Hi everyone, I'm very aware I'm the last talk of the day at the end of the conference so I just wanted to say in advance there's no code in any of my slides. You're safe. There's also no musical notation which is like syntactically close enough. So I just want to take advantage of the mushy and vulnerable state all of our brains are in and return to some themes, ask some unanswerable questions. The whole thing also ended up kind of being personal and I was writing it so I hope you like me and if you don't keep that to yourself. That's all. I mean Ember knows its way around conventions so I'm sure you'll all be nice. All right as Matthew said, I'm Michael, I'm at Hashtagorp, we're going to get into that but this talk starts with space. So NASA launched the Voyager spacecrafts in 1977 and today they now hold the record for the longest continuously running computers over 45 years. At this time frame they pre-date all modern computing, they also are still sending and receiving data at 45 years plus the years before the mission where everyone was coming together. The entire careers had started and ended with the Voyager program. In February of 1990 Voyager 1 snapped this photo of Earth from its position out near Neptune. It's the famous pale blue dot, that's Earth. This was 13 years after the launch date and I'm sure this was a wild time if you were working at NASA but the Voyagers didn't have a wild ride necessarily. They went faster than probably any other spacecraft but it was all math. We knew it was going to be there, it ended up there, we knew longer advance. And once this had happened the Voyagers were prepared for the next phase in their travels. Again this wasn't a reaction to some sort of unforeseen scenario of the satellites being far away. This was all known in advance, calculated and prepared for. Since there's not a lot of stuff past Neptune and since Neptune's pretty far away the satellites received a software overhaul. The flight software was more or less entirely rewritten to be more autonomous and more energy efficient. And then this new software package so to speak was deployed to production 2.7 billion miles away. This is a room of engineers so I'm sure you're wondering how in the world, slash all the worlds in the solar system, did they do that? Well they didn't use SWR. This came out in 2019, it's much too new. It's a cool library, like nothing against it. I like the names, Stale Wall Revalidate, we've been calling it background loading and Ember data but it's cool that Ember or React people could do use this now also. Doesn't use fetch either, this came out around 2013. The timelines are a little fuzzy and it's not documented very well. Also didn't use XML HTTP request which came out in 2006. In fact XML and HTTP are both too new. HTTP was first released in 1991. Underneath HTTP is TCP IP and technically the first draft of TCP did come out before the voiders had launched but it would take another 10 years before this proof of concept became the standard we know it's a day. No, they used this. Your laptop has a network interface card and the voiders have a network interface complex. The dish there on the right, this is in Madrid, shout out to Ember Fest. This dish is 70 meters tall. This talk isn't about the voiders. I have a really awesome PDF here if you're interested in interstellar telecom but it's not that. I'm returning to a theme that we've been talking about. This is about longevity. It's about stability and uncertain times. It's about sustainability. In 2008 this was 31 years after the voiders were launched. I graduated from high school. Also the economy collapsed. As an 18-year-old I didn't fully understand the situation. Sure it seemed bad but I felt protected. I was going to college which if you grew up in that time you knew was the correct thing to do. Plus I'd already taught myself how to code. I wrote action script and made Flash games, paid for lunch money this way or got my lunch money this way. I had skills for the new century so who cares if the economy is doing things. Two years after that Steve Jobs wrote this letter thoughts on Flash. Somehow it was simultaneously the spiritual eulogy of Flash and also the murder weapon. Steve Jobs did have a way with words. Flash lived from 95 to 2010. At 15 years careers didn't quite come and go with Flash. Instead people who had been professionals scrambled to find something else to do. Some ended up making iOS apps. Others found platforms like Unity. Some wrote the CSS3 and HTML5 wave and still yet some stubbornly held onto Flash. Someone had to. Whole ecosystems aren't actually gone in an instant. If we look at this timeline we can think of the internet as more on this voyager scale where Flash was a fleeting technology choice. I also can't talk about Flash in 2023 without mentioning these two projects. Flashpoint Archive which came out in 2017 is a community effort to archive all of the amazing Flash cartoons, videos, games that were on the old web that no longer play in a browser. And then on the left there is Ruffle RS which is a tech project to reimplement the action script VMs in Rust to compile down to Wasm. So the same Swift file that was made in 2006 can be recompiled and played using Canvas and HTML audio. Pretty neat. It's okay though. I was in college. College is a time to learn new stuff. If Flash was going to go away that's fine. I'd pick up something new. While I was in college I played with .NET, played with Python, did some unbedded C for some reason, played with C++ to learn data structures, did art things and processing, even explored functional paradigms and racket. But mostly I worked in C sharp. I own this book. I took this photo. I want to read the cover of this because I think it really grounds what was happening at that moment. Link, Silverlight, ASP.NET, Ajax, WPF, XAML, WCF. It's a whole can of alphabet soup on the cover of this book. But it was really exciting. This was during a time when Java was in a bit of a lull. And because of all the momentum that was behind .NET, I was led to believe that this was the Java killer. Of course, neither died. Java and C sharp .NET, they both have widespread use, growing ecosystems and thousands upon thousands of developers. They also have their own vibes. It's quite curious. This is Jakarta EE. The site makes me so sad. It's an A plus Java pun, Jakarta. I mean, it's great. But then the site is entirely humorless. It's got stock metography. And then .NET, they have this weird consistent way of looking like knockoff websites. Every single time. I don't know how they do it. Which is in itself a tragedy because this blazer project, it takes C sharp and compiles it to WASM so you're using a single language but still making client-side experiences. It's really neat. We can laugh at Microsoft all we want, but we should also take a moment to note that in addition to .NET, Microsoft owns TypeScript and VS code and GitHub and NPM. So we should be careful who we mock. The good news is, they don't own JavaScript. That's covering through the independent CC39. Well, technically, ECMAScript is because JavaScript is a trademark owned by Oracle and Oracle owns Java because they acquired Sun. Did you also know that Larry Ellison, the billionaire, the mega-billionaire behind Oracle, owns 98% of Lanai? Lanai isn't a huge Hawaiian island, but one dude owns a whole Hawaiian island. That's just weird. And the talk also isn't about capitalism, but tech is so awash with capital that it just ends up being interesting to observe where it pulls up. All right, back to me. In 2009, I was working at a job where I was doing web forms in ASP.NET, which is a peculiar way of making websites. There are lots of genius things in here and also lots of horrendous hacks, which was customary at the time. Eventually, Microsoft released ASP.NET NVC to compete with emerging projects like Rails and Django. Unfortunately, they didn't offer a good path for migration, so it created a bit of a schism in the ecosystem where people weren't sure if they should migrate to NVC or if it was only for new projects or what they were supposed to do. It's also funny looking back at this because once upon a time, Ember used to be in a VC framework. I wouldn't call it that anymore, but I guarantee you that there are apps still in development today that once had many more views than components. It's also strange to think that there was a time before services. And according to the keynote this morning, maybe models are underway out next or there's models and schemas. I'm looking forward to it, but things change and Ember keeps making sure you come along with. After that job, I got my first big kid job I like to call it. I was 21 when I got this job. I was pretty young for a software engineer, but I was qualified, so who cares. But when people found out I was born in 1990, they vomit. It's not too dissimilar from when I think about how some of my peers now were born after the year 2000. That makes me want to vomit. It's weird. They'll never get to remember that day we're meant to never forget. But it's okay. It's actually more than okay. It just is. There's no alternative, so you've got to get okay with it. And if I attempt empathy here for a second, I graduated into a recession, they graduated into a pandemic. A recession doesn't seem so bad in comparison. When I was at this job, people knew I was the flash guy, so one of the products I had was to migrate our flash AM charge to some sort of non-flash solution to replace these dashboardy lines and bars we had. After doing some research, the best alternative we ended up finding was AM charts, but the JavaScript version. The developers made sure to port flash version to JavaScript, preserving as much of the API as possible to create a migration path. And that's continuity. I ended up sticking with JavaScript at this job. It seemed like a better career move than sticking with Pearl, and being in the scene of JavaScript in 2012, there was a lot going on. There was a whirlwind of activity, new and exciting ideas and projects being thrown around. I used to say that you could Google any animal followed by JS, and you'd find a GitHub repo. Just to verify this is still true, I Googled chinchilla JS? Sure enough. It's got like two stars, but it's there. Eventually, I left that job also to work on a startup, just kind of ride the wave even more. They were using Golang on the back end and Ember and less on the front end, and the whole thing felt very new. It felt like the future. It felt next-gen in the classical sense. And when I say next-gen in the classical sense, I think next-gen really should mean what I was talking about earlier, about me being 21, and now they're 21-year-olds again, making sure that just continuity for 10 years, for 20 years, for 30 years, that's much more next-gen in my mind than just breaking stuff and saying it's disruptive. Thank you. You can clap. You also