One of the things we found out that we probably should have known was that the price fluctuations in a given country frequently exceeds the price fluctuations in the world market. What governments in most countries are trying to do is to stabilize food prices because food prices are so important politically in countries where food occupies a very large share of the expenditure of the consumer. So it isn't unusual for a low-income consumer in a developing country to spend more than half of its money on food, whether that's food they produce themselves or food that they buy. So when food prices fluctuate, their real purchasing power fluctuates and governments don't like fluctuating purchasing power in the population because that creates instability and if it really gets bad, riots, smashing windows and burning cars. So governments are very concerned about maintaining stable food prices. When food prices fluctuate in the international market, therefore, they try to protect their domestic market. They either remove import tariffs if it's an importing country which would lower the food prices domestically or they put an export restriction, maybe an export ban on food if it's an exporting country. In the case of the former, many of the African countries removed import taxes which brought down the price of imported food when, in fact, the world market price went up. In the case of the latter where they put restrictions on exports, India and China managed to maintain their domestic prices almost unchanged during a period of time when the international prices, and I'm talking about prices of cereals, of grains, when the international prices went up dramatically, they didn't really change in the domestic market of India and China. Why? Because those two countries manipulated their trade policy in such a way that there was virtually no transmission of price fluctuations in the international market into those domestic markets. You also have cases where the country simply kept an open market. Brazil and South Africa for some of the grains said, look, we'll just let the prices transmit into domestic markets. If the price goes up in the world market, so be it, it will go up in our domestic market. What they then did to protect those groups that would otherwise cause violence and riots in the street, they would compensate them either by targeted food subsidies, reducing the food prices, using fiscal, using money from government, or they would transfer cash so they could afford to buy the food. So the countries behaved very differently. And what was interesting in this study was to understand why they behaved differently. And that goes right back to the question of the various interest groups and how much power does each of those interest groups have and what is the agenda of each of the interest groups. And in South Africa and Brazil, large farmers had a major say in the matter. So when food prices went up internationally, those large farmer associations say, wait a minute, just let the prices go up, that would be fine for us. Whereas in other countries, consumers had more power than the farmers and the consumers would say, look, if you don't control that price increase, we're going to come after you and we're going to threaten your legitimacy. You may not stay in power very long after we've finished with you unless you control those prices. So what the government did, among other things, was they had targeted income transfers when the food prices went up. They targeted income transfers or food subsidies to the groups that they were most scared of. Those were not the groups that were the most seriously affected. You would think from a more ethical perspective, they would compensate the poorest of the poor who may spend as much as 70% of their income on food, compensate them to protect them from the negative impact of food price increases. They didn't. They were targeting the transfers on the lower middle class in urban areas because that was the group that would instigate trouble for the government. That was the group that either went to the streets themselves or paid somebody to go on the street and demonstrate or do things that were worse. Governments were very concerned about that. Whether they were democratically elected or they were self-appointed, those governments had priority number one, protect our legitimacy. That wasn't what they said. They said our priority number one is to protect food security, meaning that everybody has access to enough food and if that is threatened, we will compensate the people who can no longer afford to buy the food they need. That's what they said. That's not what they did. Absolutely. We have seen an urban bias in food policy for a very long time. It was a lot worse 40 years ago than it was 20 years ago, but since the world food crisis beginning in 2007, the urban bias has been more pronounced, meaning that governments are much more concerned about making the urban population happy than making the rural population happy. Now, there are exceptions to that. China is an exception. China is very concerned about stability in rural areas. They have introduced policies for the benefit of the rural poor, but in most countries there is a bias towards benefiting the urban poor. That means, for example, food subsidies, access to food at lower prices than what the market would offer. We saw an increase in that bias towards urban areas, precisely for the reason that, or at least partly for the reason that the rural poor are less likely to get organized and threaten the government. Each unit in government, being a ministry or some other unit, would have its own agenda, would have its own goals, and it will try to pursue those goals by whatever means are available to the ministry. Now, some governments have a very strong leader who is actually capable of keeping these various goals and approaches together. In other governments, that's not so. Ministry of Agriculture would have one goal and would try to achieve that goal, whereas other ministries, the Ministry of Health, for example, would have a different goal and would try to pursue it in a different way. What happened to the extent that we could get the information in these debates within the government itself, you frequently had some very heated arguments as to what the policy intervention should be. What we may see from the outside is a government that makes a decision. It looks like a unitary government making a decision. Everything is beautiful. Well, what happens in reality is there's a lot of fighting or arguments going on before you arrive at that. In governments that didn't really were cohesive, you could end up with policies that were contradictory. So one ministry would be capable of putting in place of implementing one policy and another ministry would implement another one. You saw some of that as well. Most governments respond within a very short time horizon. And it is possible that a government will think to the extent that governments think, but the policy makers will expect that they can survive until the next election or the next appointment without having another price spike, so therefore there's no need for making the investments. But we have to be very clear about the difference between investing in a sustainable improvement such as investing in rural infrastructure, in roads, in institutions, in irrigation facilities, in energy, electricity and telephones and all of that. That's investing in a sustainable future where as a subsidy or some panic solution of the kind that took place is not an investment. It's money spent and it really has no long-term positive effect. So the enlightened government will use this current window of opportunity where we don't have huge price increases to prepare for the next one. But it does take a somewhat longer time horizon than most governments have. But it's no different from investing in education. You invest in kids education, it's not going to have a payoff for many years to come. You invest in agricultural research, it takes a while for that to work. That is why governments in most cases would much rather give a fertilizer subsidy because that has an effect next year than making investments in ag research which may have an effect 20 years from now. But those very short-term solutions are extremely expensive and they're not sustainable. The evidence base for understanding how the policy process works is rather deficient. But the evidence base that the policy makers need to make the right policy decisions is extremely weak. We really need to help governments whether it's in a developing country or a high-income country. Governments need help in setting up institutions that will generate the context-specific knowledge that policy makers need. Now there are people who argue that policy makers are irrational and they do not respond to evidence. They are wrong, those who argue that. Policy makers respond to evidence but they may not respond in the way that we think they should or that we think is rational. But they have their goals and they pursue those goals using the best evidence available. That is why organizations such as WIDA is very important in generating or helping to generate the capacity that's necessary to develop that context-specific knowledge. Without that knowledge policy makers will still make decisions they have to but then they may not make the right ones as far as they themselves are concerned. Certainly the best we can do as researchers is to help governments understand the consequences of alternative action. Make that available to all of the stakeholder groups and say, okay, if the outcome of the policy process is this policy intervention, here are the likely consequences for all of the groups that the government or the society is interested in. If however you choose this other route, this other policy intervention, you have a different set of outcomes. That I think is what WIDA should be doing. That is what the International Food Policy Research Institute has been doing over many years. That's what I think some of the university economists should be doing, policy analysts. We shouldn't tell governments what to do. We should tell governments here's what happens if you do this versus doing something else.


