So, we are getting started, and we're getting started so that we can be on time. And it's my pleasure, after those wonderful ground-laying talks from this early session, we're going to have shorter talks to get a sense of what is going on around the world. Somebody asked the question about Europe. I think Ricardo asked the question, and Dr. Mückenhaupt from the University of Freiburg is going to talk to us about Europe. Thank you very much for this kind introduction, Mr. Chairman and colleagues. I'm happy to have the chance to talk about this topic today and present you a little bit of the European experience. That lasts, I would say, 25 years, but more for some of my colleagues 30, 40 years back, and I can only just briefly touch some of the issues and not go into too much detail. I thought, I'd start with what were our aims and what were the approaches that we took. The first question that we had in the 1980s and 90s was, what is the incidence, the frequency, demographic data? We started a case registry in Germany on a population-based level that is still in place, and then we also thought we should look at etiology, risk estimation, exposure times, and we performed two case-control studies using the cases of SGS and TNS, one group and healthy controls as the other and compared the exposure to drugs. We had a number of requirements such as the initiation, organization of a network, the definition of clinical entities, a clear diagnosis, what you call phenotypes, a systematic case ascertainment, standardized case validation done independently, still to date, and professional data management and statistical analysis. Now, you've seen these conditions that we were talking about in the various amount of skin detachment, and in the beginning, you do not necessarily know how far this will go. Now, case ascertainment is one of our major issues that I want to point out a little bit more in detail. It's trained investigator, healthcare professional, it can be a pharmacist, a physician, a study nurse, and each national center, because we are now operating on an international level, uses the same standardized questionnaire, the same remote data entry system to enter the data, and the interview is done directly with a patient. So we go and see the patient in the hospital where the patient is treated, and sometimes the patient is so sick, you have to use other sources to get back to the medication history, and sometimes the patient has been transferred several times, so you have to go back and make sure you capture everything completely. Now, after review of the cases, whether they were validated as a possible probable or definite, we came up with these incidence rates that were already mentioned before, and some colleagues were so kind to point out some of our data in the previous talks. We came up with a high mortality, and what we could also see that the more skin is detached and the older the patient is, the higher the mortality is, up to 70% no matter what we do in all these clinical settings. And we could also see with the population-based data that in terms of age, here's a period of seven years, you see these two columns, and they represent the patient's 65 and older, and they have the highest incidence. So that is something we have to consider because we are having more and more older populations in western countries. Now, the case control studies. The first one called SCAR study was mentioned already by Neil Scheer before, and we had a number of publications by two relevant ones like an overall drug risk paper and one on non-drug risk factors, and the other study was called EUROSCAR. They were both done in Europe, but the first one had the database in Boston, and the second one had the database and the data management in Europe as well. And one of the results here was that we definitely could make the difference between erythema-multiforma, which is usually induced by infections, 99.9%, I would say, mainly mycoplasma in children, more herpes in adults, and that can occur repeatedly. So there's a certain way of recurrence, what you usually do not have in SJSTN. That is mainly drug-induced, but not only, and we will come to that later. Now, the achievements we also had were identifying high-risk drugs, and these are the ones that can explain more than 60% of the cases, and they were seen in both studies. And one other thing was important, that we saw a certain timeframe. So it's not the first drug, it's not the repeated use, and sometimes it's confused, re-challenged and re-exposure to a drug. Usually the drug causing SJSTN is used for the first continuous period of time. So that means not the first tablet, but the first clinical or the treatment course, and usually this is one to four weeks as we had heard before. Now, other medications were shown to have a moderate risk, but not as high as the other one, and most important for all these drugs. No risk could be found, could be detected in both case-control studies to induce SJSTN. And this is a number of drugs that even have it in the label, at least in Europe, but we've never seen a case. Now, the early events are very important in the disease, and that was mentioned already before. So the beginning of drug use, let's say about 14 days before the first symptoms, that may be prodromal symptoms like fever, flu-like things for a day or two, and then the diagnosis is made, and then it takes a bit till the patient comes to the hospital, but the disease already takes its course, and then a few days later you have the maximal detachment. This was done on the validated euros car cases. Now, most often you have things like that. This is the medication history of a patient, and especially in those 30 or 35% of the patients who developed the disease during hospitalization for other conditions. And even if you mark here your index-day line and you certainly do not consider a drug once taken here, a long time before to be culprit, it's difficult. And we heard already about Alden that was developed in Europe, and that algorithm can help taking into account the relevant exposure times, the recent start of a drug, the notoriety, all based on these study results. Now, somebody, I think Elizabeth Phillips already mentioned the problem of protopathic bias in TN, and that's a huge problem because it causes a lot of lawsuits, especially in the United States, because a lot of people think there must be a drug. So if someone has taken for the first symptoms one of these medications, whether it has been tolerated before or not, whether it's the first time of use, there was a drug, that must be the cause. And we think this is an important error because very often this is not. Now, these are the typical examples to cure or to work against fever or secretolytics, and they cannot be blamed in our opinion from the data we have if they have been tolerated multiple times before, if they were taken very shortly before the first objective sign to treat the protromos. Now, there's some critical thoughts also because I mentioned that not all of the cases are drug-induced. In the two case control studies, we could see that about 55% of the patients had taken a highly suspected drug, that of the first list I showed with a high risk. Another 10% were added with patients that had a suspected drug, plus highly suspected. So 65% could be clearly explained by drugs. Now, we looked at the current study, the registrar study, and we applied the Alden algorithm to all of the cases because this is not a case control study anymore. And we could see that in 68% of the cases, we had a probable or very probable drug course. We had almost 20% of possible courses, but the others were unlikely or no drug at all. Now, based on those data, we could say about 68, 65, close to 70% are certainly drug-induced. But what about these other 30 or more percent of the cases where we cannot identify a drug? Some may be drug-induced, there's possible ones, others are certainly not. So we have a potential, but up to 30, 32% of the cases are often called idiopathic, meaning we do not know what it is. We have heard that there have been other courses identified, but they are very few. We know about acute GVHD, we know a few cases with microplasma, but microplasma usually is the cause in erythema multiforma. I've only seen very few cases with TN and microplasma, or other overdose issues. But what we see is infectious condition, all types of viruses, many of them are perhaps not tested at the right time or cannot be tested at all. And so there is a lot of work to do, and I think it's probably also genetically mediated. I just wanna briefly point out some pathomechanism work and outcome work we've done. We heard a lot about the HLA studies, and somebody asked before, was there anything done in Europe? Yes, we did more than just carbamazepine and allopurinol. We looked for the HLA types of all high-risk drugs, but there was no clear sign. The clearest we had with the Europeans in 55% positive for the HLA allele for allopurinol. We also did a print, a genome-wide association study, together with a research center in France, and here you see what we found the threshold for the chromosome six. And for the specialists of you, I don't want to go into detail with that. Now, one point I would like to mention is the cohort study. Our aim was, in the beginning of Registrar, to have at least 300 patients to follow for more than a year. And this is the data, those who consented to be part of the cohort, but you see a high number of deaths here, especially after a longer period of time. And when we looked at outcome and severity, we could see that the death rate is, of course, higher in those patients who had the more severe disease compared to the overlap and SJS. What was more striking was that the death rate increased in the time period up to a year, so from six weeks in the acute phase of the disease to one year. And we wondered why is that? And the acute phase we know is the amount of skin detachment severity. But in later stages, obviously underlying conditions are leading to death that perhaps may not have occurred without the reaction. Now, the follow-up data then, we had 170 patients to look at, acute stage a few weeks later, and I just want to point out the ocular sequelae, because they are really a problem. More than 70% of the patients were suffering from that. And here you see the problem that is difficult even in surgical terms. And if you ask the patient in terms of impact of sequelae on daily life, you see the eyes have a serious impact in that. So we are now in the state of analyzing a five-year follow-up questionnaire on these patients. And my last thing I would like to point out is the treatment because we were discussing that before. You see again this curve and we saw when is the treatment usually administered? When the disease is already kind of full blown, rather late, and you wonder why should it help? And we doubt that. And in the observational study we did, we could see somewhat a little bit of a beneficial effect for steroids and not the same in contrast for IVIG. So we did a systematic review now that was just published as an abstract and it's based on the Cochrane rules and we try to look what is published and do this analysis. Now to summarize, I think we have the word largest database with at least validated cases of SCAR in all these topics. There's a comprised knowledge and large expertise in Europe in different fields because there's experts in clinical setting and treatment, pharmacovigilance and pharmacogenetics. And I think besides some new findings, we were able to elucidate and exclude some of the old errors and hopefully can avoid them in the future. And I thank you for your attention. Thank you very much. Your talk generated lots of questions. I'm sure amongst a lot of people we have just a few minutes for questions. Yes. Mark Williams, guys here, just very quickly. How much suicide was there that accounted for late mortality? Pardon? Suicide, accounting for late mortality in the group? We have not observed that, I have to say. Maybe for some patients, we are not 100% sure. But there was no clear suicide that we are aware of, at least not in Germany and in France. Next question. Could you tell me what percentage of the cohort is pediatric defined as under 18? And could you elaborate on the delayed tooth growth that you showed flash by on one of the slides? Yeah. Please. Fortunately, the percentage of children is lower than that of adults. So under 18, maybe 25%. And the tooth growth was observed in two or three children. We had not been expecting that. And talking to specialists in the field, we assume that it's due to kind of a breakdown of the mucus glands of the mucosa. So the saliva is different. And that has an effect on that. Similar as it is sometimes with epidermal lusus pulosa. And could I ask, what, do you have any idea of how many people you missed? In other words, this is not necessarily reportable disease. So in terms of coming to prevalence. Yeah. How do you know what your catchment is? Yeah, that's a good point. Actually, for the incidence or prevalence data, we just used the data from Germany. And we compared them with a certain area of France around Paris, Île-de-France, where we think we capture all cases. In Germany, we have a system in place that we have contact to all the departments that are able to treat these patients, including pediatrics, burn units, and so forth. And we contact them on a regular basis to make sure we haven't missed anything. So this is like every three months. They get a letter and then we check after one year if those departments that are most likely to treat the patient, so intensive care, burn, and so forth, and dermatology, that we give them a call. And we kind of do that on a regular basis, which does not mean we do not miss anyone, but one thing is for sure that these people are all hospitalized. Thank you. Thank you very much. And there was a recent paper, I think, in November from Canada, sort of poo-pooing the idea of IVIG in favor of cyclosporine. How good it was, it was not a big paper, but there was a lot of enthusiasm at first because of that science paper. But I think some of that enthusiasm has been lost with regard to the IVIG. Thank you very, very much. Our next speaker is Dr. Hung, who is Associate Professor at the Institute of Department of Pharmacology at the National Yangming University. Also in Taiwan.