don't have to. That's fine. Now it's awkward. All right. This is also when I got my first taste of open source. It wasn't the first time I participated in open source, though. The honor of that goes to this issue I opened in 2011, IE conditional comments triggering compatibility view. Apologies to anyone who understands what that means. It was not a good time. I felt like I handled myself pretty well, though, until I accidentally closed the issue while trying to comment on it. In my defense, the UI was a lot worse back then. It's still bad. I heard that. Fortunately, Paul Irish came to my rescue, and he reopened the issue with the comment reopened.dot. Now, again, I don't want to talk about syntax too much, but one dot, that finishes the sentence. Three dots, that's a pause. Two dots, that's an awkward silence. Never meet your heroes. They say you'll only embarrass yourself. All right. So we had been using open source here. We believed in open source at this company, but we were still mostly a consumer of it. We had some projects that were technically open, but they weren't popular. It's not where our business interests were. We use open source in a way that a lot of companies do as a recruiting tool. It was a way to signal the qualifications of our engineering team. In 2017, I switched jobs again, and I went to HashiCorp, and that's where I still am. I actually applied for HashiCorp accidentally at an Invercon. Story forward, not the stage. I initially worked at Nomad when I was here. It was a real open source. I was on the production side. Everything was open. You can still read my code and my comments and my issues from six years ago. It's all in the public. I mean, who doesn't want that? And moving from the consumer side to the producer side, it got me thinking a lot about open source as a concept. The participants, patterns, the purpose, and I'm not sure if anyone has thought about all this stuff in a metaphysical way more than Christopher Alexander, who's written several large tomes of this type of wisdom, opinionated wisdom, but a lot of people agree with him. If you've heard of him before, it probably means you either have a background in architecture or in design systems. I shouldn't use memes in a closing keynote. It's a serious time. Fortunately, this meme is actually just a Venn diagram, so fixed it. He has this quote that I think really applies to what I've had been thinking about. The total pattern, space and events together, is an element of people's culture. It is invented by culture, transmitted by culture, and merely anchored in space. But there is a fundamental interconnection between each pattern of events and the pattern of space in which it happens. And I find this rings true. There's also consensus within our industry that at the very least our digital spaces resemble our physical spaces. That's why we call it information architecture after all. So if this connection among culture, space, and events is true, what does this space say about our culture? I think it's quite telling that the first tab is code and the second tab is issues. We also don't teach people the relationship between these two numbers. Should one be bigger than the other? And if the numbers are big, should I believe the project is poorly maintained? If the numbers are small, should I believe the project isn't being used? There's a relationship between these three numbers. Between commits, issues, and pull requests, there's something going on here, except it's never really communicated. You're kind of on your own to figure it out. And between commits and contributors, there's something going on here. And if contributors is derived from the Git log, aren't we missing major contributions in the form of community support? And then there are all these numbers on the screen, but there's no sense of what the project has been through or even when it was started. It's only the latest release here that gets us seated at the table. And when our space is so uninterested in history, why should we be surprised when a recurring event is the pursuit of new? On a larger scale, it was just exciting to be a part of HashiCorp. When I started, we were at around 100 employees. The last round of funding we had secured was a $24 million series B round, bringing our total funding to $34 million. This quote sums up the state of the company. Armon still our CTO, by the way. Our immediate focus continues to be the seven tentpole projects we have and the corresponding enterprise applications we're building. Looking back at this, what kind of tent has seven poles? It underscores the experimental mode we were in. The core thesis was, could we make open source also be sustainable? I also learned quickly that infrastructure OSS is built different, pun absolutely intended. I think this really encapsulates how different it is. IBM acquired Red Hat for $34 billion, which was $1,000x what HashiCorp had been funded when I joined. IBM didn't do that because Red Hat was open source and open source is cool. It is. Those things are true. But they did it strategically. They figured that the open source community within infrastructure is the future and they needed to catch up and also Red Hat happened to be profitable. They figured this out already. To merge together was good for IBM. The scale, excuse me, around this time I also went to AWS re-invent. This was in 2018 I had this pleasure. There were over 50,000 attendees. It was a campus of six hotels. I should note this is in Vegas, so a Vegas-sized hotel is not a normal-sized hotel. So, you know, it's not quite six. In a premier booth on the floor of the expo hall cost a million dollars. This is just an unfathomable scale to me at the time. One of the vendors had hired Hofthor, also known as the mountain, from Game of Thrones. He was just standing there and you can get your photo. They said, how are you going to handle your mountain of data? That's a human you just paid for to come out here as a prop. It was weird. During the closing party, they also had skrillex and future islands headlining. Both of them at the same time on two different stages just because they could. The point I'm trying to make here is this wasn't funded by a Patreon account. That's for sure. This was business. This was territory carving. This was capitalism. This was markets. People who were running booths, they'd be happy on the first day and then dejected on the last because somewhere in the middle AWS announced a new service that would compete head-to-head with their startup. To Amazon's credit, they never said this was about open source to them, but it sure didn't feel like community either. Why couldn't we be doing this altogether? This photo is from the Hashikon in 2017 in Austin, Texas. This was the first time that the work I had been doing over the summer was shown. It was just a really satisfying experience. Not just because seeing your work displayed on the 30-foot widescreen is bad ass in itself, but also because you can just feel the energy of people who are eager to have this UI to complement the existing Nomad CLI experience. And also people who are interested in Nomad for the first time because the web UI made it more approachable. But in the back of my head, there's this inescapable thought. I'm working on Nomad, the underdog workload orchestrator fighting Kubernetes, the incumbent container orchestrator, but I'm also using Ember, the underdog JS framework fighting React, the incumbent JavaScript library. Except Nomad is corporate backed and Ember is community backed, while Kubernetes is community backed and React is corporate backed. So how did this all come together? I enjoyed philosophizing about this, but I was also still working on a startup and I had things to do. Hashingorp grew and grew. We secured funding in amounts I felt were absurd and unnecessary, including our series E, which was $175 million. I've since learned to appreciate this as a strategy even if I can't stomach the thought of numbers that big. And then on December 9th, 2021, we achieved a startup dream, which just did not be a startup anymore. We went public. This is a really busy photo, but somewhere in there is my forehead. Yeah, when we rung that bell, we had a $16 billion market cap. It was a surreal feeling, being in Manhattan in a suit, never worn a suit before, ringing Nasdaq's opening bell and seeing the far faces on towering billboards of Times Square next to Bizarro NFT billboards talking about the moon. If you've been to New York, you know exactly what I'm talking about. In the back of my mind though, I still couldn't escape the reality that Wall Street didn't like us because we were successful open source experiment that had created value in the world. They liked us because we had found a repeatable way to capture that value. To underscore what I mean by this, this is the clearest example of the difference between value creation and value capture. Stack overflow was also acquired, or excuse me, they had an exit through acquisition, not through public, but they were required for $1.8 billion. That's not a small amount of money. I'm happy for them, but when you compare it to the wealth of knowledge hosted on that site and how directly applicable it is to the tech industry as a whole, which is in turn one of the most profitable industries in the world, you have to wonder how it ended up that way, just $1.8 billion. Of course, Stack Overflow is also a platform. You could easily argue that the real value came from user-generated content and they weren't paid at all. This is where I have to talk about the elephant in the room. Nothing captures the value of user-generated content much like this new generation of value capture monsters, large language models, GANs, diffusion models and all the like. They've enabled companies to slurp up the entire internet and then put up toll booths. Again, not talking about capitalism, but I think everything is kind of intertwined. At the time, I was thinking this instead. Was Hashtagorp also part of this problem? How much of our value came from capturing value other projects that generated or to use this in a more standard expression? We were standing on the shoulders of giants. Didn't they deserve some of this credit? We were famously in an early go length shop without our success. Surely some of it was. We're also maybe not quite as famously a long time Ember shop, nine years going. Surely Ember is also part of our success story, but it was Hashtagorp that got to be the unicorn with the good exit. What does this mean for open source? Do we have to sell our souls to get here? Were we doing open source wrong? And if we apply purity tests like this to open source, what prevents AWS from eating up competition, white labeling successful projects as Amazon elastic widget? And what does it mean for community participation when the project is governed by an organization that has to answer to shareholders? A