So, I'm going to talk to you about Ember Twiddle. Some of you may know me from IRC where I ended up spending a lot of time helping people new or not new to Ember and ended up needing a way to demonstrate code and show stuff a lot. Initially, there was JS Fiddle and JS Bin, which were great solutions for this. Now, obviously, there's gists or paste bin or whatever, but it's really nice to actually share a live example of the code that actually runs and because it's JavaScript, it's really easy to do that. You just send someone in a browser to it. JS Fiddle, JS Bin, pretty great. They're great for general JavaScript code. They're great because they run the actual code that you're demonstrating. They're great for demonstrating problems. So, you know, you can show someone an actual error that's happening. You can share them, edit them, fork them. I think one or both of them update live as people are typing, although I've never really got that to work, but apparently they do. They're really quick and easy, but they're totally not suited to Ember code specifically.  You don't get handlebars syntax highlighting and, you know, as you know, the templates is, you know, the key part of Ember, really, or one of the key parts of Ember and handlebars is really key to that. So, back in 2013, I think, I was at the EmberFest conference in Munich and at the hack day, I decided to work on something called EmberWang. So, this is basically, yeah, I'll, if you don't know, you know, NumberWang, Michelin Web script, Sketch, the name is based on that. Yeah, unfortunately, when I released this, it has a kind of different connotation to the US-centric Ember audience. Show me your Wang seems to mean something very different over there, because I learned. So, anyway, it's, the idea is kind of basic. You've got different editors where you can easily add templates and name them without having to mess around with script tags. You can type in JavaScript or there was a coffee script and Ember script option, I think, shows the result and shows the URL as well. I think that's like quite an important thing for Ember apps. It's really nice to see what URL the app thinks it's on. So, yeah, you know, it's got Ember pre-loaded, you don't have to type in the Ember scripts. So, it was extremely basic and rough. It was made in a day. It was built with Ember Rails, which was kind of on the wane even at that point. And it's totally obsolete now. All of the files were persisted in a relational DB. I think it was Postgres. So, it had to have a server running. Someone had to maintain that to keep it up and running.   And eventually, it didn't really get much traction and it was abandoned. When it came to EmberConf this year, I decided to revisit it because the issues with JS Fiddler and JS Spinner getting worse with Ember CLI, the code you share with those kind of services just doesn't look like the code that you write in an Ember app. And it's really confusing for people just getting started because the code that you send them and the code they have to write, or when they're trying to demonstrate a problem, the code that they want to copy paste from their Ember app into JS Fiddler, they have to know a lot even to be able to demonstrate a simple problem. So, I decided to try and make something to solve that. I was at EmberConf and then Ruby on Ales in Portland. That is a great conference, by the way. It's like a Ruby conference over two days with unlimited craft beer and cider included in the ticket. So, if you get a chance to go to that, do go. I always have a conference project at Projects. I really like to take some time away from my normal work and just hack on something in between the talks and try and build something. The idea is to base it on Ember CLI so that you get the same conventions but easily shareable on the web. The persistence is handled through GitHub Gists. So, you don't have to really run a server. You just save it to a Gist and you can look at the Gist separately. You can clone Gists and edit it on your local machine, push it back up, fork, all of that kind of stuff. And this one ended up getting traction. So, it's now part of the Ember CLI organization, it's an active project, lots of people are using it. It's great. So, I'm going to do a quick demo. So, this is what it looks like when you go to Ember Twiddle and you get basically an application controller and application template. You can easily add some new files. So, this is my favorite feature. You can add a component JavaScript and HPS at the same time. And you get both of these. And it doesn't actually matter that I've misspelled that. Then go back to application and there we go. Misspelled? That's fine. What else have we got? So, there's a nice file tree. You can inspect all of the files in your Gist. You can save it to GitHub. And as you can see, it just stores all of the files in a Gist as multiple different files. There's this twiddle.json, which I'm going to talk about a bit more in a minute. You can use your favorite editor mode. What else? It's just kind of really, really slick. So, and that's not because of me, by the way. So, I'm going to talk about the attribution for all of this in a minute, but it's had some really great contributions to making it as good as it is now. So, let's go back and talk a bit about the architecture. So, Ember CLI is written in JavaScript, which is great because it means that you can pretty much use wholesale loads of the infrastructure from Ember CLI and just put it in a browser. So, if you look at Ember Browserify, it's an Ember CLI add-on and it lets you use stuff from Node just really easily. You just use one line and import Babel from MPM Babel or whichever MPM package you want to use, and you can use it. So, as you may know, Babel is used to compile ESNext JavaScript that you write in Ember CLI into ES5 that you can use in the browser. And this is how the JavaScript compilation happens. So, this is kind of like the core part of Ember Twiddle. It's taking the code that comes from one of the editors in the browser compiling into AMD modules. And you can see this is just so simple. I mean, I thought this would be like quite a big project, but actually to get the initial hacked version up, it was so simple to do. And that's one of the benefits of building your tools in the same language that you're coding for. Like, I've used Ember Rails for a long time before Ember CLI, and it's great. And Rails has a great asset pipeline, but you don't get these kind of benefits unless you're doing everything in JavaScript. It's really good for some things. For handlebars compilation, we just basically outsourced that to the page. So, we put the template in an Ember HTMLBars compile statement, and that's executed by Ember template compiler when the page loads. So, we're not doing any kind of pre-compilation like Ember CLI would do, but it's not really necessary. I mean, it doesn't really make sense to pre-compile when you're running on the browser anyway, because you just compiled it like a few milliseconds before you would have anyway. We keep the code isolated with several features that are relatively new. SourceDoc allows setting an iframe's HTML content. You could previously do this with like some hacks or using data URIs as the source attribute for the iframe, but SourceDoc just works really easily. It allows things like cookies to work properly. It makes it really easy to kind of build isolated sections into an app. And Sandbox gives you control over what documents in an iframe can do. So, you can kind of make sure that the Ember app in the iframe doesn't leak out into the outside app, and that can be important.  So, this kind of security stuff is quite important, even though it might not seem it at first, because it's only like an app for like throwaway code, but actually you want to be careful. The editor is Ivy CodeMirror. It's really great. It's another Ember CLI plugin that's so easy to use. I mean, I'm just so happy that JavaScript has something now that like Rails had for a while. The ability to like really easy drop-in code from other people without having to like, you know, download a zip file and figure out where to put it in your assets and, you know, figuring out which, you know, need the minified version. You know, it's just like the it might not seem like much, but being able to just type like Ember, Ember add-on Ivy CodeMirror and then have a code editor in your app like right away, it's just so frictionless. It's great. So, Ivy CodeMirror is the the Ember CLI add-on that allows you to do that. The gist backend uses Ember data and some adapters and serializers. So, it's surprising little code here as well, even though the gist API is like slightly more convoluted and very non-standard compared to the kind of REST APIs you'd normally integrate with Ember data. We use the embedded records mixing, so a gist object has many files and it's kind of like it's a really good example. If you want to see like examples of an adapter and a serializer kind of process for dealing with a non-standard API, it just makes things it's just quite clear. It's quite easy. It's quite simple. The code to actually serialize like all these Ember data objects into like the format that GitHub needs and we use something called GateKeeper. So, unfortunately that's like the one server component that we need and it's like, I think it's like 10 lines of code or something. Basically, with the OAuth that Git uses, you can't do it fully client-side because you need an application secret and you can't just publish that in your client-side app. So, basically it's like a 10 lines of code that does the OAuth hand-off basically and sends you back your client-side token and someone's obviously had exactly the same problem trying to build a client-side app for GitHub and GateKeeper is just for GitHub or OAuth, basically. We just deployed it to Heroku, I think and it just simply does that one thing. And because of that, we don't need to maintain a database, we don't need to deal with spam or none of the problems that would normally be associated with running an app that allows people to publish random content and code on the web. We've just outsourced that to GitHub. So, that's great. Thanks, GitHub. Twiddle.json is, lets you specify your dependencies at the moment. I think it's about to be extended to allow you to set Ember feature flags well, but at the moment it lets you specify the different versions of libraries that you want on your page. So, you can use any version of Ember or jQuery, Ember data, that kind of thing or other libraries and you can just edit that in the interface and you'll get those libraries loaded up in the order there. In the future, I think it will probably support embedding Twiddles into other sites. So, it would be really nice if the Ember Twiddle was used in the Ember docs, for example, to give illustration examples. Add on support would be really good. Unfortunately, like at some point you're going to have to end up either running a Linux VM in JavaScript in the browser or having a server that runs Ember CLI proper, because the add-ons depend on if you look at SAS or something, like generally the Ember CLI SAS add-on uses lib SAS and that's C or C++ something and you can't really run that in the browser. But it might get to the stage where M-script or something allows us to run way more in the browser than you ever thought you could. But I think there could be some support for very basic add-ons that are pure JavaScript sooner than that and easier than that and, of course, writing your Ember app for you. That's the ultimate goal. You just press the button and go to the pub and let it do its thing. So, finally, I like to give the credits for Ember Twiddles. So, as you can see, I did a very little bit and got the very basic version up and running at the beginning and essentially handed it off to Gower of Zero and Juiced of Rays, who have done like everything to take this from a silly hack to a real project that looks beautiful and works really well. So, I mean, I think I'm really proud of this because it's probably the most successful open source project that I've launched, like it's got real people using it and it's become part of the official Ember organization. But, unfortunately, just time constraints. I'm just not that involved with it anymore. So, that feels really great and I'd like to thank all the people who have contributed to it and made it a success. So, that's it, really. Has anyone got any questions?  I can't control for that. So, I'm just interested given that you've managed to perform as much of it as possible out to the clients I can get help. Does it still include you or someone at cost? Or to what extent does it sort of give you a cost? Well, I mean, it has a domain name. It's ember-twittle.com. So, there's domain hosting cost. I'm pretty sure the Heroku instance is a free instance but I'm not sure how that works anymore. I know it was initially a free instance but then they stopped. It's doing so little. Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, I mean, it does very, very little. I mean, it does one request per sign-in basically and that request is like 10 lines of code. It's like very, very minimal. I don't think that that actually costs anything but I know Heroku changed their pricing after it was initially set up so I'm not sure if that's grandfathered or not. Yeah, it's basically zero. Okay, great. Thanks, everyone.