Hello, hello, friends. This is a story from the Quinault people. A long time ago, in the time of the animal people, this land that is now the northwest was flat, green, and beautiful. There were no mountains, no lakes, no beautiful sounds, just flat land and the ocean. But the land was covered with flowers and trees. It was a time of joy and plenty, and all the animals were happy. But God became angry at the animal people for some reason and sent a great drought upon the land. For days and days, weeks and weeks, months and months, there was no rain and the sun was showing down fiercely. The land grew dry, the flowers and trees began to die, and the animals were thirsty. In the land to the east, the animals held a great council to see what they could do. For days and days, they talked and argued. At last Bear said, let us ask the ocean to help us, and they all agreed. So they sent Coyote as their messenger to the ocean. Coyote walked and walked. Until at last, he came to the ocean. Coyote spoke to the ocean. Ocean, ocean he said, hear me for we are in need. Ocean heard him and answered.  Coyote told him of their troubles, and Ocean said, I will send my sons and daughters in a form of clouds to help you, but you must not harm them. Coyote said they would not be harmed, and he returned to his people. When Coyote got home and told the animals what Ocean had said, they were all very happy. Soon great clouds began to rise from the ocean and drift over the land. These were the sons and daughters of the ocean who were giving rain to the land as they drifted eastward. Soon everything was green and beautiful again, but trouble began among the animals. Crow said, let us dig great holes and keep this water for ourselves. No, said Bear, Ocean will always help us if we do not harm his sons and daughters. I don't trust anyone, said Crow. So they argued and argued. Bear and Coyote against all the other animals. Bear and Coyote lost, and soon the animals began to dig great holes to catch the water. These became the lakes of Shilan, Ponderay, Coeur d'Alene, and others in the Spokane area. Ocean waited and waited for his sons and daughters to return, but only a few returned. At last Coyote came and told Ocean what had happened. Because his promise to Ocean had been broken, Coyote was ashamed and sneaked back to his people. Ocean was angry, and lashed, and snarled, and roared. Finally Ocean spoke to the great God, Weneekwene, and told him what had happened. God listened and said, these animal people must be punished. So the great hand of God came down from the sky and scooped up the earth. He spread the earth across the land from north to south. This became the Cascade Mountains. Some of the earth fell between his thumb and first finger, and became the Olympic Mountains. The whole left way had scooped up the earth, was filled by water from the ocean, and became Puget Sound. The mountains formed a barrier across the country, and from that time on very few clouds could visit the east, and the land grew dry and barren. Forests disappeared, and the animals suffered. In shame for what the animal people had done, bear took to hiding most of the year, while Coyote sings his sorrow to his friend, the moon. The land west of the Cascades has remained much as it was before, green and beautiful. But even today, ocean is still waiting for his sons and daughters to return. We still hear him say, Tra-ra-ra, Tra-ra-ra, Tra-ra-ra.


Meanwhile, the House of Representatives has received the report of its Committee on Finance on the medium-term expenditure framework and fiscal strategy paper for 2022-2024. The MTEF slash FSPE is a template on which the annual budget preparation is based. The document submitted to the National Assembly in July was referred to the House Committee on Finance to interrogate and make recommendation to the House before the 2022 budget is presented by the President. The Committee Chairman James Falake submitted the report to the House at Wednesday's plenary.


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Thank you. And welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar. My name is Crystal Thomas and I'm the Digital Archivist at Florida State University and I'm currently the Chair of the Project Manager's Group Steering Committee. And we're excited today to be hosting Galen Haynes for a presentation about the Smithsonian Transcription Center's Agile Approach to Program and Community Management. This webinar is a part of our series on skill sharing and virtual learning experiences that we started running last year because of the pandemic. Just a little housekeeping before we get started. If you have any questions during the presentation, please type them into the Zoom chat and we will bring them up at the end of Caitlin's presentation. I would also like to let everyone know that this webinar will be recorded and uploaded to the DLF YouTube channel afterwards. So without much further ado, I will introduce Caitlin very quickly. Galen Haynes is the Program Coordinator for the Smithsonian Transcription Center where she collaborates with staff around the Smithsonian and worldwide digital volunteers to improve accessibility to the Smithsonian's digitized historic collections. And with that, Caitlin, it's over to you. Hi everybody. Thank you all so much for coming today. And thank you to Crystal and Anu and Gail and everyone who helped coordinate this webinar today and who helps to manage this amazing Project Manager's Working Group. This is so exciting. I am very passionate about Transcription Center and about collaboration and communication. So anytime we get the opportunity to talk about what we're doing and sort of the lessons we've learned while in communication with others in our field so that we can brainstorm how to make that even better is an exciting opportunity that we usually jump at. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen because I do have a few little slides here. So before I kind of dive into the background of Transcription Center and what we do here. In the Smithsonian, I did want to kind of qualify here, clarify and qualify everything and say that I am not a professional Project Manager. I am an Archivist by Training. I have a graduate degree in United States History and Library Science. And I have sort of grown in different ways professionally in various positions in the cultural heritage field and inside the Smithsonian as well. I've been in this position since 2018 here at the Transcription Center. And I don't have any professional Project Manager or program management certification. And the success of Transcription Center which is a long-standing program is largely due to the sort of diverse kinds of different people inside and outside the institution that helped to make it all possible. And a lot of the work that we're doing right now with agile program management was literally sort of started and developed just a few weeks ago which is really exciting. This is really perfectly timed. And everything that we do even though Transcription Center is eight years old is always sort of still in flux. I think that's sort of the nature of programs in the cultural heritage field regardless. I'm sure I hope a lot of you can relate to that or I hope not. You guys can relate to that that you know we're still sort of always figuring things out always learning and then of course the resources and staff and time capacity are sometimes always changing. So this is sort of just meant sort of the ways that we've approached things the sort of challenges and maybe even failures that we've faced in the History of Transcription Center and the ways in which we're trying to do things a little bit differently now. All right so with that I want to go into a little bit of background about the Transcription Center in general. Since I'm not sure how familiar everybody is with TC. Oh this is my beautiful blurry pictures. Sorry guys. So what is the Transcription Center? So created in 2013 the Transcription Center is the institution's largest digital volunteering and crowdsourcing platform. It was developed inside the Smithsonian's Office of the Chief Information Officer which is our OCIO, our IT unit. It is just a website freely available 24 hours a day 365 days a year that connects curious learners everywhere with digitized content from across the Smithsonian's museum departments, libraries and archives and invites digital volunteers in helping us make those materials more searchable, readable and accessible through collaborative transcription and review. Over the past eight years Transcription Center has grown exponentially. So together alongside more than 52,000 digital volunteers to date we've transcribed and reviewed over 800,000 pages of historical materials including diaries, scientific specimen labels, letters, memorabilia, scrapbooks and more from 19 of our different Smithsonian units. In 2019 we became the first federal crowdsourcing project to launch transcription of archival audio recordings and since then our volunteers have captioned more than 200 hours of these collections. We've also transcribed materials in more than 26 different languages. Anonymous users can transcribe on the Transcription Center anything that they would like without registering but registered users which we do require that our registered users be 14 years of age or older are able to transcribe, review other users' work and track their volunteer activity. Unlike other on-site volunteer programs here at the Smithsonian our digital volunteers can participate as much or as little as they'd like with no minimum work requirement on our end and no particular skill set or past experience required to join. Our volunteers rage in age, background and interest and include high school and college students, educators, retired and active librarians, history enthusiasts, scientists, corporations, everything in between. We do know that we have participation from over 150 different universities, colleges and high schools around the world and then like I said we also have participation internally from our user community of colleagues across the institution from those 19 different Smithsonian units and what I mean by that is of course those different departments within all of the various museums across the institution. Our internal transcription center team so the people that are actually working day to day full-time on the transcription center to help and communicate and in with and engage all of these different user communities inside and outside the institution help with technical development and project and program management is of course myself as the program coordinator and then we also have a community coordinator who's full-time and a technical lead developer so three full-time staff members. Transcription center activity ensures that our Smithsonian collections as I said are not only more easily discovered and accessed but it also provides our diverse and dispersed user communities the opportunity to engage with historical content on a personal level which leads to new discoveries and connections. Thanks to our digital volunteers Smithsonian curators have been able to locate specific information to include in exhibits individuals researching their family history including our very own Smithsonian secretary Lottie Bunch have been able to locate specific ancestors in the historical record and archival collection staff have been able to make connections between our records throughout the Smithsonian and with external museums and throughout all of this our volunteers and researchers worldwide have been very communicative about the ways in which participation and transcription center has impacted their lives which of course means the world to us and I think even one of these comments makes all of the work that we do important and meaningful and worth it but of course what I really