more radical question that's still worth asking? Who cares? Let's not forget about the financial crisis at the epicenter of all that institutional failure was Wall Street. And from that came Occupy Wall Street, which wasn't just anti-Wall Street. It was largely anti-institution, mutual aid, direct democracy, and consensus-based decision making came from this core belief that we can't trust institutions, but maybe we can trust each other. Another artifact of the financial crisis was Bitcoin. The central belief here was not only that we can't trust institutions, we can't trust anyone. Only cryptography and algorithms, specifically in a vacuum, can be trusted. There are echoes of all of this in our open source communities. But on the flip side, HashiCorp's commercial success had put us in a position to give back. We can employ core team members. We can allocate more engineering time to projects that don't directly impact revenue. And we can fund initiatives like EmberConf and Main Matters and Broader Fund. You should do the same. Just go public with a $16 billion market cap, maybe you can afford it. But was this sustainable? Is this sustainability or is this charity? HashiCorp's own open source products sustained themselves through their own revenue channels. Terraform has Terraform Cloud, a SaaS model, Vault has Vault Enterprise, an open core model, and so forth. So let's consider a thought experiment here. No need to call anyone out. So let's just consider a hypothetical company that's also interested in open source. Let's call it Beta. And instead of finding an external project like Ember, they find an internal project that's still open source. Let's call that Redact. Would this still be charity? I mean, Redact doesn't have a revenue model, and it's not going to. So this is a successful company giving money to an initiative that has no intent on being profitable. So it sounds like charity. Isn't this kind of the same? I asked this like a rhetorical question, but there is a correct answer. And that's no. They are not the same. A corporation funding an external project is not the same as a corporation funding an internal project. There's more to sustainability than simply having funding. In this example, a corporation ceasing funding to an internal project is likely an extinction event. We heard Lea talk about this in the documentary yesterday. A corporation doing the same for an external project, it can really hurt. If a project is too dependent on a single source or a funding shaky, it can really cause a product to fall behind, but it still gets a chance to live on. Sustainability in open source is just much more complex than we ever discussed. We don't really have language for it. We can talk about GitHub stars, open and closed issues, time to first response, activity on Discord, the vibe of a Discord server or Twitter or whatever people are using these days. These are all meaningful signals, but none of them tell the whole picture. An open source project can be too successful and also collapse under its own ecosystem. Babel once had the noble ambition of being a transpiler, a transpiling ESNX to browser compatible JavaScript. Today, there's a whole section on the official plugin list dedicated to ReactThings. Last I checked, React is not actually an Equiskrip standard. This isn't even the weird stuff. I was going to memorize the name of the Babel transform deep inside of Invert that makes global still work, but then I forgot. But if you know it, you know it. Anyway, one of the things that came out of Babel is people sort of eagerly giving talks on AST transformations, and that's just not a normal relationship to have with your programming language. It's just not. I'm thankful in a way because code mods are awesome, but other languages do not expect you to understand their ASTs and transform them. If we talk about React for a second, it in turn is being cannibalized by frameworks like Next and Gatsby that bring sorely missing conventions around how to architect a React site. At first, React is the core. Eventually, React may just be the implementation detail. Projects can also make curious decisions in the pursuit of growth and stability. I love to see an open source dev get paid. Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to remakes being acquired, but you've got to admit a web framework being bought by an e-commerce company raises some eyebrows. And when an open source project doesn't grow, that can have its own set of bad things. It can fade into obscurity. It can start up great. And then it's just good. And then it's only good enough. And the next thing you know is legacy. Of course, I'm talking about OM. Talking about OM here. OM was a fascinating React like library for ClosureScript. It had an emphasis on immutable data structures and closure-inspired data polling and state management patterns. Unfortunately, it proved to you just be a little bit too niche on niche on niche. Even though it had nearly 7,000 stars, it only attracted 17 contributors over six years with the majority of that work being done by the original author, David Nolan, who eventually walked away to do other things. We also need something a little more nuanced than a marketing forward annual survey. We need to evaluate open source projects. We do. This is just not the way to do it. Both for our own due diligence as engineers, we want to make good decisions on behalf of our company. And also as individuals, we want to contribute to something bigger than we can ever do alone. So to help me sort of rationalize all of this, I found a model outside of tech that I'm quite fond of. I say I found, like, I don't know. I don't like saying that. I'm not some sort of discoverer. I'm not Mary Weather. People are doing work that isn't in tech, and I'm on the internet too much, and I saw it. That's a better way to say it than I'm some sort of discoverer. Anyway, this is a model I'm quite fond of. It's called donut economics. I'm not an economist either, so I'm not qualified to actually critique this model, but there are a couple of properties of it that stand out to me. First, that there's a sweet spot. It isn't about growth at all costs. It's about doing enough to provide a social foundation, but not overshooting and piercing the ecological ceiling. Or in other words, finding something sustainable. Second, it unapologetically has many dimensions. As mathematically aesthetic as a unifying metric like GDP is, context is important. And as I've been saying, we need nuance and nuance needs to be reasoned with. So with these Goldilock metrics in mind, I'd like to revisit some previous slides. First, let's look at Microsoft. If we take a closer look here, these aren't all the same. Different products have different licenses, policies, and governing bodies. In the case of TypeScript, the spec itself is made available under an OWFA license, and .NET itself is governed under a foundation. And then in the case of NPM and GitHub, these are platforms, and platforms have associated platform costs. So maybe it's not, maybe this is actually, it's good that it's owned by a company that has some sort of way to make money. And if we, sorry, that was just a circle. If we look at the HasherCorp slide here, yes, we did raise a lot of money. But VC firms that gave us all that money, they didn't do it because they too saw us as an open source experiment like we did. In a tangential way, they did because open source users and users are a prerequisite to revenue. But their objective wasn't to analyze the results of the experiment and do science. Now, their objective was a return on investment, like it always is. The mission you have to have when you accept VC is fundamentally different than the missions you can have when you get by on sponsorships or consulting or when you take it slow and get bootstrapped. And this Kubernetes equals Ember comparison is also deeply lacking nuance. Just generally, whenever you see something split into a binary, you should be skeptical. And in this case, this is a false dichotomy. Yes, they're both open source. But Kubernetes belongs to a foundation. And foundations aren't corporations, nor are they quite community effort. They're their own thing. To put it simply, core team members in Ember, when you go to the website, you see faces. When you go to the cloud native computing foundations website, the members look like this. Don't get me wrong, foundations also have their place. CNCF projects are often things that worked at one company. They were spun out and iterated on until there was some consensus and then it graduated to become this industry grade semi-standard solution to a problem. And that can be good. It's just different. These dimensions that we're looking at to evaluate projects, they don't all have to be cultural and financial. The way we build can also impact sustainability. A joke I like to make is that Ember CLI was too good. If you've only been using Ember for a couple years, you think I've lost my mind. But it did so much for our community. I think it was mentioned yesterday that Angular CLI was initially a fork of Ember CLI. And that's true. Ember CLI also predated to create React app. And the create React app made no sense when it came out to me, because I was already familiar with Ember. I was like, this is just copy paste, but I do it for my CLI. Where's the value in this is kind of what I was thinking. But it was so good that it meant our community didn't have to build an ecosystem of tools. And we didn't have to have the knowledge that allowed us to stay current. So now we have this data build system, and now Preston has to go around and patiently sprinkle embroider macros in every single repo. In this way, I would say we undershot. We did not actually make it to that social foundation. We created such a sealed abstraction that there wasn't space or a need for teams to independently tinker with build tools. But I'd also say that the broader JavaScript community overshot here, they pierced the ecological ceiling. Sometimes I think about the collective human hours that have gone into configuring and tweaking webpack, and I just shudder. So this is something I'm really excited about with Polaris. Ed yesterday talked about implementation versus interface, making sure you get the interface correct so the implementations can change without the whole world having to change around it. And I think that's just really good and also very true to Inverse Convention-based approach to authoring. Okay. At this point, you're probably expecting some sort of grand reveal, and I'm not going to do that. You don't get one. I'm not about to debut as a sustainability model, but I do think the question is worth asking. Can we come up with something similar for how to evaluate open source communities? And if we did, how would Inverse score? Too low in some places, maybe. Too high in others, I'm sure. But how will you help?


