for this training program today. We're going to call this training programs and offers for nonprofits and volunteers. And as I saw in the chat room, many different types of nonprofits. So you are in the right place. My name is Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. I'm going to move all the way. Before I do, let me show you how you can engage today.  We would love if you would type your questions in the Q&A, but feel free to continue typing in the chat. We have plenty of members here from the TechSoup courses team to answer your questions. This is being recorded. So are you going to get the recording along with the slides within four to eight hours? If you need the closed caption, go ahead and turn on that CC button at the bottom of your screen. And I'm excited to turn this over to Sabah, who's going to lead us into the next portion of Big Webinar, everybody. Bye-bye. Thank you, Aretha. Hello, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. Let me begin with a short introduction to our team. We have Gray Harriman, Director of Global Learning Program. Gray has over three decades of experience in learning and leads the learning team at TechSoup. We also have Shuaia, who has a PhD in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University and has over eight years of experience in instructional design and leads our instructional design team at TechSoup. And me, some are merchant leading operations and managing support for our learners globally. And I've been in learning and development at various nonprofits in different roles for close to 13 years now. Let's take a quick look at our agenda. After introducing you to the TechSoup courses program, we will dive into various formats and show you a couple of examples of our courses. And we are very excited to share with you all about our newly launched courses and also the ones that are upcoming very, very soon. And we'll also share some information around how we can help your organization with group enrollments and special offers. And before we let you go at the end of the hour, we do have a special offer for each of you that has taken the time to join us today. So with that, let me hand it over to Gray to now take us further. Gray, you are on mute. Thank you for that. Yes, great to be here with you. Now we're gonna give you a little bit of introduction to the TechSoup courses program. And so if we can go to the next slide, we'll start with telling you, just driving this slide. Okay, there we go.  So that's our aim. And in doing so, we provide any number of our courses that can support this. I think the TechSoup courses, as you can go to the next slide, has grown significantly and it started in 2017. And it grew, but grew slowly until probably 2019, 2020 when it really took off. So, I think I joined TechSoup in 2019 and we've had a few courses and we have, I think, about 5,000 learners at that point. You can see the numbers now. We have over 200 courses and that does not include all the translations to different languages. And we have about 80,000 learners. So what happened? Well, several things. Number one, it's, I think the organizations that were starting to consider growing digital in 2017 all of a sudden woke up to a new reality, especially after COVID. And COVID had also influenced the number of people that enrolled into courses once they had to start working remotely. So that's part of the growth. But one important thing is that I think a lot of nonprofits are realizing that they need to be more resilient, especially those that are in vulnerable areas. If you're in a hurricane prone area, for example, and you didn't put things in the cloud and all of a sudden your computers go floating down, the river, you're in a hurricane, you lose your nonprofit when it's most needed, right? So people are not trying to refocus, trying to see what they do, also taking advantage of social media and learning how to do email marketing and fundraising, all those things which are really important. And we provide courses in those areas. So that's what's driven this growth and we don't expect it to go away. I think we are here to stay and provide a more for you. So let's go into the next slide. And we're gonna have a little poll about the format of training that you might currently use. So I'll let Shuiya drive this little poll. Okay, that's great. So we are curious to know what type or what format of training are you currently using? So you have three ways to participate in the poll. You can either go to the direct link that we are going to share very soon in the chat or you can go to manti.com and type in the code 7495437 or you can just scan this QR code on the right side with your cell phone and it will take you to the voting page. I think my colleague can help me put in the voting link in the chat too. I'll give you a little bit more time before I show the results. Okay, we have results coming in. So a lot of you are using self-paced e-learning either videos or learning modules that you can take at your own time. And quite some of you attend instructor at online training too. And still in person training is also not has not disappeared. We have people attending in person training too. And some other options for those of you who voted other do you mind sharing what's the other format you are using in the chat? Okay, combination of three, okay. Yeah, there are plenty of options. These results are very typical I think nowadays. If it had been 10, 15 years ago, it would have had the reverse where most people would have been in in-person training. So that tells you, shows you clearly the trend as to how things have changed. Let's go into the next slide. So as you can see different people like different formats for the training. And at TechSoup we have a variety of learning formats. We do have live online events and they come in a number of flavors. We have what we call as the experts or expert led Q&A. So that it's one hour of instructors that done themselves to answer your questions or experts to answer your questions in a topic. There's regular seminars and of course webinars as well. I think the expert led Q&A is always very interesting because you get to answer your questions and if there's too many questions we do provide them after the event as well. The on-demand training, that's we have a lot of basic to advanced courses and they are really high quality. And I'll mention that a little bit on that because we have done special evaluations which we want to review today that measure of what the learning effectiveness was over time which means that it's not just an evaluation at the end of the course to find out if you learn the content of the course. We do that, it's included. But we also do follow-ups six months to a year later and see how much of the learning you've retained by you using it in your work with the nonprofits and how is the nonprofit organization being effective and we've been highly effective on that. So it's quality learning. We have learning tracks and I'll talk more about that in a little bit which our groupings of course is and I'll bring that up. Workshops, we've done a number of workshops as well so that if that's the format that you prefer we do have those formats. Micro learnings, videos, guides, manuals, we also offer those. And finally the blended programs sometimes people think what is a branded program because they might hear about a hybrid programs that's the same thing which means part of it is online part of it is live. And you work with a cooperative group of learners which move through a number of weeks tackling a specific topic or project together. So we have those formats for you in tech supply. So let's go into the next slide. As you can see we cover a lot of topic areas going from tech planning to and digital transformation well on one end to data reporting and data awareness and visualization on the other in almost everything in between whether it's email marketing, social media marketing, cybersecurity which is increasingly important for you to protect yourself and your organization. We have all that available for you as individual courses and then I'll talk about the tracks but we have a large number of courses that you can see if you go to our online catalog and just depending on what your role and your organization is you can pick individual courses or as we go into the next slide you can pick groupings of courses which we call tracks. In this case we have a track with only two courses as an example and if you go into the catalog you're gonna see how long it would take for you to do the course in this case two to three hours you'll see a little description you'll see which courses are involved if you want to look into those course descriptions you can click and see them as well. So the advantage of this is that when you go and take a track normally you have all the relevant courses to that particular topic group together but you also get them each course at a discount because the tracks are usually discounted. So let's look at some other tracks here. We have for example in Excel there's a large number of these courses you can really get very proficient at Excel. It's an incredibly successful course track for us. We have many, many learners. I think the last time I looked it was over 16,000 learners