want to focus on today and I'm sure why all of you actually joined is the ways in which our team has really developed maintained and grown our user communities both inside and outside the Smithsonian and how our approach and strategies for community and overall program and project management has adapted to some of the major changes that we've seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. So what do we do in the very beginning of transcription center in the two in 2013 I'm going to go all the way back. So the development of transcription center inside the office of the chief information officer provided us with a number of sort of strengths and opportunities so the primary focus in the beginning of transcription center was on technical development and support which we know puts us in kind of a unique position because not all crowdsourcing projects or cultural heritage projects have kind of continuous ongoing technical support so that's always been really amazing and a really incredible strength I think of transcription center and because of that because that was integrated from the very beginning it meant that the development of our platform was really seamlessly integrated with a lot of our internal and homegrown Smithsonian databases and content management systems that our archivists and museum collection staff were working with across the institution so it meant that we could easily sort of import that material that digitize content in different ways and it also meant that we can more automatically and seamlessly export those completed transcriptions into our databases to ensure their searchability and accessibility in a way that didn't require any sort of manual labor on the part of the transcriptions in our team or our archivist librarians or museum staff so awesome excellent all the way but because the focus rightly so being in OCIO was primarily on this technical development and support we didn't necessarily from the very beginning prior equally prioritize or kind of estimate appropriately the need for a community management aspect of transcription center this was there wasn't an element in a component of community management that was built into the initial development of the transcription center it was always meant to be a program centered around public engagement but it was also a pilot project in 2013 to see if and even how this would work within the Smithsonian there wasn't a precedent within our institution to inform best practices or provide information about how the public would engage or wouldn't engage and there was sort of a larger kind of guess that yeah okay we need a community manager I think to engage our internal users but in terms of an external community we're going to build this thing we're going to see how it goes and we're going to hope that they're going to come because it's the Smithsonian so we built it and they did come early participation and engagement and sign up on the transcription center site was really high but it was largely based on the novelty and excitement around the Smithsonian brand at large the question of how to keep users engaged and sustain persistent participation and really build a community of public users and volunteers was a little bit more challenging so in 2014 the team brought on our first dedicated project coordinator so one of my predecessors um Megan Ferreter who is of course at the Library of Congress now and she's incredible and transcription center owes a lot of its success to her um so she was tasked specifically with handling this sort of internal and external community management and engagement but in the beginning as I said things were relatively separated in terms of technical development on one side and community engagement and management on the other um Megan quickly realized that volunteers volunteers were transcribing pretty quickly on the site but that interest was declining since the launch of the transcription center and that most users were not completing the necessary second step of the transcription process which is volunteer review so to solve this she continued and increased a sort of combination of everyday and continuous communications and outreach including the creation of a monthly e-newsletter, social media channels, last of information across social media our website and in the newsletters about new projects, staff highlights, volunteer highlights, collection spotlights, etc. blog posts across the institution and then a pre-recorded and live virtual engagements with other Smithsonian staff. She also began working with colleagues across the institution to craft more structured experiences targeted campaigns that dove deeper into particular topics or projects to keep our community members engaged and interested in the kinds of material that we were launching on the transcription center. She's also the one that coined the phrase volunteer as a way to more accurately capture the role of our participants many of you have seen that hashtag on social media that we use to more accurately capture that role as equals and peers in our initiative rather than simple public participants helping us out because our volunteers really are the ones that are helping us learn just as much if not more than we are getting from them in transcribing these collections. This combined approach that she created that we've continued in transcription center up until this day of sort of combining structured outreach efforts and everyday engagement practices that were consistent and constant offered the increasingly diverse community that we were getting of digital volunteers multiple ways to dive into our Smithsonian collections ensuring that we had this continued public interest and participation even as users cycled in and out which is a just the nature of a crowdsourcing activity. Equally important we found was the various avenues of communications between volunteers and our Smithsonian staff so communication with our volunteers we realized really early on was critical to the success of our program not only to gather inform encourage and support participants but to also help us troubleshoot issues on the platform answer transcription questions and acknowledge the importance and impact of volunteer work also of course a key component of that is soliciting feedback from our participants being open and willing to listen to what they have to say about how things are working or maybe not working to improve and inform our own evolving workflows and projects from the simplest change the most complex technical developments the volunteers had to be involved and continue to need to be involved on every level of this because they are the major ones being impacted and their use and experience of course significantly impacts the success of our program overall so like I said in the beginning this is all going really well everybody's doing a great job there's a lot of strengths to it developing an OCIO and they're being a strong focus on technical development and ongoing support and then of course our community manager our first coordinator did a really good job of creating different kinds of strategies and engagement opportunities to sort of craft this and grow and develop and support this new program but that technical aspect and that community management aspect remained relatively separated our community though itself the growth of it remained relatively steady and while large with still for the most part manageable a manageable number and again that growth was steady so it was okay for us to sort of continue to do things in a somewhat separate way from technical and community perspectives but done done done then we face 2020 and and throughout all of this work let me just back up for a second and we did have of course some sort of continuous and consistent sort of challenges and priorities and messaging that we have always maintained throughout the transcription center pre and post pandemic that of course the primary strengths of our program arise from the pen institutional nature of the program and our dedicated communities that our digital volunteers are essential to the mission of the Smithsonian and that they deserve diverse consistent and clear communication engagement but this larger challenge of course that the community itself is ever evolving and continuously growing and that our resources just like any other cultural heritage project and program are limited so then we get into 2020 um all right so like many other digital platforms and crowdsourcing projects transcription center saw a massive uptick in participation engagement during the pandemic between March of 2020 and March of 2021 the number of registered digital volunteers on our site increased from 14,000 a little bit over 14,000 to over 51,000 with participants transcribing and reviewing an astounding an astounding 5,000 pages a month if not more um demand for new projects and content as well as engagement opportunities also of course increased um with Smithsonian staff working together to ensure that new material was being imported and I'm going to have to apologize I don't know if you guys can hear that but it is really storming outside and it is loudly thundering so apologies if you guys can hear the storm um this high level of engagement and attention on the transcription center um primarily stemmed from the fact that we were one of the only digital volunteering platforms here at the Smithsonian and we are the only digital volunteering platform here at the Smithsonian that allows such flexible participation um because of this though sort of all this attention these new users as you can see this giant spike and our numbers continue to grow um this fiscal year um did result in an increased awareness of our program of course not only externally but also within our own institution so media spotlights um public inquiries directed across the Smithsonian about the transcription center and new requests from corporate partners and donors to our institution's central advancement offices um opened up a lot of new opportunities for our team to collaborate with colleagues and participants that we hadn't necessarily been in communication with before we also saw a significant change in the makeup of our volunteer community so prior to the pandemic transcription center is most active and communicative digital volunteers were what we largely classified as self-motivated participants so these were primarily individuals between the ages of 25 and 65 who chose to participate on their own or seek out on their own the transcription center as a way to gain knowledge give back and directly engage with the Smithsonian and our historic collections many of these individuals had an interest or background in history or science or the cultural heritage field some of them were even professional proofreaders amazing um an engagement from sort of more specific or kind of groups of people um like students and educators and even corporate employees um did exist um but occurred on a relatively rare basis almost immediately at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic though transcription center began to see an extremely high increase in inquiries and participation from both of these new groups students and corporations um I mean sort of groups of individuals participating as a team as part of a course as part of an activity um with their organization etc um seeking opportunities to volunteer safely while at homes we saw a huge uptick in those kinds of participants um with such a high uptick in participation and interest of course our small team which at the time was just myself and our technical lead we did not have a second community coordinator at this time um meant that we were getting quickly overwhelmed as you can imagine with um getting almost uh over 30 000 new digital volunteers in just um a few months um we got pretty overwhelmed and it became