a lot of project management and technical assistance support across various projects that we have at MSH. I work with institutions and with CSO organizations as well as communities in Africa, Asia, Latin American, Caribbean. And my areas of expertise are health planning and budgeting. I do a lot in health finance, cost revenue analysis and resource mobilization. And I'm now very happy to start entering into the world of advocacy. With that, I'm going to let my co-presenter Carla Berdichesky present herself and then she'll present the first half of this presentation. Thank you, Eliana. Well, I will introduce myself. I am Carla Berdichesky. I'm based in Mexico City. I trained as a medical doctor and I was always concerned about the inequalities in health provision. And that's why I went into public health. I have a master's from the London School of Hygiene. And for the past 10 years, I have been an independent consultant working for a variety of NGOs, UN agencies and foundations. And in these projects, I have designed and implemented a great variety of research and advocacy projects on sexual and reproductive health issues. Not only in Mexico, but for Latin America and the Caribbean, I'm very much focused on maternal health. And I have been involved in a series of projects on midwifery recently, and this is the fifth one I collaborate on. So I'm very happy to first give you an introduction on maternal health in Mexico. We can have the next slide, Eliana, please. For those of you that are new to the scene in Latino health in Mexico, our maternal mortality rate is not very high. It would not be too striking when compared to other countries in the region or in other regions. It is currently at 36 deaths per 1,000 live birth. However, when you analyze maternal mortality, rates dramatically increase in states with higher concentrations of indigenous populations or with greater poverty levels. And these are the states where our project is based on. And for example, in one of these states, Chiapas, the current maternal mortality rates more than double the national average. So a great majority of deliveries currently nationally are occurring within hospital settings. And they're actually high rates of skilled provider attendance. Average is 96%. However, public health services are oversaturated. There is a lack of personnel and their shortages in material and financial resources. There was an article published in the Lancet in 2016 by Miller. And Mexico is really characterized by this model of too much too soon provision of maternal health services. Where there is really a routine over medicalization of normal pregnancy and birth. And this description includes really unnecessary use of non-evidence-based intervention. As well as a use, sorry. Very happy to all the doctors. Thank you, Ana Clara, for doing this job with me. We are together physically, but well, we are in the same position as well. In the work that we are doing, we are in the same position of intervention. We are in the same group. Carla, I think we can continue. I think there is some disruption. Thank you. So the unnecessary use of these non-evidence-based interventions are really harmful when applied routinely and are overused. For example, caesarean deliveries in Mexico total more than 40% of births nationally weigh over WHO recommendations and can even go up to 80% in some settings. And as facility births have increased, they have overstressed available human resources. And this has also resulted in low quality of care that in the end translates into high prevalence of disrespect. Next slide, please. Under the MDGs, Mexico fell short of achieving the two-thirds reduction in maternal deaths. However, national and state-level governments have really remained committed to improve maternal health. And the Mexican national government has officially recognized midwifery as an important strategy to address maternal mortality. And there is an explicit goal from the MOH to include midwives at the primary care level for low-risk pregnancies, but with referrals to complications to the secondary level. And so in response to this government will, in 2015, a group of private foundations, NGOs, and UN agencies began looking into strengthening maternal health services through the integration of midwives. Specifically, the MacArthur Foundation made a strong investment towards increasing options for midwifery training, increasing recognition of professional midwifery and its benefits to maternal and neonatal health, and strengthening regulation and policy and efficient integration of midwives in the health sector. So there are many complementary efforts currently underway. As an example, UNFPA is partnering with four Mexican midwifery schools to improve training for midwives to a recognized international standard. And the program provides skills, building, and works to ensure midwives are supported and championed by their local community. Partners are also coordinating recruitment efforts between midwifery schools and local health institutions to ensure that graduates are fully utilized and placed in communities where they are most needed. So timing here is key. And investing in the training of midwives will have a lasting effect. By 2030, the target date for the SDG, the population of Mexico will have grown by nearly 20% to 143 million. And professional midwives can provide capacity and level of care that ensures a growing population can receive the care they need to ensure healthy women have those marks. Next slide, please. I'd like to give you a view of midwifery in Mexico today. According to the state of the world midwifery profile on Mexico in 2014, there were only 78 professional midwives that were dedicating 100% of the time to maternal and neonatal health. However, nurse midwives that total more than 15,000 professionals in the country currently spend a low proportion to none other time on maternal and neonatal health. The country has 23,000 traditional midwives that are often accompanying women as part of the referral chain, and only in some communities remain as only available and culturally acceptable health provider. Given the few numbers of their 3.5 million pregnancies a year, professional midwives remain very in position, and most of them have independent practices supporting home-based deliveries and only a few work within the health system. Regulation is open to professional midwifery, but must be strengthened. For example, labor coasts permit the employment of professional midwives. However, national and state policies are currently lacking a definition of the role and competencies of a professional midwife. Professional midwifery schools are relatively know and have restricted capacity to a few hundred graduates per year. And university nursing programs have recently reviewed and strengthened midwifery competencies and training, and will soon be graduating professionals with a full set of ICM competencies. Efforts on association are underway and newly established Mexican Association of Midwives have recently officially been recognized by the ICM. As described earlier, this MSH project is part of the MacArthur Foundation efforts to strengthen midwifery in Mexico and runs from November 2016 to December this year. The project goal is to strengthen the advocacy capacity of midwives and see stakeholders to make compelling arguments that are sensitive to and effective within Mexico's political context. This supports the three pillars of the project. The project focuses geographically on five states that are highlighted on this map of Mexico. They were selected as they combine high levels of maternal mortality as I explained earlier, but there is a strong political commitment to improve maternal and neonatal health. And they all have strong institutional capacity and human resources to build on in order to conduct activities to promote the inclusion of professional midwives. My colleague Iliana will take over in a minute to describe the detail of our advocacy course that is one of the main activities of the MSH project. But I would just like to take advantage here to highlight that there are a series of complementary activities that are also taking place. For example, we have produced a documentary of the midwives that has become an integral part of the maternal health team in a rural health center of Dalbo. And also for the state of Dalbo and in coordination with health authorities, we have produced this state level midwifery profile that is on the slide to be used as an apple. Next slide please. Finally, and before passing the presentation back to Iliana, I have a review with this post that illustrates the motivation of Carolina, one of the professional midwives that is part of the advocacy training exercise and works in the state of Chiapas. One of the first states in the country where access to quality maternal health services is often available to a very few. Iliana can you take over now please. Yes, thank you so much Carla. We'll go to the next slide. Okay, so now let's take a deeper dive into what this advocacy course looks like. The purpose of our advocacy course is to build the skills of mid-level health professionals to effectively advocate for programs and policies that integrate midwifery into the state and national systems. So we're offering this advocacy course in four phases. The first phase was a virtual phase where we offered five to our virtual seminars. During those two hour virtual seminars we had different guest speakers come in from the central level Ministry of Health. We had people from some of the network organizations like the Safe Motherhood Committee, the Association of Professional Midwifery in Mexico, and we even had some people from other countries, midwives from other countries that wanted to talk about their success stories. And during this virtual phase we also asked that the participants do an assessment of what midwifery looked like in their states. So how many midwives they currently have professional midwives and what their maternal mortality is for example, what kind of midwifery associations exist policies. And so they completed those assessments in that first phase. In the second phase we held a one week in-person advocacy planning workshop where we actually got all the participants together and in teams they worked on evaluating the results of their assessment to see really what those midwifery gaps were in their states. And then based on those gaps they created an advocacy plan for the following six months. And then we moved on to phase three which is the phase where we're in right now where they're currently implementing their advocacy plans in the six month time period. And then we'll eventually move on to phase four which will be in October where they're going to have a results workshop. We plan on inviting people from the Secretaries of Health again interested CSO organizations, network organizations and possibly other health professionals to hear about the results and the outcomes of the advocacy plans that the teams have implemented. During the in-person advocacy course where we taught them how to do advocacy planning, I just wanted to put a plug in that we use the IPPF handbook for advocacy planning as a basis for our content for that workshop. It was absolutely great to use that. We are currently offering this course to six teams with a total of 22 participants. The teams come from the states of Chiapas Guerrero, Hidalgo, Morelos, Oaxaca and San Luis Potosí. We designed this course for not just midwives, but midwives, nurses, doctors and other midwifery advocates that are committed to strengthening midwifery in Mexico. And the reason we included not just midwives is because we thought it was really important that we have other cadres support midwifery in these advocacy plans. And the goal really in Mexico is to see these midwives working as a team with the health professionals in the different hospitals and health clinics and what a perfect opportunity for them to start working as a team doing advocacy planning for midwifery in their states. We also found that the teams, the participants in each of the teams already work together on midwifery in their stage, which was a huge added value because we already had a group of people that knew each other and that were delivering or managing midwifery in their individual states. So during the virtual part of the program and then also throughout the rest of the phases, we created a group on our leadernet platform for this particular course. In this group we've been able to post all of the recordings from our virtual sessions. We also have forums where we have the participants discuss the topics that were presented in the midwifery, I mean in the virtual sessions. And then we also right now that they're in their implementation phase, we're using this forum to allow them to update us on how the implementation of their advocacy plans are going. One thing we did find about doing this first virtual phase is that I think the participants were a little timid in the beginning to participate in the virtual sessions and even in the virtual platform. I think that maybe while in discussing with them during the face-to-face workshop I think they found that it was not necessarily a methodology, the virtual platform that they're used to using and so it took a little bit of warming up for them. So that was good feedback that we got and we also decided to put strict homework assignments and deadlines for when they need to listen to the virtual sessions if they weren't able to attend in the live sessions. And I think we also had a lot of discussions with the teams just behind the scenes, which little by little they became a lot more active and warmed up to the platform and started becoming incredibly participative. The only other thing I'll say about this virtual platform is that right now we're hoping at the end of this course to transfer all of the content and the material to a platform that the investigative, well in Spanish it's investigación en salud en demográfica. Inside it's a local consulting group in Mexico that created a midwifery platform for Mexico. And so the idea is that we're able to transfer this onto their platform so that in the future this course can be offered. We'd like to package the methodology for all of the phases so that people in the different states could eventually offer this or maybe even the Institute of Public Health or the UNFPA in Mexico could replicate this for other states. It's right now we're only working with those five. So just to give you a sense of what the advocacy plan topics are. We have advocacy plans that are focused on decreasing obstetric violence, some on increasing municipal funding and support. Some to develop midwifery champion groups and then others to establish standard operating procedures for once a midwife graduates, how you insert them into the overall health system. What we found was interesting actually with this group of participants is that it took them a while to really really understand what we meant by advocacy planning and what advocacy was all about. And I think what's been great about the way we designed this program is that they got a lot of theory during the virtual sessions and even the face to face workshop. And now that they're actually doing the implementation, they're really seeing not just what advocacy is but what it looks like in the implementation phase. And they're really starting to see how important it is to have constant follow up of your advocacy activities, how to be persistent and resilient in the face of adversity. And so I think that's