Welcome. My name is Eliana, and I'm a librarian for the San Francisco Public Library. Thank you for joining us today. We are so happy you're here with us to celebrate Viva at the Library, an annual celebration of Latinx heritage, cultures, and traditions. San Francisco has a rich Latinx heritage that is highlighted in a diverse array of exciting programs for all ages, from Spanish bilingual story times to cooking classes, author talks to art, and cultural presentations. Come celebrate with us y bienvenidos. Check out the Viva webpage of the San Francisco Public Library to see our upcoming events, find great books by Latinx authors and illustrators, and more. We are on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Rometish Aloni, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula, and continue to live, work, and play here today. As the indigenous stewards of this land, and in accordance with their traditions, the Rometish Aloni have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional territory. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Rometish community, and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. Thank you to the friends of the San Francisco Public Library for their generous support of this entire program series. We would not be able to do this without them. I am really excited to be able to introduce our authors tonight. We'll be having a conversation about their fantastic middle grade books. First, let me introduce Chantelle Acevedo. She's the author of the novel's Love and Ghost Letters, A Falling Star, The Distant Marbles, which was a finalist for the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Living Infinite, hailed by Booklist as a vivid and enthralling tale of love and redemption. In the sequel to the Mew Squad, the Cassandra Curse, Acevedo's middle grade duology was called Riveting and Suspenseful by School Library Journal, and the sequel, Mew Squad, The Mystery of the Tenth, follows the main characters on an unforgettable adventure. She is professor of English at the University of Miami, where she directs the MFA program. And joining Chantelle, I'd like to introduce Donna Barba-Higuera, who grew up in Central California surrounded by agriculture and oil fields. As a child, rather than dealing with the regular dust doubles, she preferred spending recess, whirled away in the janitor's closet with a good book. Higuera is the author of Lupe Wong Won't Dance, El Cucuy is Scared 2, and The Last Guendista. Her middle grade and picture books are about kids who find themselves in odd or scary situations. She lives in Washington State with her family, three dogs, and two frogs. Both of our authors are members of Las Musas Books. Las Musas is a collective of women and non-binary identifying on the female spectrum Latinx picture book, middle grade, chapter book, and young adult authors. Their mission is to spotlight the new contributions of Las Musas in the evolving canon of children's literature and celebrate the diversity of voice, experience, and power in our communities. Welcome Chantelle and Donna. Thank you, Eliana. I know Donna and I are both so happy to be here. And Donna, I'm so glad to see you.  Yes, I know it's early evening for you, but it's late at night here in Miami, so I'm glad I get to spend time with you. We are about as full or opposite on the sides of the country as you can get. Oh my gosh, right? Seattle to Miami. We couldn't get further away. Exactly. Oh, it's so good to be here with you. I think, I think for all the kids watching and some of their teachers, maybe the best way to start is introduce our books and maybe read a little bit from the books. Sure. Yeah, sure. Do you want to go first or do you want me to? Sure, I'll go first. And as Eliana said, I'm the author of several books for adults, but new squad is my first middle grade book. And so here's new squad, the Cassandra curse, which is part one and new squad, the mystery of the 10th, which came out this summer. And that is part two. And new squad tells the story of Cali Martinez Silva, who is a Cuban American girl living in Miami, who discovers that she is one of the nine uses of classical myth. When she accidentally turns her best friend into a pop star. So that's book one. And then in book two, she leaves Miami to spend the summer with her dad and her stepmom in New York City and her new baby brother. And the muses, four of whom are girls or kids like like Cali, they learn that there could potentially be a 10th muse.  So I'll read from that book because it's the most recent and it's just a little passage, and then I'll hand it off to Donna. That night, I lay awake in bed thinking about the way my summer was turning out. When I came to New York, I thought I knew exactly who I was. Cali Martinez Silva, muse of the epic poem, Eater of Arroz con Pollo, Watcher of television, and a good friend.  My magic had changed. And I was the storyteller. I had all this power and I didn't exactly know what I was supposed to do with it. All my friends seemed to know who they were and what they were meant to be. Me? I didn't have a clue. I was New York Cali, Miami Cali, now Cali, future Cali, Papi's daughter, mommy's daughter, Fernando and Mario's little sister, Maya and Rafaelido's big sister, the ninth muse. I was all these things and yet I still didn't know what my purpose was or if I had one. Future Cali definitely had her work cut out for her. So you get a taste of Cali's voice there. How about you Donna? Well, so, as I said, I have a few books. This is the picture book that just released. El Cucuy is scared to about, if you don't know who El Cucuy is, he's about the scariest of scary things in the world. And he is sort of like the Mexican boogeyman. And in this book it shows that even the things that are the scariest things to some of us are scared of something and El Cucuy is afraid of change and moving and starting a new school and worried about making friends. I think we've all been through that this year starting back to school after a little bit of a break.  Suddenly they're both afraid of change. And a book that's just about to come out in a few weeks, The Last Quintista, and this book is written for middle grade. It's a little, I would say upper middle grade. So maybe 10 years old and over nine years old and older. But a lot of adults are reading it. And so it's kind of one of those books that I think might be one that people read with families. And it's about, it's set in the future. And it's about a girl Petra who wants to be a storyteller. And when Earth is going to be destroyed, don't worry, it's long in the future. She is going to be going to another planet and when she goes to this planet she wants to be a storyteller her parents want her to be a scientist. And along the journey, as often happens in books, things happen and an evil empire takes over and when Petra awakens from her deep sleep of 100 years, she discovers that all the memories of Earth and stories and everything she adored and loved have been erased from those memories and she is the only one who remembers. So she has to try to remind people through storytelling of what it was to be human and remind them of Earth and maybe their families. So it's a little bit more of a tension filled book. So we're going to talk more about Lupe Wong won't dance I've got my little place card here. And this book is about Lupe Wong, who wants to be the first female pitcher in the major leagues. And when she goes to, and if she gets straight A's this quarter or semester, her uncle, who is a groundskeeper for the Mariners is going to introduce her to fully Hernandez who is a pitcher and like her is a Mexican, and Chinese descent. And so Lupe, if she she got to get straight A so she can meet him she shows up to PE one day and finds out that they're going to be square dancing. And she's having none of it so she's trying to eliminate square dancing. It's a lot more than that it's not just about square dancing it's about friendships and it's a funny book, but so it's a lot more funny than my serious work. I'll read to you a scene from Lupe, when she's having dinner with her grandparents her grandparents come over for dinner, and her mother's side of the family is of Mexican descent, her father's side of the families from Chinese descent. So we're going to start off when they sit down at the table. We're going to start the whole families around the table including Lupe's mom, her brother Paolo and her grandmother Salgado and her grandma and Grandpa Wong. Grace Paolo mom says, God thank you for our grandparents who can cook. No offense he whispers to mom. There's a small knock followed by out. Thank you for giving Mr Montgomery pink eye so my algebra test is postponed and help Lupe through puberty and bless this food. Paolo mom admonishes. Oh sorry he says and bows his head again. Amen. Mom and Bella sigh simultaneously and cross themselves, Papa and Grandma Wong are not so religious, but they not respectively. Paolo must be hungry because he doesn't waste any time spooning Pusole into his bowl. Pusole and Pats his head. Pusole is magic. It will cure any illness or trouble you have. How much do you weigh now Grandma Wong asks Paolo to skinny. Yes to skinny Bella says in agreement. Mom sets her chopsticks down. He's perfect. He just had his physical.  Bella ignores mom's comet and spoons more Pusole into Paolo's bowl. I put a heaping spoon of steamed eggs on top of my white rice and spoon Pusole over a scoop of Mexican rice. I grabbed the soy sauce and drizzle barely four drops on top of the eggs. Too much soy sauce. Grandma Wong says. Paolo narrows his eyes at me just like Grandma and we erupt and laughter. I yeah, Grandma says shocked at our outburst.  Already done. Grandma reaches up and pinches my cheek again. I guess you don't need anymore. I can see you've been eating a lot. Mom drops the shrimp she's holding. Bella takes my plate from my hand and sets it back down. She takes it to mouth from her own plate and sets it on mine.  