really apparent that our previous sort of modes of program management or really lack thereof because we were basically doing things on our own individually um was really inadequate it really spotlighted for us the kind of problems um and gaps in our current processes and amplified existing issues and challenges that we had so it really highlighted the need for more strategic planning and strategic program management um and also of course highlighted the need for um um resources as well to improve collaboration and communication within our own team and of course with our various user communities in short it forced us to prioritize and strategize um as the sole community and program coordinator at the transcription center at the time I was faced with as you can imagine thousands of emails and new volunteers um and so I sort of took a step back and worked um to strategically seek out resources and help from various colleagues around the institution so I called upon fellow volunteer coordinators and museum educators to help me draft new guidelines and information for students who were seeking forms for proof of volunteer service which was a huge huge need um when students could not volunteer in other ways um I called upon our participating Smithsonian units in the transcription center to of course step in and identify additional available content to transcribe and also help me answer all of these public inquiries um and then of course I also kind of took advantage of these new opportunities for collaboration and worked with our office of public affairs in the central Smithsonian and our central office of advancement um with press coverage social media engagement and the development of new virtual engagements for students and corporate partners um I also of course had to start working even more closely and communicatively with is that a word communicatively with our technical development team our technical lead um to ensure that our site could handle this huge increase in traffic that we were seeing and brainstorm additional functionality and troubleshooting to improve our user experience and sort of answer new platform issues questions challenges that we were seeing and that our volunteers were bringing to us these collaborations not only helped in the immediate sense of improving our overall team communications and just like making my life a little bit easier but also opened up new avenues for solving some of our biggest challenges um meaning resources and staff capacity because of the new kind of attention and awareness of transcription center around the institution primarily in our central office of advancement we were able to push leadership here in OCIO and across the institution to dedicate more resources to the transcription center and we were able to hire our new team member um Emily Kane our community coordinator who I believe is also in this call um in November of 2020 to assist with the management of our ever-growing community of volunteers we've also worked with our advancement teams to develop corporate engagement opportunities specific to the transcription center that have resulted in new funding to support transcription center initiatives so things like virtual transcribathons um with corporate members um as well as sort of content experts sharing information about our collections on a deeper more personal level we've also of course engaged in more virtual transcribathons like you see here on the screen with students high school and college around the country and the world um we hosted transcribathons pre-pandemic but primarily in person and so that of course limited things to schools in our surrounding DC area by doing them online we're able to not only welcome more people um but have them with a wider um array of our volunteers um and in a way that fits all of our schedules a little bit better we've also found the virtual transcribathons just work better because we can share screens and really kind of get into the documents together in a way where we're not running around the room and trying to like make everybody pay attention to somebody else's computer um so it actually works really well um most recently though literally in the past few weeks we've been able to take a step back and reassess everything about the way that we were approaching program and management in the transcription center um now that we have a new team member and um more support and resources we were able to take a step back and have an actual strategic planning week to address our overall program management our team roles and responsibilities and our goals and priorities um all of this work um and development helped reaffirm the transcription center's overall mission and allowed us to see the true benefit of collaborative and iterative agile project management so before 2020 as I said the community engagement and management aspects of our program and technical development and management of our program were largely separate so we had sort of all of this ongoing work kind of going on on the day-to-day basis and with larger kind of goals and campaigns and initiatives on the community engagement sign and then our technical work was largely structured as kind of one-off tasks and sort of or one-week sprints and more of like a waterfall project management approach and the two didn't necessarily always meet um it was difficult for us to kind of keep track of each other's progress align goals and priorities and hold each other accountable and hold ourselves accountable for what we were really getting done um other some initiatives kind of dragged on with no real ability for our team to follow through now however after bringing together our internal team just the three of us again we've been able to establish new um processes and workflows that prioritize and organize program initiatives and equitably divide up team responsibilities to address our community needs and capitalize on new opportunities um sort of more efficiently and appropriately when they arise so we're now um sort of focusing and tracking all of our programs and tasks under larger ongoing and upcoming campaigns and initiatives that allow for us to sort of adapt as our ever-evolving community changes while still incorporating new feedback and ideas um so one of the ways that we do this is of course to sort of come up with our larger initiatives campaigns and priorities and then group the technical tasks and the community engagement and management tasks that relate to those things under under that larger project or goal or whatever it may be um and then we can more efficiently and effectively track that work inform each other's decisions provide feedback on each other's work and progress and then also of course incorporate those back community feedback that's so essential to actually making our develop technical development and functionality better we also meet weekly with our larger um OCIO team and with just the three of us to go over our weekly status reports track campaign and initiative progress adjust timelines and tasks and check in on our successes and challenges we've also begun documenting and tracking our work collaboratively through platforms like air table and JIRA that create and share content and allow us to capture those new ideas and comment on each other's work this also ensures that we can more easily maintain not only consistent and transparent communication with each other which was definitely needed and we've improved because of it but also with our internal and external communities because we can more easily pull updates information stats and content for the reports that we um put out monthly to our internal user communities and then also that we can use for social media blasts and campaigns for e-newsletters and for website content like blogs etc um so one example of this without completely pulling back the curtain and letting you guys see every little aspect of our dirty laundry here at the transcription center is that one of the biggest things that we noticed with these sort of massive changes to our user community here in the transcription center was that we were getting a lot of direct feedback from users about um sort of confusion with our process and questions about instructions and then we also were beginning to see an uptick in errors and in the accuracy of completed transcriptions because again a lot of the new users we were seeing were high school students or individuals just participating for one event like a corporate engagement transcript was on um that's not to say that these students or these corporate partners were not um super motivated and engaged and dedicated to the work but transcribing 19th century and 18th century handwriting is hard even for those of us who've been doing it for a long time so we started to notice um an uptick in errors and also you know just sort of those little difficulties in navigating this site or getting overwhelmed with instructions were kind of amplified with all of these new users coming on so we decided that this was a problem obviously um that would best be solved not only by making um this idea of addressing new user needs and challenges its own initiative um and prioritizing it in our workflow but also dividing up what are the individual tasks that we need to do that um kind of bring together both the technical and community engagement perspective so this is something that's ongoing right now we're still working on this we've completed some of these tasks we have in others but we have them sketched out in timelines that we can shift as needed um based on feedback from volunteers and testing that we're doing so we are looking at the user experience um that our users are having we are working with um some of our internal units here in the Smithsonian to conduct a volunteer survey that we'll be putting out hopefully in the next few months um we have developed sort of ways to do targeted outreach and engagement a lot of which has been informed by new technical functionality that our lead developer came up with to sort of make us we get um a little message internally in transcription center if participants are completing pages like really really really really quickly um and that way um our community coordinator can sort of directly reach out to users and say like hey is everything going okay um you just reviewed a thousand pages in an hour um and sort of checking in with users more directly um we've also come up with a number of different ways to engage our users in person uh so by launching new virtual engagements like our online office hours which we launched a few months ago and we have those each month um new kinds of collections deep dives and webinars that we've been hosting um we've been sketching out what uh new web content revising our instructions and our processes a lot of which again has been informed by um our internal community who has been continuously providing feedback as well as sort of drawing upon the strengths of some of our longest serving volunteers um and uh who are open and willing to communicate with us um and sort of test things out for us to say like oh like yeah I'd love to read through these new instructions and tell you if they're terrible or wonderful um and they don't hold back which is actually perfect and super super appreciated um in how we are able to actually develop and implement things so this is just one example of how we're sort of grouping this stuff together in a way that we weren't before and we are really kind of sketching that out again in Airtable and Onjira and um sort of making sure that things are on a timeline but are also iterative enough and flexible enough that we can incorporate user feedback when it comes through because oftentimes that is really what is um leading us to the most success in developing these new fill-in-the-blank instructions content engagements etc and so overall we've