been a very valuable part of this course. So moving on to the next slide. These are our formal expected results that we're looking at in the short and the long term. We want to see that, you know, our participants complete the course and that they were able to develop and successfully implement their advocacy plans. And in the longer term, we'd like to see that out of all of the, oh, I'm sorry, this is replicated, but in the longer term what we want to see is that whatever focus they have on their advocacy plans. That they're able to actually influence policy and influence their environment over time. We understand that in a six month implementation period, we're probably not going to see a whole lot of policy changes in that time period, but there's still a lot. I think that we can see in terms of like the capacity building that we're doing for these midwives and for these participants. And the other thing I would just like to say is some of our recent results have been just seeing that the different groups from the different states are for the first time really communicating across states and sharing knowledge and experience. And that was very valuable in the in-person session. And now that they've all met each other in person, it's great to see them discuss virtually, you know, just what their experiences have been so far. And I think that a lot of the states have very similar challenges when it comes to midwifery. And in fact, some of the advocacy plans are similar across states. And so this whole initiative has just really been great for them to share those kinds of experiences and lessons learned. We also have some states that have less midwifery in their states than others. Some are a lot more advanced in terms of the degree of midwifery integration into their health system. So I think it's also been great for those teams or for those states that are a little bit more behind to really learn from other states that are more advanced as to, you know, how they made all those successes happen. And, you know, what are the different activities that they're currently doing to continue building midwifery in those individual states. Currently right now, what pretty much all the teams have gotten is they went back to their states and they've obtained local buy-in for their advocacy plans and obviously getting more and more stakeholders on board. They've continued to revise and perfect their advocacy and M&E plans as they implement them. And a lot of them are just starting with all of their stakeholder meetings and really starting to influence policy, which has been really great to see as well. So we have quite a few lessons learned before I end. So the selection process was, it took a bit of time, but we realized I think after having gone through it how important it was to spend a significant amount of time identifying the right participant profiles to ensure that you're putting together an effective team. In some states we saw that we had a great variety of participants. We had the representation of midwives. We had some very high level people from the Secretaries of Health and we had a lot of people that were managing midwifery in their states. And so I think when in those cases we had a very strong and effective team where we had a variety of people that could cover those different roles that were going to be needed during the implementation of the advocacy plans. In other states they weren't as varied and so I think they have really faced challenges in how to move their advocacy plans forward. We didn't quite nail getting those high level people that could really open doors for those participants or for those teams once they go back into their states. And what we're seeing right now is that we actually have those teams integrating more and more people that aren't necessarily in the course but just really getting buy-in for what they're doing and really getting that support locally to help them open those doors. But I think definitely spending more time really getting to know what the participant profiles are and making sure that we have a diverse team was very important. It also was very important for us to work in teams rather than having individual trainings. Over the years MSH has really promoted this form of training mostly because it's much easier for a team to go back to a work site or to go back to their states and really promote and implement the work that they're doing or learning in the training sessions versus having just one individual. And like I said earlier it's also great that these are teams of not just midwives but of doctors and nurses and it's great to hear all these different voices supporting midwives in the advocacy plan implementation process. The other thing that we learned about the virtual sessions is not all participants had great connectivity especially our participants from CHAPAS that are from more rural areas. And also we saw that because you know we were working with a lot of doctors, nurses and midwives that their schedules varied from week to week. And so we were trying really hard to nail down a two hour time period where we could have our virtual seminars and we did Saturday mornings but still a lot of people were either on call or working at the time. And so it was difficult for everybody to participate in the live sessions. And so one thing that we've been considering for the next iteration of this program is to actually have the sessions pre-recorded and uploaded onto our site so that people could listen to them at their own pace. And what we would do is probably just have homework assignments for each virtual seminar and have a deadline for when they have to listen to the virtual seminar and complete the homework assignment so that we know they listen to it. And then also the homework assignments are basically discussion questions on our forum to really generate discussion across the different participants. And so that was just another lesson learned that it would be great to just give them that opportunity to have more of the self-paced virtual sessions. The other is the that we learned is in terms of expected results versus the time frame that we had. So this is a one year course we started in October. And last year and we're going to end in October of this year. However, the implementation period for the advocacy planning is only six months. And so our expected results really had to change thinking about that. What we're really trying to accomplish here is that we increase the capacity of midwives to be able to advocate for themselves and for the services that they offer. And so I think that in that six month time period we can definitely measure that the degree of capacity building that we achieved. But like I said earlier in our results page it's it's going to be difficult for us in the six month time period to see things like policies changing in their states it who knows it may happen and that would be amazing. And I'm sure there are other things that are going to happen like them being able to create a more enabling environment for midwifery by creating more champion groups for example. But definitely you know if in offering this you really want to see that policy change as a result of the advocacy work it is important to give a lot more time during the implementation period of their advocacy plans. So that was another lesson learned. And then also the elections are going on right now in Mexico and we didn't really foresee well we just didn't know that it was going to fall within our time period and so that was definitely something that the participants have seen as a challenge because they're trying to influence a lot of policy makers but right now they're not sure which policy makers are going to be in their states after the elections. And so that has definitely halted the implementation of their plans and so it'll be really important for future just to kind of for future reference to look at these types of events like elections and see you know possibly how they can impact and compensate for that by maybe adding more time or maybe adjusting your start date of the advocacy course. And with that, I just want to end with this quote from one of our participants. Her name is Issela Barrera Cortes she's a physician. She's this one right here and I really like this quote because it really shows you the motivation behind why those who participated are in the course. And she says I decided to participate in the advocacy course because I see how midwifery improves the quality of maternal health services for women and their families. Because of this since 2016 I've been advocating for midwifery in my state. And definitely this was something that I saw across the participants and talking to them about why they were interested in this. And they were really committed to improving the quality of maternal health services and maternal health outcomes in their states and I think that's why all of them are extremely motivated enthusiastic and participative in this program. So thank you very much again for listening this is the whole group of us. There's Carla and there's me. And then we have all of the participants here. This was during our in person workshop. We are going to have about 20 minutes I believe a question and answer and I are more than happy to answer any of the questions about just the context in Mexico or anything related to our advocacy course. Thank you, Eliana. That was an informative presentation. I love your last slide in the quote at the end. I certainly can appreciate here in the United States that collaborative piece where during your advocacy planning stage you made sure to include not only midwives but doctors and other healthcare professionals. I think that's just such a key piece of this whole plan and can certainly appreciate that part of it. I have other comments but I want to make sure that we have time for questions from any of any of our participants. Please feel free to use the chat or raise your hands for questions or comments about the presentation. And Eliana if you can throw the presenter piece back over to me. That would be great. Sure. And I couldn't help but when we were listening when I was listening to think about the similarities at Frontier Nursing University. We have distance based community community based distance education and so a lot of our students are in rural areas. And certainly have some connectivity issues for the online piece of their didactic coursework. And so I had that question for you. How did participants overcome the connectivity barrier if there is one but you seem to have answered that. And the other piece of that was just thinking about working professionals and how do you kind of adjust for that time and place bound piece of that work. Just because they're in clinic and they are busy. So how do you get them all together to be able to collaborate in person or face to face. So this I think falls in one of our lessons learned in terms of our selection process and really being very careful about the participant profiles because in some of the teams we were able to get people from the same like groups to apply within the same state. So for example in San Luis Potosí we have a team of people that work in the same hospital and they're in the same office. And so that makes it really easy for them to come together and to find time to work on their advocacy plans. But then in other states like for example Morelos like they're all working in different parts of the state and not necessarily in like a central location. So it is a little harder for them to meet although they're very motivated that group and they every Sunday find a central location where they meet. But that's just an example of how it's easier when you select people that are already in one team that are like in one location to work on those advocacy planning activities. And then in terms of the connectivity so we did have quite a bit of trouble with connectivity especially for some of those states that don't have great connection. And as a response to that we did record all of the sessions and then just give them the link to how they can stream it and then they would just go online and complete some discussion questions. And so that really helped a lot and I think that's why this lesson learned about you know making the virtual part a little bit more self paced came out because I know that these are clinicians and that they're very busy and sometimes like even when they're not working they're on call. And so giving them the opportunity to participate at their own pace I think would be really important for future offerings. Yes, that's great. Related to connectivity but not specifically responding to the question. It's it's been key to maintain motivation within the groups. So we've, we followed we followed up on the phone by email and really made efforts to keep motivation high and feedback to these teams that are now off back to their state that working really on their own and within these really creative groups but it's been key to follow up with them periodically. Yeah, and I would add also. So in the beginning I know I mentioned that they were very timid especially on the virtual platform and participating in the seminars. And I think that took a lot of like follow up to to really get them engaged in the platform and in the course and we had very strict rules for like who can proceed into the in person face to face workshop so it was you know people who completed their assignments who attended or listened to the virtual seminars. I would send like weekly updates to the entire group and then to some groups to the entire participant group of participants and then to separate groups and then, you know, if I saw that there was an individual that was active or participating I would have you know my own call with that person or I would reach out to that person to see you know how best we could support him or her so that they could you know be more active and some people just realize that they really did not have the time and they dropped out of the course but it's good to see that they're actually a lot of them are still supporting their teams and some of the implementation activities that they're doing. And so yeah I think I agree with Carla like it did take a lot of persistence and a lot of following up and like she said not just over email but also over the phone over whatsapp so it did take a lot of that. Thank you both for that for that insight that the pearls of wisdom from your this process and it will be special part of this presentation for viewers does anyone else have questions or comments for the presenters. Well I certainly do want to thank Eliana and Carla for their work and for presenting I know the long term results of this will have a greater health impact. It will be interesting to be nice to hear and update later and see how the groups are doing and it's such special work so certainly thank you both for that. If there aren't any other questions I'm going to stop the recording now and we appreciate everyone's participation. Yes we do and for those midwives that tuned in we so appreciate all of the work that you do for women children and families all around the world so thank you very much for that. Thank you very much Carla we appreciate your time this morning also. Thank you for the space it's been a very rewarding experience to see these midwives and these midwifery groups empowered and moving on towards new goals in Michigan and Mexico so thank you for the space and we'd welcome any further questions after this talk if there are any. So thank you for having us. Thank you so powerful.