in Excel courses. So now you can see the effectiveness of that and the quality that people like and they go through all these courses. Grant writing is another example of a track. You can get it highly discounted as well by buying all the courses as a track instead of buying them individually. So how do we create the courses and all that is something that I'm gonna pass on to Shunya to give examples and talk about. Okay, thanks, Gray. Now let's get a closer look at the course formats and the experience. So as Gray mentioned, our course, our instructional design focus on making the behavior change that result from the learning. That means we not only want you to remember what you learned, the knowledge you learned from the course but also be able to apply what you learned to actually, to your actual work. So to achieve that, we are following a process called EDDI, which starts from the analysis of our learners. Who are your needs on this topic area and what are your common challenges? So based on the analysis, we then do the design of what strategies to use, what materials to include, what activities to accompany those content and also how we will measure the outcome in the end. So then we develop all the assets and build the course and then launch the course to the learners. And it ends with an evaluation that we get feedback from learners about how the course was for them, what went well and what didn't. So I said end, but it's not really an end to the whole process. This is a whole interactive process. We use the feedback to make updates to the course. So it will be improved and better serve our learners' needs. And also with that aim of providing long-term benefits, we sometimes do another, other than all the standard course evaluation we do at the end, we also do a Kirkpatrick evaluation on selected courses to further look at how the behavior changed, how the impact has been after months, after the course has finished. So we can better understand whether we achieved our goals and what we can do better to improve that. And please allow me to highlight two of the formats, two of the most popular formats that Gray has mentioned just now. The first type is the on-demand courses we're offering that people can take at your own time, at your own pace. And usually you will go through some videos or interactive presentations to get the content. And we also provide scenarios or case studies with the content so you can see how those knowledge and skills are better applied in the actual work. We also use knowledge check quizzes for each module so you can get an understanding or you can get an idea of how much you have learned. And of course, at practice activities too if you want to apply the things into the course and do the work. We also have progress track in the course. So you will remember like you don't have to take the course at once, you can pause in between and when you come back you can see a green check mark showing you what you have already completed and what have not. And at the end of the course if you need to get a certificate of completion you can get that. For example, you may want to show your employer that you have finished the training that they sponsored. So this is type one. And the other type of course that's very popular is the blended learning courses. You very often will find it marked with 301 or other 300 level numbers on our catalog. It is usually a four to eight weeks learning program. More typical length is six weeks. It's composed of instructional led online live sessions and also other on-demand learning content. We usually design these courses with a project in mind so people will complete a big project throughout the course and it's usually break down into smaller tasks for each week. So you complete some steps each week and at the end you will have a tangible project that you can take to implement in your organization and to help you with that practice and tasks we provide worksheets and handouts so you can download and fill out on your own that makes the action a bit more easier. And for these types of courses we work very closely with the experts that have a lot of nonprofit experience and also a lot of online teaching experience. So they will share their best practices with you and also be providing feedback to learners' work and questions during the course. There is a discussion forum dedicated for this type of course. Learners can share their work in the forum. So for other people or the expert to provide feedback there might be also other discussion questions so that you can share more of your ideas or experiences on the given topic with the community of other nonprofit peers. You will network and share ideas and learn from each other. And I would like to show you a few examples of these two types of courses. Please allow me to pull in my browser window. The first example is a series of two courses on project management basics for nonprofit and this is an on-demand course type. So after people register in the course you can come into this course session to get an overview of what this course is about what you are going to learn and you can take a self-assessment before going through any content just to see how much you already know about this topic. So you can see we developed this series of courses with our internal subject matter expert, John Tumer and Gray who is here with many years of nonprofit project management experiences. So you will go through some interactive presentations in this course. For example, the first one is a little scenario. Your nonprofit just had a meeting focusing on needed growth and you emerged with an assignment to increase membership by 30% in the next four months. To do so, you know you have to increase visibility among those sympathetic to your cause and reach them with offers that excite them. You know you'll need to help to carry out the task of producing the offers and to make interested individuals aware of the offer. This is important to your nonprofit and it's also very ambitious. This project might also determine the future of the organization. Given the above, you must decide how to proceed with your project. In the following scenes, you'll be presented with options. Choose the ones that you feel will help you achieve your objectives. Okay, so after going through the scenario, hopefully you'll get to know what project management can help you achieve. And then in other modules, you'll also go through similar interactive presentations to know what is a project and what is project management. And this overview 100 level course is more at a basic and overview level. So you'll have some check your understanding quizzes to see how much knowledge you have remembered from learning of this module. And in the next course of this series, Project Management Basics 201, it's talking about the first step of project management process that has been described in a 101 course. This is a little bit more hands on than the 101 course. So after you get an overview, go through some presentations on the content, you'll also get some examples and worksheets to actually start, define your own project. Of course you'll have quiz to check your knowledge to for each module. So these are all the modules you'll take. You will navigate using the back and next arrow. And if I completed this presentation, I just mark complete and they will give you a green check mark here. So you know the sub module you have already completed. And after everything is finished, you will go through the rep message. We also provided a checklist for you to download so you can bring or you can use whenever you need it. And we collect your feedback on the course. You also get a chance to evaluate yourself again of how much knowledge you learned from course to compare with the pre-assessment you did to see what's the improvement here. And you can download the certificate from the link at the top of this page here. So this is example one. And example two is another on-demand course which has recently launched. It's the Adobe InDesign course teaching you how to use InDesign for your nonprofit projects. This course, we use more of the format of videos and practice files as this is a software-based course. So you'll see similar information here in the welcome module. And we will also describe why you can choose, why you should choose InDesign for some other projects and what you can do with it. And there's also an overview of all the projects you are going to complete alongside the content of this course. So you're going to create a postcard mailer, a tri-fold brochure and an annual report or a magazine in a PDF format using InDesign. And the last project is an interactive or fillable forum PDF that you can also create in InDesign. So after the introduction, you're going to go through all the modules and all the steps of how to operate in the software and create these projects. This is our instructor, Cara, who's very experienced Adobe software trainer. And as you can see, we have videos showing you the content and you can download the course file from the link below each video. So you can follow along all the steps on your computer. The other formats are, the other structure is similar, go through all the modules, take the evaluation and another great thing is the downloads and