I quickly make a muscle with my arm at Grandma Wong. Gotta keep my strength up Grandma. Baseball season started. Bella smiles and pats my knee under the table. Grandma Wong barely lowers her voice. No money in baseball. Waste of time. I slam down my chopsticks. It's one thing for her to always call me fat. It's just a Chinese grandma thing, but it's another to criticize the greatest game in history. Bella sits up tall and orgullosis her chichis to show she is competent. Baseball started in Mexico. It is in her blood, she says. Paolo snorts into his poise.  I sort of appreciate the help. She's dead wrong about its origin, of course, but I'm not going to correct her. So as you can see, a lot of times in families when you have a mix of cultures, some of you might be familiar with Mexican culture, some of you might be familiar with Chinese culture and sometimes when they collide, it's really interesting and funny. And so this scene is absolutely something that could have happened in my own family at certain times and it has. So it's kind of based on that, but we all have really unique families. So that's, you know, something that I wanted to show and showcase in my book. I love that aspect of complex families in both our works, but especially how it plays out in that scene, right? Where it goes from funny to suddenly, you know, your main character gets, you know, she gets upset, right?  But that's something that were you drawing from? You said it could have happened in your family. Were you drawing from experience to write, you know, a scene like that? Oh, yeah. And a lot of these things are things that actually happened, you know, within, and they're funny. Like sometimes you go, wow, is this, is this real? And all of these things have happened in some way or another. And I just wanted to show, of course, when I was writing this, I never thought that it would be a book or that other people would read it. But when I wrote this scene in particular, I just kind of imagined a dinner scene of what would happen within families.   My kids, it's even more complicated. Their dad is Chinese. And so I wanted, you know, when I was writing this, it was kind of based on my kids and their experiences and how funny it actually is. But sometimes there are things that can be said that seem difficult or they're a little complicated. And I wanted to show that there's always love. It's not meant necessarily to be that way. And we can have families that are complicated and have families from different cultures that sometimes it seems a little tense, but underlying all of that. They love each other and grandparents, no matter where they are, they love us and parents the same way they can come from different backgrounds, and even children looking at that they can have two very different grandparents and you love them just the same. Yeah, yeah. I think complex families are so are so interesting and I think important to represent in middle grade. I've got them in Muse Squad too, because my own family was complex in a different way, right? I was, my parents divorced when I was really young, my dad wasn't around. And lots of kids sort of in the extended family, right, have divorced parents and step-parents and step-brothers and I have a step-sister that I love, right, and how these families can be very complicated and tense at times, but also sort of loving and wonderful, you know. And I love that you mentioned to that difference, right, that there are sort of cultural things that are very specific, right, to families and to however that family is put together. In the second Muse Squad book, Callie has to go to spend the summer with her dad in New York and her feelings are a little raw because he, you know, her parents divorced, dad moved away, like got married almost immediately, right, to this other person, right. And who is lovely, right, who is also, there is still love there, right, and those, these are the sort of the configurations that the adults have found for one another, and the kids sometimes feel like stuck in the middle of it, you know, but they very much still love her. Well, and I think probably in your book as well, like, especially a child who's going from one household with a parent to another, there's another set of rules or expectations. And is that something that was in your book, like, did she go from her mother's home to her father's and have like suddenly it's like, wait, this is really different than what it is at mom's house. That's so real. Right. And I think kids who are sort of going between like two, two homes like that, whether it's every other week or on the weekends, I think they feel that, you know, very strongly and certainly I gave that to Callie as well. So with mom at home, it's more easy going and then she goes to New York with her dad. And he's strict right he's strict in a way that she's no longer used to. Right. She's gonna gonna custom to her mother's, her mother's flow, and her father's flows is a really different one. And I remember with my, with my editor, you know, she I mentioned in the little section that I read that she breaks curfew. And the first time she breaks curfew he takes her phone right it's like that's evil, like no more phone for you. And my editor was like, already I mean wouldn't he give her a chance. And I'm thinking myself, oh my God, he's like an old fashioned Cuban dad. That's like, that's like, that's actually not enough what he's done, right, like, like taking her phone is actually a little too mild, you know, to how he might have react and what else how else he might have like, you know, punished her and kept different friends or your or whatever you know in the way I imagine him. So that's, that's, that's funny too. And a lot of that that book is sort of her like dealing with that, that difference in disciplinary styles, you know, it's real. It's very real for kids.  And we all have our own home life and yeah it can be complicated, but it's good. You know, it doesn't have to be bad. It's just what kids experience and I think that a lot of times as kids, we think that our home life might not be great or might be complicated and we don't know that that other kids have complicated home lives as well. And sometimes we don't talk about those things. We get to read a book and see what's really going on with other kids. And as writers we try to put real life into books, and we can see that it's not always, it's not always perfect, but there's love and they're there, that's your home and it doesn't make it any better or worse than anybody else's. And I always worry that kids will, you know, read books with these perfect families and go wow I wish I had that well that's not realistic because most families are complicated and and we've got a lot of combined families and I think that kids need to know that their family is what they have to navigate and to never feel like that it's less than anybody else's. Yeah, absolutely. So families are tricky in both our books with so our friendships. Absolutely. So, I think that, you know, in your book, you've got your character, who is suddenly kind of whisked into this different world of she is in this different, you know what what her real, not persona but like what she can become. Luckily, she gets to do this with other people other uses like herself so can you speak a little bit to that about her learning to make friends with, you know, others who may not be like her have the same background and what that was like. Yeah, there are there are a couple of tensions there for Cali because, especially in the first book, you know she accidentally magically turns her best friend into a pop star, and starts to feel that she's lost her best friend right and I, and this is me pulling from my own sort of middle school memories of having a best friend who suddenly in middle school became very popular. Like suddenly she was like the school rock star and feeling, oh my God, I'm left in the dust, right like suddenly like her social sphere was different from mine and what happened to us to our friendship right we're being tugged in different directions, and trying to navigate and trying to rediscover what you liked about each other right in the first place and why you became, you know, best friends and and getting to the essence of that. So she's dealing with, with losing friends, this one best friend on one on the one hand and getting sort of guilty about that, and then making all these new friends who are completely diverse and global, and they're there, they have all these very different personalities and they have to work together as a team. So there's a lot of compromise there with them because they have their goals as users that they have to accomplish together and they might not always see the eye to eye. And so that was really fun to navigate through those complexities with Cali in both books. I think that, you know, in in Lupe Wong won't dance. She has a lot of complicated friendships to Lupe isn't always the most likable character I sometimes she she makes a lot of mistakes and one thing I wanted to showcase because a lot of people will read it and they'll go. She's not always likable and I'm like, yeah, she's growing, you know, and part of what I wanted to show is that even in her friendships, she makes really bad mistakes she takes her friends for granted and sometimes she uses them to get to her goal and so she'll you know have them do tasks for her when really she just assumes they're going to do it because they're her friends, and she discovers along the way that she's making mistakes and one thing I really wanted to show is that that's part of growing and especially when we're in, you know, middle and going into high school and navigating friendships and sometimes we lose friends and it's really hurts like you know friends will move on to other friends it happens to all of us but when it happens to us we feel like we're the only person in the world that it's happening to. But when it happens to Lupe it's really hard and she has to look at her behavior and go wait, what did I do, maybe I had part of the maybe I was part of the problem. And just to learn to forgive ourselves and I herself and I think that we need to remember that along the way, we're going to make a lot of mistakes with our friendships and other things and we have to learn to go wow. I know I made a mistake, but I can do better, and I'm going to forgive myself and move on. And if we always just think about that mistake we made and we dwell on it and that's all we think about. That's not what we should do we