learned a lot of lessons um some that we knew before the pandemic and of course some that have been more intensely reaffirmed and then of course new lessons with all of these drastic changes that have come about um the first one and I say this a lot and I mean it is that the crowd is in control and that's really a good thing um that if you don't kind of allow I think every successful program the biggest thing that I've learned period is that every successful program needs to have goals it needs to have expectations it needs to have priorities but your goals and your expectations and your priorities and your strategies cannot be so cemented that you don't allow yourself to be flexible and sort of take in the feedback and information that your crowd whatever that may be whether it's your internal community your external community or both is providing you and being aware that they're going to be changing all the time especially in our in our sense our community is changing all the time and if we sort of don't allow ourselves to be flexible to be adaptable and to kind of shift um in response to those changes we might miss out on some really incredible opportunities like corporate engagement that leads to more funding and resources for transcription center um we've also realized of course that success period in anything that we're doing from the smallest task to the largest initiative is not possible without communication collaboration and consistency and I mean that across the board um so I think that pre-pandemic we were really good about communicating with our internal units and with our volunteers but we weren't so great communicating with each other and by kind of taking a step back to reassess that and to refocus efforts um on doing that we have only gotten better um we've also learned of course that um there's a huge difference between maintenance and growth obviously um and you know making sure that we're targeting the right audiences and not necessarily just building a larger one we're really excited about this large community that we have built and that is continuing to rapidly grow but that doesn't necessarily mean that we want to keep growing growing growing growing growing what are we learning from these new sets of users that are coming into the transcription center what are we gaining what are they gaining from this experience and what are the different ways that we can sort of take that information to develop our program further um you know do we want to sort of focus on an aspect of volunteers who we don't see as much in the transcription center that we want to um or do we want to kind of focus attention on a new community group um that is kind of ballooning um that maybe seems to be having more trouble and really being able to take a step back and kind of strategically assess that has really really served us well in this year so um that is my sort of speed review of how we have changed transcription center um in response to some of the massive and drastic changes that we've seen in the past year and how we're sort of still learning um to kind of go with the flow and adapt as needed um to the needs and um evolving nature of our communities so I wanted to make sure okay good um that we still had a ton of time for questions so I will hand everything back um to you Crystal. Thank you so much Caitlin that was so interesting and I'm hopeful that lots of people have questions um so as we uh noted when we got started you can type your questions right into the chat um or I believe yep gals put the message out you can just unmute yourself and ask your question directly to Kate and while people are thinking oh is there someone? No pressure guys you can also reach out to us anytime um this email transcribe at si.edu come straight to me and our community coordinator Emily um so please don't hesitate to reach out we're always happy to share sort of more about the nuts and bolts of any aspect of transcription center um so yeah please don't be afraid. I have a question that maybe we'll get people going or give people time to think um you said something in the beginning that I think really resonates with lots of people that get involved with the project managers group and that is that we don't have training at being project or product managers that's often just something we get thrown into um as part of our jobs so a question I had for you because we get asked this a lot is how did you go about educating yourself and figuring out what pieces are are useful to you what what type of style is useful um to you and uh yeah let's start there absolutely um yeah I mean that's something that we've struggled with obviously and I think a lot of my own personal kind of challenge with all of this um is just finding the time even to stop for a second you know you're sort of I always say like I'm keeping so many burning plates in the air that I don't have time to like even breathe um or get any sort of training or educate myself on anything else and but I think one thing that is um unique about our situation is that we do work really closely with um uh the contracting company that um employees a lot of our staff a lot of our team and our technical developers here in the Smithsonian and and unlike us in the cultural heritage field a lot of them are professional project managers and program managers and um so as we've been able to finally take the time to step back um our internal three person team has really taken advantage of that and gone to some of these co-workers inside and outside the Smithsonian and been like show us how you do what you do and like can we brainstorm some strategies and you know how do we learn what any of this is and so it's really to the credit of a lot of those individuals who sort of laid out for us like hey you know what isn't useful um approaching community management as like waterfall project management and doing like one-off tasks like that's not useful maybe you guys should think about just like ongoing like iterative approach to your work and we were like oh my god wait what and so as soon as you know we were sort of dropped that kind of lovely idea um that's when myself and my colleague Emily were really able to um just honestly spend a massive amount of time googling and watching like LinkedIn learning and YouTube courses on what kinds of platforms are available to help you document these kinds of workflows and what sorts of workflows do work best for agile project management and how can we track this stuff better and then getting together as an internal team to brainstorm these ideas and these things that we're learning and figuring out what is actually going to work the best for our team um and not only from like the actual implementation standpoint but actually for like what's realistic you know like I think we all get excited about documentation and platforms and um how we're gonna like make everything work with a new workflow but then you actually get into it and you're like I actually don't have time to be like putting this into a new spreadsheet every day um so really sort of figuring that out together and that's where I feel really strongly that like meetings are not a bad thing we all have zoom fatigue um and we're all exhausted and there's never enough hours in the day and I know particularly in the cultural heritage field where I'll ask to do 15 different jobs um and it can be exhausting and we can burn out um and I think because of that we have the tendency to be like no we're not going to schedule another meeting but I think it's not about scheduling more meetings it's about scheduling the right meetings and it's about being strategic about what those meetings are and setting agendas and setting a goal for those meetings and so we found that actually communicating more often and meeting on a more consistent basis as an internal team has really really helped us to not only educate ourselves on what some of these strategies are when it comes to program and project management but to also actually do the work of implementing them and making it happen and making sure that at every step of this process we're checking in with each other um to make sure that we're dividing this work up equitably that we're hearing each other's thoughts and opinions that we're incorporating all of our feedback and our community's feedback um and that we're prioritizing the right kinds of work in the right kinds of ways instead of just trying to do everything that helps a little bit it sounds like all good things we do have a question in the chat um what do you think will change as we all emerge from the pandemic and the work personal situations involved for example do you think you will still have such large numbers of participants in the future yeah that's a great question and it's one thing that we've been talking a lot about internally not only in the transcriptions on our team but across the Smithsonian and we have already started to see our numbers I don't want to say decline but not be as massive every day or every week or every month um our numbers are still increasing every day and every week and every month but you know we're having like a couple hundred new volunteers a week instead of a couple thousand um so we're already starting to see a little bit of a shift I think part of that though is the season so students are not necessarily in class right now um and people are taking time off for holidays um I think overall though the feedback that we have gotten directly from volunteers and from our internal colleagues across the institution primarily our advancement teams who are still getting requests from corporations to do virtual engagements is that you know even if everything tomorrow turns completely back to the way it was pre-pandemic people are still interested in doing this you know they've realized oh I didn't know that was a thing or I knew that was a thing but I didn't know it could work so well or be so enjoyable and so we're still getting these kinds of requests on an individual basis and on like larger organization basis um and I think that that's been really useful for us to see we feel the same way though too like you know we originally thought like when we transitioned to virtual transcribathons that as soon as this was over we would go back to in-person transcribathons and I can tell you right now I don't necessarily see that that's useful um because with a virtual transcribathon you know we can have 400 people on a zoom call and it's not something we have to figure out the space for um or rearrange chairs and we can engage with the materials in a more intimate um kind of close looking way than we were able to in person so I I think that we're gonna see not necessarily the same spike but I do believe that we're gonna see continued engagement and participation and interest. Great um the next question is do you have data on how many people are engaging with the transcription center projects using their tablets and phones? Yeah um yes it's very little um it's very little part of that is um transcription center does work on a tablet or a phone um but we actually really discourage people from doing that just because you can transcribe on your phone but it's like a lot harder um and so we really discourage people from doing that we do know a lot of people do use their tablets though um but it it is not that many it is something we have been thinking about um kind of looking into more deeply though so we have kind of like overall data but we don't have a lot of those like sort of intricate details about user experience um or interest in um mobile engagement with transcription center um and most people don't ask for that um most people if they are going to be looking at our collections on their phone um or on their tablet they're going to be going to some of our other databases they're not going to transcribe if that makes sense but it's