Hello everyone, I'm Gabrielle over here at Oxmore Toyota you guys this beautiful vehicle just arrived I want to do a little video on it. So this is brand-new 23 Toyota Prius. It is the limited Prius is a hybrid but you guys this one has a lot more things on it than you might think So why don't we go ahead and start on the front? There's going to be LED headlights you have the daylight running lights now with it being a Prius all Toyota vehicles That emblem is going to be in blue Now the exterior color is in the windshield pearl. So it has a little sparkly White very beautiful So this one does have the premium convenience package. You have that 15 inch alloy wheels There is going to be a sunroof and then you have the removable crossbars, which really makes this Prius really sporty So on the side you have the body side moldings now It isn't that same body color But as it kind of tapers off to the back door it comes in this black which really Gives it that sporty appearance And then coming around to the back you'll see these little This little dots right here around the vehicle now These are your parking sensors and then again on the back that Toyota Emblem is going to be in the blue signifying that it is a Prius and then you have the hybrid and then your limited trim Now going into the interior. It really is beautiful. You have the Harvest beige Soft-Tax trim is a beautiful color Now that screen is in a 11.6 inch You are gonna have JBL speakers. There is going to be Apple CarPlay with Android Auto. Again, there is a sunroof There's gonna be all-weather floor liners throughout and Then for your passengers There is going to be your power adapters All right, you guys. So again, this is a very sporty looking vehicle, but don't forget about the gas mileage It's a hybrid you get 52 combined MPG. That is awesome If you all have any questions, let us know all of our contact info is listed right here Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you soon. Bye


I'm moving on to entertainment. Fans of late Olarewaju Fasasi, popularly known as South Sultan, including celebrities, gathered on Sunday for a procession and night of tribute to the musician who died at the age of 44. He died following a hard fought fought battle with angioblastic T-cell lymphoma ATCL on July 11. ATCL is a fast growing aggressive type of non-Hochkin lymphoma with symptoms including larger than normal lymph nodes in different areas of the body, joint pains, anemia and night sweats. The procession kicked off from stone fuel on 23rd road where the late musician played basketball and featured in music concert. The procession continued through 4th avenue to 3rd avenue then to 5th avenue before they convert at federal housing authority field on 23rd road for tribute.


Hey, Psych2Goers! Welcome back to another video. Before we begin, we would like to thank you for all the support that you've given us. Psych2Go's mission is to help everyone learn more about psychology and mental health in a fun and digestible manner. Now, let's begin. Did you know that your attachment style can say a lot about you? In the same way, the Myers-Briggs personality type can reveal the kind of person you are. Your attachment style can also provide insight into the types of relationships you're likely to develop. However, you should note that just as with any type or style, this is only meant to be a guide. So keep watching to find out what your attachment style says about you. So what are the attachment styles? Attachment styles look into the relationships between people. It was first developed by John Balby, who was interested in the behaviors infants had expressed when separated from their caregivers. He defined attachment as a lasting psychological connectedness between human beings, which can be observed and categorized through a pattern of behaviors and motivations. These attachment behaviors were later developed into four distinct categories. Secure, anxious and bivalent, avoidant and disorganized attachment. Secure attachment. Are you comfortable with yourself? Children with a secure attachment are more independent and have a good sense of self-esteem, which helps them perform well in school and with social relationships. As adults, you're able and more willing to attend to the needs of your loved ones without complications. According to Mark Manson, people with a secure attachment are able to reassure anxious types and give space to avoidant types without feeling insecure. Your strong sense of independence and healthy self-esteem allows you to set healthy boundaries in your relationships. Anxious, ambivalent attachment. Are you always suspicious or doubtful of other people's intentions? Anxious or ambivalent attachment in children may have been a result of inconsistent attention from caregivers. Your parents may become warm and nurturing one minute and cold and insensitive the next, which may make you confused and distrustful of them. Yet, you still have to cling to them to get your needs met. This alertness and suspicion of others will carry over into adulthood, where you may require constant reassurance for the anxiousness and distrustfulness you feel. Avoidant attachment. You withdraw yourself or repress your emotions when you're stressed. As a child, those who develop avoidant attachment likely did not have their needs met by their caregiver. You may have been discouraged from crying or expressing your feelings, which may cause you to lean to ignore your wants, needs and sensations to maintain your relationship with your caregiver. This habit to disconnect and minimize your emotions can continue on to adulthood. As an adult with an avoidant attachment, you may perceive your partner as needing too much attention or being too clingy since you are uncomfortable with emotional intimacy. Disorganized avoidant fearful attachment. Do you sometimes not know how to react or feel about your parents? Disorganized attachment develops when a child feels that there is no secure way to get their needs met. As a child, your relationship with an unpredictable caregiver may cause you to have difficulty establishing a consistent view of your parents and yourself. Unfortunately, these confusions and behaviors can carry over into adulthood, affecting your relationships with others. You may have trouble developing good social and emotional regulation skills, where you end up prioritizing the behaviors that will get your needs met. Oh, what can you do? If you're worried that you may have an insecure attachment style that's interfering with your relationships, it's important to talk to a mental health professional who can help you identify what you may be experiencing and how you can support yourself through it. Do any of the attachment styles sound familiar to you? Tell us about it in the comments below. If you enjoyed this video, please like and share it with others who may find it helpful too. All the references used are also added in the description box below. Don't forget to subscribe to Psych2Go and hit the notification icon for more videos. Thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one.


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello, you're watching People's Dispatch. Today, we hear from South Africa where the workers of the country's largest and oldest dairy sector employer, that's Clover, are on strike. Now, the workers' strike has entered its second month. There have been a lot of rounds of negotiations, but the government has not accepted the demands and the workers are determined that they will continue their protests until these demands are met. To know more about these demands as well as the nature of the protests, we have with us John Apollis, who is the General Secretary of Jeevusa. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Yes, so first of all, I just wanted to ask you about the strike itself. There are about 5,000 workers involved here. This is the second month that the strike has been going on. So what are the key labour issues that have really caused the strike? The key issues are one, the massive job losses that was affected by Clover SA and Milko. At the end of July, this year, they retrenched, cut about 843 jobs. At the end of November, they cut 874 jobs and they are planning to cut another 812 jobs in February 2022. So one of the key demands of the strike is that the company must stop these job cuts and take back and reinstate those workers that they have dismissed through the process of retrenchment. The second key issue is the cuts in the salaries. The company has imposed a unilateral cut in the salaries of workers to the tune of 20%. In fact, this has also led to the retrenchment of workers because they are saying that if you do not accept the 20% cut in your salaries, then you will be retrenched and many of the workers, especially the 874 workers, have rejected the 20% cut in their salaries. Hence, they were then dismissed and retrenched at the end of November. The third issue is the issue of what we call austerity measures. Here, the company is forcing workers to work on a Saturday and a Sunday as well as public holidays. Now in South Africa, we have about 10 paid public holidays where workers are supposed to be off on those particular days and get paid for being off on the public holidays. So the company is forcing them to work on those particular public holidays. They are also cutting the transport allowance. There are workers who work night shift and they get a transport allowance and the company wants to cut it by 50%. Then the other issue is the issue of what they called permanent short time. In other words, when there's a slack in demand for their goods, orders are down, they want to have the right to inform the worker not to come to work because there are no orders, there are no products to deliver to the various retailers. And then they want to have a situation where they don't have to pay those particular workers. And these workers are permanent workers, they supposed to have guaranteed working hours per week and per month. So they want to now acquire this right to inform permanent workers not to come to work, put them on short time and not be able to pay them. And then there's the last issue, which is one of the major issues is what we called a working operation, where currently when workers do deliveries of the dairy products to the different retailers, the driver has two van assistance, two assistance in the truck with him because they deliver huge tons of products to the different retailers, especially the major retailers in our country. Now the company wants to away with the two van assistance and want to impose one van assistance. That means that the driver must now, in addition to driving the trucks and be responsible for the products, must also do delivery, picking up orders on the truck and also offloading and also taking the products into the retailers. Now, and sorry, the last one is what we call, they want to impose a compressed working week where they want to change the ordering hours from nine hours to 12 hours. Now you can see combined with this scrapping of the two van assistance system and a 12 hour shift work. Clearly, you can see the workload and on the workers are going to intensify. So those are the issues that our members are striking and our demands are clear. One, that the company must stop the job cuts, reinstate those workers, stop the salary cuts and also withdraw all these austerity measures as we call them in our propaganda, in our agitation. So those are the issues that has led to the strike from the 22nd of November this year. Absolutely. Just quickly to follow up, has the company responded to any of these demands at all in any manner? In fact, we have been in negotiations with them for about four months and in fact, the problem that we had is that every time we have a meeting with the company, they increase the numbers of the job cuts. They start out to maybe 200 and then the next meeting say no, because they are doing certain calculations, the numbers increase, etc., etc. So they have not moved one inch from their position. The only issue that they sort of compromise on was the issue of the reinstatement of certain numbers of workers. They are saying that they are prepared to take back 763 workers, but these workers must accept the 20 percent wage cuts. They must also accept all these other changes in the operations and the conditions of employment, which our members are not prepared to exceed. Now, what's important to understand here is that the company is embarking on this major onslaught against workers' wages and jobs and their living standards, because they told us that in order to restore their levels of profitability, they need to cut labor costs by 300 million REN per annum. So they have set themselves that particular target of saving labor costs to the tune of 300 million REN, and hence they are now implementing all these different measures to achieve that particular target. So clearly they have made up the mind that they want to achieve a certain rate of return on the investment of their shareholders, and therefore the workers have to carry the burden of achieving that level of profitability. Absolutely. And in this context, of course, it's not only the workers of clover who might be affected, but also the larger dairy sector and farmers as well. So could you maybe also talk about how these plans might affect them?   And secondly, also the consumer, the consumers, we have launched a national boycott of clover products. We have called on the public and the communities not to buy the products of clover. As you can see behind me, we do have a poster calling on the public to boycott clover products. We have produced many pamphlets and stickers that we stick on the products. We get teams of people, squads of people to go to the supermarkets, the retail shops, and they stick these boycott stickers on the products of clover. In that sense, we're also popularizing the boycott of clover products. And in this context, of course, quickly wanted to check before going into the international aspect, what has been the government's response? Because I think one of the demands has been that clover should be nationalized as well. So how is the government engaged with the unity? Well, I mean, the government has not really responded. In fact, we wrote a letter to the Minister of Trade and Industry because enterprises, especially enterprises who have undertaken particular mergers fall under the sphere of the Minister of Trade and Industry. So we wrote a letter towards the end of November, requesting a meeting with the Minister. We only got a response, not directly from the Minister, but one of the public servants, the Deputy Director General in the Department of Competition Policy and Economic Planning. We met on two occasions now, last week, Thursday and this Tuesday. In the first meeting, she wanted the details of what are the developments at clover, because she was indicating she must develop a briefing document for the Minister. We then provided her with all the information. And then on Tuesday, when we got the feedback from her, all she said was that she gave the briefing to the Minister. He asked a couple of questions, but he did not give any indication whether he is prepared to meet with us or intervene in this particular dispute and strike that is currently in place. In fact, we are not surprised by the lack of response and lack of interest on the part of the Minister and the government as a whole. Because for the past 20 years, the ANC government has pursued a new liberal economic program where they put at the center the interests of the private sector, capitalist enterprises. In fact, for them, I mean, economic development and development in a country will be premised on the private sector creating economic growth. And we all know that economic growth means making more profits for employers, for the capitalists. So they don't want to upset the employers, the capitalists. So therefore they are kind of dragging the feet to intervene. Because for us, what's important here is that Clover was taken over by an Israeli-based company called Central Bottling Company in 2019. They paid out the the shareholders to the tune of four comma, I think two billion REN. And they became then the major shareholder of Clover. We opposed the merger as unions. And also with the Palestinian Solidarity Organization in South Africa, we made a submission to the what we call the competition commission that has the right to determine whether a merger must go ahead or not. We made the submission, raised all the problems of the fact that the CBC, the Central Bottling Company, is a company that is operating in the occupied territories of Palestine and is very complicit in the in the violation of human rights and the oppression of the Palestinian people. In fact, the Palestinian Solidarity Groups assisted us in doing research on the CBC. And they found a whole range of violations and anti-worker and anti-human rights practices on the part of CBC. In fact, they operate in the Gulen Heights and also in parts of the West Bank. They also have a dairy that they have in Israel. They also have a beverage company. So we then indicated to the to the competition commission and to the government that the takeover by CBC, first of all is in violation of the international law because of the the fact that this company is operating in the occupied territories. Secondly, that CBC, this takeover is going to lead to a major process of rationalization and reorganization restructuring. This is not going to lead to drop creation or development of the local manufacturing capacity in the country. And this is what is playing out now. I mean, besides now the job losses and the tax on workers wages, Clover is also shutting down its inland production facilities. They claim they are shifting it to the coastal areas, you know, like Durban, which is one of the coastal areas and in Port Elizabeth, another coastal areas. But from from our perspective, we kind of saying that this is really to prepare Clover to become a distribution network for the products of CBC because they are putting Clover at key harbor ports in our countries. And we know CBC is a major player also in the dairy industry in the Middle East and also in the beverages, which is where Clover is also operating within the markets. So and therefore, Clover will become for us a destination for the products of CBC and they're going to scale down its Clover's manufacturing capacity and turn it into a major distribution network for the products of Israel. So that's how we can analyze the situation. And therefore, the ANC government, although it pays lip service to the support of the struggle and liberation of the Palestinian people, but when it comes down to it, when it comes to taking real action, you can see the ANC government runs away from actually doing anything substantial and concrete to assist the Palestinian people. And therefore, we are not surprised by the lack of response or interest on the part of the Minister of Trade and Industry in the issues that workers are facing as well as the Palestinian people. And finally, quickly, how do you see the strike action continuing in the coming weeks as well, considering the response? Well, we are organizing a major mass rally on the 8th of January. We are inviting and calling all organizations and progressive individuals. We are doing it together with the Palestinian Support Committee, support organizations like the BDS, the Palestinian Solidarity Alliance, the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, as well as SAFTA, that is one of the trade unifederations, and with FAU, is the other union that is also part of this strike. So we're calling a major mass meeting where we're going to kind of strategize in terms of how do we going to intensify the struggle against clover. We're also planning a major march to the offices of the Minister of Trade and Industry on the 13th of January, so that we can highlight the call for the disinvestment of CPC from South Africa. Thank you so much for talking to us. Okay. Thank you very much for having me. That's all your time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.


Sharp's battle, by Bernard Cornwell, read by Paul McGahn. Sharp's war. Then in desperation he turned the map upside down.  We could light a fire with it, Sergeant Harper suggested. It's not bloody use for anything else, Sharp said. The hand-drawn map showed a scatter of villages, a few spidery lines for roads, streams, and hills, whereas all Sharp could seep as mountains, gray, bleak mountains with peaks shrouded by mists, and valleys cooked by streams turned white and full by the spring rains. Sharp had led his company into the high ground, on the border between Spain and Portugal, and there become lost. His company, forty soldiers, seemed not to care. They were just grateful for the rest, and so sat all day beside the grassy track, while Captain Richard Sharp crumpled the map into a ball and swore, I'm bloody lost. My grandad got lost once. Harper said helpfully. He bought a bullock from a fella in Clonelli Parish, and decided to take a shortcut home across the Derivé Mountains. Then the fog rolled in, and grandad couldn't tell his left from his right, and the bullock bolted into the fog and jumped clear over a cliff into the Barra Valley. Grandad said you could hear the poor wee beast bellowing all the way down, and there was a thump like you dropped a bagpipe off a church tire only louder.  It was a valuable beast, Harper protested. Lieutenant Price had been at the rear of the column, but now joined his commanding officer. Are we lost, sir? No hurry.  Sharp stared glumly about the damp, bleak valley. We need a compass, he said. Or a map, Lieutenant Price suggested happily. We've got a bloody map here! Sharp thrust the balled-up map into the Lieutenant's hands. Major Hogan drew it for me, and I can't make head nor tail out of it. Sharp, on his way to Villa Famoso, where his company, the light company of the South Essex Regiment, would be attached to the town major as a guard unit, had heard a distant cannonade, and had marched toward the sound, only to discover that the noise of the skirmish, if indeed it was not thunder, had faded away, and now Sharp was lost. One thing certain, Sharp said.  I said my grandad did. Harper said. He followed.  Sharp said quietly, and gestured to make his companion's crouch. Bloody crapo! He said softly, or something. Never seen a uniform like it. A horseman had appeared out of a side valley. Harper cocked his rifle. Sharp's men were all alert now, and lying motionless in the grass. Even if the horseman had turned, he would not have noticed the infantry. The horseman had a short, grey dragoon jacket, grey trousers, and a grey horse-herd plume on his steel grey helmet. Spaniard, Sharp wondered. The don's roll was gaudy, sir, Harper said. He's got crapper weapons, Price said. The horseman was indeed armed like a French dragoon. He wore a straight sword, had a short, barrelled carbine, and abrasive pistols, but French dragoons always wore green coats. The man looked about, saw nothing to alarm him, and spurred his horse back into the side valley. He was scouting. Harper said softly.  We're going to see who those bastards are. He pointed uphill. You first, Harry.  Lieutenant Price led the red coats of Sharp's company up the steep slope. Half of the company wore the red jackets of Britain's line infantry, while the other half, like Sharp himself, had the green jackets of the elite rifle regiments. It had been an accident of war that had stranded Sharp and his riflemen in a red coat battalion, but sheer bureaucratic inertia that had held them there. You think we've crossed the lines? Harper asked Sharp.  The French were retreating out of Portugal. Throughout the winter of 1810, the enemy had stayed in front of the lines of Torres Vedras, just half days march from Lisbon. And there they'd frozen and half starved to death rather than retreat to their supply depots in Spain. Marshal Massenaire had known that retreat would yield all Portugal to the British, while to attack the lines of Torres Vedras would be pure suicide. Sample complete. Ready to continue?


I heard this quote. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings. And this got me thinking. Prototyping is one of the most crucial steps in my design process. It allows us, as UX designers, to create preliminary versions of the product. It can often make or break the final product. I've been designing products for the last 10 years and getting early feedback is crucial. Making updates to a prototype is much more convenient and cost efficient compared to revising a ship product. Let's start with a hotdog.  Yes! I mean it allows us to test how people interact with the concept. So let's talk about what is prototyping, the step-by-step guide, then later in the video I want to talk about common pitfalls to avoid. So stick around for that. Prototyping. What is it exactly? Well a prototype is an example of a mock-up used to test a process or product built with varying degrees of fidelity to capture design concepts and test them with real users. Some of the high-value benefits are leveraging insights from team members verifying product market fit, improving user experience, eliminating waste, predict unexpected scenarios and usability problems, a standard for presentation, time and cost efficient. Without further ado, here is the step-by-step guide. First you want to establish a clear purpose. Without a defined concept you can easily set your product up for failure. The second is defining a prototype's requirements early. Ask yourself how real or complex does the prototype have to be to serve this purpose? Then you don't want to rely entirely on your prototyping tool. Think about ways that you can kind of fake the experience. Number four is you need to choose the right amount of fidelity. Is it medium? Is it high? Is it low? Who knows? Then you've got to think about how the prototype can be updated. Number six is reuse, reuse, reuse. For digital prototyping this means saving reusable templates, stencils, patterns and widgets for future projects. Then start with a disclaimer. Start every prototype review session with a disclaimer that this is just a prototype, a mock-up and it's not the actual solution. This reminds stakeholders and users that this is still work in progress and they won't get frustrated. Number eight, don't forget to test. The goal of this is to identify problems and areas to make improvements early so you can make the necessary changes. So let's get into the common pitfalls. I used to design products as quickly as I could to make deadlines so I can hand them off to developers and not make a back. A few weeks later the product has been released, we started getting feedback. I don't get it. How does it work? It was back. I didn't validate the flows, features or interactions before getting the developers to code my design. Months later we ended up needing full redesign. Static designs don't help anyone. So here's what to avoid. Don't be a perfectionist. Don't focus too much on the first good idea. Don't add too many features. Try to avoid the endowment effect. It's an emotional bias that causes the value that you put into your project higher and often irrationally higher than its market value. Don't prototype without a clear objective. Don't spend too much time explaining it. It's always better to show rather than tell. So when I started building UX Playbook I didn't sit by the computer and write 30,000 words. Instead I wrote one guide around 2,000 words about how I created Preda Personas. Uploaded it and wanted to buy me a coffee and tested it with a bunch of users. During that week someone randomly found it. Yeah no it was super lucky. They purchased it with zero marketing. From that UX Playbook was born. Nice. Building a prototype should be fast and even dirty. Nice. And if your prototype involves coding the actual code doesn't have to be perfect or clean. It just needs to do the job that it was intended to do. If you want to learn more about prototyping with detailed guides and templates check out the link in the description. Hit the big red button for another Playbook height breakdown of UX Playbooks. Bye!


మenter మీర్ ధేపశుటిబల�寂ంటేకోచ్డ౟రే.a అక్��విటరి భాయ addressing me.w match f 🐄 snake ల౎సీంటేసీడొబనంచ్మర్. w నాిచేటుగ ☀నంటేపతు. అట౉  PSAKI�ేటాగ! When I saw the advert for the financial modeling academy, it was really huge one for me, although I was not even prepared for it, but getting to see the huge discount and the value, it made me opting for the training and the academy, and getting into the academy was a huge one for me, I've been doing one or two things with the brand before. I was part of the bootcamp participants before, but the training in the academy was on another level for me because of the structure and the way the modules were being structured and the way the tutor with the brand took us in the course. One other thing that stand out for me was the mock exam because it really took me up for me because my plan of the exam, I've not done the exam before, but getting to do the mock exam showed me my real self that I'm not prepared. Another thing that stood out for me was the case-by-case step-by-step guide, step-by-step guide in answering the exam. That stood out for me because for me, I already have the issue with the revolving debt schedule before coming into the academy. But getting to see the step-by-step guide in answering the exam really helped me and also the case study questions, like we had about six to seven that we had to do and I had to practice them for the exam. That really made the exam a breeze for me when I did it. Thank you.


All right, here we're back with Timeout Ribbon, which is really just a condition stimulus for Timeout. So you can make not just a ribbon, but anything signal Timeout. That's a fun thought to play with. Anyway, we're going to go back to Timeout, which is contingent on a behavior you're no longer going to get reinforcement for said period of time. I've had great success with condition, not conditionally, but well, conditionally on Timeout, you need to wear a rubber band on your wrist for said period of Timeout. It's become really effective in all settings in the car and the grocery store across everywhere. It's phenomenal. My other favorite is the Timeout rug. The family decided that the kiddo needs to sit on the said rug. So that rug became conditioned to the point where they took the rug with them on vacation all the way four states over. It was brilliant. They completely had an issue and they put them on the rug for Timeout and he completely stopped the rest of the vacation and had no problem and they were reinforcing for the entire time out of Timeout.


Hi everyone! I'm Liz Wade and I wanted to give you a little update on our channel. So we have been growing and trying new things and I really wanted to be able to give you a little update on what those things were. So I have a list here in my little notebook of three things that I wanted to tell you about that are happening on our channel right now. The first is memberships. Maybe you have noticed underneath each video now you can see a little button that says join and if you click that button you can get more information. I think that some people think that if they click the button they are immediately going to be charged and that is not the case. If you click you'll be able to see what different levels there are and then also make the choice whether you want to be a member or not and there are four different levels of membership. The first one is you get some cool badges and emojis and also you get your name in every single video we make after you sign up. In the second level you also get access to exclusive member videos and what is the other thing? Oh yeah you get PDFs of scripts so that's really great and then as you go up you get more PDFs and more video access and other perks so that's really cool. So if you want to join being in one of the first months of our membership this is a really cool time to join. Okay so what is our second thing? Oh yeah our second thing we have people ask all the time how can I download your program and we have had a long history. Spotlight is over 20 years old so for many years people were able to very easily download our programs from our website and our website changed and you know sometimes change is hard and we have programs that are available on YouTube and a podcast and an app and our website so there's lots of choices but we recently updated our website to be able to easily download programs so if you are a person who just listens to the program or wants to download it later so that you can listen to it again and again now that is a super easy option. You just need to go to the website there's a little player at the bottom and you just click the little down arrow with a line under it the download symbol right so you just click the download symbol and it will automatically save that program to your computer or your phone or whatever so that I think is a really great way to be able to download the programs. Number three oh yes this is another thing that people have been asking for and we posted a poll on our community page a couple weeks ago now I think asking if people like the music in the program or not because we often get people asking us to make the music levels lower so that it's easier to understand the voices so we are trying this as an experiment we are going to try to make some of our programs no music programs and now our first no music program comes out tonight uh or maybe it's in the morning for you wherever it is for me it's tonight that program will come out tonight and you will be able to listen to that program with only the intro music and the outro music so the beginning theme music and the ending theme music and if you like that program if you like that style of no music let us know leave a comment or if you miss the music and the sound effects let us know that too we really want to make sure that you are getting your best English practice and English learning experience from spotlight English programs and we love listening to your requests and trying to make those real so um again check out the join button below check out the programs that you can now download on our website and uh check out our new no music programs and as soon as we get a few we'll have a whole playlist of those so let us know what you think in the comments below give a like on a program or even subscribe that really helps us get the word out about spotlight English so that more people can use our programs to practice and learn English thank you so much for being a subscriber if you already are or thank you especially to our members our new members we're super glad to have you with us listen watch practice learn spotlight out