should learn from it and say okay I'll do better next time and move on and, and we should do that with our friendships and yeah. One thing I love about Lupe though is that she has many different friendships she has her friendship with her friend, Andy who she and Andy have been friends for a long time. And she also is friends with a boy down the street whose name is Niles. And so she's in there, they're all very different and I think that that's one thing I wanted to show as well that it's, it's okay. So school is tough because a lot of times people run in clicks. It's okay to have all kinds of friends and friends are there are different from you or have different hobbies or activities and you know friendships can be a lot deeper than just, you know, kind of going okay this way or this click is that way. There might be that quiet person that you never talked to, or you might be that quiet person and it's okay to make friends with someone who you may not have thought you ever would be friends with and it could create a lifelong friendship. Yeah. Absolutely. I think that the, at least in, you know, in my book at the sort of towards the end. I'm going to spoil a little bit but she gets her best friend back. It would be kind of sad if they were like enemies forever right so like she gets her best friend back and part of that is, is that they apologize to one another, and the power of an apology I think is really, really important and it's, I'm always shocked at how there are some people who really struggle with apologies right they have a hard time saying I'm sorry. But I think once you once you learn how to do that in a way that that's genuine right and it's thoughtful it can really heal things right when you think of a friendship has gone bad what you really need to just communicate. And the power of an apology I think is really, really important there too. I agree and I think you know when you when those apologies happen. Sometimes it doesn't mean that you agree on what happened you can still be that we just don't agree on this one thing and you apologize and you move on in your friendship and you just know okay hey you know what, we're not going to agree on that thing. It doesn't mean that we're not going to be friends or we can never be friends again. We just know that okay that's something we're not going to agree on and we have to, you know, learn to just respect that the other person has a different opinion. And accept each other's differences too. Absolutely. It's important as well. Yeah. You know what else both our books have in common is a sense of activism. Absolutely. Yeah. Lupe is a bit of a social justice warrior and that's kind of what gets her into trouble you know she's trying to band square dancing but we found it find out almost immediately that because she is Mexican American and Chinese. She was upset about there being one bubble on the scantron where it said choose one. And she's like wait a minute. Why do I have to choose one I'm equal parts of these things and that was that came out of how I felt as a teacher or when I was a young I asked a teacher why do I have to choose one bubble and she goes well that's just the way it is you have to choose one. Not just one and it was very odd to me so she becomes an activist for that she doesn't like the dress code where girls have to wear shorts that are to their fingertips but boys, it doesn't matter.  If this is if this is just feels wrong to me she can't just accept it and so she is constantly trying to figure out ways to either get something banned or bring it up with the school board or bring it up with the school. Unfortunately for Lupe she gets so excited about these things and that she forgets that sometimes you have to take other people into consideration it's not just about yourself it's great to have causes it's wonderful to do that but you want to do it in a way that if you are going to enlist the help of your friends you do it politely and you ask you don't tell and so. But yeah social activism it's I think it's important that if something doesn't feel right to you I know sometimes as a kid. You feel powerless to change something. And this was something you know when my kids came home and said, Well, we have to square dance and not only do we have to square dance. We have to square dance only with a boy and we only have to square dance with the person who asks us. So, and we have to say yes. And so, for my daughter I felt so bad for her she never even held a boy's hand. And suddenly she's in middle school and she's going to have to dance with a boy and hold his hand it just all felt very awkward to her. And she was powerless to change it her grade depended on it so that's kind of how I like okay. Yeah, who could stand up for those of us who felt like we you know we felt like I was like wait a minute I had to do that too so I loop they long was a character who I'm like okay she's going to be she's going to stand up for all the things that I was too afraid to stand up for. And it's hard there are things all the time that you go wow I really want to get I don't think this is fair.  Now that's really that's really powerful and something that always intrigued me about adolescence, right, which is that that incredible sense of passion, right, for causes for sort of for for justice, and not a lot of power in the in the world, you know, at least power power that's sort of visible to you as a kid right that you can't access it and so, of course there are there are ways to do it and doing it in the ways that loop a learns to over the course of the book right is is really healthy. When I was writing new squad I wanted to because it was set in Miami. And I'm married to a scientist and so there's always like science conversations happening in my house and, and I knew that I wanted climate change to be a part of the story as well right because it's something that that kids, especially are worried about and kids, especially in coastal areas like Seattle and like Miami are worried about in really specific ways. I want to be that to be part of the story. And so the muses are tasked with inspiring faded ones right people who are destined for greatness, whether it's in the arts, or it's in it's in some other field. And so Kelly's first assignment is actually a classmate Maya Rivera was there like the science geek of the school and she kind of dresses funny and she's goofy, but she's passionate, particularly about climate change. And so, Kelly and the other muses in the music squad where the kids on the of the nine muses are tasked with inspiring Maya and making sure she has a friend, because she's destined for greatness. And so when you are 11. What that means is making sure she gets to that science fair, and that she does a good job at the science fair you know and so I was able to call yourself as an activist but she's the support system. Right for that for the activists in her life and you see that actually in both books. And I thought that was important too because you might not be that kid who feels maybe brave enough to be on the frontline, right, of an issue, but you can certainly support right those those who do if you agree with them right and whether that's helped them make posters or even Tom good job I think that's great right like being that support system can be really important to that I think that's a vital position to hold and so the muses are there they were interesting to write because they're not front and center they're not the heroes of the story. Right like they're the makers of heroes. And so they're sort of in the shadows, and they're, they're helping people like do what they need to do in the world.  I love that because I think that a child who would read your book would say okay maybe I don't have to be the one on the frontline maybe I'm shy maybe that's not my strong suit but I can help and you know say I can I can inspire other people or I can be a support system for a friend. And, you know, like you said, obviously you want to believe in what it is they're doing, but even just, you know, activism sometimes is knowing that, you know, saying, Wow, that's their cause, but I do believe in it, but I want to help and that's a great, a great way to to be proud of yourself and to find those things that are important to you and to help others to it doesn't always have to be your cause and yeah I love. Yeah that's a great way to look at it and I think kids will will if they read your book will go wow okay I can do that so what a great message. Oh, thanks so I think of Mr Rogers right that was always his his famous quote look for the helpers. And sometimes I mean I think so many kids books, especially books that are fantasy books, right like they're especially the magical books like you are the chosen one. And so like a spotlight on that one kid and these these girls are are magical right but they're not, they're not the goddesses in the gods right like they're they're taking that back seat because they're there sort of as an assist. I think it's an I think it's an important role. Yeah, and when you don't see very often. There's been some really fun heartwarming chatter on both in chat on YouTube and here just just empowering multiracial families and kids just showcasing that diversity and talking and in an appreciation of like the friendships and the families and the and the activism so I wanted No, no questions yet, but I wanted to just share that that there's folks that are out there that appreciate the discussion around those pieces and I really appreciated how you both went into depth a little bit around the growth of your characters, because I do feel like that's something like that's very real right and and that's very much a piece of of the middle grade experience. It's very real to have likable days and unlikable days, whether they're internal or external so I do have a question about writing process, if you both are willing to share a little bit about how, how you go about writing. If it's changed from when you wrote these books and depending on what you both have coming up. Well, my writing process is normally I get like just the spark of an idea, and it always starts that way if I try to force an idea for a book, it doesn't happen it's normally and it's can be something weird and bizarre like the last Quintista. I was listening to an NP you know it can happen at any time where you hear something but it was a writing prompt and it was right about take a traditional fairy tale and make it sci fi. And even though the book I mean it's considered science fiction it's also dystopian. I just wrote a short story and then after that I write down plot I'm like wow this would make a good novel so I wrote down plot points. And then as I start writing, and I start following my little plot points, the characters start forming in my mind and so as I'm writing them. It never follows the plot points because the characters start just it sounds so weird but it really happens they characters start taking the story in another direction, and sometimes as a writer you're going wait that's not where we're supposed to be going we're supposed to go over here, but it's always more interesting in the end if you allow the characters to kind of play play like a movie in my head and I just write down what they're doing and sometimes I'm like, don't do that and they just do it anyway. So it's always interesting but most of the time when I'm writing. I don't the characters, people ask me a lot are the characters you or are the characters someone you know, and they're not they could they sometimes their pieces of them that remind me of somebody, but they're never someone in particular they always form themselves and so they're different types of writers who write plot and others that they're called panzers where panzers just means just write whatever mine are always character driven where the characters kind of come into play and then they just. It sounds silly but they kind of write the story themselves and once I have the character in my mind it actually is very easy to write the story. I basically begin with character as well I think almost everything I've written, including the adult books begin with character, the difference with you squad and everything I'd written before those books had come to me certain pieces right like I like this historical moment and then I like this, you know this theme and it slowly the pattern you know the tapestry starts to come together until finally, right I have the idea. You squad, the idea came like a bolt of lightning. And that's never happened to me before it probably will never happen again. And I like to say that it was actually news given because there's no other explanation. But for real, I was at it in museum I was the VNA, which is Victorian Albert Museum in London and I made that news had headquarters in the book. And I went back to this moment, but I was visiting with my family, and waiting for the kids to use the bathroom, and there was this beautiful sculpture of a muse, and I went to take a picture of it. And the idea just came to me which was what if they'd been children like what if the muses had been children, and that was it. And I started to serve bumps. Just frantically wrote it. And you know museum that the more museum comes from the muse right museum right so place where everything is inspired and so I'm frank to frantically writing in my notes app on my phone and over the course of that vacation sort of plotting it in my head and I try not to start a project I start actually drafting until I know how it ends. Because I used to just go by the seat of my pants for the first two books and it was so painful that I decided to do it again. So I spent the rest of that that trip just dreaming about who these kids were. But yeah I was it felt very, very like a very lucky moment. I don't know. You'll have more of those moments because the way that it happened just organically you were in your this every day you're going to have another moment where you're going to go oh my gosh here's another one. You better have your notebook handy because it's just going to happen and you're going to have to write it down. It was wild. It was wild and it typically though doesn't typically like ideas build for a long time in my head like they just percolate and they start adding layers like an onion. And then they're good so yeah. So cool. I love both Callie and Lupe for different reasons like with Callie I was like when she would go to I'm not going to give spoilers so when she would not be where her mom thought she was she she would say she would say like if my mother only knew that I was. However far away and it was just so so real right and with Lupe with her mother, she was really just trying to take that measured approach as much as she could until she couldn't anymore around the different pieces around the dancing and around the boys and around baseball like it was just like it was so so fun to what to be with those characters. So thank you both for for creating them. What's next for you, if you can share. I think that's tricky for writers. I'm trying to remember what I can I can what I can and can't say. I have stuff in the works. So I will be working on another two picture books and that I can tell you that that's it I can't say more than that and another middle grade young adult that may or may not be in the same universe is the last Quintista and so the Lupe I think about all the time and I started writing another Lupe book and I decided that Lupe's journey in middle school might need to be over if we revisit Lupe. I think we need to revisit her in high school and have a young adult book and I had written about half of another Lupe and it just what it felt a little bit like she had closure for that moment and trying to keep her in that moment just it wasn't really telling her it was funny but it just didn't feel like there was more growth to happen so I'm like, we need to throw her into a high school situation, but yeah I'm I'm working on something that hopefully it will be announced soon but I can't really say anything just yet, but right now I'm, you know, next on the 12th is when the last Quintista comes out so I'm kind of focusing on that it's like having a baby when your book arrives it's like having a book baby. Absolutely. I can't wait next week. Next week. And I love the idea of Lupe in high school Lupe Wong at the prom still won't. That would be hilarious. Okay that's dancing at the prom. I'm actually I can actually announce something and it's true it's tricky sometimes you're asking that I have a thing and I can't tell you, but I can announce, and it's a new middle grade coming out next fall so Halloween 22 and it's called the curse on spectacle P. There's a lot of boy named Frank Fernandez whose parents are in the home restoration business so they turn trains into houses and old abandoned churches and all kinds of funky shapes and they've decided they're moving to a lighthouse in the Florida keys, except this house is the spookiest lighthouse ever. And Frank runs into a mysterious girl who may or may not be a ghost. And together, they're going to try to figure out what is this curse on spectacle key. And I'll add that he has a great name and her name is Mary Shelley, because Frank is obsessed with Frankenstein, the story Frankenstein. So look for that next fall. Yeah, that sounds fun and it's coming out at kind of a Halloween time. Yes. Oh, I love it. Thank you. Very cool. Very cool. Thanks. Thanks for sharing and not not doing spoilers. If you can. I appreciate that I think both of your books we have them with the San Francisco Public Library or these middle grade books, I think all of your books and so folks can check them out and use them at their local favorite local bookstore that they want to support. And is there anything else that you all would like to share. I, and in the chat there's books are just applauding and, and thinking and just so excited. So just wanted to share that too. But if there's anything else you'd like to share with the audience. I have a teacher's out there you can go to my website. It's either you can go to either Donna Barbara, he get a get a, and it'll pull up or DB E get a and it'll pull up, and I've teaching guide I've a teaching guide there for Lupe, and and there will be a teaching guide for the last Quintista coming. Very soon and I forgot Lupe Wong, no by that it's coming out in Spanish, and it's been delayed because books got stuck in shipping containers. It's a real problem, but it will be out in I think now the new release date is November and I that is wonderful for me and the last Quintista is already being translated so it will be in Spanish as well. And just being able to have a book that you can read in both English and Spanish would have been so wonderful for me when I was younger there just really weren't books like that that were translated so I just it makes me so happy so yeah if somebody you know wants to read it in both language or an ESL class that will be in Spanish in November. That's great and same for me if you go to shantosavado.com there's a teacher's guide for the first new squad book. And I also do virtual classroom visits as well. And yeah please please do check it out. Well that was amazing. I'm glad you both were able to share your teacher guides because they're definitely are some educators out there that are watching right now and that will and that are tuning in so thank you so much. And thanks for saying yes to to another yet another virtual event. We really appreciate it, especially being in San Francisco and touching Seattle and Miami is it's a joy and a pleasure so thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for connecting us across the country. I know yeah one of my airmanas from Las Musas it's wonderful to we don't get to see each other that often. So this was a great opportunity and I just I had so much fun. Same here. Thank you so much for having us and thank you to everyone for watching. Yeah. Thank you everybody for watching and joining us today and if you love today's program. Be sure to check out our calendar. There are more opportunities to engage in cultural programs like this to celebrate Viva Latinx Heritage Month. We'll explore hot chocolate traditions throughout Latin America so be sure to register for that. Take a look at our book lists that have both Chantel and Donna's books listed as well and take good care of your folks yourselves. Stay safe and we hope to see you all at another library program soon. Have a good night. Thank you.


Tena koutou, tena koutou katoa, ko whaka kahu te monga, ko wai kato te awa, te ko poko kane, te marae, ko Brenda taku ingua. Nau mai haremai. Hai, I'm Brenda and that was Amihi. I just introduced myself and said who I am and where I'm from in Te Reo Māori. I am here, I work for a company named Ravid. This is us, it's Ravid, just like the disease. When I explained the company name. I've worked there about six months and they're a great fun little start-up in Wellington that uses a lot of open source and contributes to open source. So I want to give some warnings on this talk because it is about a very horrible day and I've done my best to make this a talk that someone who was in Canterbury that day can sit through comfortably. I've tried my best. I'm going to talk about the software and the open source community response and not about the worst parts of this disaster. But I do have one slide. This is when it was, it was the 22nd of February and it was the middle of lunchtime and it was bad. So in the narrative that I've got here that what happened was the quake struck and people by and large flocked to social media to ask these questions. The first thing that people posted was I am OK. So with one update to Facebook, Twitter, whatever, they could tell hundreds of people instead of sending individual messages like they would have had to do a few years before. So Twitter was flooded with these. I remember being very annoyed at a cousin who didn't update her Facebook for two weeks saying that she was OK. We didn't quite know. But for those that did update it was great. Further away in Wellington there was a whole lot of, was that an earthquake? We weren't quite sure. We kind of felt very little. Followed by, wow, something's happened and a whole lot of are you OK? So it was a big confusing mess followed by where is person who was not responded. Social media was just on the verge of being common. I don't think we'd had any mainstream media stories about a celebrity tweeting something horrible happening. It was not a thing that a lot of middle New Zealand or whatever you want to call it these days was not aware of what social media was but there still was many thousands of New Zealanders who did use social media. Most of the interactions that were with social media at this time were using the web browser and the SMS interface. When I did a rehearsal of this talk people said, I didn't even know Twitter had an SMS interface. It used to be that when it was a new thing people would go out. When you're out with your phone your only interface was SMS. You'd send an update of, I saw a monkey running in the street, whatever you'd send it by SMS to Twitter and you'd also receive a few back. So that was the traditional interface and although that had died out by 2011 people rediscovered it about then because it was a really good interface in this scenario.  I had a smartphone in about 2009 but I'm a techie nerd person who gets free phones from Google. Most people didn't have phones. So SMS was king on the day and the older dumb phone protocols but there were some smartphones out there. This is only really interesting because Google Buzz actually was significant in the quake. I don't know, it doesn't exist anymore, I assume. I haven't seen it for so long. But it had integration with Google Maps. People could, from their Google Maps, turn on the buzz layer and see things that were going on. So we had a little spike of usage of this thing and then no more. Hashtags came out. So at the time of the quake it was no common idea of what hashtag to use at all. So all these popped up all over. And people started to send questions to Twitter. They couldn't find this kind of information from the authorities. So they asked Twitter. So these were the kind of questions we were getting and people who were on Twitter started responding. People wanted petrol to get out of town. Diesel was all there was and no you can't buy petrol, it's for ambulances. So we were finding out who will sell petrol and replying to people who were using just the SMS interface and then those people got out of town. The official info from government departments was a very small overwork team. We didn't quite realise it at the time, the conditions that they were working under. They were based in the art gallery, which is in the red zone, which is a terrible commute to work. They were there for weeks from the state onwards. They were overworked and everything was running off generators and it was mobile. Red zone is an area of the central city of Christchurch. I don't think on that day was cordoned off, but eventually was cordoned off that you couldn't go in. Everyone knew this terminology red zone from the prior earthquake in September.  So the people... I'm trying to not talk too much about this scenario in Christchurch, but it was the fenced off area and all sorts of politics and good and bad ensued. We'll move on from that though. So they were under a stress. I'm putting this in because they appear in my story quite a bit, but we need to give them all some sympathy because of the conditions that they were working under. And we later learned, this is a tweet from March, that all those websites that the council had put up, that kept falling over, were run in server rooms in Christchurch in the red zone off generators from the internet connection there. Apart from this tweet, they also started instructing people to use a web proxy to access their website in order to convince their CDN that you're not in New Zealand, and therefore you would not use their server. They really couldn't get the info out. So this is still the day of the quake. And what we did have is a bunch of New Zealand volunteers who knew each other, a very small number, from the Queensland flood crisis response. A flood is a very different disaster to an earthquake, but they had the contacts. Tim McNamara was the New Zealander most prominently involved in the Christchurch... Sorry, in the Queensland response. So Christchurch Commons had standby volunteers, but only one New Zealander among them, which was Tim. And the chosen communication channel was Skype. Okay, Skype, closed source piece of software. It was free. It was multi-platform. So this was important. We had a lot of volunteers who were using Linux at this time, and Mac and Windows, so it worked on multi-platforms. And we weren't using the voice, we were using the text. But it was awful. Skype was totally awful to use as a communications channel. It drained batteries on laptops really fast. Skype has a feature, I believe, where it proxies for other people if they can't connect, and that was going on and people's batteries were dying. I don't think there was a mobile client at the time, maybe it just wasn't well known. And every time I reconnected, it would replay 20,000 messages that I'd missed. That's the feature of their text conversations, and I'd have to wait 30 minutes before I could actually have a conversation. So about an hour after the quake, various independent open source techie people around the country started building things. They joined together into groups of two or three and started just doing things. All these things I mentioned here started to pop up. The couch apps were really cool. I was really impressed with the speed at which some of people who could build an app based on couch were just tuning things out. And there were so many WordPress installs, which they were installations on servers, and as soon as they became popular, they fell over, unfortunately, so they weren't actually a very good solution. But couch apps seemed to do really well. This is a couch app that someone built within an hour of the quake. It was built by Miles Thompson, who I believe works for Scoop, and it was the idea that you tweet a thing that you need and someone tweets that they have it. And it was just joining them up. It's still live today, and he built it really fast. So within 60 minutes of the quake, he had this thing up and running and live feeds of requests and offers. This is then later at 3.15pm, Catalyst IT in Wellington decided to fund multiple staff to work on earthquake response. We weren't quite sure what that meant. I worked there at the time, but they had said, we'll do it. The first thing that came out, I believe, was a shortcode responder. How many people remember? Shortcodes were a thing for a while. A shortcode is a phone number that's three or four digits long. You may have seen it if you vote for NZ Idol or something like that, and it's on and off an island somewhere. So you text to it, usually you get charged $2, $5, whatever voting cost these days. And so we... Some people I worked with built this really fast using these technologies and just threw it out. We had a shortcode spear, meaning it was for our staging system. It was... Sorry? It was my dev. It was our staging dev shortcode, and it was free and it was connected to all the telcos, so we wired it up. And so people could start sending in both requests for non-urgent help and offers and info. So all three telcos had it zero rated. And this was cool. We managed to get all the telcos. There were three at the time. I don't know if two degrees was a phenomenon at the time. I remember there being telecon voter phone at their own SMS centre. So they were relevant. They were there. I believe that they also... They started to advertise to people if you have things to offer or you have inquiries. You can send to this SMS code. So this was a massive amount of red tape cutting. All the telcos trusting this crowd of people gathered at an IT tech firm in Wellington. Advertising them as a place to get some help. So by 5pm the short code responder was in action. People were processing messages off the queue. And it was being advertised on Twitter and by word of mouth in Christchurch. And retweeted of course. And then all these reports started to come in and we had a little web app where you just processed the message. Not long after this really good question from Julie Starr. She's a tech reporter. She asked this question. In my research I think this is what triggered a lot of what happened after. She asked this really good question. Is anyone actually aggregating all this information we're getting out of Christchurch? And then we realised well civil defence is not. And I don't... I'm not going to go into why and how and what I think of that. But they did not have modern systems. They had nothing ready to go. And even though they were offers. So here's LP. She did some Katrina hurricane recovery response. Wrote some open source there. Offered it to civil defence in other departments. Even offered it for free. And just couldn't get through the red tape. So we're like okay we'll do it. But if civil defence isn't doing this we'll do it. Meanwhile, completely independently an organisation called crisis commons spun up a map for us. They called it a crowd map. And they put it on their server. And they said everybody come will crowdsource it. And then they said hey it's open source. If you'd rather run it yourself come get it. Not long after that we ran the server and we thought okay we can run this better. And basically we did this. We formed crisis vultron. Everybody had different things, different aspects that they could bring. And we all got together and we did it. So the piece of software that we used, the open source software that is the bulk of my talk is a thing called Ushahidi. Swahili for testimony. I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly. It was produced for election violence in Kenya. So they were mapping where the violence was happening. From messages coming in mostly out of Twitter. But it was quite a generic piece of code that we could use. And it had a big button to crowdsource. So I had to research to find these screenshots. Sorry about the quality here. But this is out of the box when we pointed it at Christchurch. So there's a big green button at the top saying submit a report. And we turned on moderation. We had volunteers who were reading it. And that we would correct the grammar, we would verify a few things because sometimes people pass information that's third or fourth hand. So a report saying that if you need food it's like 6pm at night. People are hungry. This bakery is giving out free food. So we called the bakery and said, hey, is it true? We go, yeah. And so we put it up. So that was the kind information we were putting up pretty quickly. It's worth mentioning about this time Google put up their own people finder application which I don't know that that got a huge amount of usage but it did exist and came up quickly. So we moved into New Zealand control. We didn't move it to New Zealand. We moved it to EC2 under one of the volunteers accounts and he put his credit card in and paid for an EC2 cluster that then got all the traffic in the world. Brave guy. We did a hack fest out of it. We turned it black and red Canterbury colours and mobile. Mobile was a thing that this thing didn't really do mobile very well and we realised that people were actually looking at it with smartphones and they wanted to get their information in the way that they could. Their desktop computers at home couldn't get to this. There was no power but their phones good. So here's a screenshot I found. That's what it looked like after we'd been at it. So you can see that you could filter it into any category. You could zoom into your street and see what's going on and you can send things. So this is still the day of the quake and it's 8pm now. So we've built this whole thing. I'm quite proud of what the team did on short notice. People who weren't a team before lunchtime. We had formed Voltron and it formed all these things and by 8pm two more Ushahedis appear and we thought this was all a bit silly. We were having three separate maps. So we worked our contacts here, there and everywhere and said hey, why are you making another one? We want to put it on our website. So we did another hackfest that night and made it embeddable. So you could embed our map on another site. By morning Herald and Stuff had both embedded our map. Within 24 hours they had become a group of people who really know each other an authoritative source on the front page of the Herald. The next day, I believe it was the next day this is all a bit fuzzy but Christchurch City Council made a word press it was really, really slow and people were trying to find out is my water safe to drink and they were paging through pages of blog posts that weren't it didn't really help. So I think the success of ours was our use of maps people could actually go into their area and find out if their area had information instead of paging through an entire region's word press installation trying to find info. So I think our UI was respectful of how much time people had and we had an army of volunteers forming mostly in Wellington and a few remote who were willing to put all the effort in to make it easy. Councils were hit really hard by this earthquake they had some really confusing information up the doozy I found was big giant triumphant press release saying the water is now safe to drink after that earthquake and they meant September and now none of us had any idea if that meant now. So a person had gone there in a hurry and not noticed the date or there was no date to drink when it was not. The staff were under extreme pressure I don't know what their process was to update their Lotus Notes website somewhere but they weren't able to. Civil Defence meanwhile only had official info so the kind of reports that we had mapped would never be on a Civil Defence site they would never be like places giving out free bread would not be on a City Council website not an official one. They had Lotus Notes based website and they fell over a few days after the quake. There was a long planned attack by Anonymous as a protest of the DIA filter that I don't know how you stop an anonymous protest because who's the leader anyway but they went ahead and they took out DIA's web server they tore down a poster put up by the DIA basically to protest it and it's co-hosted with Civil Defence so Civil Defence fell over their website fell over which is unfortunate for them it's not really a sign of them doing it wrong so we had the EC2 hosted it's a lamp application Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP it never went down to the best of my knowledge it was elastic, it goes bigger and just charges you more so we made contact and reassured some authorities that we were not cowboys I'm not really sure what they were afraid of us doing basically I think they were afraid we would publish a thing that wasn't true I will mention there are some people who will not talk to me today because I was involved in this effort and they felt that that was their job to do an effort like this but they didn't do it the job so I don't know so here's some numbers by the next day we had this many reports 78,000 page impressions within 24 hours is pretty good I don't know how many of those were Christchurch and how many of them were Gawkers so meanwhile in the Skype chat we had 100 plus people chatting at any moment on important things but every time I tried to use it it would be replaying replaying replaying so the nerdier ones among us started an IRC channel to have conversations but unfortunately IRC doesn't really work for many of the volunteers who turned up on that day were holding their hands through configuring an IRC client with a port and here's SSL and all this would not have worked with many of our volunteers so Skype was the answer maybe these days you'd use Slack but I don't know that there's an open source thing that is ubiquitous and common and doesn't require a bit of preconfigured knowledge these days so there's a gap there for future crisis and it was cross-platform it worked on people's iPhones it worked everywhere so about this second or third day we all started to settle on these two hashtags so we registered a domain name that was easy to remember on the next day and we pointed it at the website and then we realised that a lot of the information and the requests for help were coming from Twitter so we wired up Twitter to be just like that shortcode so someone could send the rotors blocked at X on Twitter and we would put it on the map so we had all these people who'd heard that we'd built a thing and they'd heard about us through Heald and stuff and they'd say what can I do I want to do anything so most of New Zealand just wanted to do something to help and we ran a volunteer training in Catalyst's training room and out of that we ended up with shift so there were people 10 people at times were taking a shift to process the queue and we had all these people coming 24-7 I believe it was and it didn't take much training so these companies Telecom and Catalyst both offered a lot of paid staff full-time working on it a whole lot of small companies also did the same and there were many self-employed people who stopped what they were doing and came and worked on processing the queue and putting the reports up a couple of companies in Switzerland and Google Switzerland did the night shift for us they started taking reports over night and mapping them and they actually had an entire hack-fest at Google hosted in Switzerland and they were doing our code deploys for us at night too so we could stay sleeping so the thing that was we were successful and useful to Canterbury from my interviewing people who used it was the map maps were a new thing and all the government people who could have filled this space were not very good at maps they hadn't done this they hadn't invested it they have now but at that time they had not and authorities are very cautious of publishing something they haven't triple verified so we had a lot of people were offering water from bores here there and everywhere and the council was not publishing that also the council websites did not work on mobile they would just scroll off the screen off the screen and they touched it to scroll they would pop up a do not steal my images pop up some of them that was the district council or health board maybe there were all sorts of things and they weren't updating I think just this web updating the website was low on their list that week but meanwhile telecom a vodafone I believe probably 2 degrees gave free mobile traffic to people in Christchurch so that once again just for a day or two I think massively increased it so the councils were not functioning perhaps they were but not in this area and there were yet more the water is safe to drink was very common all over the websites but the date was very old so we mapped the location of water where telecom had put a car that would charge your phone coming round and it would go from neighbourhood to neighbourhood ATMs that were working petrol stations operating and done that sorry and then the next day we started to do automated scripts so we realised that there was a water truck delivery schedule and we automated reading that and pushing it in so we had all the information on the official sites and the unofficial all in one place and we became a well oiled machine of just processing, processing, processing which you wouldn't know if there was a fish and chip shop opened we had it people were bringing bouncy castles to go to the park this is an important service if you're in a war zone in the park there were places where children to play and relax and we mapped that whereas other places didn't your Tim Kong Chris to him for managing all our volunteers and eventually we gave out logins so people didn't need to be moderated so all the banks had a login and all the banks were maintaining really up to date info of which ATMs had cash left which ones were empty, which ones were broken and they were updating at 3-4 times a day and it was all the banks this is a query that I remember working on just as an example I parked my car at place in the red zone it's not there where do I get it and I rang round and I found her car it was in turn of car option and then I knew the answer for future queries like that your car is here there were lots of neighbours offering barbecues because you want to cook and your kitchen is a mess yeah mess doesn't begin to sat neighbours had barbecues there were neighbours with spa pools said it's full of water come get water if you want water you don't want to drink it but I don't know and I didn't even know this but everyone in Christchurch knows this now if you've got a toilet with a hole in your backyard put lime on top to get the smell out to cover it up I was updating every day which places still had lime that you could buy this is a thing I learnt from it power structures like to talk to power structures this is a Nat Talkington quote from when I asked him for his version of events and we didn't really have one so we kind of presented one that wasn't but we used words that reassured government officials that there was a power structure when there really wasn't we didn't have an org chart of our group of volunteers we just did it and so the government departments didn't talk to us the one exception was the geospatial office so the New Zealand geospatial office there's kind of a link there tentatively with our mapping they organised a meeting I just didn't attend this one and they brought in people from all the departments to come find out what we are and who we are and why are we allowed to do this and what came out of that meeting is big chunk of the officials became volunteers for us so they either on company government department time or in their evenings started updating the info for us so that took the burden off they had the knowledge of how to verify things that we didn't so it was good this is a little event that happened on this side with the same team the Red Cross website fell over so the Red Cross did a lot of the on the ground work and they were unable to accept donations and right in the moment when people were likely to send the money and they needed it to operate it was a MySQL related era and we managed to find people who wrote MySQL to come and help them fix it so it was this little thing where these people from the internet would like to help you Red Cross and how did we convince them that we could help them we wrote the software that you use which really helped so we got people in it was a silly era it was just one page in their website if someone visited it the whole website locked up it locked all the tables across all their records for minutes after anyone visited it so people would be thinking they'd fixed it and it would just stop so eventually we fixed it my next slide is a grumpy slide so I wanted it really fast there was a computer world article about us fixing the Red Cross and the Red Cross took credit as if we weren't there as if they'd fixed it and that unfortunately it really annoyed some of the volunteers who had spent many hours diagnosing their problem for them they wrote a story about how clever they were in fixing it that day but that added some very tired volunteers but generally there was a very much just do it atmosphere if you think you've got an idea just go do it no one pulled rank that day that I'm aware of it just happened and people would build things and then just tell people they've done it we had an amazing network of the New Zealand tech community is really well connected and everyone buys tech so my technique for if I needed to contact a place be it a bank or a telco or anywhere I would who is their website find the technical contact half the time I would recognise the name or the company use some network to find the techie and get the techie to go say hey could you do a thing and that technique worked really well yeah so it wasn't so much to get to people catalyst need a lot of credit for there they funded staff for weeks processing this queue everyone from coders working on new things to getting the project managers to go process the queue they worked on there was a catalyst person on every shift they worked on every inquiry in some way info and they waited through there were so many manual retweets that we had to wade through to get to actual original content and they were weeding that all out Victoria University offered space for volunteers to use the computers and use the training they also sent their search and rescue team Google amended their search results so we were first result for Christchurch they can do that optimal usability also hosted a training for us they put a link to our site in their earthquake resources Fair Go did a thing on us which was really quite cool to see the student volunteer army we did a partnership with them we were in really good contact they were mostly university students with shovels who went and dug the dirt out of people's driveways this usual symbol or took food to people who were house bound they were the volunteer army the project was interviewed on TV3 news the staff became our volunteers TV3 were all over Christchurch reporting and they would have info and as well as reporting it they would update on our website directly for us which was sweet eventually internal affairs did promote us on their twitter which was cool and Google as well as making the first result actually put a link on their landing page a few days later internet NZ funded Tim McNamara to go to Christchurch so we were building all these things and not really sure what people on the ground thought of it we were doing it right, we were doing it wrong so we sent him to go make local connections what came out of that was the printable maps so we made it that you could actually press print so we didn't realise until then that you couldn't print these maps so we made printable versions and then we handed them out all over the eastern suburbs who I believe were the worst hit long term we got to 100,000 visits within a week and time went by and the days started to turn into weeks the search and rescue had ended the focus was now not on the immediate crisis but it was on how do we support the people who have stayed in Canterbury so we continued to map the data but we didn't have the shifts anymore it was normal communication channels resumed so we were coming out of the worst of the crisis and we saw that usage was dropping off so I felt like I and these people that I was now working with had built this amazing thing what can we make of it now and I had to express those feelings this is the thing and you've accomplished it so we had 130,000 front page things over the three weeks and we decided we will declare mission accomplished so we had done what we'd set out to do and it was time to wrap up and also we were tired of the shifts I guess because it wasn't as necessary now so what we did at the end is we redirected it's an HTML link redirect to canterburyearthquake.org.nz which I believe is run by multiple councils so they built their own map and now they have one we reconfigured the short code for the student volunteer army to use so they could start to communicate with the volunteers and coordinate them without paying a lot of money and then we passed anonymised copy to researchers these are reports from real users so we had to remove all links to them so what was really cool was we were quite pragmatic we went to open source we were using Skype because that's what people turned up wanted to use and it worked we used lamp, we didn't fluff with licenses closed or open wasn't important as important as cross-platform but they tended to be the same thing the fact that we could modify it within hours of the quake was the thing that made us settle on open source and I found that the people in 2011 from open source backgrounds knew what Git was whereas the people from other environments were like some Microsoft thing that you can't really cross-code share so I found that people who turned up and there were many the closed source backgrounds and the Microsoft platforms didn't know how to work in a team like this so we weren't able to use their contributions I found that many of them couldn't even install a web server because someone else does that our code went upstream into Ushahiri so the mobile and the ability to theme and ability to embed and Japan had an earthquake shortly after and they were used our code so it wasn't a fork for very long and Libya had a crisis too I wish we could do a better job with government agencies I mentioned a couple of burn bridges there and I wish that the credit taking didn't happen but I really want to have a good relationship with these authorities so if a quake happens today we can still work together my slides got marked up these days you would have to support tablets we'd probably use EC2 again it was on wiped out bill which was like thank you it was many hundreds of thousands and there's Insta provisioned in the crowd crowd map in the cloud I don't know if we'd use that because we wouldn't have been able to modify it that day but give it a go and phones now have low power modes that they didn't have in 2011 so I think we'd have to work around my phone I can put it in a mode and it will last 20 days so it would be like that today the same software is used you can go see BBC reports of violence in Syria right now if you want to look at that and SMS as an API was great we had most of our contributors did not write code and they're really awesome I love contributors like that they were great and people who care will form crisis Voltron is what I learned from that here's a big slide of people to thank my name is in there because I copy pasted it from somewhere but all these people and I'm really curious how many people here contributed to that there's a few here how many people here used it there's people okay cool that's the end of my talk so do I have time for questions okay yes Simon I've had fun with Government in areas like this do you you seem quite pessimistic at the end that Government's not getting much better do you think there's a way forward or should we be how could we be how could we make it how could we make it sorry I think I get the gist of your question I think that a group of volunteers without a command chain and press scrutiny can always be more nimble than the Government will ever be so I suspect we will be more nimble I also think that civil defences and other authorities are in a much better place than they were I think they were embarrassed a little which is part of the behaviour we saw embarrassed that we did better and this has inspired them that's great inspiration to do better next time over there I just want to ignore how to ask a question to any of the conference and just say that as someone who knew some people who were helped out massively by what you guys did thanks including a couple who are now drinking in Valhalla so but I was going to echo Simon's question and basically ask I'm noticing a common point in Eben's talk, in Bob's talk this morning and now listening to you talking about how Government seems to just get in the way more than it ever helps what Simon I think was asking is do you ever think they will be better than a group of volunteers at it I think we could draw a Venn Diagram of who actually helped that day and there is an intersection of people who actually worked for councils and were working on our project at the same time so I don't know that they'd ever be better because they have like I say command chains that they don't want to skip I like to think if an earthquake struck today that all these councils would do better that web would be a high priority for where you send your information you're not sending it to the newspaper for reading the next day that they would put it on their Twitter that they would put it on their Facebook they wouldn't be hosting their website in a red zone generator server room all these things that they'd learnt from and I just think the technology wasn't a big priority for these places it's civil defence wasn't even a spending priority before the Canterbury earthquake not that I could see Hello I was I come from Christchurch I was there at the time and if I had known about this I would have leapt in have you sort of looked at better ways of getting the word out to geeks like me that I was on the western side of the city I could have jumped in with beaks and all but I didn't know about it maybe the physical looked at other ways of getting the word out what channels were open to you in the two or three days after the quake what communications were even open I was on the western side of the city I had power back within four hours and we had running water but it wasn't safe but we were pretty good on the outside of the city it took a couple of days to get it up on Harold it was Harold and stuff had something up and it took a couple of days to get to the front page but yeah I'm not sure the communications channels fall over in these scenarios but I'm not from Canterbury it's probably not a question for me Dave Brenda, thanks very much for that I was really fascinating as someone who was in the thick of it on the east side of Christchurch without any mobile coverage because the cell towers had been killed by a falling building and there was no electricity for a few weeks we were very grateful we heard through the grapevine about what you guys were doing and I just