definitely something that we'd like to look into further. Next question is could you please say more about how you interact directly with volunteers about their work in cases where you've contacted them as opposed to responding to inquiries from them do you find they are receptive to that contact curious about what you find to be successful? Yeah um I don't Emily can continue to keep herself muted and her camera off if she wants because I don't want to put her on the spot here um but a lot of our development of targeted outreach um like I was talking about before and communications with our volunteers who we notice might be having some challenges or um maybe are struggling with transcribing her accurately that we are directly reaching out to all of that was developed and implemented by our community coordinator Emily Kane and she has done an incredible job of researching some of the new user errors that we're doing and um I think has done a much more effective and seamless and um maybe patient job than I would have so I would love to sort of hear her response to that question. Hey everybody uh wonderful talk Caitlin nice word um nice to see all of you I would say that we definitely have cases where people are not receptive to us contacting them right um especially in uh and I start with that not because that is um the more common response it's not but it does happen um I think especially with a program like ours where people are able to transcribe um at their leisure on their own time in their own space it can be a very sort of independent isolated activity if you want it to be we do have members of our community who uh who don't come to the project in order to be engaged in a community right and so that's something that we try to be very mindful of that everybody has their own preferences and we're only reaching out to people directly whenever we feel like um it's incredibly uh when we feel like it's gotten to that point where we either need to have a conversation and improve the work or we need to discontinue the relationship probably um but in most cases and I think you know in every case your approach is the key here um I spent a lot of time writing out a form template at a time that I wasn't feeling frustrated um and was able to just kind of take a really kind of gentle approach of kind of redirecting people and saying hey I noticed that this was happening so I'm reaching out with some helpful tips so that we can all kind of develop these skills together um and I spent a lot of time writing a template email that sounds kind of like that um as opposed to sort of scolding people uh because it is really important that we maintain a welcoming environment where people can learn together and that we acknowledge that this work is hard and that if you're coming to it from a place um you know that this this may be the only way that people have sort of engaged on this level with museum and archival materials before right and so we want to encourage that sort of behavior by being really um kind of gentle and encouraging and in the vast majority of cases people are really receptive to that and um and you know kind of say thank you for all of those tips and then we notice a change in their behavior. Did anyone have any other questions? You can either type in the chat or unmute yourselves. I will also say too just to follow up on what Emily said um reaching out as well like that also gives us the opportunity to check in and be like what are your thoughts and many times not only are a lot of these volunteers really receptive to hearing these helpful tips but are very communicative as well back to us and saying oh my god yeah uh this was just really confusing that like I thought this button meant that and it really meant this other thing and I didn't realize and that's really eye-opening and helpful for us um to then again incorporate back into the sort of updates and edits that we're doing to our instructions and our content um making our making the buttons more clear you know things that we hadn't thought about because we get we're so deeply entrenched in this right it's sometimes hard to see the forest for the trees and so reaching out to a lot of these volunteers sort of spotlights um spotlights that for us sometimes so that's really useful. Not seeing any further questions and I want to be mindful of time so thank you again Kaylin and Emily Kane for popping in there um for the great presentation I would also like to see this opportunity to thank Gal um the program associate for DLF for setting up the Zoom link and making sure the event ran successfully and um also helped us with the recording and I want to thank you all for uh joining this session uh please feel free to contact the project managers group via Artless Serve if you have any questions or if watching this has inspired you and you want to share work that you are doing in the project management fields um we're always looking for other people to to host with talks like this and then I will also just plug um the project manager group right now is looking for its next cohort for our mentoring program so if you are interested in being a mentor that call actually closes at the end of the day tomorrow and then we will next send out the call for mentees starting next week so hopefully some of you will also be interested in participating in that and all of those details have gone out to the listserv but I will pop into the chat the form to sign up to be a mentor and then the mentee information will go out next week um but I'm just seeing lots of thanks this was great everyone was really interested so thank you again Kailah and it was super interesting um and with that I will let you all go off into your days thank you all so much this was great


So just to set the stage, he's the corporate in the jeans and the boots, and I'm the entrepreneur and the coach. We like to look like something different. Dan, I'm really excited that you are here and talking about financial inclusion. You know, we can make money reducing the cost of being poor and not making money off the poor. And it's exciting that American Express and other folks, you know, PayPal is here and other folks have real revenue targets around a mission where the market overlaps with justice. It doesn't happen every time. Fair trade. You have to subsidize some of the costs. With this, that's actually you can make money, smartphones, big data, reducing the cost of being poor, financial inclusion. That's new. And so we've had corporate sponsors before. You're one of the first to have actual revenue targets around things that the entrepreneurs in this room would be working at, things that the Village Capital Financial Inclusion Corridor are working at. So that's new. Why is American Express there? Why is this now a corporate goal? Why does this make sense as a business? Well, there's a saying that inspires me every day that it's expensive to be poor. And that couldn't be more true in the financial services arena. The things that you and I take for granted, caching a check, paying a bill, sending money to somebody you love, they're incredibly time consuming and very expensive for a huge population here in the United States and across the world. There are over two and a half billion people in the world that are financially excluded from the traditional financial system. Here in the U.S., incredibly, there are anywhere between 70 and 100 million adults, almost a third of our population that don't have access to bank accounts. And so when they want to cash a check, they're hard-earned money that they've gotten, some working two or three jobs, they have to go to a check caching location, stand in line for 30 or 40 minutes, and then just to give them cash, the check caching location takes anywhere between 2% and 4% of their check to give them cash. And then when you have cash, what can you do with it? You can't do anything really. With cash, you can't pay your bills with it, so you have to go to another location, stand in line for another 40 minutes, and get a money order to pay your bill. So for a typical cable bill that might cost $50, you pay $11 to get a money order to pay that bill. And with technology, that just doesn't have to be the case anymore. We actually can dramatically reduce the cost, simplify the experience, take all that unproductive time away, and create alternatives to what traditional banking is, and do so profitably. So for us, my charge coming into American Express a couple of years ago were, how can we rethink financial services because of what's happening with technology? And what I found is there is a huge population that needs this technology, and it inspires us to create different and innovative ways of thinking about products. Has American Express done any official sizing of the market of financial inclusion in the U.S.? Well, in the U.S. alone, I'll just give you a couple of statistics, and you can define it any way you want. The FDIC defines it as that about 70 million Americans who are either unbanked or underbanked. And underbanked means you use things like a pawn shop or a check cash location. You may have a savings account, but that may be it. The study just came out that anywhere between 50% to 65% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Right. So what's the size of the problem? What about the size of the market opportunity? If you're doing things like reducing the $11 out of $40 cost of paying a bill and the hour and a half cost, what's the economic opportunity to? So this population spends about $1.3 trillion of spending the U.S. alone. So the myth that they're not disposable income is completely wrong. Right. But the fees and interests that the underserved population pay last year alone was $89 billion.  The typical checking account terms and conditions is 110 pages long, which is two times Romeo and Juliet. Okay. And the only thing they have in common is they're both sort of a tragedy in their own way. So Americans spent over $30 billion last year on bounce checks. On bounce checks. $30 billion. A lot of banks still do what's called high-low sorting. So if you have three checks that come in, one for $10 is one for $50, one for $100, they'll cash the $100 check first to put you into overdraft immediately, so you have $40 in your checking account. So they get three overdraft fees instead of maybe one that might have occurred. And so... Institutionalized predatory... It's, there are a lot of bad practices that are out there, payday loans are probably the worst of them all with interest rates that can be 20 times credit card rates that can be anywhere up to 300, 400% interest rates on that. So my thought is that technology can take that $89 billion that's spent right now. And you know, sort of the personal goal we have is how can we return half of that back to the underserved population? How do we take that $90 billion and save at a minimum $45 billion? Because the problem is it's not that people don't have revenues don't equal expenses. It's that the cash flow is very uneven. Prices may be coming in when your expenses are low and then you can get hit with a, you know, a car accident, a leaky roof, whatever medical emergency. And then once that happens and you have no savings, you go into this downward spiral. And so if we can return that money back into the economy, back it to people and start to encourage things like savings, we might be able to make a real dent in the issue. For AmEx, you know, you have kind of an exclusive brand. With the brand comes privilege is one of your things. These are folks who are not privileged. How, you've been kind of an exclusive brand, how do you brand and tell the story around financial inclusion? And then you're even putting on a movie here. Yeah. How does the brand and the story fit in? Yeah. Well, there are a lot of conversations around that at the board level and at the senior level in terms of what does it mean for us to rethink what our brand stands for? And our brand is always stood for, you know, in my view, sort of integrity, security, service. Not necessarily mass affluent, although our most famous products, you know, our charging credit card and the black card and that kind of thing are obviously at the mass affluent. But the company is 164 years old.  