling you what to do, and there are a whole lot of review processes taking place. So we had 145 authors in the main report, 250 in the policymaker summary. We had advisory boards that had 78 people, quality assurance, UN reviewers, lots and lots of work, and seven face-to-face meeting, 100 virtual conference calls, et cetera. So it's a very complex process. And then we had the negotiation of the summary for policymakers. And this was really exciting for me because everybody told me that the negotiation is complicated because you're told by governments what to say and what not to say. But actually, I felt that at the end of the week, every single government official in the room knew what those 35 pages said because they were negotiating a lot amongst each other. And sometimes they would negotiate on words and they would cancel each other out so the text that the scientists put on the table would be accepted. But like, for example, the term, we had also recommended somewhere that meat production, meat consumption should go down, not production, consumption. And of course, the Latin American countries objected very much to the word meat consumption, so it became, in the final report, a healthy diet. So things changed, but I know, for example, the precautionary principle is a big issue between the European Union and the United States because the precautionary principle is something that the European Union pushes for a lot, especially with respect to nanotechnology and with all these new types of scientific knowledges, whereas the United States is not very keen on it. An interesting story is that the government of United States was in lockdown during the negotiations, so there was no formal mandate from Washington, so they did not object as much as they may have done if the government was not in lockdown during the process. So actually I found this a very tiring but very, very exciting process because in that process, I felt the government officials got to understand the process. Then we presented the Geo6 to governments and let's look a little bit at the output outcome and impact. So we basically brought this out to the press conference and why I'm talking about this is that the press really covered this issue. I stopped counting after we reached 150 newspaper clippings worldwide. It was in all kinds of countries, including in the United States, which I thought would not cover it. However, in the Netherlands, it was hardly covered. Though the University of Amsterdam and PBL sent out press releases, there was only one piece in the trough but for the rest, it was pretty much blanked out. On the other hand, the Indian newspapers actually covered many of these issues and looked at the question about how government of India should develop. So the newspapers took a critical approach to how growth is organized and they really wanted to engage with it as did many other countries. The Western press, when they were asking us questions, were focused more on nanotechnology and antibiotics. The African press, when they asked questions, was about why and how can Africa prioritize the environment. And unfortunately, we didn't do those kinds of issues. We really need to engage more with that. And the Indian press kept talking about how should we define development? Can we sacrifice growth? Does growth need to be sacrificed? How do we organize the concept of growth? During this meeting, there were also a large number of resolutions adopted by governments and I'm really happy with those resolutions. There were around 22 resolutions if I'm not mistaken. There was a debate about whether this report that we put up would be adopted or endorsed. And as you can see in the title, it says endorsement, but the United States government was not willing to endorse it. So ultimately, they just welcomed it. And I don't know what it means because it's just a scientific report. It's not legally binding, but they spent hours discussing how to frame it. Anyway, then another one of the reports was really interesting because it was, it's a resolution of governments on sustainable consumption and production. And I thought it was really nice because they said at the end that they decide taking into account national circumstances, that they would look at full lifecycle approaches, go for low carbon economies, sustainable consumption, production patterns, focus on a circular economy, go for sustainable ecosystem restoration, et cetera. So they really talked about the environmental issues that were presented at the report and they made their decisions. The question is, will they go home? Will they discuss this with their colleagues? And will this lead to action in their home country? So that's where we are now. And of course, this process is based on a huge amount of free work. So all the scientists in the process have worked free of cost in this writing process because there's no resources, but all the meetings were funded generously by a large number of countries. On Monday, we present this report also to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and I'm really curious whether they are going to move with all the resolutions to take actions within the Netherlands. I stop there. Any questions? What are green bonds? Green bonds are financial instruments to encourage the investment in green technologies. And it is also state, in the case of China, it is a state-oriented initiative. And other countries, more Western countries have more private-oriented initiatives of selling these green bonds to people. Yes? Yeah, great. Yes, that's true. So, I don't want to be so bogged down as opposed to, you know, global power for example, and I don't want you to say what we should do. So let me split this question up into two. The first part is that one hope of this process was that we would link up with the health ministries. And so in some way, the environment ministries are less powerful in most countries. So if the environment ministry could link up with the health ministry and they could come up with a joint strategy that could perhaps strengthen both ministries in their negotiations. That was the first part of the narrative that we are trying to bring forward. But during the United Nations Environment Assembly, there was a brilliant German girl who was standing there in front of us and she said, we are 50% of the world's populations today and 100% of the world's population tomorrow and you governments have just failed us. And it was a really powerful speech. So we desperately need the youth to hold our generation accountable because I have a feeling that when it is a discussion between business as well against science and NGOs, business tends to win. And most of us are also locked into our way of lives. So it is now becoming a, there's a changed axis of negotiations, youth versus seniors. And so this narrative can become very important but direct action is not enough. They have to go onto the streets but I'm also seeing go to court. So both in Pakistan, India and the US and several other countries, a large number of youth are going to court to demand that their own government takes action. So I think that has to be the way to go because science is not going to do the trick. And you can already see that when we come up with our scientific narratives, the politicians just see that as not adequate. We are seen as just a stakeholder, a stakeholder that creates problems, talks about risks. And you see that also in the policy pushed forward by Trump, which is that he doesn't want any research done on issues related to risk, whether it's health risk or environmental risk. So we need to do two things. We need to know how to communicate our story. And the second part is we need to get the youth to really get their actions organized. But I can also tell you something about gender and how that relates. There are some articles have come out which show that women economists tend to take environmental issues more seriously than male economists. And women economists tend to see the role of the state as providing instructions on how a state should develop much more seriously than male economists who see that the market will solve everything. So there may also be a gender perspective in the way we do our work and research. So we're following on a bit from how the Canada just started coming forward. And it links a bit to sort of this idea in their system. So you say, okay, it's not too late for it, it's the same way we do it. And we'll all be able to do it in a minute because I suggest we're not going to ask for these six pathways as opposed to the one that we take to meet the powers that we want. But there's also a huge lag in the other. It's a day you might be able to seize in 2014. And then at the same time, that position, my stuff's in the news. So I guess my question is, how fast, and even if these changes are fixed, how fast can we move on? Because we've even changed like now. We've worked out of a serious culture who's still got this life of listening to the issue of the system. Can we actually answer that question? You know, that's a really difficult question to answer. The outlook section was written by a plan bureau, and they tended to feel very strongly that there's still hope in the system. But if you just take the issue of birth control and inequality and child mortality, which was also discussed quite heavily in the report, if you can reduce child mortality between zero to five, then very soon thereafter, families will choose less children. But you have to get rid of the zero to five mortality rate first. But we won't get to that if we don't address urban air pollution and rural air pollution or water pollution. So you really have to move very, very fast. And that is why the youth have to be much more organized because I don't see it, but I can't really answer your question as to whether we are going to get there. But what I can say is that if I look at the politics of decision making, then you'll find that most governments, democratic governments, are there for only four, five years. So they don't want to take unnecessary and unpopular decisions in their view. To take action. However, the courts are there for a much longer time and unless governments intervene with who is going to be the judge, which happens in a few countries, the courts can be a much stronger protector of future interest. And the courts are taking science worldwide into account. They're looking at IPCC reports and saying this is what needs to happen. So if you look at the political arena, we have to put our hope now on the stick, the stick of the courts. There's a court injunction in the Netherlands by 2020 that the Dutch government should beat up its efforts. To reduce emissions. To reduce emissions by 2020, so yeah, and that stands. So the Arcanda case in the Netherlands shows that even in civil law countries, which are very, very conservative, we are taking action. But that court, that more than 1500 court cases right now worldwide on these issues. So if you can couple the mass movement with the court cases, we have a much higher ability to change policies. But I don't see our politicians being able to take decisions that easily quickly. I'm experiencing, perhaps it's a little bit. I'm making the decision last moment. That's the big thing. You need someone who's willing to stick their neck out. Are there other questions? A nice story, thank you. We have something, especially on dams in the report. I'm sure we have something on dams. We, the water chapter must have covered dams. I'm pretty sure it's there. I've read so much about dams. I can't actually isolate whether it's there, but it must be there. We, what happened was because of page limits, some of the issues had to be dropped at a certain point of time. And we also wanted to cover new issues like antibiotics and nanotechnology and things. So those were some of the limitations. But we also didn't cover issues where the knowledge between 2012 and 2017 was relatively less significant in terms of its changes. Yeah? So you mentioned that India and China starts to gain more of them from the 1.5 degrees. So have the people been more or less, I mean they look more or less on the 1.5 degrees. I don't know whether the, it's difficult to answer this question, but if I look at the Chinese negotiator who was there during the line by line negotiations, he was extremely constructive and did not, did not try to get the 1.5 out of the report like happens in other negotiations. So and his whole message to all of us was we need these kinds of reports. We are trying to go as far as possible to a fossil free universe, but of course it's not going to be easy. The Indian negotiator is a little bit more complex because every time there was a different negotiator from India. So it looked like this issue was not so much on the top of the Indian government's agenda. Having said that the Indian government has reduced last year its fossil fuel investments significantly and its renewables have gone up much more. And we are finding that that maybe because the business model, business case for renewables is growing in India compared to the fossil fuel. There's a reason why they have a bigger interest in keeping with the 1.5. They don't have an interest yet. They have not said that they are really interested in the 1.5 yet, but the market in India is different from the policy process which expected that there would be more investment in fossil fuels. So the reason for that is the 1.5 is more beneficial for India and China. Oh, this is science is saying that. The government's not saying that. The scientific analysis of the economic costs of these two compared with the benefits to human health show that it is significantly better, larger benefits for both China and India if they invest in a 1.5. For Europe, it's a two degree has a higher benefit. 1.5 means you have to spend more. On the other hand, that research did not take into account whether there would be migrants into Europe. And apparently, I think a few days ago, there's been a whole discussion in IMF with Christiane Lagarde about whether there would be more migrants into Europe if Africa becomes much warmer. So then the costs for Europe may also go up significantly. No, they don't. Just look at the health costs. One of the problems with the statistics in this report is that the statistics are done. Firstly, the person who's trying to collect a meta statistic is just adding statistics from different parts of the world and putting it together. So there may be problems with that. So these statistics need to be beefed up. But when you compare the statistics, it doesn't always work out. So I gave the example of 90 billion tons of resources in the system and 90 billion tons of extractive resources related waste. But they're not the same 90 billion tons. So how does it add up and how is it brought together is very complicated. One of the things I noticed if there are any social scientists in the room is that social scientists who don't actually work with numbers and try to collect data on this, tend to get ignored in the process because unless you come up with numbers of inequality or numbers about who's getting affected or how many papers cover this, it doesn't sort of find its way into a report. It doesn't help if you just say there's a lot of power politics. So. The reports are like how the people might be displaced in the last 50 years as part of it. So the report only covers numbers that are there in the literature. So we use numbers from the global displacement report or something like that. And that has numbers in it. And those numbers come back, but the report did not do new and original work. So then I guess if there are no, are there any last questions? No?


Hello and welcome back to another fun-filled fake news freak out this time with a mentally deranged Canadian MP with no Self-awareness who attempts to smear and demonize millions of people with completely imagined flags and a straight-up nut job Conspiracy theory which I have no doubt She thinks isn't a conspiracy theory when she does it but first a quick message about this new special offer from C60 Evo Nothing is more important than our health as we struggle with health system changes and an overload of questionable information We need to make sure we take care of our mind and bodies because of this I recommend C60 Evo C60 Evo has been a part of my daily routine for a while now and I gotta tell you I love the increased energy and the increased mental focus Which you may have noticed in my videos and best of all just like thousands of other customers I've noticed some very positive changes in my sleep. Here's why you should at least try C60 Evo's Olive oil product. It's manufactured right here in America It's based on Nobel Prize-winning chemistry and it's supported by peer reviewed published research Including a longevity experiment where the test subjects received the C60 Evo formula Lived 90% longer than the control group It's one of the only products on the market that you take in the morning to help support boosted energy and mental Focus during the day then positive sleep that night with only one teaspoon of the C60 Evo product I now wake up refreshed and confident that I'm taking care of my mind and body So go to my link in the description or pin comment and take advantage of a 20% savings by going on subscription You can cancel at any time and make sure to use the promo code drone tech to get an additional 10% off I've heard the words of my colleague on the other side of the floor and so I have a few questions As a Jewish member of Parliament myself and a descendant of survivors of the Holocaust as well I like many Canadians were shocked to see Nazi flags Confederate flags Dismayed and angry and hurt horribly hurt So how many Nazi flags does it take how much vitriol do we have to see of Hong Kong which is an acronym for hail Hitler? Do we need to see by these? Protesters on social media Excuse me.  Hong Kong indeed you fucking clown That's right these lunatics have now arbitrarily decided that honking your horn twice means hail Hitler a Transparenly stupid idea to demonize her political opponents to justify a harsh crackdown by the Canadian government It's not easy to do that to peaceful protesters So just turn them into monsters using a conspiracy theory that as far as I can tell Originated at an Antifa Twitter account the communist terrorist account says quote It's easy to miss Nazi alt-right signifiers are if you aren't swimming in this cesspool all the time So this is going to be a running thread on what to watch for with special emphasis on vocabulary and symbols That should make you suspicious she goes on to provide a bunch of Pepe the clown memes as proof Remember because they already arbitrarily decided that the frog was a secret Nazi symbol That's how this self-feeding propaganda cesspool works the Canadian MP also prefaced her insane Accusations with other dubious claims such as the freedom convoy protesters carrying Nazi and Confederate flags as proof of their evil This is a tactic we often see employed against the left's political opposition Anytime protests arise when they're in power We saw this with the Tea Party when Barack Obama was president where the media would find some random person with a Confederate flag Then use that one person to smear the whole protest is racist They did it again with the anti-lockdown protests again finding one guy with the Confederate flag and one person with the sign Comparing Gretchen Whitmer to Nazis then the media along with Gretchen Whitmer claimed that the anti-lockdown protests were Filled with Nazi and Confederate flags the fact of the matter is we have to listen to the epidemiologists and their public health expert and Displays like the one that we saw at our capital is not representative of who we are in Michigan There were swastikas and Confederate flags and nooses and people with assault rifles given this well-documented tactic I started looking into these evil flags allegedly being associated with the freedom convoy and unsurprisingly Found the Canadian MPs and the leftist media doing exactly what they do here All right So I looked up freedom convoy Canada flags and just wanted to see pictures of the protests and you know See what all was there and what you pretty much see are mostly Canadian flags. I mean you look at these pictures You're gonna see lots of Canadian flags There are other flags also, but you know nothing no Confederate or anything like that But when you look here you see this picture, which is the one when you start looking into this This is the picture or you know various pictures of this guy that the media was using as proof of you know Horrible evil people being associated with these protests now who is this guy? Who knows?  It's that way It says his face is hidden. So, you know, they don't want to they don't want to show that none of the articles that I found about it Made any attempt to interview him or find out who he was continuing to look here American flag Canadian flags, you know, I'm not seeing any Nazi flags at all in here. I mean looking at these pictures. Look a Lots of flags not any Confederate flags or Nazi flags You know, and I don't know why anybody would have those flags these that's not who these people are pretty clearly and obviously Continuing to look here.  I mean and look at this It's literally a drawing like that's not real It's a Confederate the Nazi flag in this convoy. It's a drawing. Where is the actual thing? So finally I came across this And I do remember seeing this the day of that protest. This is one guy It's literally one guy here standing with it. Now. I don't know who these other guys staying with them are At the cops. This is for people Which this flag's okay Canadian flags, okay? I mean personally, I wouldn't want to be standing around this flag But who who is this person again? We have no idea for all we know This could be a member of the Canadian government, you know a Justin Trudeau lackey He went out there and did that specifically so it was a photo op so the media could then You know take that picture and spear the entire protest. Are we seeing Nazi flags everywhere? Nope, it's just as one which is why it's the only picture. You're gonna find of one, okay? Very suspicious lastly I went to snopes because they had an article here swastika and Confederate flag seen in Canadians freedom convoy These were the sightings of swastikas and other symbols of hate at freedom convoy protest So this is I'm gonna tell you right now.  Just like the media. Oh, and here we come to our first one Oh, okay. All right.  Maybe that's what they're getting at. I don't know either way This doesn't look like an endorsement either. This looks like again. They're comparing what they're seeing to Nazism So this is not an endorsement of Nazis. These people are not Nazis Okay, who knows who this guy was this guy could have been a member of the media could have been some Antifa leftist who showed up specifically to get these pictures Who knows? I'm guessing these people were together. I really don't know But that's their one Nazi flag and it's very suspicious So these examples end up looking exactly like what we see here in the US when they're trying to demonize protest against the leftist Democrat government what we end up having is like one guy with a Confederate flag and a couple other people who use the swastika as Satire to attack the restrictions and policies We know that the left does this all the time and nobody in the media and none of these politicians ever compare those people to Actually being Nazis because they know what they're doing that they're using it as a comparison But again, these people think that it's somehow different when they do it all right folks That's all I have for that one. I hope you enjoyed it Please hit that like button then leave me a comment to let us know what you think


This program contains strong language and sexual references throughout.  To be honest, I'm just trying to keep out of this one. I'll tell you what, you guys stay clear of me and I'll stay clear of you.    No one likes you, babe.  Natalie is acting like an enraged dinner lady cleaning the canteen. Well, I'm the one sitting there eating caviar.  The friendship between us as a girl gang. Nah, she's never ever welcome back in us ever again. He loved me and they will never leave me. I was seeing Aaron for a couple of months. We had so much fun together and then suddenly vanished and I never saw him again.  I came here to see where we're standing at because obviously, like, it just ended. Was it just like a shack? Where's this tough man Aaron gone, man? Obviously, like... Where's this tough man gone? The geezer's crumbled. He looks like a little kid. Where's the Bobby? You're melting like butter in the sun, mate. I enjoy spending time with you in that, obviously. Getting to know your pork. You're just a shag to me, to be honest.  Oh, am I? I don't know why he's saying that because I'm not. That's the reason why I fired you because you're batshit crazy. I'm absolutely fuming.  Get rid of some of your casts.    It's a bit rich coming from you and not your nutcase. Oh, yeah?  You're going to tell her or Amaya? I don't even... Amaya, it's alright, man. Spit it out. Come on. The sexual terminator looks like he's been dominated. He looks like Bobby's little brother. No, I've been seeing one girl in there. Her name's Dominique. She's Polish. And she's 21.   Babe, we're not winding you up. This ain't no joke. Do you think I'm joking?  What happened on the date, then? We just sighted every now, like, we're just friends. Did you know that come to date? No. Was there any flirt in tonight? Not really, no. The case is getting us to having deep trouble.    Don't you think I'm dumb?  Aaron, be honest. He lied.  What do you want me to... What was the question again? Was there any touchy-feely in this date? No. Kiss for that. Yeah, go on, girl. Go on, give me a kiss.    And the girls are psycho. Any man can have Dominique at this point. I'd rather them have the problem than me. She's hard work, man. Come on.


Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Mustapha Naseem and I'm a clinical assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. I'm going to be the moderator for this panel discussion titled how software companies are driving tech for good. The goal of the panel is to learn more about how different software companies are creating social impact to specific technology based initiatives. Each of the panelists will give a brief three to five minute introductory remarks, after which we'll have an engaging 20 minute interactive conversation before moving on to 15 minutes of question and answers from the audience. The session is sponsored by Red Hat and we're grateful for their support. We have an amazing group of panelists and I'm looking forward to an engaging discussion. Our first speaker on the panel today is Phyllis Vesterman. Phyllis has worked for Red Hat for 8.5 years and holds an MBA degree. Phyllis has spoken internationally in the US, Europe and Asia around the topics of communities of practice, open organization principles, social innovation, and served as the master of ceremonies for Red Hat in internal conferences. Phyllis resides in North Carolina. Phyllis, will you start us off by giving three to five minutes of introductory remarks. Sure. Thank you, Mustafa, and thank you everyone for this opportunity. The topic at hand is very near and dear to my heart as well as my role in the technical industry. If you're not familiar with Red Hat, we are the world's enterprise open source leader. And that is very open source, both on the technical side, as well as the cultural and the principles of practice is very important to us. We use a very unique community powered approach to deliver high performing Linux cloud container and Kubernetes technologies. We were founded in 1993, we have about 16,000 employees globally, and in July of 2019, just a little over a year ago, we were acquired by IBM, but we operate as a subsidiary. As Mustafa said, I'm the senior manager of the Knowledge Management Office, and in most corporations, you would think of the Knowledge Management Office as content management and taxonomy and tools and processes. Well, that's exactly what it is at Red Hat, except for our charter also includes programs that support and encourage collaboration amongst our internal associates. We use communities of practice to destroy silos. We're probably all familiar no matter what industry we're in that teams can lack communication from one team or one org or one geo to another. So our communities of practice are a vehicle to bring every role together at Red Hat and encourage that full circle feedback. And in our case, that's from the products and technology, the developer side to the field, those sales and delivery and taking feedback back to our technical teams. So Red Hat is successful because of our culture. So I want to make sure I highlight that because the culture influences why and how social innovation and social good, why it's been so successful as at Red Hat. Our culture is based upon principles such as collaboration, trust, meritocracy, transparency and openness. And I do a plug for a book that Jim Whitehurst, our former CEO and now president of IBM wrote called the open org. And it's free. It's online, but this book talks a lot about what are open principles and how do you become successful in the world with open principles. And I also have to say thank you to Alexandra Machado. She is our senior manager of the social innovation program at Red Hat, and she had her first daughter this week two days ago. So I'm filling in for her, but I have worked in social innovation since Alexandra started this journey and she's really come out of the gates like so fast. And now we have an official program at Red Hat. We've always had volunteer opportunities to do good in the world. But social innovation is specific to doing good in the software world with nonprofits. So our social innovation mission is to connect Red Hatters and nonprofits to the power of open source. So our associates win, the open source projects win, and overall the world wins. And two of the key benefits that have made this program so successful. One of them is employee engagement. We have found that Red Hatters are called to contribute their time and their skills and their passions to do good in the world. So we formed this program where we work with nonprofits, and we work with all kinds of open source projects, and we have volunteers that work nights weekends, and then something new we introduced this year. As a result of the pandemic is that we're actually granting Red Hat time for people to contribute to some of the open source projects related to COVID-19 and fighting the pandemic. So a benefit we found as individuals and as a company is participating in these opportunities also helps up skill and train our associates. And so it's a win-win situation. People maybe want, maybe are nervous to contribute because they don't work in open shift every day, but there's this open source project for the World Health Organization where they can participate without any risk of being shut down or making a wrong step. So in 2018 and 19 is really when we entered the world of social innovation and professional services and consulting at Red Hat. And we've worked with UNICEF Greenpeace with Laura, actually another panelists. And in all of these cases, we donated our time and our resources on the technical side, as well as the cultural side. So we wanted to teach them the power of open source through principles, through practices. And then, so we've worked with World Health Organization since the pandemic, and then our internal Red Hat corporate sponsored initiative has been coined since 2019. And as soon as the pandemic hit, we had a response from Red Haters right away saying, what are we doing as Red Haters to fight this pandemic? We have all these talented people and skills. And so within a couple of weeks, Team 19 was launched. And that's four open source projects, mostly dealing with healthcare, contact tracing, where people get the knowledge and the information about the pandemic they need on their mobile phone right away. And so we have been working on these Team 19 projects as a company on volunteer time, but Red Hat approves the time since probably April. So that's just a tidbit of what we're doing at Red Hat. And I'll give it back over to you, Mustafa. Thank you, Phyllis, for that very brief overview but really engaging. I'm looking forward to diving deeper into some of the projects that you've mentioned, but also the culture that you've mentioned is key to doing socially impactful projects at Red Hat. So I'm looking forward to our conversation. Our second speaker for today is Laura Hiliker. Laura is a writer, activist and technologist. She's a co-founder of the We Are Open co-op and ambassador for the Open Organization is helping to open up Greenpeace and a Mozilla alum. Laura's bio indicates she wears many hats and her work has included being a conceptual architect, a multimedia designer and developer, a technical liaison, a project manager, and an open advocate who is happiest in collaborative environments. In 2020, Laura won the Women in IT Digital Leader of the Year award. We're very excited to have her here. Laura, if you could take the stage and take it away. Thank you, Mustafa, and thank you for inviting me. Mustafa already said a lot of what I was going to say, but I'll just go a little bit more in depth. As he said, my name is Laura Hiliker and I am an ambassador for an open organization. The OpenOrg is a community of open experts who are working to essentially define and spread open principles across various industries. I'm also a director of We Are Open Cooperative, which is a worker owned cooperative and my co-op is organized around the express mission of helping both private and public sector organizations learn and utilize the culture and processes of open source. I was awarded that Digital Leader of the Year award for my work in this area, really connecting open culture to the nonprofit industry. And I believe that when organizations and projects work openly, there's no limit to the amount of impact that they can have. I work with Greenpeace and Red Hat, which both Mustafa and Phyllis mentioned. I've managed to facilitate a connection that motivates open source contributions to technology for environmental good. So connecting open tech companies to nonprofit initiatives really helps eliminate problems on both sides. On one side, the nonprofit side, a lack of resources can hamstring innovation. And on the other side, employee happiness really relies on a values alignment with their organization. Corporate responsibility programs can help reduce the impact of both of these problems by giving their staff a mechanism to contribute to a better world, which by extension helps nonprofits who might not have as many resources as possible with global key issues, which Phyllis also mentioned with COVID-19 responses, as well as stuff like environmental or social justice. This corporate responsibility really actually helps a private company in their social scorecard because they're working to show their staff and their industry partners, as well as the public at large, where their values lie. And that can be a very interesting and engaging reason for people to pay more attention to an organization in the private sector. We are open co-op, helps organizations do this. We help organizations who are looking to innovate and engage, use open principles and practices, and improve open mindsets. Sometimes our work is about technology, but most of the time it's about digital savvy, distributed leadership, empowering people, and structural change that allows for the people working in an organization to feel real agency. We don't just throw technical solutions at the issues that we address because technology is just a tool. It's like a pencil. If you can't draw, then the tool might not work for you and it's the people behind the technology that are out there changing the world. I wanted to mention a little bit about the cooperative structure because a co-op structure is inherently a social economic structure because cooperatives are worker owned. The engagement of the organization is an extension of each member's motivation for a more equitable world. A co-operative exists for the benefits of its members rather than for a shareholder or a market. It's a one-member, one-vote structure. And this reality means that people are more likely to join a co-operative that aligns with their personal values and motivations and to influence that co-operative to kind of walk the walk in what they personally believe. Interestingly, although cooperatives are gaining more traction at this point in history, it's been a profitable alternative to capital-based economic structures for a very, very long time. Capitalism and cooperatism grew up together. It's just that in our world, capitalism has tended to be the more mainstream option. However, co-ops contribute trillions to the world economy every year. If we start talking about driving tech for good, we have to start thinking about the governance structures that influence the motivations. And I think that we've really come to a point in history where we need to sort of question the structures that are driving our world because we're seeing what the impacts of individualism and capitalism have actually done to our world. And it's particularly obvious since the pandemic. These capitalist structures are starting to crumble. And I think that we owe it to ourselves, our environment and each other to sort of return to our true animal nature of collectivism. Human beings were built to collaborate and to coordinate with each other. We were built to take care of each other, and we need to give that back into everything that we're doing in the world of business. So today I'm going to put on that activist hat and kind of situate myself pretty firmly in the cooperative perspective. But I'm pretty sure that my experience in the worlds of technology and nonprofits are going to shine through a little bit. So I'm interested to see where we go. Thank you so much. Thank you, Laura. And thank you for bringing your activist hat to this panel. I think we can use that here. Last but not the least, we have Mercedes Escalade. Mercedes is originally from Peru and joined IBM Latin America in 1995. Most of her career has been in human resources. She has had roles as the HR leader in compensation and benefits leader. Eight years ago she moved to the US with her family and was responsible for global recognition and compensation in North America and Latin America. In January 2019, she is embarked on a new career as VP of corporate citizenship initiatives, bringing together two of her passions, making a social impact and driving employees to find purpose on what they do. We're very excited to have you here Mercedes. Please take it away. Thank you so much, Mustafa. Thanks, Yuli, and Laura, in honor to be sharing the stage with you. I would say the video with you. But it's been great just to be part of it. I appreciate the invitation, but being part of this very diverse set of experiences. I'm going to very quickly tell you a little bit about what I do here at IBM and how do we drive social impact. One important thing, you know, in IBM we are a technology company and we are really focused on how can we really use technology for good. How can we make this available for everybody? So what we've done as part of our CSR strategy is we need to really deliver CSR just as we deliver the business. So in order to enable that deep social impact at scale, we apply the same principles that we use to drive our business. And what are they, you know, user centricity, putting the user at the forefront of all the CSR initiatives, you know, trying to really make sure that we are we understand our audiences. We know what IBMers skills are. How do we make that perfect match? Then the important part of the co-creation piece, just how do we get those communities, those audiences to work with us with partnerships, with innovation programs, just co-create things that will allow IBMers to grow as part of the initiative, learn new things, reach out to other peers to really drive impact, and also provide those communities the level of social impact that we want. We also understand that CSR just, you know, I think Laura was mentioning around how important it is for a brand to really showcase what their values are. And this is exactly what we do with CSR. We have the possibility to actually go to the individual. IBM is a B2B company. We're not on the retail market. We do not have like a first-hand customer, but every time we deploy a CSR project, we are there with the individual. We can tell people what IBM's values are, what we do, and how we can use technology to drive that social good. So that's what we do. I am going to turn it over to you, Mustafa, so we can start the questions. This is perfect. Thank you, Mercedes. So I'll start a question with you directly. This question is from one of my students in my class, Drew, and Drew asks, what do you believe is a corporation's role in supporting social responsibility initiatives? Do you believe corporations should simply support activists or be leaders themselves and why? You touched upon it briefly in your introductory remarks, both in terms of co-creations and working with partners, but also delivering CSR just like you would deliver your business, which is to putting the user at the center and designing solutions yourself. So how does IBM balance this? What do you think is the ideal balance? What does the ideal balance look like? Should IBM be delivering social impact themselves or should IBM be supporting activists in delivering social impact? Well, a great question, definitely very thought through, so I appreciate the question. And I personally believe that we should, corporations should be leading by example, be the leaders, drive what you really want to drive. And as I mentioned, for us in IBM, we believe that science and technology have the power to change the world, but not for some of us, but for all of us. How can we drive that that really makes an effort to be scalable, to really drive that social impact that we want? So you've heard what I've shared about our focus on user centricity, but as a leader, how do we make sure that we have great talent, we have great technology? How can we help people succeed and communities thrive? And believe it or not, we've been doing this for many years, but every time I share our story, more companies feel that they can do, maybe not at the same level, you know, we're a big corporation. But it's just planting that seed of leaders just opening the trenches for others to follow. That's my answer to the question. Thank you, Mercedes. Laura and Phyllis, do you want to add to that? I know both of you have mentioned contributing employee time to open source projects, but do either of your organizations initiate the projects yourselves, or do you just partner with other organizations such as Greenpeace or UNICEF that have boots on the ground? So we do both at Red Hat. I think the easiest route to market is partnering with a nonprofit that already has a project in motion where we can bring our talents and our resources to assist them in advancing the project. So that's what we did with the Initiative Team 19, where we started contributing to four open source projects that already existed. And what we did as a company, and I was the project manager and the project manager on a project called Open EMR from the Red Hat side, is I helped onboard our associates. Open source is what a lot of our associates do every day on the development side, but people like myself that may be in a different role where I'm not coding and developing every day. It was scary to think, oh, how do I even get started contributing? And so my role and others at Red Hat, our role was to onboard them and help them get started, match them with a mentor that can guide them. I feel like the responsibility was shared. Red Hat supports it and saw this as very important, and that's why they gave us time to contribute. But it's also the individual, I think we got four hours a week for the rest of the year, and people would contribute at night's weekends. You know, it's really what the individual makes of it. And one other thing is we celebrate their contributions. It has nothing, they may be developing their skills, but it's not associated with a promotion or anything, but we give what we call Red Hat reward zone points and we just gave a bunch out, and we recognize them. And we also, we have a Red Hat wide TV show once a quarter, and social innovation was featured on our anniversary episode that goes to all 16,000 employees and we have virtual parties. And the team 19 projects and specific people were featured on that. So that's kind of a pad on the back as well. Thank you for sharing that it goes on to the point that you made initially which is to set the culture right. And once you do that a lot of people get motivated and driven to contribute to work social causes. Laura, as you answer this question I want you to wear your activist hat. And so from the activist side, would you rather the large tech companies contribute employee time or what do you think activists would prefer to just be supported financially monetarily otherwise. How do you or, or if large tech companies want to drive the project themselves and have activists provide input from the outside which one do you think activists would prefer. With my activist hat on, I think that it's not an either or question I think the activist community needs and wants, especially large corporate entities to do all of those things and a little bit more. It's not just about donating money. It's not just about donating resources but also taking leadership because some of the problems that we're dealing with are global problems that are affecting people all over the world. And a lot of times some of those problems are actually coming from the private sector and so what we need is more activism that is not just looking at you know at the end of the day for my company. What's going to make us look good, but rather how can we truly, you know, support what's going on in the world and be good for lack of a better term. And I think that the, you know, the larger in an organization gets the more complicated that gets because, you know, at the end of the day, the more people the more ideas, also the more motivations, and some people are motivated. You know, to figure out how to deal with systemic inequalities and, you know, help our planet help the world other people are motivated by other things.  And that means that they're going to make the decision that makes their organization more money, as opposed to what might be better for the world. And that's okay if we accept that reality but we have to put measures in place to protect things like the Commons, so that the things that we all share are not being damaged by one or another person's companies, you know, entities motivations but but rather that we figure out ways that we can, you know, help protect the things that we all have to share. So. Thank you Laura for sharing that in about 10 minutes time we're going to start to go towards question and answers from the from the audience. So I would just like to encourage the audience to start submitting your question and answer so we can start taking them in about 10 minutes. Laura, I just want to come back to you as to what you just said, and then something that you said in your introductory remarks as well was around giving the companies a scorecard some sort of scorecard in terms of how they're doing in terms of social impact. Do you are you aware of such a scorecard card existing. Are there existing metrics through which companies contract their own progress in terms of how they're doing in terms of social impact and is this kind of reading available for consumers to go see how companies are doing in terms of their social impact projects. Yeah, there are a variety of frameworks that companies can use to judge themselves on everything from, you know, what their carbon footprint is to you know how racial racially equitable they are. There's plenty of different frameworks that allow companies to sort of see where they fall on the scale. And when I said social scorecard I was actually thinking more about sort of the unwritten identity piece of the scorecard and kind of talking about like, you know, how do we, you know, how do we as a global community make sure that people are doing things for the right reason and in the right way, as opposed to, you know, for maybe reasons that we don't all agree with. And so when I was saying social scorecard I start to think about companies who, you know, say that they're green, for example, but aren't actually green or, you know, say that they care about systemic inequalities, but then support, you know, other organizations or communities that clearly do not. And I think, you know, I think there's a problem of saying that you have a particular value, but acting in a different way. And I think that, you know, part of what I do is I really, I want to hold truth to power, and to help people see that actions matter, our actions matter both individually, but also, you know, in a more in a social construct. And so when I think about that scorecard I'm thinking about how do we, you know, how do we actually have that conversation in a way that benefits all motivations. I think it's really important to hold truth to power and I'm glad. I'm glad you're here on the panel but also just the work that activists generally do do hold large corporations to account. I want to transition the conversation just a little bit and talk about open source and open source principles and open source and start to talk about how, how do we go about creating communities of practice and what are some of the challenges that are affiliated with creating communities of practice around open source which is a huge part of open source principles. And so the question that I want to present to Phyllis is from one of my students, Julian Powers, and Julian asks, can you talk about some of the challenges you've encountered evangelizing for communities of practice and global communities or businesses. How do you go about convincing people who think of coordination as a threat, who are not, who don't buy in into openness and communities of practice around openness. Thank you, Miss Daffa and to the student who submitted that question. I love talking about communities of practice. It's been part of my career for the past eight and a half years, and it's very important to red hat, but I have been with the program, and now we have 43 communities of practice at red hat that are internal and we have all of our open source communities that are external that we support and moderate. But I have been there through the initiation and implementation so I'm very well aware of the challenges and I think back eight years ago when I started communities of practice. By definition, we're bringing practitioners together, and I added aspiring practitioners, because the community of practice is a great place to go to to learn about something. So practitioners and aspiring practitioners to have a forum to share best practices challenges issues ideas. So it's all based upon openness. And I want to make sure I relate this to social good so let me just give you a quick rundown of the challenges getting started is the first challenge. Because we have a group let's say there are 10 super engaged super excited people, and I'll talk about our social innovation community of practice. So we have COPs around technical areas like our products or system integration, everything from products and functionality to roles like I want to become a project manager let me go here and learn about it or user experience. So with social innovation, it starts with a small group of very passionate people and Alexandra Machado, Mariela sister is one of those people at red hat, and it was not hard to find a group of other passionate people it's just the culture of red hat. So this group of people got together, and then they start that journey of creating buy in and and awareness. So you're you're going to get pushed back from from some people. And what I learned because I've been through this for eight years is I had the door slammed in my face, many times, and you just got to open it back up and keep trying. So it's time and time of getting in front of people. Middle managers are hard to convince sometimes so that was where I targeted is convincing our middle managers that communities of practice are the best way to reduce cycles to share knowledge to for professional development and career development, and to share and repurpose knowledge, whether it's within your company or your nonprofit or your community, or you're sharing it with the world. And so for social innovation. That's a lot of what we're doing by contributing to these open source projects and there are barriers to entry like I don't know how to get started. So we realize that and we're creating onboarding materials and mentoring relationships. The idea is everyone is invited to the community. No one's, we don't close the door to anyone, regardless of your role your location your skill level, your opinions, you're all welcome. Thank you for this so we have a question from the audience which is very relevant to what you just said so I'll pose it to you and then also to Mercedes. So the question is from Sean Melville. And the question is how can a social enterprise or NGO reach out to an IBM or a red hat to access technical support from a volunteer employees. So you've mentioned that you're trying to create these resources to onboard people. Can you talk a little bit more about that and what what should an NGO or social enterprise do to reach out to red hat to get those resources. Sure, so our program, the official program for social innovation where we dedicate and donate our time and resources is just getting going as far as setting up the processes in the framework. I think, and Laura would know firsthand with Greenpeace either there was already an existing engagement or a relationship that was already existed, or Laura nodding her head I'm not sure how Greenpeace got involved. Laura, could you answer that so yes. Well, I, the way that the Greenpeace and the red hat connection happened was because I walked up to Alexandra after I saw her on a panel at a red hat summit a number of years ago and I said, you know what you this thing that you're trying to do the social innovation at the time. She had just done a pilot program with UNICEF. And she sat on a panel and she was actually working with a university and sorry I don't remember which university but the university was helping their students learn technical skills and they were donating time to red hat, which Alexandra then redirected towards UNICEF. And I saw her speaking about this and this program and I said, ooh, that's very interesting and also I know a project at Greenpeace that could really benefit from having some help from Greenpeace. At the time we were just, we were a couple of years in into development of a global engagement platform called Planet Four. And we had, you know, just a couple of people on the team and so I was looking for any way to, you know, sort of expand resources. And then Alexandra and I spent a year and a half trying to figure out the ins and outs of how do we, how do we actually bring these two organizations together. You know, it's why that experience is part of the reason that, you know, that I bring up the idea that we have to do both from a private sector perspective, both of donate resources and start our own projects but also let activists and communities lead because the, you know, the associating Greenpeace and red hat as a brand, like together, was not without its trials and tribulations and I think it's, you know, it's, it's really important that that we do the legwork to make sure that everybody's happy in a partnership. And so and that, you know, involves give and take. And let me let me just quickly say that in the case of IBM, it's pretty easy you go to www.ivm.org that's our platform you just, you know, scroll there. Check the different things that we're doing the, the different initiatives is very easy. And you know my name, Mercedes, you can reach out to me too. I was going to reverse if it's okay Mustafa, I was just going to say thank you Laura for sharing, and that is perfect because that is exactly what I was going to ask Sean to do. Since we don't have a website yet, I was going to ask Sean just email me and I'll give you my email address because this is how we're getting started and building on our program. So Laura, thank you for talking to Alexandra after that session and I encourage all of the attendees to have the courage to do like Laura did walk. That's how I've gotten most of the speaking opportunities that Mustafa talked about is I had courage to just take a chance and you never know what's going to come out of it. And I think what I'm hearing from all of you is personal connections matter a lot and and being able to be bold and reach out goes a really long way. A lot of some of the really great partnerships that I've been a part of as far as my professional work goes is through people I met at a conference at a panel at a workshop, and then strike up a conversation afterwards. That being said, I do hope that are more formal structured opportunities as well, because especially for a smaller nonprofit that that nobody's ever heard of it can be really intimidating to reach out to somebody and do a call call but also oftentimes you'll knock on so many doors and just never hear back and so having those kinds of structured opportunities is also useful. I would like to encourage our audience to continue to keep asking questions and I'm seeing them directly in the Q&A panel and and if we don't have them then I'll just keep bringing my own questions. So Laura I have a question for you that one of my students Sylvia had asked that said, there's so many contextual factors to consider when creating socially impactful technology. What does the initial research and development stages look like in the creation process. What steps have you seen companies take to ensure that their technologies are harmonious with their intended social or cultural environment, especially when you're partnering with other cross sector collaborators as well. So that's a great question and I think I'll preface my answer by saying that every context is different, so a different, you know, different nonprofits or cooperatives or corporations you know they're going to need to design their, their offerings to the world, depending on you know what their reality is inside of their organization and the reality of whatever issue that they're trying to address. I think that the first step is always to identify the problem that you want to that you want to address and that should be quite specific. And when I think about you know when I think about a sort of the discovery phase I really think a lot about the fact that often projects or even organizations fail because they don't take the time to really gather enough information from both the users so the end user the people that they're trying to support, as well as the stakeholders. So we, you know, I, I think it's really important that we think from that people first perspective, what do people actually need and not just you know the person that's at the other side of the technology but also the people that work in the business that are funding the development of that technology that you know the activists that are on the ground that have to use that technology. You know there's, it's really important to think of all these different stakeholders, and then you know be quite clear about the people who are going to be using it at the, at the end. And I, yeah, I mean for as far as like specifics around a discovery phase, you know, starting with people and the audience and then, you know, finding figuring out the problem being specific about the problem being specific about the audience, and then taking time and using participatory methodologies to generate ideas and really, you know, doing your research I think that that is such a key piece to designing good technology that has, you know, a social impact. And I also think it's the piece where people cut corners the most, or organizations cut corners the most because we tend to think we know what people want without asking them. And, you know, we see a lot of we see a lot of good ideas fail, because you know they didn't take the time to do the user research up front. I think this is really important I, I feel fortunate as an academic. I don't have the same kind of time pressures as corporations do. So I can start to take the energy and the effort required to keep continue to listen. One of the projects that I'm working on with colleagues in Pakistan is around trying to create digital safe spaces for women who live in patriarchal context and don't have social support, especially for women who are in abusive marriages or have to deal with intimate partner violence. And, and we've been working on this project for about two years. And thus far, neither I nor my collaborators have written a single line of code. I mean, we've been listening and and and every time we listen we find that there's more nuance and more context and more challenges and we don't want to unintentionally go ahead and create a platform or a service that leads to other unintended negative consequences we don't want our platform to lead to more domestic violence, or putting these women and more danger for example. And one example I can share from from this particular project is, we were thinking about creating hidden backdoors in applications that women could use to enter this feminist, say, digital safe space that we were creating. And I feel like the actual password would connect you to this feminist space, but any, any kind of other password like like a dual pin so a second pin would get you into a more benign application so if you if you hit login, you enter the right password you go to this feminist space, but if you hit another password will take you to whether or news or something like that. And it asks you, what's the password to the service you can just give them this other password and it'll take you to this benign service and you won't get discovered for using this feminist digital space.  I will just blurt whatever number comes to my mind and odds are I'm going to give him the real password to the real service. I need to remember this other password that will give get to this more benign service. Why can't I just give any other number that comes to my mind. And so just talking about participating principles listening to the users listening to their context and then trying to understand that context, as you're trying to develop solutions for privacy for authentication for communication on such platforms as well. I'm still waiting for more questions but Maria has asked this question around, how have your programming, how is your programming changed around Kobe. So, I know Phyllis mentioned team 19. Mercedes has IBM done stuff around Kobe 19 and how are you partnering with organizations on the ground to support initiatives for for Kobe 19 and then Laura for you as well around, either from your co op or from some of the other corporations that you support. What are some influential projects that you've seen around Kobe so we'll start with Mercedes, and then we'll come to Phyllis and then Laura. Yes, we've had different initiatives. We have a very strong pillar within CSR that's focused on education and skills. So we actually opened our platform our education platform for free to all students and around the world. We've had great teams of IBMers actually taking their own initiative and starting groups around the world, just driving webinars and seminars around education, not only technology actually our most popular download class is the mindfulness class that we developed with the University of Oxford. So we have 2,000 people have certified. We have live sessions with teachers that are really busy, you know, good busy, which is great. Then on the other side of the world we started to help small and medium businesses just a think about what the, you know, the new role of them in society will be it's very easy to tell people go reinvent yourself some people don't know where to start. So having an IBM or that can you know be your coach you're trying to curate material try to create information for them and we have great partners that have been part of those initiatives. So, many, many different ways of helping with a comeback. So, then the other things of course, local food pantries, making masks, all that IBMers just keep surprising us of how above and beyond they do go one step forward to different initiatives so we've done great things. The team is committed to follow on all those for 2021, all our support is virtual. That was also very challenging. We were used to do things face to face and now everything had to be done virtually. And we flipped very quickly, which I'm also very proud. So, yeah, that's what we've done. Thank you, Mercedes. Phyllis do you want to talk about one of the COVID initiatives that you talked about earlier on. Sure. So we have four open source projects open EMR COVID net path check and connected health. And open EMR is a project that that I am working on and it's about open source electronic medical records. And so since it's open source it's going to be available for more people to have access to it's not going to be proprietary or require a lot of funding. I see this is really moving in the right direction and it also encourages people to like collectivism people to come together. We have we all need to come together and that's what open source does is help bring people together. And these projects are just a couple of examples of the opportunities out there and and going virtual was very tough for everyone in the beginning that we learn these new ways of working. And now we have really no excuse to not contribute because we know how it works now we're all virtual. Thank you Phyllis. I'm excited to learn more about open EMR familiar with open MRS and open SRP for immunization systems, looking forward to EMR as well. Laura, do you want to quickly jump in and talk about what organizations are doing around COVID and a project that stands out for you. I think the one that stands out to me a project that we've been while a number of projects that we've had at we are open this year have been helping small charities and nonprofits who have no technical skills or very low technical skills actually create programming and access marginalized communities. We're talking about charities that have two or three employees that used to run a homeless shelter, you know, in the back street in London or, you know, artistic charities who, you know have 10 employees and used to have a museum that they no longer can afford the rent time because when COVID shut things down it really shut down a lot of things and they're trying to figure out how do I, you know how do we actually exist in this new world when we're not tech people we're not, we don't work remotely we can barely email and how do we create programming for our for marginalized communities and that work has been very, very rewarding because things that we take for granted, like being able to talk in on a panel in a zoom call pay with the questions coming from the audience and maybe having some notes on a secondary screen. These are not given for a vast majority of the world, and helping people to sort of understand even small basics really brings them quite far during COVID-19 and it helps them connect not only to maybe their, their work and their marginalized communities and rethink how they, you know, do their work, but we're helping these people in their personal lives as well. You know, they, they take the skills that they're learning through, you know, through some of these funds and they're able to use it to connect with their friends and families and they're off time. And so I think that's, you know, I think it's really important that during COVID, those of us who can work remotely are used to it know how to, you know, have a chat or, you know, create community collaborate and documents, all of these kinds of things that we take for granted. The more we share that with people who don't have that experience, the easier it's going to be for the world to shift into the new paradigm that we're moving very quickly towards. Thank you so much for everything that you all do. This is really inspiring. I know we're at time. So I have, there's one other question in the chat from Andrea Duncan around what should recent graduates be doing in order to get a job in this economy that is also impactful. And so not when there's a scarcity of jobs, how do you go about doing that. So Laura and Mercedes, if you could just answer that in the chat window, just because we're on time. And thank you for that question, we will get to it. We're going to answer this in the chat window. But I just want to take a moment to thank the panelists for their time. I really enjoyed hosting this conversation. And I'm looking forward to continuing to stay in touch and seeing all of the amazing things that you all do. So thank you. Thank you for the audience for joining and thank you for that to sponsor this session. Thank you for impact engineered and SME and engineering for change for having us here and for Mariela and everybody else who put this panel together so thank you and I hope everybody has a good afternoon. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Dapo and Mariela.