resources are all aggregated in this module for you to download if you don't want to go through each of the links there. So this is example two of the on-demand course. And the third example I want to show you is a blended learning course, a 301 course. This is on the topic of website management, which we had delivered in 2021. And just FYI, we have the same course being offered in next month. We renamed that to nonprofit strategies, nonprofit website strategies to better represent the focus and content of the course. So in this course, the welcome module is similar. You get an overview, you complete self-assessment and our expert also provide a wellness report for your website that you can go to and get a report before the first session. So this is like a baseline assessment for your current status code of your website. So after you go through the course, you can see how much has been improved and has also a link to the forum thread where learners can introduce yourselves and get to know the other four learners, fellow learners. So for each week, learners will sometimes have some pre-session learning to complete. For example, some online videos or articles to read about. And if it's a live course, you will see an orange button here saying clip care to join the live session. And after the live session, the recordings will be uploaded to this page, the same page, you'll be able to watch the recording, download the transcripts and the presentation deck that has been used. And for each week, we have the activities for you to complete. So some of those is PDF that you can download to work on. Or sometimes we make that into a form or something you can complete directly on the LMS page. And we also have other discussion topic for people to share their thoughts in the forum. So for this course, the focus is how to improve the website with a growth driven strategy to attract more visitors and convert the right visitors, increase your donations, volunteers, sponsorships and some other goals. So breaking down into each week, there's an intro and review of best practices and each week following that is going to be one aspect of the website technology that you can do to improve your website. And at the end, you'll get a list of updates you want to take to implement onto your own website. So I have gone through all the examples in our formats and before handing over to Sabah, I wanna see if you have any questions about the course format. If not, then Sabah is going to talk about newly launched courses with you. Take your ways, Sabah. Thank you, Shuiya. I'm excited to share about our newly launched courses. And before I get into that, I do want to address some questions that we had in our chat regarding pricing. So we do have many free courses on our catalog that we offer. And in addition to, in addition, we also have special offers which we send out twice a month. And these are for existing learners that are already on our platform. Our courses, of course, are priced between $10 to $350. So we do absolutely consider cases in which discounts are needed. If you do have specific needs or if you have questions regarding that, please email us at Learn at TechSoup. And we will do our best to help you. Moving on to our newly launched courses. If you can go ahead and yeah. Thank you, Shuiya. So as Shuiya was sharing, she did share a little about our Adobe course. So here is an example of what the course outline looks like and what the learning modules would include in our Adobe InDesign to 200 level course. We have also newly launched introduction to leading in the digital age course. This is much shorter. It's a hundred level course. So it's about an hour or so. And here is the outline on what this course would cover. Very interesting nuggets of information around digital transformation. As a leader, what role you would be playing into leading your organization into digital transformation and how do you lead not only people but teams and make a concrete plan around that. And then of course we have the wrap up session as well. If you can go to the next slide, we have two other Adobe courses as well that we've launched, which is on Adobe Premiere Rush and Adobe Photoshop. Both of these, as you can see in the learning objectives, of course concentrate on the product, which is the Adobe product Premiere Rush or Photoshop. But it's mostly around familiarizing you with how to use it. How do you use, for example, simple animation or color grading through Premiere Rush or for that matter in Photoshop, how do you make basic adjustments to contrast and exposure and how do you apply color edits and correctly save images for different outputs. So these are our four newest courses that we have recently launched, which are live on our catalog. Now coming to the exciting part, which is our upcoming courses. So on 9th of March, we have a live event which is going to be held for an hour. And the topic is the top three factors for a successful nonprofit website. This is a free event, so we encourage you to join. It gives you time to interact with our subject matter experts and really understand the fundamentals of what goes into a nonprofit website. How do you incorporate changes or consider things for successful factors in not only times when you're making a new website, but also in your current, in your existing website. And then we will talk a little about all the methodologies and structures that you need or should be using when you're making adjustments to your website. So because this is a free event, this is a one-hour session. So we leave five or 10 minutes at the start to just introduce you to the topic and then after, well, not five or 10, it's a little more than that towards half of that. And then towards the end, we leave time for question and answers for you to ask to the experts' lives. And of course, this session will be recorded. So in case you register and for some reason are not able to attend, there will be a recording available for you to watch later on. So we encourage you to go ahead and register for this, which is happening on 9th March at 11 a.m. Pacific time. I'd like to then also talk about another upcoming course, which starts next week, which is on cybersecurity and data privacy for nonprofits. This is a blended program. It is six weeks long and we have over 15 nonprofit staff that are gonna come together in this cohort to learn the fundamentals about data privacy and cybersecurity practice experts from Roundtable Technology. And you will leave this six week, at the end of six weeks, you will leave with a roadmap that you have for your organization that you worked upon during these six weeks on what the cybersecurity posture of your organization should be, what your data privacy practices should be and how do you take calculated risks that are more sustainable for your organization. For this course, it's a six week course. This is a price at $350. We are currently running $100 off as a promotion, especially for you today. So if you are interested in this course, please use Cyber 100 Web at checkout to get $100 off when you register for this course. And moving on to the next one. We have another course, which is starting on nonprofit website strategy. So after you kind of experience the one-hour session, you will see how this particular course, nonprofit website strategy, which is also a blended learning course spread over six weeks, takes you through a plan and gives you sort of an understanding of the basic concepts that you need to strategize on how you build a growth-driven website, what is important to put in terms of nonprofit, what your nonprofit is doing or highlight all of that, how do you set goals, how do you track visitor data that is coming, the traffic that's coming onto your website and come up with sort of a plan if there are any changes that you wanna make on your current website and what are the most successful factors in designing a nonprofit website that maximizes donations and support, et cetera. So again, this is starting on April 5th. It is priced at $350, but we are running a $100 off promotion, especially for you. So this is on, please use our discount code at website, which is 100 website and checkout. And I will pause here just to see if there are any questions in chat. I think my colleague Mona is already answering them. So thank you for that, Mona. I wanna move on to the next slide. We have many courses that we are coming up with besides these three that are happening in the near future that I mentioned. Some of our courses are around AI for Good, which AI for Good, Project Management, Tech Strategy, these three are the six-week blended courses that is happening later this year. Other than this, we have courses around two Adobe products, which is Adobe Express and Illustrator. We also have an Introduction to Data Awareness course, which is a 100 level course coming up, and we have a branding's basic course coming up as well. Just gonna quickly peek into chat. We do have a question around the Priceless and Discount codes available. We will send out this presentation and it will include all the links for you. And just in case you have any questions related to that, please remember you can email us at learn.techsgroup.org. Okay, moving on to our next slide. I want to take a moment