We basically sent overstage coach and the Pony Express packages from one coast to the other coast for people that were going out West and needed to move things and that was an express. Yeah. Right. It was literally that's where it came. And American Express were together and created this. And so the brand has not always been mass affluent. It started off more populous than that. But the the issue for us is that technology is fundamentally changing financial services right now. If you stand still, you will fall behind. And honestly, we could now, for the first time with technology, think about new segments of the population in ways that we never could do before and serve them with a great value proposition. And that to me was the key. The data smart phones. You've got to get software platforms, smart phones, and then relationships with a bunch of retailers to reimagine what banking could be out there. And you can do that profitably, but be a consumer champion at the same time. And so our whole idea was and the rallying crime, the company was move our brand from being exclusive to being inclusive. And that was a big step to the company. And the time that it's a pivot for some huge company for American Express. When we saw the success we were having with some of the products that you mentioned, you know, it really started to resonate and it's inspiring, quite frankly, to be part of a company that's actually trying to address financial exclusion. Yeah. And why the movie? You've got it. They've got a great documentary that is showing here. Why tell a story about it? Why tell the story of the need the way this movie does? And if you haven't seen it, you should see it. We're showing it. Yeah. So the documentary is called Spent Looking for Change. We worked with Davis Guggenheim, who some of you may know of. He did an Incommonion Truth and Waiting for Superman. And what we really wanted to do is that people hear statistics around financial exclusion. Right. About 70 million people or $89 billion of fees. But most people do not understand that this isn't just about the very lower income level. This is really about the new middle class is the way that I define it. Every single one of us in this room either knows a friend or personally or a family member who is struggling right now. In some way shape or form. More now than before. That's happening. Absolutely. It's happening in my family. It's happening to everybody. We all know somebody. And what we wanted to do is with this documentary, and I encourage everybody to watch it. It's 38 minutes long. It doesn't take a lot of time. But we released it on YouTube because we didn't want to do whatever there's an exclusive film. Right. Because it was like, let's release this free of charge on YouTube. Just about 18 million people have seen the documentary. 18 million people. Wow. Yeah. Which is why I have to say that we had a couple of members of a couple of senators and congressmen put out press releases saying, you know, all Americans should see this. Yeah. And the reason we put out the movie and there's nothing about America's first in there. It's like at the very end of their credits that say we have to sponsor it. But it was to put a human face on the problem because if you really want to start a conversation about financial inclusion and have it be a real issue, it's a little like I saw some of the presentations that some of the folks did this morning. Yeah. And they tell stories. Right. About individuals. And it makes things come alive. Right. And I think to really, really address this problem, there needs to be a whole ecosystem that comes together. It can't be government. We can't rely on the government to address this problem. They don't have the resources to go and do it. Or the way. And it's a very divided, you know, very partisan body right now. And so to expect them to pass legislation of some sort that is going to fundamentally fix financial exclusion, I just don't think we can count on that. I also don't think we can just count on academia to put out research papers, although they put out extremely important bodies of work. Or the nonprofit world. This has to be a partnership between government, regulators, private enterprise, public NGO, that kind of thing. And so we wanted this conversation to start with this. And we wanted people to not just intellectually get the problem, but emotionally get the problem. And we show this at the Consumer Financial Services Board, the CFPB, and to their board. And after the film ended, like the head of it said, we got to take a couple of minutes just to compose ourselves, because it's heartbreaking when you see what people go through. It really can bring tears to your eyes.  So you're doing a lot with AMEX Ventures, working with startups. Tell me how that works and how you make a decision. So we've got a couple of things that we are trying to do. I mean, one of the things is that we do have some resources within American Express to leverage against this problem. We are doing a financial inclusion lab in which we are asking academia to submit research, which we will fund, and that website goes live later today. We also set up a venture arm here in Silicon Valley in which we look to invest in companies that are promoting financial inclusion. We've set up $100 million fund out here. We look at a couple of areas, but financial inclusion is one of our biggest. We just closed our first round in a company called Signify yesterday. I think we announced it this morning. Signify works in seven developing markets where they, on an opt-in basis from customers, look at cell phone records and do an algorithm to look at credit worthiness. Because as many people know, traditional FICO scores and your credit worthiness scores, they don't look at things like your rent payment or what's your most recent record. I mean, there's a lot of things they exclude, and therefore people can't get a loan at a reasonable interest rate because so much of the data is not used. And so we think that this is just one very interesting model of many to support in looking at all of the different forms of data that might form sort of a different type of scoring methodology to extend credit. Because if you can extend credit to somebody at reasonable interest rates or an installment loan capacity as opposed to forcing them to go to pawn shops or give up their loved items or go to payday lenders or title loan companies, that's a good thing to go do. Right. So big data lets you extend the credit. Yeah, exactly. And your co-investor there is a mid-yard network. Yes. It's one of our long-term supporters here, but also been involved with it forever. Right. So this is your first investment. It's also obviously your first co-investment out of this thing. How did you have to figure out how to partner, how to make the deal work in terms of terms? Well, we have a venture arm out here. There's six people out here in Silicon Valley. Right. They're incredibly experienced in looking at the entrepreneurial community, the startup community. We looked at over 300 companies last year, for instance. And so we encourage anybody who's working in the arena of financial inclusion to submit to us. We look at all of them. We do screening criteria around it. And we want to invest in quite a number of companies in the arena. So we just have a little bit of time. I'm seeing McFly. Where will this be in five or six years? What do you see happening? So I think we're entering the era of the non-bank, is the way that I think about it. Where you can do, the bank branch infrastructure is such an antiquated out-of-date concept. It's incredibly expensive. Bank branches, thousands close every year. Where do they close? All, 97%, in neighborhoods where the median income is below the national average. So they're putting bank branches in rich neighborhoods, taking them out of poor neighborhoods. But the great thing is we don't need bank branches anymore. We don't need to go to a bank branch to cash currency, to get a checking account. You can do all of this now in the palm of your hand with a smartphone or even a feature phone through text type of functionality and software platforms and go to a retail store and have a cashier be sort of the equivalent of what a teller used to be. And so this idea of the post office maybe doing something, there's some very innovative thinking about how you can reimagine consumer financial services. And I think it can be extraordinarily powerful in solving this issue if we all come together around it. Yeah, that's great. We can talk more, but it looks like we're out of time. Okay, thank you very much. It's an honor to be here. Thank you. Have a great. Thank you. Thank you very much.


Hello, I am Dr. J. M. I. T., Professor, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, introducing you the NOC course, Applied Multivariate Statistical Modelling. Today is the era of data analytics. Large amount of multidimensional data from different sources are now easily available. Understanding knowledge from such massive data and identifying the relationships among the multiple dimensions, describing the system from where data has been collected will help immensely to data decision making. It is applicable to all sectors of industrial service, administration and management organizations. This course, Applied Multivariate Statistical Modelling will help the participant in statistical thinking and data decision making with large, small, medium sized data with respect to all kinds of practical problems be it in banking, insurance, healthcare, supply chain, all kinds of applications. This course is a 40 hours course and it is divided into 5 modules. In module 1, we will introduce the concepts of multivariate statistical modelling and we also discuss the basic prerequisites for learning this course which is basic univariate statistics. In module 2, we describe the multivariate statistics part namely multivariate descriptive statistics, multivariate normal distribution and multivariate inferential statistics. In module 3, multivariate dependence models namely analysis of variance, multivariate analysis of variance, multiple linear regressions, multivariate linear regression will be discussed. In module 4, we will be discussing on multivariate interdependence models namely principal component analysis, factor analysis, cluster analysis and correspondence analysis. Finally in module 5, we will be discussing in detail the structural equation modelling. It has two components, one is measurement model and other one is structural model. Measurement model is known as so called confirmatory factor analysis and structural model is the path model. These two models will be combined and then finally the structural equation models will be described. This five modules codes will definitely help the participant in different ways. For example, the participants who are interested to establish themselves in the area of data analytics will be immensely helped by going through these 40 hour codes. For example, if someone is interested to build his career in marketing, in healthcare, in finance, insurance, supply chain management, safety, security, administration in other places as a data scientist, the course is fit to immensely fit to the he or her. I hope this 40 hour course will be beneficial to all of you and you will be enjoying the entire duration of the course from the lectures, from the assignments, exams and related interactions. Thank you very much. Thank you.