want to say thanks again to you and the whole team because it was really great to know that you guys were batting for us in fact it had a lot to do with the fact that I wanted to sell my company to Catalyst which thankfully subsequently happened any time Dave any more questions or comments is there any sort of follow on work for apps that people could put on their mobile devices for example that can get them pre-primed before the emergency happens because as we found out once the emergency happens nobody wants to change anything they're too busy fixing their broken crap there's things like serval mesh for phones and stuff that we didn't have then Auckland City Council Auckland Civil Defence have a thing for smartphones that will tell you about events like there's a tsunami coming but that's not the same at all that you're asking this is not the triple one style thing this is the where can I find fish and chips where can I find food I was thinking along those of distributed apps infrastructure I think what I learnt from that is if you fall back to SMS and web that's better and especially with the low power modes but a low power mode Android app would be quite cool but I'm not sure Christ is common still exist and they do have a lot of projects on there they may have this they certainly deal with a lot of wars more than earthquakes but they have it let's hope we don't have one of those because once you have an actual disaster the the kind of attitude you have towards your technology changes very quickly so when I'm going about my normal day I don't want my phone tracking and telling everyone where I am I don't want my phone sharing my data in an open access point but the minute we have an actual disaster I want both of those things to happen so I'm speaking to people looking at apps to say when all my settings from my normal mode to I've had a disaster now I want to share if I've got data and no one else around me has I want to be able to share that I want to be able to share my location with anyone who wants and that sort of stuff We did this work because the earthquake happened it's not like we would have done funded 20 plus employees for weeks to work on a thing if this earthquake hadn't happened it was the people funded to work 40 hours a week on an application is hugely valuable and amazing things come out the other end so doing that practically would be very hard and it would be very hard to predict what year and what technology the event that this is going to be used for when I wrote this the more I realised that things we did then we wouldn't do now because things have moved on so what we wrote was perfectly tailored to that event and it was people who were available because the event happened This will be the last question To answer the civil project that Paul Gardiner-Steven has spoken about before is they're working on a mesh network to run low power over the most codecs they can and basically that will on-send messages you've got a message to send to someone I've got enough power to write it OK, I've written my message there was a phone over there on the mesh network that received it when someone else is online that will send it further and it will propagate and hopefully get to who it needs to get to but they will, as power goes on it will propagate messages and we've played with it here at conference before and it's gone very well so they're still working I think that's it for questions Thank you everybody for everyone


to win a game there, but is that decision to walk Miguel Cabrera at all difficult for you? No, absolutely. And, you know, I mean, you can make the case of, you know, bringing the on base in the play that it's questionable. Anyway, it was close, just being down in that spot, you know, felt like that was the matchup we wanted there and, you know, obviously understanding the moment in time.  The decision to do it, he's not the hitter that he once was, but he's clearly been swinging a hot bat at three against you yesterday, what went into the decision to do it? Not as much, I mean, that, I mean, we got a lot of respect from Meadows, too, behind them.  And it came down to a baseball call for me there and, you know, tough decision.  So, you know, tough call, but I wanted to make it. You didn't expect that reaction from McGrath? Yeah, yeah, of course, certainly understand that. And, you know, you know, you don't necessarily like being in that position, but that's part of it. Aaron, how much do you actually weigh the moment? I mean, you're in real time managing that. I don't know.  So, you know, but in the end, you got to go with what you think is right within the context of the game. Was that as good as you've seen Montgomery earlier? Um, you know, it was good. I thought he, I thought he got into a good rhythm as he went, and I loved his pace. I thought he worked, worked quickly. I thought his stuff got better as the game went along. So probably this year, yeah, yeah, you know, although I feel like he's been throwing the ball okay, like I thought that was another step, but saw his fastball kind of life to the fastball.  What made Panetta so tough early? Just mixing, you know, he's a little funky arm action, mixing, but, you know, we just, you know, we need to, we need to give ourselves better chances there. You know, I felt like in the fifth inning, finally put together some good at bats against him, you know, and Jose, you know, hits a ball about as good as he can here at the center, which, you know, so I thought at least in that inning, we strung together some of the quality at bats against him, just couldn't break through. What did you think about the... Coming in, you know, Hicks, yeah, what do you think of the lack of execution, I guess, there, just probably the order? You mean late? Late. Late.   But, you know, when you're struggling to score runs, or, you know, you're not hitting the ball in the seats, like we have it on this trip, you gotta take advantage of the opportunities you get, and we're unable to do that.


Thank you Volkang. It's my happy duty to open on behalf of the London School of Economics, this Urban Age Conference here in Hong Kong. I'm Tony Travers as Volkang has said, from the school's government department and an associate of LSE cities. I'd like to add on a personal note how happy I am to be sharing this introductory event, or introductory session with Volkang maen nhw'n gweithio ddau'r sgolig yng ngyreun y Sgol Llywodraeth, a'r ddiolch yn ymweld, lle o'r inisiatifeth. Ond yna, gyda'n ymolffgawr y LSE City's yn y Llywodraeth i'r ddweud a'r ddweud cyflaen o'r newid yn gweithio'r siwtio. Mae'r ffrindio'r sgol, mae'r ffrindio'r llwyddoedd, a'r unrhyw o'r cyflaen o'r Nwy, Johannesburg, City of Mexico, Berlin, Chicago, Shanghai, Sao Paolo, and Mumbai. Here in Hong Kong we've worked with the University of Hong Kong, and on behalf of LSE, I would like to acknowledge all the assistance and cooperation we've enjoyed in preparing this event. I should mention the very strong links that exist between the LSE and London and Hong Kong. For a start, there are just under 2,000 LSE alumni here in Hong Kong, a remarkable total. Hong Kong has one of the world's longest-standing and most active LSE alumni groups, which started in the 1980s. Each year, around 350 Hong Kong students are admitted to the LSE, and they are, it goes without saying, enormously welcome. LSE alumni have been prominent in public affairs here in Hong Kong, filling roles such as permanent judge in the Court of Final Appeal, a member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council, Attorney General and, since 1997, as a member of the new Executive Council in the Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The school, I can say, honestly takes great pride in these and all other alumni taking part in government and commercial roles in Hong Kong. LSE is based in London, at one time described as the biggest city the world had ever known. Not that any longer, many cities far closer to here can claim that crown now, but it was nevertheless an early contender for this kind of role. And it is still today Europe's largest metropolis with a fast-growing population of 8 million. The urban age conferences have been coordinated from London, initiated by my colleague Ricky Burdett and Richard Sennett, who's also in the audience here today. Today, today and tomorrow, this event is about cities, health and well-being, and it's the 10th conference since 2005. The format of these conferences has changed somewhat recently and is now concerned with a particular issue, as well as with the host city itself. The urban age is an international investigation, as Wolfgang has said, the spatial and social dynamics of cities centred on this annual conference, but there is also a research initiative and publications of various kinds, one of which is here available today. These are co-organized by the LSE city's unit at the LSE, but also with the help of Deutsche Bank's Alfred Harehausen Society. Urban age events are about deep comparative urbanism and sharing best practice. We've also, throughout our work, remained aware of the pivotal importance of architecture and design in cities, the way buildings and streets are put together, profoundly affects the lives of the people who live and work in them. The conferences provide a laboratory to test and sample the social and physical characteristics of global cities, and here in Hong Kong I'm sure that we will have much to learn. So LSE cities extends the LSE's century-long commitment to understand the reasons for things, notably in this case cities. We're now based in London, one of the most complex multicultural places on earth, and have a great opportunity here to compare and contrast major urban agglomerations in all continents. Finally, just to add this, this is a time of great economic turbulence in the global economy, particularly in the Eurozone and to some extent in the United States. Many of the longer established cities such as London, New York, Paris, Berlin and Los Angeles will find themselves faced with several years of economic constraint. In China, India, Latin America and parts of the Middle East, rapid development and growth should continue, but it would be naive not to note that the resolution or otherwise of the Eurozone crisis will have implications for all major cities in the world for some time to come. Having said that, and more optimistically, history suggests that the world's great cities will continue to grow and to act as poles of economic and social progress. Here in Hong Kong, I'm sure we will learn much. So on behalf of the London School of Economics and Political Science, I'd now like to hand over to John Burns from Hong Kong University, who will add his thoughts to the start of this, the Urban Age Hong Kong Conference. Thank you very much.


The skill of this exercise is something that I personally have not seen. Exercises like this give our airmen that exposure that they need to understand. It's not just that one week in a month. It's not two weeks a year. It kind of wraps everything up. Like why do we train so hard when we do? Opportunity like this, we've been looking for for four years. Let's project power somewhere other than it's on there. An entire team effort. It's almost like that, you know, that one in the field where everyone is there to get the mission. It kind of opens your eyes to what the world's fastest and fastest ocean. In some islands, you see the skill of what our joint partners have to deal with and what we do. The parts that enable exercise in the field are the fighter aircraft that are part of our big takeaway from this exercise. It is the ability to project forces from the Air Force Reserves to take forces from the United States and the United States.