to talk a little about our group enrollments. So we mentioned that a little earlier. We will be happy to help your organization with enrolling multiple staff or volunteers for any of our courses. And a big reason why I think you should consider group enrollments is, A, of course, if we do have an organization with five or more staff, there is a separate group rate that is given to you, which is lower than what you will see on our catalog. All of your staff or volunteers do have the flexibility of taking whichever course that they think or you think they need training in. So our course catalog, as we mentioned, has over 200 courses to choose from. So definitely plenty of variety across many topics. And you could have many people from your organization participating at the same time in these courses. We also offer, as we mentioned earlier, the convenience of taking these courses at your own time and at your own pace. And sometimes what happens is organizations come to us with a particular training need that they have for their organization or training goal that they have. And we're able to meet that by pulling together a combination of various courses that we might suggest for development. As I mentioned, we do have a variety of courses, over 200 courses to choose from. And then at the end of each course, there is a certificate of completion given. So for example, if one might consider that you are serving as the training manager for your nonprofit organization and you have a plan in place, you can then ask your employees to take our courses and share the certificate of completion at the end of the course. So you know that everyone's taken the course and you have an understanding of the topics that they have chosen to take courses on. And then maybe you can even ask them to share the learning that they've learned. So with group discounts, as I mentioned, with group enrollments, we do have many organizations that we have assisted. We have actually over 70 organizations with, I want to say, about over 400 staff and volunteers globally that we have had through our group enrollments. And we highly encourage you to make the most of this opportunity, email us, and then we can actually even set up a call to walk through what your needs are and maybe suggest some courses that might work best for your organization. I want to move on to the next slide and talk to you a little about special offers. So at the top, if you can see our link to the catalog is mentioned here. And when you scroll in there, you come up on this page, which is the special offers tab. Under special offers, you have the upcoming courses that we have in any discounts that we are running. This will, the special offers tab will show you that. Other than the discounts that you see here, every learner that is registered on our platform, we send out a special discount quote, which is done twice a month. So if you are registered on our platform, you will be receiving an email from us every other week with the discounts that are valid only for you. So as of now, you can see the three upcoming courses that we have and the ones that we have planned later in the year, you are welcome to come back to the special offers tab and take a look at which are the upcoming live events or any seminars or blended learning courses that we have or even tracks, of course, or sometimes that we offer discounts for. I think that is all that I have to share in terms of special offers. And I know we have a couple of minutes. So before I go ahead and share with you our special discount for everyone that's coming here, I wanna take a minute to just review our chat and see if we have any unanswered questions. Please use the chat or the Q and A section to answer any, to ask us any questions. So I do want to clarify a quick thing. I know we have a large audience that has joined us today. Many of you that are TechSoup members and many of you that are not TechSoup members as well. And it's very important for you to know that to take any of these courses that we are talking about today, all that you need is an email address. If you are a nonprofit staff or volunteer and have an email address, you can take a course. There is no membership or there is no eligibility or validation criteria as such. So anyone, if all you need to do is simply log on to our platform, which is shared here up on screen, techsoup.course.tc. Register, log in, sign up as a new member and you can begin taking a training course. And for one other mention I want to make is if you are a TechSoup member, please know that the TechSoup courses account is different from a TechSoup member account. So any staff or volunteer can get a TechSoup courses account for free by signing up on our platform. And you don't need to be a TechSoup member for doing that. So I saw one question from Margaret regarding registered on our platform. And I think Mona, my colleague clarified. So our TechSoup courses account, as we mentioned, is different from the membership account that you hold at TechSoup courses and any staff or volunteer can take it. I think we've shared the link in our chat of where you need to go in and create an account so that you can view the catalog of offerings of our courses that we have. I'm just going to take a peek at the Q&A. Libby, I think you had a question around the special offers. So in what you see under special offers is when you click inside under the view details, you'll see a discount code. Now this is for anyone coming and wanting to take a course. But every other week, as I mentioned, if you have come on onto our platform and registered as a learner via email, we will send you a newsletter and that newsletter has discounts, which are only for people that have registered on the platform which may or which will be different from the ones that you see here. So that's how it is shared. I don't think I have any other open questions at this time. So we can, yeah, I don't see any other open questions at this time. So let me wrap up here and I want to share a special offer that we have. I know we've talked a lot about our Adobe courses and we are very proud of these courses because not only are these extremely new courses that we have, we've kept in mind, of course, our learning methodology, but we have an absolutely excellent subject matter expert, Kara Placanik, who has deep experience in using Adobe for nonprofits. And we encourage you to go ahead and take a look at these courses and enroll in these courses. We have a special offer which is a 10% off on the most new Adobe courses that we have. Please use our promo code ADOBE10WEB at checkout and take advantage of this discount to get a 10% off for our Adobe courses. I think, let me take a quick look in our chat. Saba, there's a lot of questions about where to find the discount coupon in the catalog. So if you could, I think especially about the cybersecurity course. So if you could show your screen so everyone can see where we put the coupon code in the catalog. I think there's a lot of questions about that. Thank you. Let me go ahead and share my screen. Just give me a quick moment here. Sorry about this. Sorry, my laptop is running a little slow. So I'm just trying to pull up the screen. Just bear with me for a moment. Okay, I think I have a tour. Let me share my screen. So here is our special offers and events. And as I mentioned, under cybersecurity, right now this is running at full price.  That code we will send to you via email. But for example, if you were to go under non-profit website strategy, the early word offers mentioned here. So there is a discount running and then you can use this code for checking out whatever our various offers are. Other than that, to log into the platform, you need to use this web link and simply go on to sign up. When you go on to sign up, it'll take you, it'll drive you to a page which is prompting you to create an account. And once you do that and you sign up, it'll take you back to the catalog page where you can choose which course you'd like to register for and browse through our catalog and choose a course and proceed and done. Do we have any, let me check. I do see things popping up in the chat. Thank you Mona for sharing the link to our catalog and where to sign up for our courses. I think, I don't think we have any other questions but if you do, please put them in our Q&A section or in chat. If you do want to reach out to us, please email us at learn at techsoup.org. We will be happy to assist you. Our courses are available to a global audience. So in case you have volunteers and staff members based anywhere else besides North America, we do have courses available to them. We also offer courses in various languages like Spanish and French and Portuguese and Arabic and Romanian. So if you do have staff and volunteers based in other countries that speak different languages, we have courses in these languages as well. So please email us at learn at techsoup and we will be happy to assist you. Thank you everyone for joining. I think we will follow up as promised via email which will bear a copy of this presentation which will have all the links to the discounts as well. And of course, if you have any questions, email us at learn at techsoup.org. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Bye-bye.


Kamu siap-siap? Bagus, nanti kita mempunyai... ...sampai saya tak boleh menghubungi itu sekarang. Jadi nanti kita mempunyai Tuan Ming. Dia hebat. Dia boleh memperkenalkan diri sendiri, kan? Ya. Kamu hanya memperkenalkan diri. Saya tahu. Hai, nama saya Tuan Ming. Saya dari All-in Data. Sebenarnya kami sudah memperkenalkan diri. Saya tak memperkenalkan diri. Kamu tahu apa yang saya fikir tadi? Saya rasa Papa lebih baik daripada saya. Saya seorang perempuan perempuan. Jangan risau. Saya rasa perempuan perempuan lebih baik daripada saya. Ya. Tetapi, perempuan perempuan perempuan itu hebat. Okey. Tapi hari ini saya tak akan bercakap tentang perempuan perempuan perempuan. Saya telah beri banyak bercakap. Sebenarnya... ...saya membuat sesuatu yang berbeza. Jadi... ...saya datang ke dalam teknologi ini... ...sebelum tahun lalu. Dan ia berguna untuk... ...diklub. Lihat, apa yang kita ada di sini... ...saya mengenai... ...perempuan perempuan, bukan? Jadi, kali ini... ...saya ingin memperkenalkan diri... ...perempuan perempuan perempuan... ...dan telah memperkenalkan diri... ...perempuan perempuan perempuan... ...sebagai solusi... ...untuk perempuan perempuan. Ya. Saya akan memperkenalkan diri dulu. Apabila... ...saya memperkenalkan... ...perempuan perempuan perempuan... ...saya tidak akan memperkenalkan... ...perempuan perempuan perempuan perempuan saya. Okey. Jadi... ...lebih baik-baik saja... ...apa yang berlaku di luar? Semua orang mahu pergi ke luar. Mereka berkata... ...saya mahu membuat perempuan perempuan... ...saya mahu menggunakan Vmware... ...saya mahu menggunakan... ...E-C2S1. Baiklah? Kenapa kita membuat itu? Kerana... ...kita mahu memperkenalkan... ...perempuan perempuan... ...atau kita mahu memperkenalkan... ...apapun kita mahu membuat sesuatu. Jadi, ingat pada awal kuasa terb ту... ...sehingga kita mahu memperkenalkan... ...PAAS, AAAS, IIIAS, dan sebagainya. Jadi, bagaimana cara, Emperor? Kita mahu membuat perempuan. Tapi... ...kita ini adalah wilayah tunjuk... ...yang knotut untuk mereka. Dan, kita другойkan...) ... instructions Perempuan selalu ber labels... dan kata, A to make, I want you to build me a cloud solution. And the first thing I ask them, what do they have in mind? The first thing that comes to them is always open site. And I ask them, why open site? And they say, because open site is the in thing right now. The in thing, right? When we were talking about building a cloud, what would you first think of? I think David, right? What would you think of first thing? Amazon, maybe open site, right? But these are the big players. These are something that has been there. But do we really need them? That's my question. So, it depends. I ask my client, do you really need open site or do you need something else? And he told me because open site is the name and hence I chose open site. But that's where I started to correct that. And this is where my topic comes into play. And what comes into play is I want to see how you actually need or what you need to build your cloud. You don't really need such complexity. For example, EC2 is beneficial but there are so many things that you do not need in there. Do you really need DPCs? Do you really need RDS and so on? All this are unnecessary. And then we come to open site. You have sender, you have, let's say, neutron and all this. It's too complicated for average and user or a company that just wants something simple. Who uses digital ocean? So you like it because it's a one point click thing, isn't it? So this is what my client wants to see. It's cheap, it's five dollars. Sorry? It's cheap. It's cheap but it's easy to use. It's a one point click thing, isn't it? If you go to EC2, you have to click that fill in the blanks and whatnot. It's too much of a hassle. And especially for enterprise cloud. We're talking about private clouds. These guys, they just want to be able to play deploy machine rather than fill in the blanks. So you do not really need everything. And therefore, I would like to introduce to you OpenEvola. OpenEvola is what we commonly term as the open source solution to VMware. How many of you have actually seen how VMware works? VMware re-centered. So you have seen it or maybe some of you are not aware. Let's just say OpenEvola is a platform that brings the best out of several different other platforms like EC2, like VMware, KVM, or OpenShift, or OpenStack into one. So they take the best of these components and integrate it as one. Meaning, for example, if you are used to deploying by a tanklets on VMware, you can do the same thing out of OpenEvola. Images also OpenEvola. You want to have simple network management. Simple network management just by clicking. Yes, I get this IP address, I get this network, and done. So you basically do not want to restrict yourself to a specific background. You want to be able to have third party integration. And let's talk about setups. How complicated is it to setup OpenStack? Or VMware is very complicated. You have a lot of packages. You have a lot of configuration documentation and everything. But OpenEvola is as simple as running yang install OpenEvola and OpenEvola sunstone, which is the G1. These two packages would bring you the entire controller server already. You want to install a compute node. One package OpenEvola node package. And there you go, your compute node is ready. And that brings you the entirety of OpenEvola. Why they don't have network or storage and whatnot? I will explain it to you as we go along through these slides. Okay, so OpenEvola, let's take a look at the infrastructure. So let's see how it works. I choose OpenEvola this way. So OpenEvola is very simple. All these services network, meaning they are drivers. OpenEvola integrates with all the components using drivers. We don't build them in. Because when we build them in like how OpenStack builds it, you are actually locking yourself in. Whereas if we just provide you with the drivers, you can use multiple different type of data storage, multiple type of networking mechanisms in a single setup. And you can just integrate it to be and service network through the drivers. And all this you can control or add through the SunStore GUI. They call it GUI SunStore. And the SunStore GUI will also control the VMs. And the VMs has its own network based on the host. Meaning that let's take an example game with OpenStack. You want when you choose a network it's all about neutron. Neutron meaning OpenVswitch. We don't want that. And then if we want to integrate with VLAN or VXLAN or EV tables, we still have to use neutron and we have to use the plug-in for it. But we don't need that. Sometimes what we need is just a simple setup on our server plug it into OpenNebula via API or the drivers configure it and make it work. Just write out the box like that. That's what we are looking for. What we are looking for here with OpenNebula is simplicity. We do not want something too complex. When we have simplicity it makes us adopt technology easier. We do not want to configure something that is too complex and again, we never use it at all. Okay? So these are usually the core portion of OpenNebula whereby we have to monitoring metrics, storage network, database, authentication virtualization club bursting where you can integrate with public clouds to have your private cloud setup or you can burst it to the public cloud so in case you do not have any more compute resources available. Okay? So what is supported in OpenNebula? I'm just going to go through the feature rather simple and then I'll show you if there's time, I'll show you a demo on how it actually works. So the hypervisor support are standard hypervisors like KVM, ZAN and what also adds in VMWare EXX or vCenterSports and there's obviously a few more that's upcoming. There are still buildings already version 4.1.2 and it's built by the OpenNebula Systems Company. They are a really cool Spanish company by the way. Okay? Next thing, the next feature that we have for OpenNebula that makes is east of ACL, access controllers. But we want to have to create a policy for access controllers for any of our let's say platform like VMWare OpenSty or Amazon is not as easy as it is. What I want to see is being able to select a group or user and then by giving me a list select them allow, disallow what I can view, what I cannot view and so on. And just by ticking these boxes I should be able to control or create a policy or ACL for my users. That way it makes things a lot easier for me. So my control now becomes more granular. The idea here is you want to have more granular control so you cannot actually manage what is not allowed to. Because usually you have the cloud users and then the cloud and means and obviously infrastructure and different roles so this is where the ACL of OpenNebula comes in. And the next thing software define networking again like I mentioned with OpenNebula our networking choices are broad. We can use OpenVswitch EVK roles 802QV line or VX line then we have the same feature as Amazon's EC2 security groups. So this how does this software define networking work? We don't really need it all the time. OBS is OpenVswitch we define networking but we really need it when we implement that we are actually introducing complexity to our already existing network setup. What if we could just create a network target with whatever we land numbering and send it to our router switches. We want something as simple as that. We do not want another application on top of our switches so with OpenNebula you can have a cluster of holes with a simple Linux bridge networking and then another cluster of holes which uses OpenVswitch so basically you can have two different clusters with two different networking and you can connect them to OpenNebula. OpenNebula has an interface that says you are using the Linux bridges and you are using OpenVswitch but when you create a network it still gives you the same interface as a spotIP network name and so on what is your bridge name that you want to integrate and that's all that's what we want. Simplicity yet diversity we want to be able to integrate with all sorts of different third party applications is that right? Okay, the next thing storage how many of you share storage and I see a show of hands what kind of share storage are you using? sorry? maybe like SAP or GloucesterFS you are using those so who uses let's just say OpenSlide can I see a show of hands but you so you are using SAP I presume so but I mean you said this is that what your type to with OpenSlide is it your choice or was it your type down to it it's a choice, right so this is what we want, right we want to have the choice of being able to choose different type of storages but when you choose that one storage you usually have to stick to it, isn't it? same thing but in again like I said I'm going to mention and start getting sick of saying it myself so we refer this one so one allows you to choose again multiple different storages and use it and integrate it with the statement itself meaning that you can have a file storage or file system based storage that uses that your image storage that probably uses Swift and then your another so basically you can have different type of data storage using different storage mechanism we are not tying it down to simple, a single one okay, the next thing is what is missing in OpenSlide or VMware and this is what Amazon has done, right the existence of a marketplace so because when we want to deploy something for public cloud we want to be able to give our users the ability to choose what's of OS but in order to do that first of all you need a marketplace of images and templates so when you have images and templates then your users can actually select say oh I want to deploy a VM and all of this image are tabled that is what we provide on top of having connectivity to the public marketplace you can create your own private marketplace for your own internal usage yes isn't that like a path like containers no, just like images like QCAU2s but by using plugins like Docker container and then auto-scaling how many of us love the feature of auto-scaling nobody loves auto-scaling only 2 that's it ok, why do we want auto-scaling because we want to automatically scale our infrastructure let's say we hit a certain threshold isn't it so that I can sleep at night so that I can sleep at night yes, sleep at night we want to sleep at night so what is missing again from all the other components like VM or auto-style auto-scaling we want simplicity in auto-scaling like EC2 if my CPU hits a certain threshold I'm going to spin up that X number of VM if my memory takes a hit but another X number of VM when it's done it goes below the threshold I remove all the extra VMs that I spin up earlier at the same time saving me cost so this is what also we provide to you it's a feature what we call the one flow and then the next thing is Federation we have Federation so basically every data center we have 10 data centers 10 installation but it's going to be a pain when you have to manage all 10 of them from 10 different sounds so what we do is we can bring all of this as one so basically the Federation is equivalent to zones or your availability sites or your regions in VMware or oversight or let's just say EC2 or Federation we bring it under a single control or a single UI and the next thing I mentioned earlier about ACLs where we have more granular control but this is a little bit different this is what we call VDC or virtual data centers meaning that we can create a virtual organization within our open Nebula so let's just say we have a federated setup but then your user is only tied down to your data center but you want to be able to have access to specific compute resources across different data centers that is going to be complex when you create the ACLs to make it simpler what we do is we bring all these selective compute resources as a virtual data center and then you add your user group to this VDC By doing so you can have your control over that VDC itself without changing too much of your ACL and next thing we can do public cloud versi like I mentioned earlier what happen if your compute node call your compute resources ran out you really need to spin a machine quickly so it comes with an integration with Amazon EC2 VMware HyperVs Azure so you can burst your cloud from your public or your internal cloud to the public cloud itself so you can become a hybrid a pure hybrid and monitoring that's important isn't it so we providing monitoring is a very simple mechanism we don't use complex stuff for example in IBM Zen we have their own monitoring solution monitoring mechanism using UDP we provide UDP pushes from the host so also we also have the SSH pool for active monitoring or you can use the monitoring data when collecting that is integrated into open envelope or monitoring purposes and metrics where are they what are these metrics that I am talking about the metrics that I am talking about here is your usage when we are talking about your usage how much of memory this machine use how much of memory that machine use or memory or this usage usually this is what we call the showback or the chargeback you want to know the cost of running orders fortunately version 4.12 that was released few days ago open envelope now has an accounting feature that you can take a look from your dashboard for each and separate user also you can show your showback charges meaning that will tell you how much of and how much it will cost you or the amount of time and I think we still have a couple more minutes do you have any questions if you have no questions I'll actually show you the open envelope installation right now can we go back to the BBC sorry how do you migrate the monitoring monitoring so basically the BBC the virtual data center the virtual data center oh the virtual data center so basically as I say you have one data center here so you have two different set of computer resources so when you have a user for one data center installation it's restricted to this computer sources when you fabricate them together you want to be able to access this but usually you'll be able to access it as a whole so with the virtual data center meaning that we take selective computer resources one or two here and then we bring it together as a virtual data center so that way your ACL will not be too complex when you want to add a user to manage only a specific resources from different data centers you will add it to the virtual data center instead which already has all the complex minimize complexity for you where it takes up the computer resources from different servers bring it under a virtual logical group sorry so it's a function how can people manage you know so everything is done done under OpenNabila you just need to fabricate them together and then you just need to create classes and be easy so basically everything on OpenNabila there's a point in like so it makes things a lot easier for you I can show you how it's being done actually 5 minutes oops see right so blame him he did not turn on my charger the VMs all shut down okay so this is the dashboard very simple okay let's just start with the simple cloud user interface first virtualbox yeah i'm running out of virtualbox alright so now you can see here are my virtual machines list that I have and by just clicking on this I can say what is the state of my machines see it's very simple all I need to do is just click on it and see what it looks like and let's just see further VMs add and then select based on my available template which I already make one and then you can see my capacity and how much the cost per hour all this I'll show you how it's being defined later and also if it's not my capacity that I want I can change it and does this not look for me similar to AWS EC2 setup isn't it I add my interface whichever interface that I want to and I just click create and it will just create as simple as it will be okay the next thing templates okay so here we have the accounting I'll show you the accounting features this is my cost that I've been using over the last couple of days how much of memory and how much does it cost me and then if I go to show bag and you tell me this is how much it cost me for the entire month for running 3 virtual machines kind of little bit expensive yes how do you pull out pricing from AWS sorry pull out oh this one we are unable to pull out the pricing yet because this is just a brand new shop now this one is preset yeah I'll show you how we select the show bag cost shortly so this is the simple users interface so let's see how does it means interface look like alright so from here overview of our entire setup and we can see the located CPU, memory and you know the standard stuff that we take a look we get to see okay and then let's take a look here the system, the users the groups the VDCs we can just like say set the VDC belongs to which class how many host, the groups and so forth ACL okay let's take a look how or why I like this ACL a lot and you see replies to which user you can choose your specific user which zone and all your effectively stores let's just say data stores and what can I do in a data store I can use, manage, administrate or create so this give me a simpler ACL virtual resources we have the virtual machine list for all my machines and let's just say we can see the capacity storage the network the network betas and then you can take snapshots placement is policies whereby you can decide which server you want to allocate your VM to which host based on let's just say if your server is running to a little memory put it to another server put it to another compute host then we have actions template details this is all template details system logs and of course we have VNC okay, on top of VNC we can use spice as well so you can plug in this to spice on top of just general VNC templates what I mean template the template details so basically we can have the permissions or who can use it as simple as it is then we want to update the template and we can choose how we want to do it for each template I can say it cost me one one unit okay then the CPU and the cost and virtual CPU so unfortunately my time has run out so thank you you have any questions you want to see more of this demo you can find me after this I'll still be around thank you


My light's on. Don't believe it's going to work across Virginia against Paul Trubble. Paul's sticking with you, Mr. President. And we're going to stick with you all the way. I was next supposed to turn this platform over to John Warner. John wanted to be with you. I want to be John Warner's partner in the United States Senate. My fellow Virginians, this is a historic moment. This is an opportunity for America that may not come again. In 1980, I did States of America. Thank you very much. Governor Dalton, the members of the Congress, State Chairman Al Kramer, the delegates and candidates for the House of Delegates, you ladies and gentlemen, and oh how happy I am to see all of you young people here.  I thank all of you for certainly a warm Virginia welcome. What do you say, man? It's a pleasure. I couldn't hear what the words of dissent might have been. But once again, aren't we happy that we can live in a country where somebody by himself can dissent with the crowd and know that the roof isn't going to fall down? Of course, I'd like to have a chance to convert him. You know, it's a pleasure to be able to travel such a short distance and still come so far from the Washington state of mind. On this side of the river, only horses suffer from Potomac fever. Hard work, love of families, and belief in God are the values at the center of life in Virginia. And with your help and that of your representatives, we're going to return respect for those values to our national government. I want to thank you for your able Republican delegation. They serve Virginia and they serve the nation well. I have had and rely on the advice and support of leaders like your distinguished former Governor John Dalton and the senator who had to stay on the job John Dalton. Representatives like Tom Bliley and Ken Robinson and Paul Tribble, who if you do what I think you're going to do, will be Senator Paul Tribble. I'm counting on the people of Virginia to re-elect these fine house members and to send Paul to the United States Senate this November. In this election and throughout this decade, the American people will be asked to reaffirm our difficult course toward national renewal. The vote of every citizen will matter and every ounce of individual commitment will count. And make no mistake, the choice the American voters have this year is just as important as the one they had two years ago. It's a clear choice, as you've been told already, about the kind of nation that we will be. Whether we will continue our sure and steady course to put America back on track or whether we will slide backward into another economic binge like the one which left us with today's pounding national hangover. Not that this campaign doesn't have its humorous side. You should hear some of the things that the candidates on the other side have been saying. They're getting more imaginative every day. You know, it won't be long before they will have convinced themselves that the astronomers are correct, those astronomers that believe in the Big Bang theory, that the whole universe and the world suddenly came into being through a big explosion, a Big Bang. In their version, history began with a Big Bang on January 21st, 1980. According to them, the economic crisis emerged full-blown by spontaneous generation just a few seconds after I took the oath of office. But with all respect to astronomers, let's take a look at history. You've heard some already, and it's all true. In the four years before we got to Washington, the entire government of the United States was in the hands of those today who are the most vocal of our critics. They controlled the presidency, the United States Senate, the House of Representatives, all the committees of the Congress, the entire executive branch, the hundreds of departments, agencies, and administrative units responsible for running the federal establishment. Something no Republican administration has experienced for nearly 30 years. When my friends on the other side began this power monopoly, America was enjoying economic stability. There would be a source of envy today. Inflation was running at 4.8 percent at the end of 1976 as Gerald Ford left office. And the prime interest rate was under 7 percent. You could get a home mortgage for 9 percent. But in these four years of Democratic monopoly, and let me point something out, when I used the term referring to the opposition party, the Democratic Party, I spent most of my life as a Democrat. I know that others in this room did, others in this room who still are members of that party. But what has happened is a great gulf has developed between the leadership of the Democratic Party and millions of rank-and-file Democratic Party members who aren't in lockstep with that leadership. Inflation shot up to over 13 percent in 1979 to an astonishing 18 percent by January of 1980. Those in charge of the government managed to do something that had not been done in over 60 years. They gave us two years of back-to-back double-digit inflation. Interest rates began their nightmarish climb. From less than 7 percent in 1976, they climbed to 21.5 percent in 1980. Mortgages went as high as 17.5 percent and home buying came to a drastic halt. These were the highest interest rates in over a century. Productivity dropped in 79 and 80, and that was the first two year in a row drop in productivity in our recorded history. The savings rate went down. The rate of increase of industrial production dropped every year. The rate of increase in our gross national product dropped for three years straight. High taxes smothered the incentives of individuals and businesses. Taxpayers began paying the due bills for runaway inflation as it kicked them relentlessly into higher income tax brackets. Think of it, your taxes actually doubled in the five years before we came to Washington. A Democratic president and a Democratic Congress passed the single highest peace time increase, tax increase in the history of the Republic. The ultimate victims, of course, were American workers and their families, and the senior citizens they profess to care so much about. The grim results were that both real wages and weekly earnings decreased between 1976 and 1980, so much for liberal fairness and liberal compassion for the working people of this nation. Yes, America went backward during those four Democratic years. The actual standard of living went down. In many ways, they marked the culmination of decades of overindulgence by the liberal Washington establishment. Government had spun out of control like a washing machine out of balance, and the programs just grew automatically. Regulations became more complex and added untold billions in new costs. Deficits caused our national debt to bulge rapidly toward the $1 trillion market. New departments sprang up like toadstools after a rainstorm, and Washington increasingly swallowed up the prosperity of the entire nation. Families were driven in the evening to the kitchen table to try and figure out if they sat around that table how to cope with the inflation that robbed their buying power. At the same time, it reduced their spendable earnings. Young couples didn't dream of new homes. They dreamed of just surviving. Small businesses were hit especially hard. The only sure thing was the unstoppable fattening of the United States government. In the year before I took office, federal spending increased by 17 percent in that single year. How many of our fellow citizens were able to say that their incomes or their pensions or their savings had gone up by 17 percent? This legacy was the inevitable result of the liberal Democratic philosophy that the federal government could be all things to all people. The Congress had been under virtual one-party control for a quarter of a century. A spend-thrift era of busted budgets and fatter-and-fatter government. For every new tax, there were always plenty of new ways to spend it. The Washington establishment believed that the only good dollar was the one taken out of a taxpayer's pocket. As a matter of fact, they began to talk about and still talk about the legitimate deductions that you're permitted by law in computing your income tax as tax expenditures, meaning that all of your money belonged to them. They only let you keep what they decided you should keep. Today, right now, we're all paying the penalty of those tragic excesses. Nearly 11 million people are out of work and I share their suffering and frustration. Every American should be shocked at the economic chaos which created today's needless benefits or results. Words cannot tell how painful it is to me that each day for millions of Americans is one of hurt and indignity because they want to work and can't find a place where they can sell their ability to work. You younger people, I grew up in the era of the depression and there are others in this room who did so, did also. Anyone who tells you that we don't have compassion for someone who's lost his job don't know what they're talking about because we saw that great tragedy and we all wish there was some quick and easy cure for this terrible economic illness that was so long in the making. For months now, I've been biting my tongue while I've listened to all those strident speeches about why we've purposely thrown people out of work. But it seems to me that the people who created the mess we're in, the same politicians who took us down the path of guaranteed economic disaster are the last ones who should be delivering sermenets on the cause of unemployment. From our very first day of office we've been working to undo the economic wreckage they left behind. As a matter of fact when I finished taking the oath on that inaugural day, I turned around went back into the Capitol, we found a table down and signed an executive order right then, freezing the size of the federal government. To get control of the spending, encourage incentives by lowering taxes, to stop the unwise regulations and start America on the road to expansion and growth once again, that is what we've been trying to do since that January day. Our first urgent priority was to break the back of inflation because it touched on nearly every other problem we had. And we did. We have more than cut it in half 3.3 last month, but since January it has averaged 5.1%. And as you were told, the interest rates have also dropped by nearly 40%. People are saving more and they're paying lower taxes than if we hadn't taken the action we did. The prime interest rate isn't 21.5, it's been 13.5 but yesterday the bankers trust lowered it to 11.3%. This devastating recessionary virus, one that many economists believe started and has continued since 1979 has begun to show signs of finally running its course. For four months in a row now, the leading economic indicators have been encouraging. Confidence has soared in the stock market. It's blown up 140 points in the last seven weeks. These are positive signals and the occasional blip the pattern is firmly established. I believe deeply that we can put this nightmarish economic calamity behind us if we have the strength to stick to our course. But until there's a job for every American who wants to work and as long as plants and machine relay idle, we cannot let up in our efforts. From the very beginning I've cautioned that this work of recovery would be slow. Progress would come slowly, but it would come steadily. This has been a time of great testing and a time when millions of Americans have displayed enormous courage and patience. The road to economic recovery is never easy, but we have made progress. Yet this election season has brought a clamor of negative voices that nothing seems to please. The cuts in spending they say will continue to grow. Their favorite special interests have been hurt. Despite all their failures of the past they still oppose our comprehensive reform measures. And what is their alternative? Well, the congressman was right. As far as anyone can tell, their answers have mostly been recommendations to repeat their own past failures. Artificially stimulate the money supply.  In short, everything they were doing between 1977 and 1980. Well, I've got news for them. Double digit inflation is no alternative. 21.5% interest rates are no alternative. Another trillion dollars of national debt is no alternative. Higher taxes are no alternative. To my liberal friends I say you can't create a desert and hand someone in the middle of that desert a cup of water and call that compassion. You can't pour billions of dollars into dead end make-work jobs and call that opportunity.   And during those times, unemployment continued to increase and it averaged 7% over those seven years. We've been down all those roads. Let's not make those same mistakes again. This time, let's do the job right. We Americans have been sorely tested by these past few years of discouragement. But we've never been quitters and we're not about to quit now. I hear all those voices every day that say we can't succeed. Well, if we only put our heart and courage to the test, I say we cannot fail. To those who are faint-hearted and unsure, I have this message. If you're afraid of the future, then get out of the way. Stand aside. The people of this country are ready to move again. That wonderful Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes teaches us that to everything, there is a season. As I've traveled around the country, I've become more and more convinced that today America stands at the dawning of a season of hope. It is the hope which springs from the vitality of the American spirit. A hope that will fulfill the richness of all the promise that is within us. To these young people, I want to say I have a dream that I hope all of you share that before we step down and they take over, we will at least have made some payments to reduce that trillion-dollar debt. We will not keep on increasing it down through the years to dump it on their backs. Virginia is rich in tradition. I think everyone in America knows that and respects the traditions of this great state. You have now you have a 50-year tradition and certainly it crosses party lines. A tradition that for 50 years you had a Senate seat that was occupied by two senators in succession, father and son, who were true to all of the things that we've been talking about these ideals of fiscal responsibility and integrity and yes the spiritual revival of this country. I think the best way to continue that tradition on beyond 50 years is to send Paul Tribble to the United States Senate. Thank you, God bless you.


As-salaamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh Al-Abbas alayhi as-salam was the first child of Ummul Bani, with his birth Madinah Shon and the whole world glittered. He was born on the 4th of Sha'ban in the 26th year after Hijrah. Waves of pleasures flowed in the family of Imam Ali alayhi as-salam, for the birth of their magnificent moon that would enlighten this world with his merits and would add immortal glory to the numerous glories of the Hashimites and the Ahlul Bayt alaykum as-salam. As soon as Imam Ali alayhi as-salam was given the good news of the birth of this blessed child, he hurried to take him, kiss him frequently and hold the sharia ceremonies of newborns. The Imam alayhi as-salam recited the Avaan in his newborn's right ear and recited the Iqama in the left. Hence the first voice that penetrated this great newborn's hearing was his father saying Allahu akbar la hilaha illa Allah Allah is the greatest, there is no God but Allah. These great words which are the message of all prophets alaykum as-salam and the melody of the God fearing found the ground in the inner self of al-Abbas alayhi as-salam. These words later on became the most significant element of his personality, no doubt. In his future he would adopt the calling to the true application of these words for which he would lose all of his limbs. On the seventh day after his birth Imam alayhi as-salam shaved al-Abbas alayhi as-salam's hair and gave golden and silver arms as weighty as the hair he had cut as he had done for Imam al-Hassan alayhi as-salam and Imam al-Hussain alayhi as-salam. Imam alayhi as-salam slaughtered a ram as an offering to God on behalf of this baby. These practices are adopted from the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi as-salam whose words, practices and confirmations are regarded as authoritative. When it came to naming al-Abbas alayhi as-salam, narrations tell us that Zaynab alayhi as-salam turned her face towards her father and asked Father, have you chosen a name and a nickname for this new baby? Her father answered, yes daughter, I have. What are they father? Zaynab alayhi as-salam asked. The father, as he perceived that this baby would be one of the heroes of Islam and would be frowning in the faces of evils and the wrongdoers, replied, I name him al-Abbas, the frowning and the nickname him Abu al-Fadl. Father of virtue al-Abbas alayhi as-salam was nursed at the hands of a faithful mother who nurtured him on faith, loyalty, knowledge, devoutness and high principles. His father too was that great personality who is described as a copy of the Prophet himself sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi as-salam. The inheritor of the Prophet's knowledge and the hero of all combats al-Abbas alayhi as-salam was brought up under the custody of these parents.  Al-Abbas adhered to his father when he was in Medina and when he moved to Iraq and resided in Kufa, al-Abbas alayhi as-salam was also under his full care and wise education and environment. Al-Abbas alayhi as-salam acquired all virtues, high moral standards, knowledge and conversants. After his father's demise, al-Abbas alayhi as-salam adhered closely to his two brothers, Imam al-Hasan alayhi as-salam and Imam al-Hussain. He returned with them to Medina and learned from them the religious knowledge and fundamentals in addition to the nobilities of character. When Imam al-Hasan alayhi as-salam was poisoned to death, al-Abbas alayhi as-salam adhered to his brother Imam al-Hussain and his nephew Imam Ali Zain al-Abadin alayhi as-salam. He kept himself with his brother in Medina, Mecca and Iraq, always remained loyal where he protected him as well as his haram until he lost his life for his sake. Thus, unlike the other sons of Imam Ali alayhi as-salam, al-Abbas alayhi as-salam had the characteristic of full adherence to his father, two brothers and nephew. For that reason, he was a true copy of the imams in knowledge and morality. He was their guardian until the very end. Wassalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.