If you're familiar with tiktok, you already know who she is and if you're not, I'm sure you've heard her name before. Charli DeMalio may be only 16 but she's taken over as the most popular teen on the internet. Since fans are always watching Charli's every move, most recently the focus is on her nose job. Many are curious, including me, as to why someone so young would feel the need to get work done. In this vid, we're gonna look at Charli's overall transformation since coming to Hollywood, including this mysterious nose surgery. Charli DeMalio is a social media personality and dancer who rose to fame just last year thanks to tiktok. She and her older sister Dixie DeMalio are both mega stars in the app and members of the exclusive Hype House in Los Angeles. By the way, we recently did a video of the Hype House if you guys wanna check that out too. This past spring, Charli had two events to celebrate, a quarantine style 16th birthday party. Hello guys, it's Charli and for a while you guys have been asking for me to do a room tour since I got my room redecorated for my birthday by Tov. So here I am to finally give you guys a room tour. As well as becoming the most popular creator on tiktok, past in the likes of Lauren Gray. These days are following on the app holds over 72 million fans and that's just one platform. So while she may look like a normal teenager, think again. Before I walked into dance class it was about 50,000, I was like that's it I'm famous. Although it may seem her biggest problems are coming up with choreography for new tiktoks and how she'll enjoy her newfound fame. Charli has been a subject of bullying and body shaming in the past which she and her sister Dixie have spoken up about. But honestly these girls are way too young to even have to worry about that.  Before you guys tell me all it's because of her breathing and she broke her nose. I know that's what she explained and I'm not saying it isn't. But how many times have we been told that story before? Yeah, my nose is complaining so much so I found a doctor that was like willing to actually work on all these problems because most of them weren't. Whatever the case, after this video I'll let you guys be the judge. What's going on guys and girls my name is Kara and this series we've titled Before and After. We're going to take a look at tiktok sensation Charli D'Amelio and how she's changed since her childhood and debut in Hollywood. I'm talking early days, nose job style, you name it. But she still is super young so this video might be a little different than usual. That being said we've done other celebrity transformations on the likes of Britney Spears and Khloe Kardashian and we'll link to some at the end. Be sure to like, hit subscribe and ring that bell for notifications. As always if there's anyone else you want a Before and After on let me know in the comments down below. Follow me over on instagram to chat and let's get into this video. Before her tiktok fame Charli grew up in Connecticut and danced competitively. She's from Norwalk Connecticut and was living there with her family until 2019 when they moved to Los Angeles. It makes sense that Charli is so good at what she does on tiktok considering her background in dance and she used to post videos and photos from her competitions on instagram. Her first viral video was this tiktok duet slash tutorial with move with joy. And Charli said in an interview she doesn't even know how she got so famous saying I wish I could give everyone an explanation as to what happened but I have no idea. In October renegade became a huge tiktok trend largely thanks to Charli. The most popular versions of renegade are hers but many other tiktokers did duets in their own versions. But before the entire demelio family would sign with a talent agency and before Charli would reach the height of fame overnight what was she like? Back in Connecticut Charli really didn't look much different than she does these days. Charli seems to have had the same small features throughout her childhood the same dark hair and even freckles. The only thing that's different is back then she rocked the whole braces and glasses face. I still need glasses so I was one of those kids too just not the braces. But clearly from what we can see those braces worked for Charli and she has a perfect smile these days. When I was 15 or 16 I was definitely not considered a style icon but then again I didn't have to worry about over 70 million people watching and idolizing me. We didn't even have instagram. Anyways unlike your average teenager Charli has people all over the world wanting to copy her fashion. Okay so right now I'm getting glammed up for the Proto show right heading in my Proto pictures. Okay so right now we are all dressed and such and everything and now we're gonna go to the actual show. It's actually really fun. It's my messy suitcase but it'll all right. Oh wow you're really close. Hey how are you? Yeah okay so we're going to show now and then I'll talk to you later. It's no doubt that with her rise to fame her style evolved too. When you're 15 already going to Fashion Week in Milan you know that your wardrobe is better than anyone else your age. Not to mention Charli can wear all the designer duds she wants with the millions of dollars she's earning. I think now it's time to address the elephant in the room. Charli's recent nose job. Fans were recently concerned when they saw her rocking some pretty intense looking bandages over her nose. Don't worry though your faith tiktoker is A-OK and according to Charli the surgery was simply to help with her breathing. November was when I was my surgery was scheduled because it's like I can't breathe at all and it's super the bone when it broke it collapsed so the bone inside is like this and you can see now there's like more of a bump. It wasn't for the shape it was for it was for just like breathing purposes and I saw the first time we've heard this age old excuse celebrities often use health or breathing issues as the reason for a rhinoplasty instead of just owning up to cosmetic work. However looking at Charli's nose before it was already petite and suited to her face perfectly so I personally see no reason to change it especially since she's only 16 but it's also not the first time that such a young celeb would go under the knife either. Anyways back in April Charli explained the situation tweeting that since she broke her nose last August she's had a breathing problem ever since. She said I was supposed to have surgery in November to fix it but then I started having problems in my left nostril and now I can barely breathe out of my nose at all. Also adding that these nose issues interfered with her dancing which clearly is a big deal. Over to last week and Charli posted a tiktok with her bandage nose and two black eyes stating in the caption surgery is done and I am so beyond excited that I was finally able to fix my breathing. It didn't stop her from making multiple tiktoks either. Her sister Dixie also posted a vlog titled Charli got surgery where the family welcomed her back from her nose procedure and gets her cake and stuff. Once those bandages are awful better be able to see Charli's new and improved nose. So what do you guys think as of now? Do you believe Charli's reasons for getting no surgery or do you think she got an actual nose job? Sound off in the comments because I personally have no idea on this one. Usually this is the part of the video I would talk about a celebrity's diet or exercise plans and how they stay so fit. Since she's 16 it's unlikely that Charli has to do much of anything to keep in shape. Despite her young age Charli still had to deal with her fair share of body shamers already. From any posts or tiktoks to star posts we can tell she is slim and in great shape but comments are not always positive. In the past Charli has spoken about all the comments she gets every day about her weight and body whether she's told she's too thin gaining weight you name it and simply being judged. When she addressed this she tweeted stop talking about my body it's not your place to tell me if I'm losing or gaining weights. Charli also asked people to be respectful of each other and understand that we should just be kind and uplift everyone instead of trying to bring others down. And honestly it is weird to make any type of comments about someone's body especially when they're still a kid. I guess that's why Billie Eilish does the whole body hiding thing with her baggy clothes. Anyways all we know about how Charli stays in shape is all of her daily dancing which is no doubt a workout in itself. She also said I've been very motivated to start eating better and working out every day to become the healthiest version of myself. Whatever that means. So I guess that's all there is for Charli D'Amelio's transformation since she is only 16. Although she may look like just your average teenager she's way more glam than most of us were at her age. Just admit it. This shocking nose job could have been the beginning of newfound love for cosmetic surgery for Charli or it could have been exactly what she said it was a corrective surgery to fix her breathing. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. She's still grown into a teen with enviable fashion sense and for you guys that are fans there are even accounts showing you her every outfit if you want to copy her. I saw Katie Harron wearing army pants and flip flops so I bought army pants and flip flops. But don't forget she's a millionaire it's easy for them to look great 24 seven. After seeing Charli from her childhood to recent times what did you think and what do you think about the new nose job? Be sure to let me know down in the comments as well as who else I should do a before and after on. If you want to talk more about Charli's transformation you can hit me up on Instagram. Be sure to subscribe and I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye!