Welcome to Agile Roots 2010, sponsored by Version 1, Rally Software, Vario, Amirsis, Agile Alliance, and Xmission Internet. Agile Team Performance Management by Arlen Bankstone and Sanjeev Augustine. We have something called White Speed here. We have an Agile Coaching Consulting Training Company, and Sanjeev and I've been working together about 10 years. My background is user experience design and Agile Coaching and Development of all various sorts, certified scrum trainer that I'll do in the industry. I've had a lot of experience in a lot of different sorts of companies, and that's what a lot of this is coming for us. Thanks. So, I'm Sanjeev Augustine. I've been in the industry for the past 20 years, about two decades, so a little over two decades, and I've been playing with this thing called Agile for over a decade. I got started, I think Jeff happened this earlier this morning, talking about XP. He got started on an XP program, an XP team, and likewise, so did I. In fact, my first experience with Agile was the fact that in a situation that I was coming into a company as a project manager, and in this company, they were asked, they said, well, you know what, we have these three projects for you, extreme programming projects, and have you learned about extreme programming? And I said, no, I haven't, but I've been interested in learning new stuff, so I've been willing to go on and learn the... So, we were, you know, I joined this company as a project manager that said, we need some help managing these projects, and there's this thing called extreme programming. I said, well, it sounds good, but we don't need to find out about it, although I learned about extreme programming. And in those days, there was the first book by Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained. Anyone read the book? All right, yeah. Great book, and I went off and read it, and thought it was a really easy kind of nice read, right? So, both of our art pages, so I said, well, my own background was as a developer, I got started as a software developer, and did that for a number of years. So, the many techniques of technical discipline and real strong software craftsmanship were kind of filmmaking to me. But, at the very end of the book, Kent said, you know, where's the stuff about the project management in this book? So, I thought maybe I'd miss something, so I went back to the index, and I looked for project management. It pointed me back to one paragraph in the book about the role of a project manager, and there wasn't a lot, but there's one line that I can remember. It said, the role of a project manager is to remove obstacles for the team and to bring the team pizza. Okay, that's a good place to start, so it's, you know, this good sort of job description, I can get started with that. Anyway, one thing led to another, and I sort of ended up writing my own book about project management, managing action projects. Freddie's home in 2005, and they're so inclined in that direction. But, in recently, what Arnold and I, and others in the industry, are doing, is that we're exploring more, sort of beyond the boundaries of Scrum, beyond the boundaries of action project management, what it is to create a true management system. What is a performance management system? And we've heard a number of speakers today, and you'll see a sort of these threads running through, when Jeff talked, when Jeff happened to talk, when Diana talked, and some others spoke. Now, how do we set up an environment, a true environment where we can truly manage a project? So, I'm going to jump into our sort of agenda, we're going to keep it in right here, this smaller crowd, so we'll maybe take a couple of questions as we go along. We don't have to rely on the phone Q&A at the end. But I want to talk about what's wrong with performance management, and actually more specifically, what's wrong with performance measurement today, because a lot of times we conflate performance measurement with performance management. I'll come back to that talk that's coming up. So, I'm going to talk about some current issues, some emerging trends that are pushing us in the opposite direction, where we can actually get our whole performance management system better aligned with agile teams, self-organization, true, certain leadership from project managers and other managers as well. So, we'll talk about an agile performance management system, and we'll talk about some goals. I don't want to speak about intrinsic motivation, and over to all of these, we'll talk about extrinsic motivation, these cool trends that have been starting to come into prominence now, especially with the work of Dan Pink, you know, with this new book called Drive. Who here has heard of Dan Pink or read his stuff or, you know, so if you haven't made sure you want to look at this, lots of stuff on YouTube, on Google, it is certainly Dan Pink has this new book called Drive, and a lot of, you know, the fair part of what they're talking about here is being inspired or involved like this. All right, so we'll talk about some of the current issues with performance management. Who here has actually either delivered or, you know, the receiving end of a performance appraisal? All right, anyone who not?  Who do you work with? Right now, this is a dependent consultant. Right, but over the course of a year, he has several different software companies. Right, so over the course of a career, I'm sure, you know, each one of us has encountered a performance appraisal, right?  Manager, senior manager, director, all right, you guys, you all start at the left of your eye over here with us, actually.  Tell me, put your hand up if you really loved delivering that performance appraisal. Who really loved it? Okay, so we got, and we went to explore that, but you see the numbers kind of thing down, when you say, do we have a good performance measurement and more importantly, a performance management system? We don't have performance appraisals, and we kind of do these things de facto, I think the de facto standard in the industry, standard image, 360-degree feedback, but the sad truth of it is that our performance management systems are broken, and the reviews are probably one of the worst ways of doing that. People get demobilized, they get demotivated, and a lot of times we end up as managers talking more about the things that are wrong with people than where the strengths are. So, you know, there's Marcus Buckingham, you guys, who here has heard of Marcus Buckingham, right? First discover where your strengths are, actually, what does it do? First break all the rules, now discuss your strengths. If there's this whole sort of thinking that you've been saying, it is much more effective to discover and amplify people's strengths than it is to continuously sort of bump them off the weaknesses. Of course, if you have some egregious weaknesses which should be able to fix those, we have to do this part of our members of the civilized society so that we have a productive team, but let's tap into people's actual strengths, and that is much more productive than actually spending more time talking about the weaknesses. Look at that graph over there. However, the performance appraisal process actually meets us in the opposite direction. It meets us to spend much more time talking about people's weaknesses and how to fix them and move them to some sort of medium of sort of performance management. Many of these techniques tend to be looked at in what we call management 1.0. Spread big trailers, industrial things, management. Not suited for management of knowledge workers. Peter Drucker coined this term knowledge workers for people who use their minds as much as they their hands. And certainly within software development of any sort of knowledge-based profession, the way we manage knowledge workers has to be quite different from the way we manage industrial workers. So, management 1.0 tends to overemphasize the role of the manager. If you think about the typical review, it involves collection, feedback from a whole bunch of folks, the manager collects it and then gives his or her interpretation. There's an interpretation and an overemphasization of the role of the manager. That's one of the issues of this whole performance of praises that is set up. Let's look at some of the other issues. Traditional reviews bundle three things. Feedback. You're supposed to get feedback from a performance of praises. That's supposed to be the point. Do we do a performance review? Put your hands up if you're doing annual performance reviews.  You guys are getting better. Anyone doing the month of quarter? You guys are way better. And more frequently than month of quarter, maybe once a month. I got a company joining a company. Tell us which company you own it. wannabe. That's the name of the company. I certainly want to talk with you because there are very few companies that out here that understand that a performance of praises is primarily about feedback. And it's actually less about compensation and merit pay. So one of the things we need to do is to figure out how to unbundle these things because they actually tend to get performance of praises getting done once a year. And feedback once a year is what? Good, bad, ugly? Really? It's feedback once a year is just too little, too late. So the more frequently we can get feedback, it's the better. And of course, if you want to apply someone that we got to legal cover, that's sometimes the goal of a performance of praises. There's some sort of normal distribution that we are usually told that we can only have 10% of people who are doing exceed expectations. You can have only another 20% or a median expectation. And therefore, once we work with this appraisal process, we have to be able to fit some people into this normal distribution and our hands are tight with that. So there are a bunch of issues over there. We'll get several speakers that quote Edward Deming and we certainly don't want to be left out of the game. So we have our own Deming quote over there. And he's looking at what he tends to think about annual ratings. We're starting to see a number of trends in the opposite direction. Anyone here, let's say under the age of 35? Yeah, you guys, 35. You guys qualify for Gen Y in the later generation. I think for the first time in corporate America we have Gen X in the ballroom and Baby Boomers in Gen Y and Gen X together in Workforce. So Gen X kind of executives driving Workforces that have a mixture of Gen Y, Gen X and Baby Boomers. Also, it turns out that the values not to paint everybody with the same brush but they tend to be generational differences in expectations between folks who are in the 35 or under the Gen Xers or people in the 40s like myself or Baby Boomers who are you know, been around for a while. And we start to see that there are things like the quality of life movement where people are looking for more meaning as part of their lives. So my father's work was a professor of sociology and he worked in the university for 25 years. Everyday he'd go up and you know he'd teach everyday but when he came back and he did that for 25 years. And he started meaning a little bit to his teaching profession but a lot of it through his extracurricular activities outside of work. Well, it turns out that in today's workforce many of us are seeking meaning in our lives that combine what we're doing at work with our personal passions, with our personal ambitions, with our personal motives. And so what you see is that there's a you know, especially among the Gen Y it turns out that they will more often be driven by personal passion than you know in a punch in the pocket and way from looking at work and their activities. So I want to sort of jump into what we're proposing here today. We're talking about an agile performance management system that will start to define an overall management system not just a measurement system which is what the performance appraisal is the performance appraisal is just one way of HR sort of influencing one sort of measurement with a whole lot of disastrous consequences. So we're talking about a more holistic look or a more holistic system that really draws everybody and Andrew used his term into the circle of evidence. We talk about agile in the circle of evidence but now our circle of evidence is fairly restricted to or it was fairly restricted to developers. Agile grew from out of the development community. Therefore, you know, if you're a developer you're sourced where maths might end at the minimum of the circle of evidence. If you were a project manager you're kind of left out of the party. Well, now we're starting to make a remedy that now project management is strong and all of that has been sort of being brought completely into the circle of evidence at least on the bridge. If you were a product order, I remember Jeff some years ago sort of lamenting the lack of usability techniques within the agile community. Well, we're starting to make live up to our own promise if you will that agile teams are holistic they're one team and they integrate all the disciplines. Well, we want to come up with a performance measurement system that combines intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. So, intrinsic motivation is about what drives each one of us as individuals. How do we find meaning in our work? What excites us? How do we get passionate? How do we get into the zone? Into this flow there's this guy called Mihai Jixson. Mihai Jixson behind me. Thank you. We'll get her in a grand block where we'll talk about flow and passion. How you can get into the zone and really get highly productive. We'll be talking about it a little later. But intrinsic motivation is about that. And it's not all about ourselves. We have to anchor what we're doing and align it with the external system. Behavior is a function of the person within the system. So, therefore, we need an extrinsic motivation that says, here's the final set. These are external outcomes. These are external outcomes. These are things. What are the results? We can come up with the best kind of system that works for us that helps us align our passions. We can truly align unless we're talking about what are the results we're able to achieve? What are we achieving? How is the market just us? It's ultimately about results. It's not about the process. It is processes simply in mean stores that end. And it's about the results that the end said we're shooting for. So, we're going to be talking about each one of those things. There are some companies actually that are very involved in cultures. And those cultures are actually rooted in their performance management system. Or the performance management system. You see some examples up there. Not that we're calling out one or the other, but these are different strokes for different forms, right? Google might appeal to us in this whimsical idea factory. People end this 20% time that helps them to work on things outside of work. Who here is sort of the Google 20% rule? What is the Google 20% rule? 20% is your own time, which means you do want to spend... You work on everything you want. You work not quite what if you want something, but something whatever you want that an entrepreneur can add, result back to the company. So, you can go on things like the first holiday, occasionally Google would permit or sort of break from the simplistic rules and they allow this holiday theme to come up, right? Halloween and little pictures and all that. I think it's fair to play later on with something in a component's way back into Google's actual product. Senco, a Brazilian company, our Brazilian example of years is this company where everything is extremely democratic right up to the point that there are two places reserved on the board of directors for employees. At any point, employees can walk into a board meeting and sit down and observe so that employees can be participated in the board of directors meeting. Different models. If you're not performing and you've fallen into that about 10%, you will be fine. Now, certainly not a model that we would want to adopt for ourselves, but it kind of drives a type of culture and type of behavior. General Electric is sort of financially successful and quite undistinguishable. You can tell from this culture work what it is. What kind of system do we want to set up? We want to set up a system that is much more in alignment with the agile ethos. I actually haven't seen the new purpose that Diana put up for the agile alliance. It's about the sort of transcendent purpose that we would. It's about productivity. It's about helping companies be more productive and more humane. And what is the third one? Sustainable, I think. Product humane and sustainable. I think that's those are three goals or principles that we should be looking for. What are some of the goals that we want to set up? First of all, we want to set up a true performance management system, not just a performance appraisal system. Or it's got to be all encompassing and encompassing those roles that we talked about. We talked about unbundled feedback compensation of merit aid. We talked about those issues with actually having them bundled and doing the feedback only once at the end of the year. But let's begin from team members accommodate different levels of performance. People perform at different levels at different points of the career. You might have the same top performer if you move people to a different environment. So different people perform at different levels during the two years. And most importantly we want to make sure that ours is an adaptive system and what makes it adaptive we have to be collecting feedback and delivering feedback every step of the way. So we're going to talk about a few of these things. I'm going to go through this slide on intrinsic motivation and how we're doing that. So when it comes to intrinsic motivation we're going to draw on three things. And these are the three things that Dan made sense to watch out for look out for. Autonomy, master and purpose. When we're striving to motivate people and we're striving to help them find meaning within their jobs and within their lives. Not quite within their lives but please within their jobs. We need to be looking at these three things. Autonomy, master and purpose. So let's start with the first one. Way back in the 40-50 years about the bureaucracy a few years at least but here's the one who first proposed or coined this term knowledge workers. He said we need to manage knowledge workers differently from the way we manage the industrialized world. He also said that measuring productivity is actually a pretty difficult thing to do. And he said quality is the optimal not too high productivity. How do we actually get high quality and thereby high productivity? Knowledge workers need to determine their own goals. They need to be involved in the measurement criteria. So this is all about intrinsic motivation and then here sort of anchoring back, anchoring it back in extrinsic motivation is that we're saying that knowledge workers must understand what is our business? What kind of business results should we do? Are we expected to deliver? What are our customers? What do they want? How will they pay us? What does the customer consider valuable? These are the extrinsic but the stuff at the bottom of the slide are the extrinsic driving factors and the stuff at the top is how are they expected myself and maybe my own intrinsic motivation factor. So I can get to autonomy if I have my knowledge workers focus on the top part of the slide and myself and my other fellow managers can work with the knowledge workers to answer the bottom of the slide. That makes sense? Any questions there? We'll keep moving on. So Alistair I guess is another room. So Alistair's famous for many things and one of the things he's famous for is for coming up with this taxonomy of learning progression where people follow this path of shoe-on-wee a beginner or a practice level a journeyman level and a master level every craft every profession follows some sort of progression. We don't all start out as experts. In fact the path to becoming an expert is actually pretty long and arduous. Anyone here who's reading books like Malcolm's Level I think it was in Outliers Malcolm Gladwell said that you need what in order to become an expert. Anyone come up with this? Ten thousand hours. It turns out that many of the child so-called child prodigies actually just had an early slowly start and it actually worked out to ten thousand hours which is exactly what in our work base we talked about five years of solid hard work you know really practicing and working towards mastery and if we understand that there's a progression towards mastery and then we also understand and the gentleman at the back will lean on you for the process again Mihaly, six cents behind six cents behind six cents behind thank you very much he says people are most happy when they are in a state of flow on this journey of mastery when you're in the zone working writing some code designing a screen of your manager and what managers feel happy about coming up with a great system like this so whatever your role is it's how do we achieve that journey or how do we get into mastery because mastery is in some senses a journey without an end we have a destination so let's get let's understand that we need to cater to people's autonomy let's understand that we need a journey towards mastery and then also let's understand that people are looking for some meaning and purpose in their lives so it's not just about getting that reward it's actually going to motivate me here's my reward, I'm going to get 10 bucks if I build this kind of code and I'm going to sort of run like the hamster away let's part of it we need both but I'm also going to be for something a higher purpose for my life how can I anchor or teach my work that I'm doing to something larger than myself the Agile Alliance is not just about a teaching process it's about coming up with a you know it's a valuation or a system of community of team members that's driving sustainably in the programming software driving that's right so autonomy, mastery and purpose is all part of interest and motivation and I'm going to sort of leave you with this one I've talked in a fairly high level in terms of gear but I want to talk about share this one slide we have a given amount of time but here's an example of how you might do to take a personal objective kind of process a personal performance abrasion process and rather than just say deliver a line of code such as such or let's take some of these and analyze and direct market research you might want to do something like this this is called job crafting where people can look at the jobs they're doing and in those great shared of areas are their activities and this one person has basically looked at the sites of these activities represent the time she's spending on them if they're a little smaller writing quality reports less than analyzing and directing market research you see two roles over here but basically what we're saying is now let's talk about what this person does more actually one who give them a word to write themselves and if you want them to list the activities that they do the work job and responsibilities start with their passions what are your passions what are the motives if you have a passion for teaching wait 5 seconds if I have a passion for teaching others I didn't do that another 5 seconds if I have a passion for teaching others how can I align that with the work that I'm doing I have a strength of one on one communication now my strength can be aligned with my passion for teaching somebody else and I'm looking for meaningful relationships so how do I take my passions plug into my strengths align those with my motives and then you see the two roles over here one role by me and part of my team to do is best and there's another role up there and then I can start to prove maybe do this very visually put it in context with the rest of the team but at the end of this process there's several objectives that are not also allowing me to identify my own interests and motivations and also I'm looking for some really straightforward objectives by which I can measure as part of the role of the system with that I'm going to hand over to all of you who are talking about it so we have Sanjeev has described a system where we have intrinsic motivations for the things we're doing in other words we care about the work we're doing we like it we find it enjoyable it's rewarding is this enough have any of us have any of you ever started companies that you had to stop at some point because they didn't work financially what we're talking about here are in fact that life is not so simple it's doing a job you love and it'll all work out there are elements that come into play and that is the extrinsic realities in the world the fact is we need a little of both of these elements we need to be passionate about the things we're doing we need to build products that we love if we don't do that they don't come out right and their life can fail this has really been getting in all of the others as it's staying all along it's something the Agile Movement has certainly pulled the mark very closely and knows well if we think about the other side of the coin the extrinsic motivations are there any that matter and we would argue they're not where you should start you start with the intrinsic stuff but at the end of the day the extrinsic comes into play as well and if you fire this summit up what we're really saying here if you're doing things that you love you find a way to work with that complete you have to be good during processes you also need to be good during products Jeff Patton's you know this morning as well Jeff and I have known each other for a long time I think very much alike in a lot of ways what he's basically saying is we've been Agile has been a developer-convenient thing or maybe not just developers but over time testers have found a way to be included user experience background UX people have found a way to be included it's a gradually growing sort of ten big guy here and now what we're trying to do is extend it out and say also we're going to include everyone in some sort of an effective manner and here's where some other things come into play if you look at basic extrinsic motivations think of safety those of us who have been coaches always hear about this you can create an environment of safety for your teams such that they can feel comfortable to learn and experiment and fail and to see the case and in order to do this you've got to get paid enough to pay your mortgage and support your family and upgrade your life every year and again when things get a little slow for you this means that basically you have a base salary that is fair that is set by the market that is not greatly below those peers of yours and why does this matter because this is the way people are people are relativistic and they can care one another to one another keeping up the genesis things that people next door make more money than me this makes people unhappy and it's unfortunate that people are that way but they are so we need to take that into account and say alright we've got a base salary and it's fair and I think we can agree that's not anything new but there's also the idea of something above and beyond that that people are really passionate about you create a product and you've had fun doing it and everything but then let's say it succeeds wildly and you get no piece of the pie and somebody else takes all the credit does this eat at you a bit I mean despite the fact that you love the journey it was a fun journey at the end of it you'd also like to say well I created something marvelous and I'd like to share the reports there and if it doesn't happen we'll begin to feel jilted and that's this lack of justice will sink the mightiness of efforts and over time it will make even an agentically rewarding system unsustainable so what we're saying here is you need some of the extrinsic reports in order to be able to I don't think that's a good compute it's a projector but that needs to be able to need to be able to look at the extrinsic side of things and basically include people with the rewards of the efforts that they've been that they've been working with so if you look at ways to actually build this into a system what we're really saying is you've got different sorts of roles of course there and these you've got here a few hysteria types you have people who are in a strong team what do they try to do to create a good product help their team members and then report to the creator team and then do things collectively that are good for everyone so you can say that perhaps in a sense it's like video game development companies well there's something that is certainly intrinsically and extensically motivating in different ways a common metric how many of you can fill with metacritic if you've heard of this site it's a site that gathers reviews from various outlooks video games, movies and whatnot and actually there are a number of game companies out there that often are incited by their publishers to get high scores on metacritic because a lot of people look at that and when reviewers are writing things in the press it's just something that the market books that it says you've even got your succeder that you haven't based upon that score so that might need one of those extrinsic motivations now as you're going towards that you would say that if they succeeded they would be able to reap the benefits of that so there would be an element of team results how do we do that as a team to basically deliver that product and there may be some portion of individual results as well depending on your particular role in the project and what you're able to do that might come into play the basic point of this is none of these are meant to be said in stone that the individual reports should be subsumed by the larger ones and then not that they should ever exist because in some cases they make sense but they should be subsumed and then the larger system of helping your team in fact to do good stuff there's a up in this invisible blue slide up here where we're talking about are some examples in fact of different sorts of measurements that you might find that would be examples of extrinsically measured of extrinsic measures and these are mostly real examples from various projects we might say that there's a project out there to try to keep a you know a website to be designing a website because people start a process to sign up for your service and they never finish and we've got to drop out a 96% and that sucks so we want to get better than that and that would be in fact an extrinsic motivation and the things that the team would suggest ways to get there is this the product that there's job well they're there to spearhead the vision and they provide ideas and ways to get there but it's everybody's job and everybody has to say well that's our goal and we're going to play our little part and try to get a little bit closer to that goal as we move forward but it gives us data to which we can turn and decide if we're improving or not improving as we go forward I did a lot of work in it Lean and Six Sigma and things like this actually after I had learned Agile so when I was learning all of that I was doing it in the context of in fact working with the Agile teams and it led to a lot of this what we call discovery sessions these project kickoff events where basically we try to decide what these measures were and have teams share in the description of what those measures were so that decreased dropout rate would not be something handed down from on high it would be something where the team would collectively come to the realization that that is in fact to be a role model of what they're trying to do and it would be a good way to demonstrate success in the proper direction an x-ray take part data measure and it's one that you would apply a number of different solutions to that everybody has a part to play and once we come back to what you're going to see is basically then all we're really talking about is a more holistic process Agile has an era of inclusivity to it in the language but in practice it's not always inclusive it's inclusive with any smaller containers as Diana put it that slide up there so nice even the team it's inclusive but not necessarily inclusive in the broader context so how can people play a more effective role basically managers can be leaders they can try to set up systems and again I'm saying exactly what Diana was saying previously set up environments here where in this sort of a system can actually live where team members feel safe to mode their process through retrospectives improving it and all that and the product that is in product owners they're not just about the product and the result in fact they're also interested in the process because it will help them to realize a better end product so then you've got this an entire inclusive system here which involves basically managers and the team and who are you missing here the customers and users and again if you look at Jeff you got to do a little detail about what I really mean by this we're not talking about having one customer ever since it had come we're talking about actually having users and customers actively involved and basically they're telling you what their problems are or you're looking at them even better at figuring it out for yourself you need the entire team not just the product you're going out there and finding out what's happening and coming back but in fact the entire team determining what the issues are and understanding them and it's difficult to read there but then this leads to both these intrinsic and extrinsic objectives intrinsic basically we as a team feel like the work we're doing is good we can't come up with better ideas how to do it you think about a tentacle metaphor here for a moment you might say that the team would go out there they would select the seeds and they would choose the plant we think that given the environment out there what we understand about our customers and the market and the competition these would be ideas that would probably succeed led by a product owner perhaps but again with involvement in the entire team and they would decide how the process they felt would best achieve that in life scrum a dash of XP and some con models as a tool set perhaps and then they would go out there and at the end of each sprint let's say we're doing scrum if you go and you show some things to customers and users you let them use it if you look at your experience and mention you say are all the things we're doing working or aren't they is the product all it needs to be or isn't it and if it isn't perhaps we haven't chosen the right things to do perhaps our process needs improvement but again it brings that into perspective as well not just about the process but about the product capability as well and so this is basically a system that it is definitely an old loop it's happening all the time from both the process and product perspective we're building things we're testing how they work we're seeing how we did them and if we can do it better and we're moving forward over time so that's basically the essence of what we're talking about find the entrance and motivations and matters of team find things that they're passionate about and basically have them understand and involve directly customers and users in the entire process not in demonstrations of dog and funny shows but in actually rolling things out operationally letting people play with them and get some experience and you can see what's happening I'll go back to you because what inspired me to come up with a lot of this is really just pulling together ideas with different spheres there were sparks of brilliance up here that nobody else ever came to but basically I was talking about video game development because you would go with it and say a video game is interesting because it's so much more subjective and inherently it's much more difficult to say here's an idea for a game and it will work the fact is you never know it'll work and if you look at the most successful companies out there they're ones that have good ideas at the start and then take them and they just they nurture them and evolve them and pivot them and change them until they're at a diamond sheet and if they don't then it'll succeed it's not a game that's the sort of thing anybody needs to buy so it's extra important that you build something that people will want to buy and we can look at any of our products and there are elements of this in those things that we build but that's extremely compelling so for example a team might say I want to build something that would be a full voting environment that creates tension in the player and makes them nervous so a product owner, creative director game designer to come to us with all the answers we've been involved in everyone and say what do you think can make them work from a music perspective what do you think can make them work from an animation perspective how do we measure full voting you know how we're testing with people how do we know if it's full voting we'd ask the team you know come up with a way to measure this maybe to survey maybe there are very concrete measures okay so it's not all form and fuzzy and in abstract we need to get into something that's measurable and that's not always easy but it is usually possible okay so even for very abstract things like games and so just to sort of sum up the basic idea there are lots of different things floating out there we're not going to get into any detail about these right now although the browser may talk about it offline but this idea that there are different levels of feedback and different types of things that happen and I'm sort of talking about this idea of group discovery and that's what Jeff was talking about this morning as well involving everybody in the definition and ideation and iteration of whatever it is we're building a product group feedback on a product there's this idea of micro feedback and things like that which are mostly meant to be individual again process feedback about performance of an individual we'll twitter review you know Arlen you're too long-winded I'll take that as a note for my next talk the short things up a bit there are these ideas of majority assessments it's sort of an evil a much diminished thing and as a service to many people they say oh but we don't want to be assessed for maturity but what is it used for is a key question if a team says there are elements that we can see in our engineering practices or in our product discovery practices where we're more or less mature according to various benchmarks and our own interpretations then that can help us get better and as long as we're not measured and then our pay suffers because of it or what not then that's a good thing it's feedback that helps us improve our process and that's marvelous so lots of different tactics and techniques and tricks how to go about implementing this but the basic idea we need to find the intrinsic motivations that actually drive the goal and we need to make sure that we are linking these to measurable extrinsic outcomes and that we're also involving the teams and product trainers and everyone else and in finding and defining those extrinsic measures and the intrinsic ones people decide how they can best contribute they come up with their objectives teams and product trainers decide what's best for them to succeed and they test it and if it doesn't succeed they change it so an adaptive inclusive process here I'm not going to try to read all that up there but basically there are lots of problems and you see real problems having to have a coach consultant the ones you see most often in agile teams these simple ideas and values can help you address but being more inclusive that's my job we don't say we don't stay out of a room manager we don't say product manager that's just you we're all trying to build something quality here and there are various parts that we can play in it and HR needs to be part of the game too and it's an element that has been long outside of the equation and it's time for it to come back in and with that that's pretty much it I just wanted to sort of round up here and ask questions apologize for the undigivory presentation and it's that they have no privilege for the next thing yes I think the basic idea comes down to boundary context in the game if you have contractors and they're involved in a specific effort and you can say that they've got roles and responsibilities ask contractors to the team ask temporary employees of the new organization in some sense that's part of their job responsibility all we're really saying here is you need to basically help to define in fact what your responsibilities are as a contractor and to help the team define what the product or service or capability is that we're building needs to do and it's just part of your job it could be built in as part of the contract in fact as you when you get the person in terms of actual extrinsic reward measures did that make a complaint or something of that nature involved it may not necessarily be I mean it could be something that's just you know you participated in retrospectives you participated in the discovery session you give us your feedback here's the role you play in it it's just another team member it all got that way I'm not too good at this other question any of you think you've already got a system that's just like network we're actively so I'm going out there and looking in the community examples of various parts of this trying to help companies grow into the other part so this is you know we love to hear your stories basically the things that you think have worked about working your environments sort of trying to take this knowledge and spread it around it and help people find find their own way especially what happened with the proposal we already have so I think you have one hand up there for general talk about a system that the most amazing system that you've built has worked really well so I'd love to hear from you if I could place the easiest and we'll put the disappearing presentation on the slide for you to see alright thank you very much thank you always


Anyway, so today's live stream good to see you format today's live stream Like I said, I don't know if you guys heard me earlier, but we put hold on our live streams For the last two or three weeks So I'm really happy to be doing this one Today, we really just wanted to to come in Alex is not here. He Sadly was not able to make it. He's still working but I'm gonna keep this short 30 minutes, maybe even shorter but just wanted to Pretty much celebrate our milestone of being two years on YouTube creating content and then also this will technically be our send off The last live stream before we travel to Africa, which is happening in a week Can't even believe we are going this this soon So really just at this point of time. We're just getting things ready and squared away for the trip I am definitely way behind when it comes to packing and making sure that I have all of the gear for the climb I have a long long long list of things to do just earlier today I started my process to apply for an electronic visa for Tanzania I don't know if you guys know already but Tanzania is one of the countries that requires a visa in order to enter So us citizens are expected to apply for visa before getting to Tanzania Well, actually you don't have to do it before going to Tanzania But it's visa upon arrival So when you get to the airport usually people before getting to the when they get to the airport They would fill the paperwork share their information Think photos obviously passport return tickets and stuff like that and then they would pay $100 and get the visa approved right there So it takes some time for the paperwork to be filled and approved by an officer But there's also an option to do that online. So that's what I was working on earlier This morning and I suddenly see my visa application So Very excited I Have You know, I just can't believe that it's happening this quick and I have a long list of things to do and prepare and pack but I know that I've been falling a little bit behind with content here on youtube It just has been a little bit difficult with the traveling because every weekend we've been pretty much traveling every thursday and then Training during the weekend and then come back around monday or tuesday And it was really difficult for me to make content on the road or at home So I kind of have to put that on hold for a little bit. Maybe even during our trip. So it's going to be Most likely Livestreams and then I'm going to be sharing some short videos here and there But yeah, we are very excited for the trip So let's see Let's see if we've got any any questions I hope people are not going to the to the previous live stream Because I have the link in the in the community tab shared there But it's not the one that we are live on right now Just because it didn't want to work for me. So I've been reading a bunch of books that uh, alex's dad gave me One that I was reading the other day on my way to the dentist was a book about tanzania. So just It's an old book. It even looks It's an old edition, but It has a lot of useful information about you know traditions in tanzania the tribes wildlife It's very very useful. So whenever I don't have much going on. I would sit and read a little bit Savvy calm. Hello. I am wondering why the viewership is so low Yeah, so I was saying earlier that the link that I kind of not promoted But the link that I put out there for folks to join the live stream is not the same as the one that I'm live on right now Uh, because I was just having a lot of problems With the the connectivity on the previous link. So I just started this one immediately. Maybe that's why the viewership is low Maybe people are still busy. I don't know Um, I think it's so awesome that you took the swimming lessons. Oh my god, that was the highlight of my week um Yeah, I've been always scared or intimidated by deep water And so I found the adult swimming school here and it was amazing. It was really It was really worth the time and the money too to do so I spent friday saturday Of last week friday saturday sunday and then monday morning And saturday sunday was six hours a day And then I think friday was probably four five hours after work And then the last day was pretty much just two hours But I really feel like i'm in a better place right now. I feel more comfortable in deep water Um, I really want to start training more because when when we get to tanzania Which also just about getting to tanzania. I am watching the news and just seeing the state of the world I'm starting to feel nervous Because a lot of countries are closing right now or they have restrictions And i'm just worried that this is not gonna happen. So I don't know But if we go if we go or when we go there's definitely a lot of opportunities for snorkeling I don't know if I have the opportunity. I have the confidence to swim in open water yet But I will give it a try and maybe in the next few days. We'll just go to the pool and practice more Yeah, but that's being the the big thing that happened To me this week. I was really happy with it Yeah, so that's that Hello. Hello everyone. If you guys are Watching please give this live stream a thumbs up. This way it's gonna show up on Other people's feed or at least people who follow us so that they can join in as well We went to la last weekend and you can tell that covet 19 is shutting things back down there Yeah, so that's why I'm Every time I talk openly about going to tanzania or even in these live streams I'm always thinking in the back of my head. What if it doesn't happen because you never know I mean if if they say you can't go to tanzania anymore. You just can't go to tanzania anymore, but I hope that Tanzania has been open for a long time right now It's been one of those countries like turkey at some point Croatia some some of the countries were open for for a long time. So I hope nothing changes by then Where else vaccine I got my first dose probably three Weeks ago and then the second shot. I have my second shot actually on monday of next week Which is going to be pretty exciting. I get the shot and then just two three days later I'm gonna be on the plane. So I don't know if I will have the most comfortable flight, but I have to be vaccinated. It's just gonna make a lot of things easier Yeah, I was also told that the the second one is not as pleasant as the first one. So we'll see how that goes Cool, cool. What else did I have any side effects with the first one? Uh, not much the first one my arm was I think once I took the shot three hours was just fine four hours But towards the end of the day I took it around noon I just you know, my arm was sore And then when I went to bed or when I was about to go to bed I just can't lift my arm. It just felt so heavy And I think the day after I had just a little bit of you know, soreness and feeling tired overall, but it wasn't upsetting My second was worse than the first. Yeah, that's what I was told to So but that's fine My goal is before Monday because I'm getting the shot on Monday I should Finish up all of my packing and shopping and getting things ready so that if I have to rest for a day or so I can do that, but I'm really still behind with the with packing We've been doing a lot of trips to REI go back and forth go back and forth order stuff return stuff just to make sure it's the right Size and make sure everything fits. Well You can come to Canada when you get double Vaccinated you mean? Yeah, I would love to go to Canada The West Coast definitely want to go to the West Coast and then At some point in the future. I want to make it to Banff Canada that will be nice or Jasper National Park. It's definitely on the list It's funny because the year we were in Glacier National Park You could literally drive to to Canada from Glacier National Park, but we didn't have much time to do that Yeah, but it's definitely in the plan So that's that I got new hiking shoes I got new hiking shoes, which was the pretty Pretty exciting for me. I got Solomon shoes And I took them when we went hiking pike speak in Colorado But right now actually my phone is on top of the box right now If I move everything To show you the shoes that's gonna probably destroy my setup here But they really fit very well. I'm probably gonna do a review about them in the future But they are so so comfortable You know how usually have to break in new shoes and then walk in them and until you know You feel more comfortable in the shoes. I didn't have to do that with these shoes The only thing is the one that I ordered was half a size up to what I usually wear So I had to order a second pair So now I have the nine and then I have nine and a half and I'm yet to try both of them And see which one works better and then I will just return the other pair Talking about REI, I went to two of them today Yeah, we've been going to REI pretty much every day just to make sure that we you know get all of the stuff that we need The problem is they close by the time we finish our work day and then go there and then just like walk around for one hour or so And get stuff that we need they are about to close. So we have to keep going back every day really I've been searching their garage sales trying to find a good deal Yeah, they always have good deals in their garage sale And also if you go online to their website REI.com and then you go In the tabs and you click outlets They have more options than what you would normally find in their Stores or in their garage sale. So that's what I've been doing lately Just go into their outlets online and then see what options they have right now I'm pretty much focused on base layers for hiking and then I'm also looking at some Base layer pants because the ones that I have are either not too warm They're not going to be perfect for summit day when it's going to be super cold at the top Or you know, I've been using them for more than three four years and they're not as warm as they used to be So kind of need new gear there But these are the major things that I'm looking at feel like hiking pants I have plenty jacket down jacket. That's squared wear already Yeah, what time is it now? Hey google. What time is it? 416. Okay, because I have to go I have to go 4 30. I have a meeting at 4 30 But anyway, so What else I've got five people watching Hello everyone. Hello. Hello everybody Yeah, so That's that for the planning we obviously the the climb itself is the is planned The the safari is also planned But then the last seven to eight days in Tanzania. We haven't planned them yet There's just so many things to plan So I'm just gonna leave it up in the air and once we get there we can figure out what we want to do The last days there Mm-hmm What else what else what else? I don't think I skipped any comments. I'm just looking at the comments to make sure I didn't skip anything Yeah, so that's that It's trekking pals birthday today. This is the first the august 11th is when I first Created the youtube channel two two years ago So now I have to put it on my calendar. It's a date that I should remember last year we Alex and I we got a cake and then we had a mini celebration at home took some photos and shared them to to social media but this year we're just So busy that we didn't have you know, we're not gonna be able to do that But instead I wanted to come in live and say hello and chat And enjoy my uh-huh Uh-huh sparkling water I've been enjoying this drink Okay, so I'm gonna see if there are any questions if you guys have any questions or you want to share anything with us Let me know if not Let's just give it two More minutes or so and then we'll just wrap up for the today Oh, yeah, and then if you guys have any content ideas that you want to see in the future Obviously when we're gonna be there It's gonna be hard to find time To sit down and make videos and obviously we're gonna be filming But we're not gonna be able to sit and edit But I will definitely do that once we are back to the States Tell Alex. I said hi. I hope you all Excuse me Hope you all have a fun and safe trip. Thank you so much formats I saw your format on instagram So definitely the best way to stay in touch over the next few days few weeks Actually, it's gonna be up to a month. The best way to stay in touch will be On instagram because we try to share Stories I would say on a daily basis. Obviously it depends on whether we have access to the internet or not If we will have access to the internet on the mountain, I will share updates every now and then on the phone Um, and then also we'll try to post more to to the community here on youtube And if I have a chance, I will definitely do a live stream there as well It all depends on how much time and if we have a reliable connection Okay awesome guys thank you so much And really excited to share this adventure with you Thank you format for joining and savvy com. Thank you for joining And we'll catch up with you guys later Have a great day


In this video, I will show you how easy it is to migrate from oncloud 10 to next cloud 12. As you see, I have oncloud 10 running here, including a couple of applications like contacts and calendar. I also installed the audio player app, but for some reason it does not show up. So, let's start the migration. So you simply go into the folder where oncloud is installed and you copy paste the commands to download the index.php file, which is the migrator, and then you move it into the update folder. You see it gets named index.php.1 because there is already an index.php file. And then you simply visit it into the browser. So you go to updater slash index.php and there is the migrator. It correctly detects we're running oncloud 10.0.0 and we can migrate to next cloud 12. So let's get going. The system is checked. Put in maintenance mode. Backup is made. The files are downloaded. The integrity is verified. The files are extracted and very quickly we are ready to continue. Now we can let the web-based updater do its thing, but I'm going to use a command line tool to show how that works. So the system is in maintenance mode and we run the upgrades. Well, that's easy and quick because that's done now. So now we need to turn off maintenance mode. I always forget the exact command. Maintenance semicolon mode.  Now let's check in our next cloud instance. We've upgraded to a much faster and more secure next cloud. Just to refresh. And here we are. You see there's a problem with the code integrity check. Next cloud checks if all the files are secure. So you see a number of files that have filled the integrity check. This is the auto player, the calendar, the context, and the personalized apps. So these certificates are not trusted. They're still own cloud certificates. They're not next cloud certificates. So you wonder what can we do about this? Well, we're going to go back to the app store. So we simply need to replace them with versions from next cloud. Well, you see there are newer versions available, so that is very easy. The audio player doesn't have a newer version available, so we simply remove this one. So we re-enable the calendar, context, and the personalized apps. You see them appear on the top. And then we go and install the audio player app. Ooh, and there's video calls. Let's install that too. So now these apps are back. So we go back to the integrity check and let it do a re-scan. And now you will see that all files pass the check. Note that you will not have to reinstall or re-enable apps when you do an update from next cloud, because in next cloud 12 we automatically re-enable apps that were enabled before you run an update. Thank you for watching.


Oh boy. Good morning. Good morning. Yes. Yes. Clap it up. Mayor Sheena Wright and I want to welcome you to Union Settlement for this very, very special day. Union Settlement was founded in 1895 and has been an amazing resource and haven for East Harlem, providing mental health care, EITC services, and countless other programs, including early childhood education programming. So thank you, Union Settlement. Right here, Union Settlement, with its over 350 employees, work with scores of volunteers to make our social safety net really complete and making sure that it's a springboard for progress for everyone. So it is only fitting that we release our blueprint for early childhood education and child care here in the space. We are really excited. It really does take a village to raise a child and it takes a village to create a comprehensive early childhood education and child care program. And I really want to start off by thanking all of the people and organizations that made this possible. All of the advocates who are here with us today and pushed for resources in this legislative session, including the campaign for children, C4C members, the Chinese American Planning Council, so many others. We started this work in the transition for the Adams Administration. Our Economic and Workforce Development Committee led by Deputy Mayor Maria Torres Springer, our Human Services Committee led by Deputy Mayor Anne Williams Isom, our Education Committee led by our Chancellor Banks, as well as scores of volunteers worked to put this together. Our Agency Commissioners, we have eight agencies that worked collaboratively. The Robin Hood Foundation came in with a major philanthropic investment. Bloomberg Philanthropies has helped to support our work with delivery associates. Thank you so much. And the CUNY Professional Development Institute, Sherry Cleary, I want to give you a shout out. Where's Sherry? There she is. I also want to shout out experts Barbara Carlson and Jocelyn Rodriguez. Where are they? Absolutely. Shout out, Shanna Middleton and Sharif Solomon from the Administration. You will hear from our mayor and other leaders as we talk more about this plan, but really, really a team effort. Everyone who's are in these seats contributed in some way and we are very grateful and we know that this is the first big step of many more. Without further ado, I want to introduce our mayor who charged us with this important investment in step and body of work. Many months ago, Mayor Eric Adams. Thank you, Shanna. Thank you. We're at my own posse. You know, let's be clear. America runs on childcare. America runs on childcare and it doesn't matter if it's mothers or grandmothers who are providing some type of childcare for their grandchildren or children, the neighbor next door or a childcare center. This country in this city wouldn't function without childcare and we're clear on that and the more qualitative the product is, the more opportunities we are going to give children. We have been zero focus on this from the Chancellor to all of the deputy mayors to our partners to the men and women who are behind us are providing childcare services to children. So no parents leaves home without the keys cell phone and making sure their child is given the proper setting so that they can have a healthy start and not only their day, but the entire life. But here's a fact and it is astonishing as we started to dig into this 375,000 parents quit or downshifted their jobs because they had no other way to take care of their children. And when you do an analysis of that, you'll see that this is a historical problem. You know, mom did three jobs to take care of her six children and that problem has continued throughout the generations. And it's just time to do better. All the research shows that quality childcare is essential for every child from day one. Our children need to build blocks of education, healthy food and active play. Everything we continue to zero in as an administration, education, healthy food and active play. They go together so that our children can build the towers of the future that we want them to have. And so today, we're going to make of those building blocks available to everyone. I'm really excited about this announcement and what we fought long and how hard for our childcare and early childcare education blueprint is a historic investment in the future of our Children, the future of working families and most importantly, the future of our city. It makes sure that children have a safe place to grow, learn and socialize. Socialization is crucial for our children as they develop the skills of how to interact with different cultures, different families and different lifestyles. Parents don't have to choose between TV as a babysitter and earning a living. This has been a choice that they have to make year after year after year. And we are saying no to that. And that Children childcare providers receive the support they need to provide high quality, affordable services. This is essential for our Children is essential for families. And it's essential for our city as we continue to grow our economy. We often think is disconnected childcare in the growth of the economy, but it's not. It all goes together and is part of the system that we are doing in this administration. And the responsibility of care unpaid or paid falls mostly on women. We know that we have to be honest about that and we have to acknowledge that when we remove childcare, we're removing women from the workforce and the opportunity to continue to have the independence and growth that they deserve. So we're going to tackle our childcare needs head on. We're going to meet it head on and make sure that we provide services and support to those who need our help the most. We're going to increase access to childcare for more than 41,000 Children across the city. We would create additional childcare and early childcare education seats. We will serve 6000 Children in DOE contract contracted programs. You know, the Chancellor is happy to hear that. He's a big believer in this and creates 17,000 more seats through tax abatements. We will measure our success, not in seats, but how many Children we place in seats. Previously, we went around bolstering the number of seats we had and many of those seats were empty. We're not playing that game. We're not going to play the game of giving the appearance that we have a fully fed childcare system. But when you dig into the crevices, you realize we're counting seats and not Children seats don't become cities. Children become cities. So we are we're focused on Children and we're going to energize our providers. You cannot recruit from within the sterilized environment of a beautiful space. We have to get into the community, speak with our healthcare providers, speak with our pediatricians, speak with our tenant leaders, association leaders, our clergy, everyone must be focused on recruiting Children to be in a safe space in their development. And that is how we're going to accomplish this task. In the next two years, we are clearing wait lists and providing childcare vouchers for 18,000 over 18,000 Children, including those 17 high needs neighborhood and a word that we say often. For the first time, we need to do a list of all of our first times. You know, for the first time in this city's history, we will be providing vouchers for 600 undocumented Children because a child's future should not be based on documentation. It should be based on the destination of the of allowing him to or her to be ready for the future. New York is always strapped for time. So we got it. We know the city is too bureaucratic. We know that we leave too many resources on the table. Because by the time you fill out all the forms you sent from agency to agency, you're just grunted, this gruntedness that settles in, and we want to fight that hard. So we will be we will streamline the application process for seats so that parents don't have to run from one department to another and fill our confusing forms over and over again. We're stopping that with streamlining. We're going to make technology work for us so that we can work for our families. We want to make sure that we are attracting talented individuals to the field of childcare. So we are partnered with CUNY to provide career development and professional training for up to 7400 additional providers. And we're hiring additional staff to eliminate unnecessary delays in background checks. All the time is taking to do a background check. We want to really alleviate that long wait, and we're going to continue to conduct thorough and rigorous background checks on our providers. So we're not going to take away the quality of the product. We're just going to make sure we do a better job in getting it done. Finally, we are creating a new office of childcare and early education at City Hall to coordinate all of our efforts in establishing advisory council. No symphony plays well without a maestro. That maestro would be at City Hall to make sure we're all playing on the same tune and not off note and off key to protect our children. This office will cut across multiple city agencies and create more streamlined processes for everyone. This blueprint is not a one in done. It's not about a fancy cover. It's about covering all of our bases. It's not about just staying what we're going to do now on an announcement. It's about continuous follow up. We will continue to revisit and revise based on parents and providers feedback. This administration is not afraid to pivot and shift if we see something that's not working. We're not going to stay just because we announced something. We're going to continue to know if it's not producing the product that we want. We are unafraid about pivoting and shifting to get the product that New York is deserved. And so as Deputy Mayor Rice states, it takes a village to raise a child. But let me modernize that. It takes a city to raise a child. And this is a city of raising children. Not just any city. This is New York City. This is a place from we're going to get in nothing done to a place we're going to get stuff done. New York GSD get stuff done. Congratulations team. Thank you so much, Mayor Adams. We are really thrilled that two of our key leaders who really are going to be the tip of the spear of getting it done and executing and implementing are here today. Deputy Chancellor Cara Ahmed, who leads the early childhood education division of the New York City public schools, as well as our commissioner for the administration for children services, Dan House are here. He'll speak in a minute. As the Mayor said that this is a really important first step. I also want to point out that 96% of the people who run child care programs are women of color. They are black, brown and Asian. So this is going to have a tremendous impact on that community as well, which is critically important. And that we are really going to be targeting these vouchers to people that also are unhoused currently and in other high need communities. So with that, I want to turn it over to Commissioner Dan Houser. Thank you so much, Deputy Mayor Wright, you, Deputy Mayor Williams Isom, Deputy Mayor Maria Torres Springer brought us all together with a clear purpose to get this done. And we are so thrilled to be here today. Hi, I'm Jess Dan Houser. I'm the commissioner at the Administration for Children Services. I'm so pleased to be here at Union Settlement. This will also be a site of our family enrichment center soon here in East Harlem.  It's an honor to be with Mayor Adams, with Deputy Mayor Wright, Chancellor Banks and all of you to officially release the city's new child care blueprint. This plan will resonate with all parents. I remember as a new parent how relieved we were to find child care for our daughter. And then I could continue my career in public service and my wife could go to seminary to pursue her dream and her call to be an Episcopal priest. Even more importantly, it meant our baby was safe and it expanded the community we could rely on to help our daughter learn and grow. This plan is also about equity, though, for parents who haven't gotten this. Parents who are striving to pursue their dreams while struggling to make ends meet. They deserve the same. The peace of mind that their child is safe, the opportunity to pursue life's goals and the community, the city of support we all need in raising children. And this blueprint will provide thousands more parents with exactly that. I'm proud that ACS will play such a critical role in expanding access to affordable child care across the city in collaboration with the mayor's team and our city agency partners. We're currently in the process of reaching out to the parents of every child on the voucher wait list. And then providing child care assistance for those who are eligible. Beginning today, including right here in East Harlem, we'll also target eligible families in 17 high needs communities across the city. These neighborhoods experience high poverty, high unemployment, and for years have had limited access to child care. And thanks to Mayor Adams and the city council for the first time, ACS will provide child care assistance to undocumented children through city funded vouchers. All together, ACS will be issuing over 18,000 more child care vouchers. At the same time, ACS has lowered the federally required family fee to child care to the lowest level permitted by federal law. And we successfully advocated to the state to increase the maximum rate we can pay our providers. These efforts will make childcare more affordable and give providers financial stability and more adequate resources to serve our children well. This much needed blueprint is a game changer for children and families all across New York City. Thank you Mayor Adams for your commitment to make New York City a better place to be a child and to be a parent. Thank you. Thank you Commissioner Dan Hauser. And our final scheduled speaker is the most important one quite frankly, one of our parents. I would love to introduce Siobhan Sharad, who is a parent of a child right here in the center. And this is what it's all about. We want to make sure that our community, our family, gets into the services they need and deserve. Hi. So my name is Siobhan as they've already mentioned.  My daughter has been going to union settlement for now for two years. And it was important for her to be here because I suffered a brain injury in 2014, which rendered me disabled and unable to work where I worked with disengaged youth for 20 plus years. So understanding childcare and adulthood and that transition is very important because I've done it all my life. Because of childcare, I did not make the choice. I had to make the choice between her going to school or me being home. And that's not something that parents want to have to decide. We want to be able to send our children to school and understand that they're safe and they're going to get educated. And they're also going to be in an environment where they are able to prosper. With today's announcement, parents get a little bit more of a peace of mind because of that. But the real winners are children. Our children get to come and be with adults that care about them. And especially within our set, like some of the things that were said, the positions that are opening is amazing because it's very, very limited. And we don't always get to see the outcome of great educators and great child providers and those that care about our children. So as she prepares for kindergarten, it's a little bittersweet, but she's on to the next level. And she leaves here knowing I leave. She leaves here with me knowing that she's now prepared because of the staff here. Thank you, ma'am, for being a champion for working families and understanding the value of childcare. I don't even know how it's possible. Let's talk about children without having our Chancellor speak. Come on, say a few words, Chancellor. Good morning, everyone. I just think it's critically important that we recognize that early childhood education is essential for everything that we're trying to do at New York City public schools. If we don't establish the foundation on that birth to five continuum, we will continue to fight an uphill battle. And so many of the issues and the challenges that we see in our schools today are result of us not getting it right from the very beginning. Sherry Cleary, I want to thank you because you were one of the first people when I became Chancellor, before I became Chancellor, that everybody told me, if you want to learn deeply about what's happening in early childhood education, there's no better person that you can learn it from than Sherry Cleary. So I want to thank you for helping me to put our New York City public schools in a better place. And it was Sherry, in fact, who was the one who made the recommendation of the person who went on to become our deputy Chancellor for early childhood education, who I didn't know, but Sherry was the one who said it is the best person that you can pick. Stand up again, please. Dr. Kara Ahmed, who is leading this work for us. And I appreciate you and I appreciate your leadership. And I know how hard you are working and fighting. We say this all the time. Bright starts will help to produce bold futures. And we've got to get it right. And all the work that is happening here that the mayor has entrusted his team to lead and Deputy Mayor Wright and so many others to drive this work on behalf of our youngest children. We get it right with them. We give everybody else the best chance to be most successful. Thank you, Michael. Two questions on topic about this. What what do you guys have in place for kind of quality control? You know, with with daycare early childhood centers, there's a broad range.  Some places the kids are learning their ABCs. What what kind of how are you going to keep an eye on standards and make sure the right things are going on at these places? So, you know, I have been communicating with the Deputy Mayor and the Department of Education. This is a big issue for me.  We're also doing a real analysis of where seats are located. What this team is doing is extremely impressive around how do we start with a standard of expectation?  That's fine. So if centers want to do extra stuff, they can. But we're going to ensure that there's a minimum expectation that we want for our children. And you're going to see that with some of the systems that we are rolling out. And how we're going to monitor that expectation. Now, you've been at many of my press conference, I said it over and over again, got to inspect what you expect or is all suspect. So we're going to be inspecting on the ground and make sure we do those spot checks to get those qualities that we're looking for. How are you? You should get the every press conference award. That all about Congress. Only time Michael comes is when he's up to something. On the campaign trail, you put out the you care plan for universal childcare. How come this doesn't get you to universal childcare? We're gonna get there. We're gonna keep moving forward. People thought it was impossible for us to drop down a dollar amount. This is a huge victory from Albany to get to the dollars that we are, I believe is $10 a week of what we're doing with immigrant children. So we're going to continue to evolve. You know, it's really challenging for many people to fully comprehend that I've only been mad for six months. But you're seeing just a clear movement of a plan as we're peeling back another layer peeling back another later layer. So our goal is universal. We think every parent that wants a seat for their child. We need to get it, but we continue to add on these numbers. And you know, we're going to continue to focus. We want Albany to help. We want some of the federal dollars. We want to re look at some of the things we're doing head start because I learned from talking to the Chancellor's team. We have all of these different buckets. And you know, you may think that everyone could apply for any bucket. No, immigrant children are not qualified for head start. So we have to create our own ways of doing this. And that's what we're doing on or off. Okay, I noticed there there's some aspects of it and don't comment this, but I think the minimum floor ceiling on wages at things have to be there has to be legislation on the state level. I noticed some of the legislation has already passed and in place, but what needs to be implemented as far as a kind of legal perspective to achieve the goals that you've laid out in the plan? Thank you. The really importantly, the state raised the maximum from 100% of the federal public line to 300%. So now family of four making about $83,000 a year can qualify. So it's a huge win. What we're asking the state to also consider is to eliminate the minimum wage floor, which is very surprised. It was surprising to me to learn as I became ACS commissioner. And if you don't make minimum wage, you don't qualify for childcare. So our gig workers, folks who work in lots of different parts of the economy don't qualify even though they are struggling to make ends meet the most. And so we're calling on the state to engage with us on that important issue. Do you want people to be eligible under as far as like wages from like who's that? Who qualifies for the plan? We think 300% of the federal poverty line is the right place to be that family of four around $83,000. So we're really thrilled about that. Again, we're also dropping costs for families. So for a family who's making less than the federal poverty line, they're going to pay $1 a week. If you make over 100% of the federal poverty line, it'll be 1% of your income beyond the 100%. So that drops it from what was around 10%. So this will make it a lot more affordable for families.  I don't want to deal with this. This is your combat. The subway saxophonist who was arrested a few days ago. Yes, I know you said that police have a job to do in the subway. Is there any discretion for someone who's been there for years and B seems to spread happiness. It was folks lamenting that this guy was just there to be a positive influence on the subway ecosystem. How did it result in that video that we saw? The homeless people living in encampments, they have been there for years. People not paying their fare. They have been doing it for years of people disrupting and littering have been there for years. That's the problem. We have a subway system that is out of control and the mandate was Eric. We need to bring back control. So a passenger called and said this person is taking up space on the platform, which can be very dangerous, by the way. So the police went and stated, sir, you can't take up this much space. You have to get this organized because if you do people can be hurt. He just regarded them. They asked him three times. Totally disregarded them. They said, you know what? We're not going to take action. We're going to call our soldier. The sergeant came. Sir, we just need you to do it within the transit rules. He disregarded them. So now I need to ask us. We can't have it both ways. We can't say we want order in our subway system. And then when police officers take action, we said, well, we don't want that type of order. No, I'm not sending my police officers mixed messages. Be polite, be kind, give people an opportunity to correct the condition. But if they refuse to do so, take appropriate action. Now, if you look at the video, the police weren't yelling. He was yelling. He was yelling. He was screaming. He was creating disorder. He went to the pre to the district. He was issue summons. He was giving back his items and he went on his way. So I'm saying to New Yorkers that are on the subway system. That is not the place for disorder. That is not the place to do whatever you want as a passenger. Transit has rules. Let's follow the rules. And my officers and your officers are going to do it in a professional courteous manner. So I'm proud of those officers. They weren't abusive. They didn't yell at the person. They took a long time to get to the point that now we have to take action. That is how you do proper policing. Questions on the former mayor, Rudy Giuliani. First, do you plan to ask the DA to less ins charges against the guy who tapped his back, slapped his back whenever we're calling it? I looked at the video and someone needs to remind former mayor Giuliani that forcibly reporting a crime is a crime. And from what he stated about being punched in the head, felt like a bullet, you know, what he stated, there was a lot of creativity. And I think the district attorney, he has the wrong person that he's investigating. To falsely reported crime is a crime. If that video wasn't there, then this person would have been charged with punching the former mayor. He would have been charged with all of these offenses that did not materialize. I saw that video. And I'm sure all of you who saw the video, you have to ask yourself. He stated if he didn't feel so heroic or whatever, he would have fallen to the ground. That was a lot of creativity there. Forcibly reporting a crime is a crime. That aspect, I mean, you think there's absolutely no merit to this? Is that what you're getting? When you look at the video, the guy basically walked by and pedaling him out on the back. I don't know if he said congratulations. I don't know what he said to him. But it was clear that he was not punched in the head. It was clear that it didn't feel like a bullet. It was clear that he wasn't about to fall to the ground. So it was clear that he had a lot of creativity and sensationalism that caused this person to be arrested. Forcibly reporting a crime is a crime. Well, I'm having a conversation with the police commissioner about do we feel that was a forcibly reported crime? Because you can't... See, here's my fear. If you don't have a video and someone of prominence making allegations against you, you should not have to wait for a video to determine you did nothing wrong. He's a former mayor. I think he's irresponsible for a former mayor. And when I heard the report that he was punched in the head and other things, when I heard that, I said, you know, why was someone to sort the former man? Now, what if we didn't have the video? This person would have been accused with a serious crime when all he did was pat the guy on the back. You know, you can't do sensationalism to carry out your own agenda. And you can't use the police to carry out your own agenda. Okay. Monkey pox vaccine. There's a lot of distress about the limited supply the city has. Appointments got booked up immediately. Is there anything you can do to get the CDC get the federal government to bring more vaccine? Do you know if there's any more supply on the way? Yeah, they gave us a thousand. Soon as they gave us a thousand, we issued out a thousand. And so we're now trying to get more here in the city to, you know, give them out. As soon as they give it to us, we're going to give them out. We have a good seamless system in place, but we gave out everyone that they issued us. And it was actually waiting lines, waiting lists to get more. So we want to get more and we're speaking with the CDC to actually do so. Okay. Thank you.


U.S. rallying allies for new China sanctions. The U.S. is coordinating with its close allies to impose new sanctions on China, should it decide to support the Russian campaign in Ukraine according to Reuters. Beijing has rejected claims that it intends to offer military aid to Moscow, and recently unveiled a plan seeking a peaceful settlement to the conflict. Washington is in consultations with foreign partners, namely those from the G7 nations regarding new economic penalties several unnamed U.S. officials told the outlet. They declined to provide details about the potential sanctions, only confirming that discussions are laying the groundwork for potential action. The report follows repeated warnings toward China from the U.S. and other Western nations, which claim Beijing intends to supply weapons to Russian forces for the campaign against Ukraine. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg echoed the charges during a recent interview with the Associated Press saying, we have seen some signs that they may be planning for that, but without offering evidence. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that Washington would not hesitate to target Chinese firms with sanctions in the event that Beijing supplies lethal aid to Moscow, saying the move would carry implications and consequences. Blinken added that he raised the issue with top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi when they met at the Munich Security Conference last month. China has dismissed the charges as groundless speculation, arguing that it does not intend to provide weapons to Russian troops while accusing Washington of hypocrisy. The U.S. has no right to dictate China-Russia relations, and we will never accept coercion and pressure from the U.S. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said. She went on to observe that it is Washington, not Beijing, that has been pouring lethal weapons into the battlefield in Ukraine. While Western nations have long pressured China to sever ties with Russia, accusations towards Beijing have only grown louder since it unveiled a 12-point roadmap for a diplomatic settlement with a conflict in Ukraine last month. Moscow has signaled willingness to carefully analyze the details of the proposal, though U.S. officials quickly rejected the plan, claiming Beijing has adopted Russia's false narrative about the war and is not serious about ending hostilities.


Thank you very much Hans-Selman Hoppe for invitation, it's a great pleasure, I have fun today. It's a great pleasure for me and great honor to speak to you about political correctness, about political correctness in Germany. For that first I will do a very brief definition about what PC is in essence, about the method and goal of PC, and after that I will discuss the German particular features on PC, compared for example with the US, the situation in the US or in Great Britain. So what is political correctness in its shortest possible definition, thus in one word? I think political correctness is language politics, or speech politics. Unless we know that the political class is trying to politicize all areas of our life, the politicization of the economy is advancing in this crisis with breathtaking speed, advancing process. We know the war against terrorism provides an excuse for never seen politicization of security. And despite some setbacks and expectations, the politicization of education, of health, of social security, of almost every area of our private life is an almost continuously advancing process these days. And PC is thus a form of a special type of this politicization process, or it is a deep personalization of our use of language. The most quote about the method and the goal of political correctness, I could found was in an article by Theodor Delrimpel, and Mr. Daniel says that in his study of communist societies he came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate. And therefore, the less it corresponded to reality, the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse, when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all the sense of poverty. I think I forgot to say that Mr. Delrimpel said political correctness is communist propaganda with small. So to send to obvious lies is to cooperate with evil. And in some small way, Mr. Daniel says, is to become evil oneself. And while standing to resist anything is thus eroded and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. Mr. Daniel says about communist propaganda and he adds, if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. Thus the method of PC is the creation of fear of saying what oneself believes to be true. And this fear is created through the possibility of losing one's job, the denouncement and isolation in society, of public humiliation, of getting trashed by political correct sucks, and of the threats of other reprisals. In case of an incorrect choice of word, you have to apologize. You have to apologize again and again, preferably on your knees, and you have to do a particular type of performance of self-criticism. And these two we know from communist societies, Maoist China. As someone may know the Germans, the Germans tend to exaggerate. And this is the case too, I think, with regard to reprisals against politically incorrect. In the beginning of this year, the right-wing extremist, Horst Mahler, who had stolen nothing, not deceived anybody, hit anybody, or attacked anyone in any other ways, was convicted just because of the wrong words and of his wrong thoughts. And because, as a judge said, he was unregenerated and obstinate to six years in jail without peril.  The linguistic areas of operation of PC is a phenomenon in all western countries and interestingly enough only in these western democracies. And they are the same in Germany as they are in these other western democracies. And there are two areas of content, I think. First it is a matter as one says, non-discrimination of perceived minorities, such as women, foreigners, non-bite and non-Christian. And until now true minorities, such as homosexuals or disabled people. And then secondly, a matter of political determination of historical truth. And this concerns particularly everything, of course, to do with the Third Reich. And this point explains why Germany is so important for the PC engineers. And in the US it concerns slavery, the war between the states or in Great Britain, the question of colonial times. But in every case, fear is created through feelings of guilt or rather through a kind of a cult of guilt. And last year Paul Gottfried told us about the religious aspect on this phenomenon. But it is not only a matter of what one says but who says it.  Even if she says something very politically incorrect and conversely a white conservative Christian man, it does not need to see anything very firm and still be attacked with PC. In that case suspicion and assumptions and obvious distortions of quotes are sufficient. In Germany this once happened to a conservative member of parliament, of our federal parliament. And this man made a speech against collective judgment of guilt. And he used the example that many Jews were on the side of the Bolsheviks during the Russian October revolution. And he argued that it would be wrong to derive a collective conviction of all Jews from that fact. And without having said anything politically incorrect directly, the media of course twisted his words and for some weeks he was the anti-Semitic devil of Germany. And years later he won by law against the misrepresentation of these facts. However it was too late for him of course. He lost his job and of course no one reported about this. And I'm sure there are many similar examples in Great Britain and France or in the US. So if content nature and areas of operation of PC are the same in Germany as in the other western democracies, where are the differences? Only in the measures or in the drastic lengths of the jail terms? Concerning this indictable language offences, so-called propaganda offences, or folks for heads or incitement of the people, which are so far unknown in the English speaking part of the world, not only the length of the sentence is shocking. Also the incredible number of criminal procedures is hardly known, even hardly known in Germany. In German courts in the 10 years between 1994 and 2004, there have been 101,310 criminal procedures because of opinion offences, propaganda offences of folks for heads or incitement. And however not the courts are the most important agents of implementing PC, but the media are. And here too there is a particular German feature, because contrary to other countries, most of the, none of the German mainstream media have grown historically. They all were created and chosen and given a public license by the Allied military forces after 1945. And only those who acknowledged the historic interpretation of the victors and had to spread them, usually over-interpretating them, were given this license. And this is possibly the most important reason for the fact that in questions regarding the interpretation of history, there exists no opposing media voice at all in Germany. Perhaps some of you may know the Germans, so yes, they know some Germans are here. And you may know then that the Germans today basically have a psychological problem I have heard of.  But today for sure most Germans are officially convinced that the Germans are the greatest and worst criminals that have ever lived. And above all that the German crimes by far are by far the most terrible and that have ever been committed. And whoever makes the slightest qualifying objection in the face of this somewhat different chauvinism, you can say this perverted form of nationalism, is per definition a Nazi. And thus a modern form of the devil. So believe me it's really impossible today for a German to speak freely, really freely, about any aspect of the Nazi time. Two years ago there was a scandal in Germany involving an up-to-then very popular blonde TV newsreader and talk show host. And she was invited to another talk show and claimed there that speaking restraints in Germany now obviously went so far that no one could not even use the word Autobahn because the Nazis built motorways too. And as the truth of her thesis became evident when she was then thrown out of that same show with the words, you can go now. And other guests in this show hyperventilated and said, Autobahn that's an absolute no-no. This woman had even been active in obligatory anti-fascist organizations and she really only wanted to promote a more conservative Christian image of a family. And she lost her job and has not been seen again in German television since then, not anywhere, although she wrote some bestseller books. So are there any protections against political correctness? I think in the U.S. there at least is a constitution with its unconditional protection of free speech. In Great Britain there may be the specific British humor who may offer a sarcastic protective wall against an all too obvious PC hounding, at least sometimes. In France there may even be more awful political tendencies or laws than in Germany, but in France of course not every stability is implemented into the population down to the last village, the consolation. And in Germany, German humor, sadly next to nothing. In this respect criminal law particularities, media particularities, mental self-hate, and absent specific protection. It is true when we think back on the quote of Mr. Der Rampel, that the Germans themselves became to a certain kind diabolical. And all Germans are quite certainly very limited in their ability to resist all kinds of politicization. And besides this because of the demonized Nazi bogey, the supposedly contrasting democratic politics and thus also the language politics, the PC, are sacrosanct and practically not criticizable. And this is madness because really in the words of my friend Carlos Gebauer who will speak next to me, the lessons from history, the real lesson from history could be after Auschwitz there can be no more politics. But however in closing I want to add something hopeful. Mr. Der Rampel's PC template Communism as it actually existed finally collapsed under the over politicization of all areas of life, as predicted by Mises for the area of economics. And there are some indications I think that Communism also collapsed due to an exaggeration of lies and fear. And then in this area too life became over the years in the true sense of the word unbearable for the people. And if that is true then Germany as the frontier state of PC could be the first country in which political correctness is finally overcome. And indications for this can be found on the relatively free until now discussion forums on the internet. Where for example hundreds of thousands of people, telling me most of them anonymously or under pseudonymic nickname, raised support for this mentioned demonized TV news reader and talk show host in the very contrast to what they were told in the mainstream media. So the methods of PC seem not to have changed the true and secret opinion of the people which used to be obscured by the mass media and which is now on the internet becoming visible for many. So perhaps this PC that will cause a radical counter movement, pressure causes counter pressure. And perhaps this counter movement will grow particularly in Germany. Let us hope then that it will be a counter movement that will be anti-political in other areas as well. Thank you.