It has been so nasty out here lately. That is not a fish. That's Looks like seaweed does That's not what we're looking for. Come on bass Come on. Just bite when he's fish It's been so bad out here lately guys. I've just Haven't been able to come out much because I've been so busy, but the times that I have came out here Fishing just been so rough and I've been just chucking around you know like this rattle trap and look at the fish eating over there It has been raining a lot today a lot. I mean what I mean raining. I mean it's been pouring pretty hard It's kind of on and off. It's been weird So these fish, I mean Hopefully we can get some feeding right here. I've seen since I walked out here I've seen you know some fish over there Feeding along the bank and when I walked out here, I saw a few fish up on on the bank right here Maybe we can get a few the bite and get a little reaction bite on this rattle trap Jesus Is that a fish? In a way, that's a fish God, I feel like I pulled the rod out of my hand. Oh My gosh, I can just catch a lot of bags today. Can I? Nice Noah nice Catching grocery bags Dang, I really thought I had a fish for a minute there.  So that fishing plan didn't go out Didn't turn out so well. So I mean today's been a super busy day. I got up super early Got a lot of homework done went to class went out of class went and ran some errands and Just came back here and tried to fish for about 45 minutes until it got dark and that just did not work guys I did not work and it's been rainy all day It's been just a just a crappy day outside in general And I've been browsing my brain like all day to try to think with ideas for This this video right here, which is tomorrow's video And I couldn't come up with much and the fact that I couldn't really go outside because of all the Weather and everything and I did need to run some errands that were very crucial right before that So yeah, I really didn't have too much time So I did think of something yesterday that I want to note to you guys that you guys can enter and Cooperate in and I think it's gonna be kind of cool first of all I don't think I'm weird because I'm vlogging in the bathroom. The lighting is just a little bit better in here I'm not gonna lie when I moved into this house all the lights that they had were like super low light Now my eyes I can barely see but they're super low light and like it made everything just kind of with the warmth of everything It's just a little different. I don't know if the white bulbs last longer Honestly, I don't know so I was thinking of this idea. So you guys know a holiday is coming up and like what? Let's say two weeks Which is Halloween? So Halloween's coming up very very soon.  I swear. I heard a voice right there But I'm gonna just go with it.  Well, I thought it would be cool this year I'm gonna do I haven't done it in like a few years and like sat down carved a pumpkin, you know Like that's that's that's like some old-school stuff right there. So This year I'm actually going to do that and I'm gonna challenge you guys as well I want to talk to a few of my sponsors and if nothing works out through there I'll get something on my own and I kind of want to run a giveaway I want to do a contest on where you guys go create your own pumpkins Fishing related so it has to be freshener late you go carve your own pumpkins You post them on Instagram tag kick in their best TV I'll pop it on the screen right here, and you tag me now one of you like the top, you know Let's just say top one for right now the best pumpkin out of all of them And you guys will win the giveaway so guys I filmed a outro a long time ago And I'm going to edit this video for tomorrow, and I realized I didn't like the outro didn't say my camera Always does this I don't know why I just got back from the gym That's the long ago. It's like 12 30 right now something like that So I'm gonna do this and do homework.  I think this is gonna be something cool You know it's something that you guys can do for the month of October all the way up until Halloween And I think it's a cool way to interact with you guys And just you know, I think it'd be something fun like who cares if you I don't care if you're 40 years old I don't care if you're 50 years old.  I don't care how old you are just go do it man It's gonna be something to have fun like I said I haven't carved a pumpkin in like a Few years like I'm yeah like I haven't carved a pumpkin in a while But I'm actually gonna carve one this year, you know Just just relax and chill out because I've been grinding every single day I kind of want to get just do something fun, you know do something different that you know only happens once a year So go do it. You only live once guys. He's seriously. You don't know if today's your last day So go do it, you know enjoy the moment. Here's the moment, but go make some badass fishing Pumpkins. I think it's gonna be cool Go browse on your ideas. I want to see some cool stuff and uh Yeah, anything fish are related, you know anything anything fish are related put it on a pumpkin Dear and don't do don't do that. Don't do that. That's a bad idea post one Instagram Be sure to tag me and we'll get it cooking like I said I'm gonna talk what I'm gonna do for like the giveaway prizes They're probably be like the best pumpkin unless like some of my things are really good And I think I want to do a few I want to talk to a few sponsors and get some stuff You know built up for the giveaway and what I'm actually gonna be giving giving you guys So I don't know on that yet, but if you guys are part of the team you guys are like hardcore, you know with me In the next couple of videos I'll eventually probably announce like what I want to be giving away for this contest But I think it's gonna be cool. No one's doing it and I think it's you know gonna be sick So be sure to create those dang pumpkins guys. I hope everything's going good with this week I hope you guys are staying motivated. I hope you guys are killing it on all aspects of life Being the best that you can be at everything that you're doing. I think that is very important And everyone who's doing that right now just keep grinding guys keep doing your thing If you want to check out some of the grind t-shirts Go on my website And go check them out there all the pictures that you take in the grind t-shirts or any kick in their bass gear I can repost on my team kick in their bass TV page and it gives you some publicity On Instagram to be awesome if you guys supported that and I spread the word of grind and Positivity and just getting after it every single day guys, but thank you guys so much for the support I love you guys so much everything that you guys do for me It really means the world like I said I had a super packed day today, you know running errands. I'm got here about 30 minutes before dark It was just pouring and then it stopped raining for a little bit. I tried to finish. I tried to do a lot of stuff They have just been so packed. I'm sorry for not like a solid packed video Especially like a tip video because that's kind of what I was referring to for Tuesdays is tip videos But possibly I can get one out Thursday if you want to see that smash the thumbs up button Otherwise comment below some other ideas that I can do and hopefully we'll get some sick content out to you guys I have a lot of ideas just just cooking up in my brain But I can't get them out this minute because I have so much going on I can't travel You know the places I'm really wanting to go all this time But I have a tournament coming up cool tournament video I'm gonna focus on a lot of stuff for that Tournament, you know a lot of different angles a lot of different shots gonna be just badass with you But overall thank you guys so much for the support You guys mean the world to me be sure to like comment and subscribe hit the little bell Thank you guys. I'm sure to support and I'll see you in the next one


Kwevo una mongele shadi aski, sii lazimu umchape. Smaikariya had sheka baksit for me to raise my children. Two sound check, alright. Welcome back. This is SPM Bars Kenya's number one online station. My good name is Seva Kilova. I'm being joined by a lovely mom, a lovely lady, amazing parent in 254. One of the leading, by the way, among the best couples we have in 254, Ivy. Welcome to SPM Bars. You're speaking to us for the first time. Yes, I am. Thank you. It's an honor. I'm so humbled to meet you for the first time. Me too, me too. Looking lovely. Thank you. What is the inspiration behind this outfit? I'm just trying to be sexy, bringing sexy back, but brand babu did this. Brand babu did that. Yes, he styled me. Yeah, so I'm happy. What is the definition of sexy by the way? Just being comfortable in your own body. Yes. Do you feel like you find yourself maybe wearing something like you need to consider maybe ask for suggestion, maybe more of an approval on how you dress, how you look? I don't think, when you say ask, who do you mean? You're talking to your husband about baby, what do you think about this? Definitely. It's my bestie. Ulazmanimu. Lizaelazmanimu onyeshe plan, but ana kuanga kwa fom. Ana kwa fom. Tuna kavizuri ku wa nibo. Ulazmanimu. Ulazmanimu. Ulazmanimu. Ulazmanimu. Ulazmanimu. But how's motherhood, how's journey, how's family? So far, so good. We are out of the newborn stage. Tukokuwa third last stage when you wanna draw, wanna draw. Si rahisi, but I'm glad that we're here. We have grown so much. I'm enjoying it, taking it, taking it a day at a time. How are you handling it? Nikosawa, support, some me time. That's going a long way in helping me point to my children. Support for my husband. And yeah, just being intentionally there for them. Trying to be better than how I was raised. Because I was raised well. What do you mean who was raised well? My mom, my dad, they did well. I feel like they supported me, they were there for me. So it's something that I want to pass down to my children. But also to konaizi, gentle, parenting, miskeizu, mamboa, takiku kuchapo wa toto. Mini aw, takiku kuchapo. Siku wanapenda kuchapo. Kwaivo mis takiku kuchapo. Kwaivo, I'm really learning. Since we don't have, we don't have somewhere to look at that from, we're starting it. So niku jifunzatu, pole pole, one day at a time. Now you don't take kuchapo, what is the option you have now? So you talk to them, you discipline them in other ways. But the violence, I didn't like. For me, I did not like it. So I'm really trying not to do it. Of course, kuna temu na skia. Oh, chapa, kuna takia kuchuna. But I really try. Because I've realized children are smarter than you think. Kuna ongele shawana skia. Kwaivo, nama ongele shadiya skia. Sila zimo umchapo. I feel like kidogo kuchapana is a bit lazy. Because when do me kasi rika. Namtato ezi kuchapo bak. Kwaivo na jaribu. Na jaribu. Na jaribu. Kuchchange. Kuchchange what I grew up with into what I want with my children. Kichapam totu na kufei, ina fekt ajem totu. Kuchaki grow up. Ata, mihata siyezi juwa. But I think it's just, it's a bit confusing. Because to them we are everything. So, ukimchapo e especially kwa hasira. Ana shanga. Kwa ni ni kifanyaviba unani chukiya. Ama unani pendatu sa zile ni kosawa. Sifaiku kosa. Ya even as we make mistakes na nana tu cha pasisi. Uki fanya makoso uchapo uski vizuri. Ata uki shauti wa uski vizuri. Kwaivo, I try to just mirror that to my children. Just because they are little doesn't mean they don't deserve respect. They are little people with big feelings. It's up to us to teach them how to regulate their emotions. How to behave. How to express themselves. So, yo kuchapa ni kama inakata. Una ruka steps minguna nda kwa violence. That's how I feel. It's a personal thing. Personal choice as well. Yes, personal choice as well. Nice to know that now you balance in content, you're balancing family, you're balancing your family time, your own time. How do you manage to balance all this? Let me say something. I watch Celestine Wanjugush. Kuna skoil kwa nasema you'll never be. Ata i kwa perfectly balanced. Something has to, something has to suffer. So it's just... Ni kama una exchangeile kikombuna una mwaga. Where you pour yourself, you change.  If I realize that I've been focusing too much on my kids and not on my relationship, I reduce that and spend focus on my relationship. So it's almost like a juggling thing. I don't think it's a balance. Ni kua exchange, kila kitu na waka tiwake. And whatever you do, be intentional. You're being intentional. Are you planning maybe giving chance to sacrifice one just for the rise to work? I don't know about sacrifice. Let's say kwe eka kwa baksit. Siku sacrifice kwa zia all important. They all make me me. When my children are happy, when my husband is happy, when I am happy, we are all happy. Akuna eni na pita mwingine. It's just, we learn, we live and learn.  Has it slowed down maybe your career, the way you see things, the way you do things? I can say as women, giving birth is not a small thing. I do recognize that there's women who work and give birth and go back to work. Salute to them. It's not easy. But yes, it definitely had to take a back seat. My career had to take a back seat for me to raise my children. And now is when I'm feeling like na kuja po sasa, no na, na kuja kwa kariya sasa, me kwa me kachatweevi sasa no na nina ruidi. But yes, it definitely had to take a back seat. My career was not my priority this past three years. And I think my husband, because he made our conducive environment for me to be a good mum and a present mum without any other worries. Can he count your husband's blessing support making it easy for you? Yes, definitely. He's such a good man, a good husband, a good father. It's even amazing to watch him do it because he's so gracious.  You've said it. I kid, naturally I joke, I joke. But just being supportive in each other's because as a man and woman it's hard to say that you're struggling and that you're struggling but it's hard to say that you're supportive. It's hard. The conversations are difficult because what you're saying is that you have hormones, you have feelings. But talking, communication is definitely one of the major things to keep going even when you don't feel like it. Because that's the only way you'll understand where someone else is coming. You know, but we always need to keep going to make it happen. I know, I know. To wish me on. What do you mean by communication is important? Are you guys have anywhere a means where you guys communicate?  We talk all the time. We are very close friends. Between us I'm the one who gets angry and emotional. And I'm a skiza. Haji ni dismissa tiyo akuna mamboza mamana skiza. Because that's what humans want. Tuna takaku skiza. Nataya kiniambea mamboa kena skiza. And you try and make life easy for each other because you know each other. Akuna nyumbani kwepa liya vita pia, unona. So atatuki this. I'd like to say with my husband I learnt that you can have a relationship it's a disagreement. There's a difference between disagreement, misunderstanding and fighting, arguing. We don't do that. We have disagreements, misunderstandings and we talk until we we get to a common ground and that takes practice. I can't say that nili kuja kwae relationship neki kwaeivo. We've learnt together. We've grown together and shout out to him. What is that important thing so grateful for? On a personal level. Onda kanili ya. He's taught me the value of consistency, discipline and hard work because he's very driven. We want him to anafikire kitu kidogo kidogo na ione me kuja. Nona. So he's taught me the value of putting in work into what you want. That includes our children. For a while I was feeling not so comfortable being a stay-at-home mum but I realised why am I ashamed of spending time with my children, raising my children. Something that many people something that many people don't get to do. So, I mean, your different perspective and also just being a good man. Ako na ranzuri. Talking about Willis Raburo, a husband what is that we don't know Willis Raburo's husband that we wish Kenyans other husbands to learn from Willis Raburo. He is very I feel like people know this but I'll just repeat it. He's very involved with his children. There's a watcha Willis na watoto angu wa Willi. Where to? Wa Willi? Na ata kuatu sao. Ata wa alisha. Ata wa osha. Ata wa lalisha. Ata cheza nao. I don't have to be there. I don't worry when he's home. Ata sais, ako nao. Wako sao kabisa. I am not scared to live my children with my husband. So, that takes practice. You know, man, sometimes manadani wa mamatu meza liwa naiki tuwa pana kilam tuwa na jifunza. Kweivo, he's very intentional about his family, his children and I respect him for that. I know you wish it's your wish to see your family achieve goals, family goals. This year, you guys have family goals? Yes, we do. I'm just honoring ourselves being ourselves, being authentic cells, pushing our own things wabebe experience. Tafazali, tunin, wach. We just want to be ourselves. Go to what God has called us to do, find our purposes and just be that. Talking about wabebe experience, the other day we saw it was more of a break. Yes. What was happening? Because people were talking, people were discussing maybe he's considering maybe stepping. It's a break. What do you mean by a break? It's a financial break. No, but it's a new issue. It's a new issue. It's too juicy. Yes, but we've done about 30 episodes. It's a new issue. There's nothing about finance, there's nothing about maybe team restructuring. Zandani. No, I'm asking. Zandani. We're just re-strategizing for how we come back. Big gun. Yes. So what do we expect now, you guys coming back of that experience? Exactly that, an experience. A creative heaven. Good vibes, you know. Different sort of creatives being represented. Kenyan vibe, kenyan style, all of that. That's what I can say. Alright, let me put you in a position. Imagine this, one day you work up to see, you know, a media station, a media house. Only the media house with the husband. Will that be your dream? Maybe that's the way you guys are thinking. One day will that be your goal? We see Willis Raburu starting a media house. He is an expert in the media field. He's been in the media for 13 years. Of course, that would be a nice full circle moment. We're working towards it. That's your dream? Definitely. That's Willis dream? Our dream. Yes. You guys are looking forward to start your own because we've seen Tanzanians having their own media houses. Eventually, definitely. I can't be like, no, I don't want that. No, we want that. We would love that and we would make it do what it does. What's your name? Badotuko. Kwanye Mikakati. Financivi. Yatuna Jipanga. Jinaiko Redina Jua. Siniwa Bebe. Siya Bazu FM? Shadua. Alright, thank you so much for speaking to us, maybe a message to your lovely husband. To my husband. Yes, look at the camera. Oh, I love you so much. I love you so much, babe. Thank you so much for your support. Thank you for being who you are to me, to us and to everyone. I love you very much. We need to talk about the Bebe Kwanye Mikakati. Bebe, Belazima. Bebo Angu. Bazu Angu. What is Bazu? Bazu Angu.  Hi. Hi. Give me five. Five. He's my Aries King. I have one. He's my Bazu. Bazu and me. He has Bazu. Bazu. Bazu. Bazu, Bazu. Bazu. Bazu. Bazu. Bazu. Bazu. Bazu. Lazarismakwebeb, Lazarismakweb, my boo-fang. Okay. Aniwe. Yes, have nicknames, maybe? Ya na nita na Muthama. No nita ma. So, when you get mad, you call him by his official names? Hey, badda siga me ta Willis. Ata na Metawin. I'm so happy honored, so at least I've proved you wrong. Yes. Guys, we don't know how we struggle to get interviews. I feel so afraid to talk to me because Alikoana Phil, Nikona Zandani, come on. Nime kuhana. I respect you. I'm very professional. I'm very professional. Say hi to Willis. I'm a good friend of yours. Miya sana piwa wa sa alimi wa buti tia, ali piti ya wa bebe experience. Namere respect sana. Yes. Thank you so much. God bless you. You too. It's time. Thank you. I need your number one.


I don't think nine years or so professionally since four years and I often have this thing that I try to use things in a way how they're maybe not thought of by the developers. So just using sometimes shaders to do actual modeling or like weird stuff. And I want to talk with you about MetaBots because they're really, really old phenomenon and they're really handy for motion graphics and even for more things. So what are those things? Let's see what we're going to talk about. It's what our MetaBots, more or less, it's not going to be too in-depth because I'm not actually understanding too much of the technical side. Then some basics, how to use them in Blender, how to bring things together to a more complex project and then from there going even more complex and doing advanced rigging techniques. And we're going to look at base measures for sculpting with MetaBots and then a quick look into how to feel fake fluid simulations with MetaBots and rigid bodies. There's also a small downside but later on to that. So what are MetaBots? So who of you guys have used MetaBots before? Just a quick hands up, oh yes, you know what I'm talking about. Who used it in a recent project? There's also quite a lot of people, amazing. And I said you're also listening to what I say. And is there anyone who doesn't have a clue what I'm talking about right now? Yes, amazing. So just real quick, these are MetaBots in their most natural form, blobby moving things and that's also one of the definitions I thought. So G. Scott Owen wrote a nice SIGGRAPH article about this in 1999. I was eight years old then so that's way back. And from the same year another article about MetaBots and it's saying like MetaBots is known as some blobby objects are a type of implicit modeling. And implicit modeling just says that you just define parameters for your object. So you have the center of the object and the radius and you're not actually saying where the vertex point sits on the model. Onto the basics of the usage in Blender with these MetaBots, it looks like that. You just have the Meta objects into your scene. They can be animated or they can be static and as soon as you add another copy of the object you will see you get this nice wielding action. So every time a MetaBot goes into a close proximity of another object they will intersect and have this nice wielding movement. So you can see this again. So again it jumps together. These are already animated but animated by hand. We will later look at how we can improve that. MetaBots also have different types. So when you add a new MetaBot you can change between a capsule, a ball, plane, an ellipsoid which is not regular and then the cube. And the cube you need to turn the view so you can see it's actually a cube. To get this view of MetaBots with the red and green ring you actually need to go into the edit mode. So yes, MetaBots have an edit mode and these allow you to further change your MetaBots and also give you these nice options to change the stiffness per MetaBot or subtract even MetaBots from each other. The next thing we need when working with MetaBots is grouping. So usually when you start out with this and you add a capsule and a plane and another ball they will all behave in one blob. So they will all go into the one same object and this will look like this. But maybe we want to have two objects in our scene and we want to have two blobby objects that don't interact with each other. It's quite simple, we just use the name of the object and give it a new name. So all the MetaObjects with the name MetaBallSingle will be the parent, the master and then we have children of that or not children in a hierarchy order in a MetaBall order with the .001, .002 these will always act as the slaves and they will blob into the same object. So with the knowledge of that we can already have two characters that are blobby but not wielding together. Texturing and coloring and yes, that's possible. I was first not sure if it's even possible because I tried to put a texture on and then you get an automatically generated UV. You can then in cycles use the generated texture coordinates or the object coordinates but there's also a handy trick to actually color just parts of your object and this is by using at least in cycles gradient textures or other texture types too with which you can already change the texture in the renderer view over here. That's just a small example. But we can also introduce texture coordinate for an empty. So here in the scene there's an empty and as soon as I put the, also this is not working, so to the cycle steps if you use the texture coordinate for a different object it will not show in the material view but we can see in the rendered view that we are now able to change the appearance of the texture and the origin of the texture coordinate by an empty and knowing that we can parent things together in Blender we can also parent this empty to a meter ball and control the color of this meter ball over a whole scene, animation and character again. Bringing things together I'm always talking about this character. I'm going to show you a small character now that's just with the basics of parenting in Blender so set parent and set the color parent and then we try to go further from that. Yeah, parenting. Good parenting helps everyone, not just you but also the people around you and the small character I came up with is this little chicken dove type of thing and for now it's not moving correctly because the colored head did not move with it but if I parent everything together I can move the actual chicken and the head will stay dark and we can also animate it real simple. The animation of that will look something like this not really animated just as a preview purpose of what we're doing here. We have different kind of meter groups so the legs and the facial parts are done in one group. The other group is inside of this body mesh which can deform and animate. But we can also use this in a more advanced case and this would be advanced parenting which is rigging. Where's the pointer of this thing? We just introduced this kind of armature into this object and we're not parenting things onto each other again but we're parenting towards a control object. Having this control object now we are able to do more complex hierarchies and we are able to store the animation of the things into one armature animation which is handable by an artist. And applying this to this complex character I talked about we ran with this kind of chicken which maybe could also play another role in the Dweeb series and you get this really articulate character. You can have then these simple IK rigs which work quite well with this. You can then also scale the meter boards so we have an ice close and I'm just scaling another meter ball inside of the ice to double scale and then the ice will blink. And also I can then just render this out. This is just for a preview purpose so the legs are glitching a bit but in general you can see that it's actually a viable tool to create a kind of character. Of course it's a stylized character but you can take this really firing at lots of detail with this because you always get a tessellation on the fly of the meter objects. To show another quick thing inside of Blender you can also do it further and Jim Moran, hi, you call it the drumstick attack I guess. You can actually pull out the drumstick of the chicken and I modeled this chicken from meter boards and it's like a regular pose and then taking the chicken leg out of the chicken it actually looks like a chicken leg which is quite interesting to me. Another thing we get, we get nice details when the chicken leg moves. It can actually behave quite nice when it's closing and opening which is hard to get from real topology. And then a really huge chicken is this one here which I also found on the SIGGRAPH website which was done by MetaRace and I think if I understand the blog post right this is made from millions of meter objects that are put together with a plugin but I'm not quite sure how they did it they at least did it with meter boards which is amazing to me, like the whole dinosaur.  You can rig some characters that are moving in their shape so you can change the shape while they're animating. You can create a database of characters that can be made from one base mesh and you can switch the proportions. You can do really a lot of this. You need to figure out the way when the arm gets too close to the body but that's up to you if you want to keep it or take it as an artistic glitch. So for something completely different you can also use the meter boards for scout base meshes which is another thing I found out in my workflow so I'm a really bad box modeler when it comes to base meshes because it takes me more time to do this rough base mesh than actually sculpting. So why do I use meter boards for this? I can sketch the volume and really think about the volume on the fly. I have an editorial translation so I can change the resolution of my base mesh how detailed it is from really low to really high. I can wheel parts together really easily but even a library of noses from characters and just drop them onto each other and they will wheel perfectly and they will have one watertight mesh and again like with the characters I can even do variations of one character really easily and then if I have done the base mesh I don't need to go in and actually sculpt or box model something new but I can just add parts and do variations of this one character. I actually try to record lots of these live editing sessions. I did four tries and I hit record in one session and this was this and it's not even the best one but on the concept art of Roman Zemenko you can check him out on art station just to give props to this amazing artist. I try to do some sculpts just to preview or base meshes how this can work and what you can see is that I'm most of the time working in one side view and then the volume gets more or less added automatically and I can play around with that later on. Then also adding the holes of the noses by subtracting a meter ball which is also possible to already add detail while actually doing this models of this special artist I found out it's really interesting to do like already hair texture with the meter ball so you don't do just the volumes and also start to add details and when it's done it can look something like this and these models are quite high-poly to render them out for you as a graphic but you can also have them really low-poly and have enough space for your own interpretation of the creases so now you're stuck with a meter ball right so what to do with that you cannot edit the pixels you cannot edit the sculpting but this is rather easy what I recommend to you is just to save the file as a meter ball state and then as an edit state and you just press Alt and C and create a mesh out of it and you can start editing the next second also symmetry is locked into my Blender version and then, but wait there's more so we now created a character a base mesh for a sculpt but we can also fake fluids with this and actually this is the one where I brought the most practical example and I just show you really quick how it works so I have a rigid body object that is behaving in a scene and I just have this rigid body object it's a fear, it's colliding, it's rigid and it's not really fluid like but I can go there and parent meter ball to this one object and can make lots and lots of copies of this one rigid body object and I start to get something like SPH fluid simulation just in really simple and stupid but it's really easy to edit as an artist because rigid body objects are quite easy to understand for us we can push them around we can make walls where they bump off we can say them to be damper we can say them to be like really bouncy and we can really nicely add direct or fluid and this is exactly what I did with the last year's cycle STEM or REAL for the just intro graphic I actually wanted to do like a real fluid simulation for that but I'm not really proficient with the fluid simulation tool and I didn't know how to actually put things so it was rendering and rendering and rendering and like baking them again and I didn't have the really fast workflow doing these meter balls I was able to really control the look of what I'm doing by simulating the spheres in a quite how you say it interactive way so when I added the meter balls they would actually be more or less in real time on my machine I could change the simulation and there's a mosquito and I had like a second just had a real good feedback of the whole thing that's going in the wrong direction there's a downside and there are multiple downsides of this and I already talked with Jaltie about that coming to the characters you would need to find a really good art style for these characters so they don't suffer from these wielding so if you have characters that are really human and articulate and they have their arms by their sides this will wield together and you have a weird look maybe this is what you want maybe this is not what you want it's not what you want you should look into different kind of grouping or then going back to a mesh object but it's another huge problem you won't get motion blur on the meter balls so this comes just down to the way deformation is handled not in blender but in general you will have constant deformation on all objects and you will not be able to get a real motion vector out of this meter ball object so what you get is a usual camera motion blur if the camera moves around the thing you will still have natural motion blur but the water, the particles will still be hanging without motion blur and that's also a kind of art direction if you do the art direction that it doesn't need this kind of motion blur, it's okay if you actually need it really important you need to go back to pixel motion blur which works without using the 3D data or you up sample your animation render it at double FPS again which is hard on the machines but not hard to do exactly also there's a small wish from me to the developers maybe if we could export a meshed version of meter balls into a lambic that would be amazing because afterwards we could import this meshed version with the whole animation as a lambic file and you would be able to add modifiers on that you would be able to do changes on a frame basis and all the perfect things you get from a lambic files but I have no idea how expensive or in workforce how hard it is to do that actually just I'm running not out of time I'm much too quick so I'm just going back and show another thing no, that's the wrong direction just going to show something again which I maybe skipped a little and this is the... where is it? is the actual rigging of the thing so with this chicken I actually was able to use mirroring of the not the bone structure of course that but also the meter balls so you don't need to worry when mirroring the model about the negative scale or anything when you just hit s-1 so this is a nice thing you can still do mirroring quite nicely and it's also helping defining the volume when doing the sculpting and just a small thing about this thing you're just seeing one meter ball and this comes back again to grouping so the master of your meter ball system needs to be visible to make the mesh show up in your viewport but you can also go into the viewport and disable all meter balls that are slaves and just the master will there and show you the complete mesh but because if you wouldn't do that and if you would show all meter balls at once you would have the problem of your viewport being super cluttered with sphere lines that are not actually needed for your character and design I'm just going to let this run through again and then I'm also done so if you have any questions and you are here at the Blender conference feel free to poke my brain there's maybe more that we can do with it and there's maybe more you can do with it and can really apply it to a real project I'm really happy to be able to be here and to share my experience with Blender and with the tools with you and come over pick my brain ask me questions after the talk because now I just make space for the next guy and he has some preparation time because my talk was a little bit shorter than thought also if you need me on the web at Zugermaster you find me anywhere from the Blender cloud to Twitter to YouTube you name it come by, say hello bye, thank you


All right, that's good. Good morning, everyone. My name is Nareesh Jain. I'm the conference chair. I started the Agiles of a Movement here in India in 2004. Been organizing conferences since then. And this is actually our second biggest conference. We've done a lot of smaller conferences. This is our second biggest conference. I see a lot of familiar faces from last year that were there at this conference. So thank you for coming back. I'm going to quickly run through the conference, give you an overview. What are the different details you need to know about the conference? And hopefully we'll be done in 15 minutes so you can go grab a hot cup of coffee or tea outside. All right, it's a little hard to see what's on the screen. So I'm going to step down a little. As you can see, this is actually a seven-day conference which started off as a three-day conference over the evolution of the conference. We kind of ended up with a seven-day conference. So we actually kicked off the conference yesterday with workshops where we had four workshops yesterday. We have two workshops taking place today. And then we have the management conference which has started today. So we have the management conference today and tomorrow. After which, we're going to have the technical conference, which is on the 1st and 2nd March. And post that, for the first time in India, we have a plop conference, which is the Patterns Languages Conference. It's called Guru Plop. So we have that on the 3rd and 4th. So that's essentially the overall bird's-eye view of what the Agile India Conference is about. These are pictures from the last year's conference. How many people can recognize these with their last year, if you can put your hands up so we can see what our repeat business is like? How's our customer retention doing? OK, cool. Are these guys having fun? What do you think? There's some serious interactions going on. People are really engaged in getting to know new things, expand their horizons, expand the perspectives. So we had a lot of interesting collaboration happen last time. We had a lot of people having fun. And that's what encouraged us to put this conference again together. We are hoping that you would have exact same similar experience or even better experience this year. What I want to do is I want to start with a small group activity because I know you all have been sitting for a while and it's good to get up once in a while and organize yourself and do something, some activity. So what I want is I want you to form groups of containing all these eight roles, all these eight descriptions, whichever group does this first, we're going to have a special prize for them.


Hi, and welcome to What's Up, Williston? I'm your host, Eric Wells. We're back here for our September episode, and join me this month as Pl. Director Matt Belanger. We're going to be talking about housing this month. Townsend doing a lot of work looking at our housing bylaws, and I have a public hearing coming up on some transmitted amendments from the Planning Commission to the Select Board. So we're going to jump into it in just a minute, but the logistics here, the public hearing on these proposed amendments is going to be on Tuesday, October 17th at 7.30 p.m. in Town Hall. These are really focused on housing supportive amendments, including inclusionary zoning. So I thought with Matt here today, we can kind of get into this proposal a little bit more and talk about housing. Kind of to start, the town did a housing needs assessment earlier this year, and that really confirmed what we felt that there was a number of areas for the town to explore further in housing. Is that kind of on track there, Matt? Yeah. So coming out of a bunch of our rezoning work in the Taft Corners area, we identified a need to do more around the encouragement of the creation of affordable housing. And with all of the opportunity in our new zoning to create more homes in Williston, we did want to look at what the need was and make sure that any changes to the zoning that would encourage housing met those needs or fed into what those needs were. So we did have a housing needs assessment done. That report is available on our website to go take a look at. And in a general sense, it confirmed some things that we'd already been perceiving out in the community. There's generally very low availability of homes in Williston, resulting in higher prices than usual. And in particular, very, very low availability of homes that might be considered affordable, particularly for the workforce that we see coming into Williston every day to work the jobs that are available there. So once we had that data, the planning commission got to work last spring. We had multiple discussions with the select board to kind of unpack what that meant and think of some pathways for the town to consider moving forward. And from that work through the spring and summer, we have these transmitted bylaw amendments that are going to be considered coming up this fall. So I was thinking to start, if you could share with the viewers, kind of what's the overall theme of these amendments? What are they looking at the proposals look like here? Sure. So the theme of the amendments is to take what exists in the current zoning bylaws, which is an incentive to create affordable homes as a part of new residential projects and really elevate it to the point where it's its own pathway to approval beyond the way Williston currently approves residential projects. Williston's really unique in Vermont in that we have a middle step in our residential approval process called growth management, where we schedule out a limited number of new dwelling units that are created over a given period of time in town. And that schedule is by its nature limited and therefore getting on the schedule is competitive. So under the current system, providing affordable homes as a component of a project is one of many incentivized attributes of a project. Others might be trails or open space or neighborhood design, things like that, energy efficiency. So what the proposed amendments do is they set a metric by which a project that provides enough of certain kinds of affordable homes would follow an approval path outside of that growth management schedule. And so it would need to meet some pretty stringent commitments around the number and type of affordable homes and those homes would need to be affordable in perpetuity via legal restriction. But those projects would not compete as part of that growth management schedule and their units would not be part of that limited number of units on the schedule. So a question we've received is, okay, if you're going to remove these projects from growth management, growth management has allocations each year. We try to plan for a number of new units, new population each year. How's that going to impact the overall growth of the town? We think with the levels that are set in the draft bylaw amendment, mostly it's going to shift the proportion of projects that follow the affordable path out of the projects that would have otherwise followed the growth management path. In other words, fundamentally, we don't expect to see a whole lot more units per year created under these changes. We expect the projects that include affordable homes to increase and the projects that follow the growth management path to decrease. And I can talk a little bit about why we think that's going to happen when we get into the details of the revision. Sure. And I want to share too, the town has a wastewater allocation ordinance that really kind of serves as our check and balance here for development. That wastewater capacity has to be allocated each year, so there's only so much to sell for each type of development. That's right. Almost all new dwellings that are created in Williston need to purchase wastewater treatment capacity from that limited pool, which is connected to but another piece of the path to approval that all residential projects have to follow. So there's a limit there that exists regardless of how we handle this other part of the process. So kind of getting into the more nuts and bolts here, but first, you know, we hear us a lot, affordable housing and sometimes I feel like that's a mis-no merchant, all housing be affordable. But you know, we get into it from a public policy realm. What are we talking about with affordable housing? So the first part is what affordable means is that a household can meet their housing expenses, spending no more than 30% of their income in doing so. So if you think about, you know, taking a little bit under a third of your household income and having that if you rent an apartment going toward your rent and your utilities or if you own a home towards your mortgage taxes and insurance. So that number is different, of course, for every household because every household has a different income. So when we talk about it in a sense of a bylaw amendment like this, what we're talking about is, is a home affordable to the median household in the geographic area that surrounds Williston? Or is it affordable to a household making some percentage of that median income? So we talk about 100% median that literally means the middle household's income and then we might talk about 80% median or lower. In the case of this, we're talking about 100% and 80%. So there's a lot to this and there's a lot to unpack. And you know, part of why we're doing this outreach today and the public information session coming up is try to unpack it for folks. So there's a lot of housing discussion going on throughout the state and Williston, as it's government and community, we're kind of looking at this of how we want to approach it to start, how the select board is going to consider these regulation changes. So, you know, this proposal goes through different project types. So maybe that's a good place to start, kind of how that affects different project sizes here. Right. So one of the things about including affordable homes in a project is those homes are sold at a price or rented at a price that's below the market rate. They need to be balanced by the homes in the project that are going to be sold at market rate. So as project sizes get really small, that gets harder and harder to do. So we have some thresholds in the draft bylaw amendment for when affordable homes would be required as part of a project. And when we're under five dwellings, we're just calling that a small project. It would be exempt from both the growth management process where we've not had a lot of luck gaining the incentivized attributes of projects in those size projects anyway because they're small. And we're including an affordable home would be very challenging. And then requirements from there, we start to require units on projects of sizes between five and nine units and going up from there. So if a project is following the affordable inclusionary path, any project over five units is needing to include a unit and, you know, starting off with five to nine include one unit. So that's the inclusionary side. And then there's also the side of somebody who does choose to build a project that's entirely market rate does not include affordable homes. This bylaw amendment includes an added requirement that they pay a fee instead of building those homes and that money would be paid into the town's affordable housing trust fund. So we think about inclusionary. It's really talking about including including units that are designated for affordability based on these thresholds. That's correct. And we look at I guess if you think about the paying into the affordable housing trust funds, there's different fee structure. So it seems this is tiered based on based on quantity and the per home fee based on the size of the project. That's correct. So it looks at it kind of a quantity of scale for for how much if someone is not going to create one of these some of these units that you have to pay more into the affordable housing trust. That's right. And the larger project gets the larger that fee gets not just linear but you know very large projects where we think there's a lot more opportunity to include affordable homes. You pay more. So we have a one to twenty home tier a twenty one to fifty and then everything over fifty. The fee goes up. And you know really that is meant very much to encourage especially large projects to be inclusionary rather than be entirely market rate. So that gives us someone puts a project together. They have to look at the economics of that project and you know what you know the cost to build and the cost to rent out potentially units cost to sell units. So they're they're trying to make the math work. That's right. In a lot of these cases it seems like and if we can put these tools in place to encourage it then we have these fees that also help if someone decides to not move forward with it. They have to pay the fee. We put into this affordable housing trust. The town has started this. We've seen it with some money. I think it may be approximately sixty thousand dollars or so there. Just last night the town established a housing committee. Seven members of the community were appointed by the select board where their roles is going to be determining uses for the trust. I know planning staff had some preliminary discussions about what that may look like. If you could share just some ways these trusts are used in public policy. Sure. So what one big use of money that's in a trust fund like this would be to help offset the cost of providing affordable homes in qualifying projects. What we're talking about in our zoning reforms here is is projects that might include what we might think of as workforce housing. These would not be requirements to require to include what we might call deeply affordable housing. You know homes that might be affordable to somebody making less than half the median income for the area. Those projects are going to come through nonprofit partnerships and things like that. And that's a great place for the town to invest some of its trust fund money to make those projects that just cannot happen with outside funding to help those go. So number one just using the money in a trust fund to make really affordable projects happen in town. There's like those types of projects too have my experiences been you've got to get these stacks of funding sources to make it all work. There might be grants out there there might be some private equity but it could be the town's way of giving some municipal support to get these projects over the top and help make them happen. Yeah. Yeah. That would that would be a great way to use that money. There are other more sort of bigger or more challenging things depending on what you want to do you know actually purchasing a piece of land that could be deeded over to an entity that would build homes on it. Another one we've seen is in zoning districts that have rigorous design standards helping a project that needs to come in at an affordable rate meet those more aesthetic standards. It looks more like everything else on the street is a use of trust fund money. So we've seen that happen in some neighboring communities as well. Lots of potential a lot of excitement here is where the town is really positioning itself more to take an active role in working on housing. We've we've built more staff capacity with addition of a senior planner focused on energy and community development including housing. So we we've got the energy committee and housing committee established so we've got legs of the policy stool established as advisory boards the select board to help work through these these big questions coming up here. Yeah. You know a lot of work was done by the Planning Commission to come up with how to formulate this proposal. Other towns have been doing this some longer than others. Kind of what that research and what that what that process looked like because there's a lot of different ways this could go with these variables and how do you where do you find the starting point. Sure. So we always start by taking a look at our neighbors and you know we compared our possible inclusionary requirements to neighboring communities mostly in Chittenden County. So we're thinking about what is the proportion of affordable homes that's required in a new project and at what level of affordability to those homes need to be made available. There's some other nuance in there. You know which communities look at just a median family income versus a given household size. How does how are perpetual affordability requirements managed other things like that. But the basic thing is how many affordable homes and how affordable are those homes being required. And you know we're lucky to be in a county where City of Burlington has been doing inclusionary zoning for over 25 years and they've had some research and reporting done on the effectiveness of that program. We have performance to look at in a couple of other communities too and we're we're slotting right in kind of kind of middle of the pack in terms of those requirements. And one of the things that's really challenging about doing something like this is requiring private development to include affordable homes makes it harder to build the homes in those developments. It makes it more expensive. And as was reported on in Burlington looking at the performance of their system over those 25 plus years. You can make the requirements so stringent that you reduce the supply of homes in general. And so you when you're thinking about wanting to increase the abundance and affordability of homes. You can require more and more things but at some point you just won't see new homes come online at all. So the Planning Commission was very conscious of that. We want a system that is usable for the sector that's going to produce the homes. Yeah it seems it's the benefit of being able to analyze this and look at the performance measures over time. And it's a starting point. And it's good we've had that data to look at and kind of see how that plays out from policy to implementation moving ahead. Should these bylaws be be adopted moving up moving ahead here. So kind of next steps here I shared at the open that you know there's going to be a public information session coming up on October the 12th on a Thursday evening in Town Hall from 6 8 p.m. Planning staff will be there they'll be going over these items taking questions want to make sure everyone's informed if you want to participate in the public hearing or you can also come share any comments you have ahead of time either. You can email to myself or planning staff to share the select board. We're doing the show today we'll have this post that we have materials posted online. Any thoughts on outreach Matt ways people can get their questions answered things. I'm sure you're asking direct email to myself or senior planner Melinda Scott in our office would work just fine we'll happy to answer questions one at a time as they come in. We do have a lot of resources out there in the planning commission and select board websites on the nights that they've looked at this. Recently this this memo we prepared to answer some of the frequently asked questions is part of the managers report of last night's select board meeting with September 19th meeting. We'll be also producing a set of slides for that October 12th meeting and making those available ahead of time as well. So really would encourage folks if you haven't to take a look at the needs assessment document that's out there on the planning department web page as well. And and the bylaw hearing notice for the October 17th meeting which includes the the nuts and bolts the draft bylaw text that would actually make all of these changes happen. But just calling us and talking to us works great too because we can really we can really drill into how this all would work. So shifting gears a little bit you know that's everything coming up with with housing right now this fall but a big effort from the planning department right now is getting ready for the next town plan. And it's kind of looking toward seven years in the future and this work is being called Wilson 2050 thinking further out as well. So I want to share kind of what that process looks like and how people can get engaged coming up here. Sure. So like all Vermont municipalities that have a comprehensive plan or a town plan. Williston has one and it will the current plan that we're working under will expire toward the end of August of 2025 which means it's time for us to start thinking about how to write the plan that will replace it. We are calling that effort Williston 2050 functionally the new comprehensive plan will guide the focus of the town from 2025 through 2032. So call it Williston 2050 it's a nice round number some of the things we do over that eight year time frame you know will really start to become evident around 2050. So you know it's very forward thinking town plans are long range in nature. We start with a vision and then we have a set of goals and objectives and policies that fall out of that vision across a number of state required categories that the plan needs to address. So where we're at is we are between now and about Thanksgiving really entering into our really big public engagement push where we're trying to interact with members of the community through a series of both in person and online events. Those are now scheduled and you can you can reserve your slot at them or sign up to come. The website for this effort is williston2050.com and you can stay in touch with us that way as well. But really between now and the holidays is when we're hoping to put the planning commission and the planning staff who will be working together to write this town plan directly in touch with the citizens of the town to make sure that we know everything that's important to people as we as we put that in. As we put that into a document. That's great. It's you know we want to hear from everybody you know it's planning for the future of the community and you know this is the vision for Wilson's future. So it's opportunity for people to get engaged share your ideas share your thoughts some early on here in this in this process. Yeah one of the really terrific things about Williston is it really uses its town plan. So I've been working in Williston long enough that there's been a couple different versions of the town plan in effect and you know we keep that document with the to do list that comes with it. Really prominent in our office and we're we're looking you know every quarter do what did this plan say we needed to do and what have we accomplished and what's the next step and that's very rewarding to do and I want to help the planning commission in the community develop that next to do list for the next eight years so that we can go to work making it happen. Yeah we see the adoption of form based code in Taft Corners that was a town plan item it's been in the plan for a couple iterations as I recall it was you know something we're able to cross off the list this past couple of years here. Yeah you know town plans they they address things for communities as diverse as education transportation housing design all of those things you just mentioned and you know there's things we're working on right now because they were talked about in town plans going back as far as probably 2006 and before so this is a chance to set those priorities going forward. I think that's all I had for today anything else you want to add Matt before we wrap up. I'll just mention the website address again williston2050.com please please go there to find out everything you can about the town plan effort or stop on by our office. We have postcards business cards bumper stickers with the Williston 2050 logo on them and you're going to see us out in the community as you may have in the last couple months. We love to talk to people about the town plan it's it's the kind of thing planners really enjoy working on. Great well thanks everyone for joining us this month on what's up Williston I'm your host Tom Andrew Eric Wells and I'll I'll see you around town take care.


Welcome to this GitHub scorn session. I will talk about how at Orange we are managing dynamic 5G core infrastructure with a FluctCD and Terraform controller. I'm David Blazano. I'm a cloud and software expert for network and tail co-application. I'm deploying mainly 5G networks using GitHub for about two years, and I'm dealing with infrastructure as code for more than five years. So first, before talking about FluctCD, Terraform controller and 5G, I have to give you a little bit of context. Orange is a telco group that is working in more than 26 countries around Europe and Africa, deploying fixed networks and mobile networks to bring communication between everyone and the internet. But what is a mobile network? Just to give you a big picture of what it is, I'll give you some numbers. Orange is dealing with more than 70 millions of mobile subscribers in Europe. All those subscribers are consuming about 800 petabytes of data in Europe per month, and all those subscribers have spread around 40,000 mobile sites in Europe. And the traffic is growing for more than two in three years. We have huge numbers, huge data network that we have to deal with. So the 5G network, this new network, this new mobile way of communication, is not only a big tube with a big bandwidth you can have access from your mobile phone. With the 5G standalone architecture, the standalone mobile network, this is one of the specific 5G deployment we can have. We have a lower latency, we have better improvements of the slice capabilities. I will give you just a few words about the slice later. And we have better support of all this new use case about IoT, VR, and ultra reliable communication. And in this use case, I will talk about the mobile private 5G network. This is a separate network deployed only for our business customers. These private networks are totally separated from the others. They have only their own application, their own 5G function, their own radio. They have everything for them. This is totally separated from the other part. This 5G network is mainly a big set of many 5G core functions in an AWS EKS cluster. This EKS cluster is somewhere in the AWS region and it's connected to local breakout. And those local breakout are mobile sites in the customer zone. They have their own routers, their own application, and their own radio. Those radios are added to cover their needs. And this UPF here, that is a router, is a specific function that allows data to go from a specific pass to ensure that the production needs are not the one of the business needs and the production users are using applications for their own needs and not the one from the business needs. So we have the 5G core functions in an EKS region. We have local breakout with UPF data routers to allow segregated data access from the radio to the application or to the internet for the specific needs depending on the business needs. So we have two kinds of dynamic needs. It's not only 5G core function in the Kubernetes, but we also have to deal with the creation of a new slice. This new slice is a new segmented network. It's clearly a new deployment inside the deployment, a new function deployment inside that. Think about, let's say, it's not a virtual loss in an Apache. It's another Apache, for example. So here it's clearly a new deployment of new application in a new pass to ensure that we have a specific and a secure router for a specific need. So we have to create a new network, we have to create a new infrastructure and to deploy an application inside this network infrastructure. We also have to deal with new radio when customer wants to enlarge its 5G coverage. You have to plug new radio in this site. So we have to securely connect this equipment to the 5G core network. So we have to get Tapsify not only Kubernetes, but also all the infrastructure around Kubernetes, around our 5G core. So to do that, we are using Flux CD Terraform Controller. The Terraform Controller is a new controller of Flux, like the notification, like the customization of the Helm one. It's a controller that will use Terraform resources in a GitHub's way. It will read Terraform custom definitions and create new runners, specific runners to run the Terraform definitions like we have and that we have in the Git repo. This Terraform Controller is multi-tenancy. It clearly allows us to have a GitHub's automation for Terraform. We ensure that what the intent we have in the Git is what will be deployed in the reality in the infrastructure. We also have drift detection, plan and manual approval, GitHub dependencies between Terraform to ensure that some Terraform definitions are run before the others. And we have the variable passing between a Flux CD object like customization or Terraform using secret and config maps. And the last one is clearly one of the key elements we are using to deploy or to use case. So to give you an example of what is a Terraform custom resource, here is a Terraform that I extracted from our pocket. For example, for this new slice, we have a neutral approval to ensure that what we deploy on the Git is what is deployed in the reality. So it's a total approval. Everything is tested. Everything is okay. It's a total approval. The other one is that we want to destroy the resource on deletion. When we delete the intent in the Git, it has to be deleted also in the reality in the infrastructure. We, of course, are using new service accounts. This service account is based on the AWS policy enrol link. So we restrict everything we can just to access that the Terraform can access just what we want on the infrastructure on our AWS deployments. We are using three main other elements. The depends on the depends on how low has to execute this Terraform module after another one. Here we want to deploy this network information after the zone, the zone one. So the two terraform resources will be deployed one after the other. And the two other elements are the managing the management of viable the passing of the viable from one terraform to the other auto customization. Here we are reading for three config to config map and a secret from many. We have config map, for example, for the cluster variables. It's a config map that is a describing what is what is the cluster. Another one to describe what is this slice and the last one to get viable from what was deployed before. And the last one. We have, we have to get information from this script. This script is not only deploying infrastructures, it's also have to to share what has been created the idea of the resource created or some specific network configuration. So we have to write the outputs of those terraform templates to these two secrets to be shared to all the terraform or just to make a customized resources. So the first use case. We have to connect a new radio site or customer business customer want to to enlarge his coverage in his in his site so he plug a new radio antenna. He plug it and we have to to create a VPN between this antenna and the core and then the UPF so this we have first to create an AWS VPN gateway. This is done once once because it's will be used for all the other clients. So at the creation of the cluster, we create an intent to say we want VPN gateway. So it will run a terraform script and this terraform script will create a secret with that is containing just the ID of the virtual the VPN gateway that was created. And when when we create a new site and you write your site with plug the new one, we create a new intent and infrasight one here. For example, with its config map saying that it has a specific configuration and what we have to create and then the name or something of the network information. This customization will create a new terraform resource that will read the variables from the secret, the previous secret and the config map we've just created. The those are variables are inputs for the terraform scripts. And it will be pushed to the terraform to create this last VPN this last VPN client gateway and site to see connection on all the related routes and ACL we have with that. And it creates the last secret to to that all of us to update all network functions because we have to connect this radio antenna to UPF to the router. We have to get information from that antenna to ensure that the network connected to the VPN to the UPF is the correct one. The order use case is the deployment of a new slice. As I said, a new slice is a separated way as a separated place in our network. We create a slice of a network for specific need for a security reason for a specific quality configuration. So this slice need to be created and in order deployment. It's mainly the creation of a new data router of a new UPF. So this UPF must rely on specific configuration. We must create a new network and security rules to have a specific pass for the data. We have to create a specific VM attached to the main clusters on the new network. It will be a new tainted node in the main cluster. But it is a specific node that will host only this UPF for security reason and traffic and data security on this UPF. And we also have to get the lower level network information on this node because this UPF, this router has a specific configuration. It needs to manage huge bandwidth for example. So it has to be connected to the lower level interface and we have to get the PCI addresses for example on the network cards on what we have just deployed. So for that, we just create a new intent, a new definition of a slice. It's a customization and a config map.  Those two customization are the definition of a slice infrastructure and then the slice application. I will not detail the slice application. I will just focus on the slice infrastructure. This slice infrastructure create three elements. We say that we have to create a new dedicated network on security rules. It read the variables from the config map, the slice definition and the cluster vars. And it creates the output to get all the network information in the secret. This secret is also read by the next Terraform definition to create this new EC2 instance. And this new zone attached, this new thing did not attach to the main cluster. It creates also a secret that is passed to the last Terraform definition. This one is quite specific because it's just a Terraform script that has to connect to the EC2 instance to be run inside it and to get the PCI addresses of this new node. So this is a Terraform definition with affinity configuration that enforce the run of this Terraform runner inside this new TNT node. And of course, like the other Terraform script, it creates a secret where it store the PCI addresses of this new TNT node. That's because the application we are deploying in the last customization, the deployment of the UPF or big router need to get the multis configuration on the PCI addresses to ensure that E is connected to the lower level to enhance the UPF performances. So last thing, a few feedbacks about what we are using and the GitHub CIFI way of deploying our infrastructure is succeeded to run for controller. Yes, it's a good idea for us. Clearly, we are just managing infrastructure resources in intents like intents like any other GitHub subject. We have continuous reco-oxidiation, notification, everything is pulled automatically. When we destroy, it's also destroying the infrastructure. We have a dependency between customization and Terraform that are easy to manage. It's easy to deploy application or to ensure to have everything done in a Kubernetes way. And all the variables can be natively passed through Kubernetes config map or secrets between Terraforms and customization. It's a locally an easy way of have a customized template with the possible substitution from flexibility. It's a huge function that allows us to have only template definition of what we deploy and then just get the variables from the local config map and secrets to ensure that what we deploy is in the same way in all the cases, but just with variables. Clearly, our decision to use also Fluid City Terraform controller is because we already had those Terraforms definition. It was previously run in a GitLab CI. It was run once and then it was, everyone say it's okay, it's done. But now it's just, we just take the same definition and put them in the Git and deploy in a GitHub way. But we just modify something in the definition. Variables must be serialized. We cannot inject variables, complex variables like JSON in the Terraform without serialize them. We have to serialize and manage everything like a string if we want to use complex variables. The last element that we have to be careful is the deletion process is a little bit trickier than the deployment. Of course, with all the infrastructures, it's the same thing. Don't cut the branch your own. I said we are using the affinity to get information from another. We also have to ensure that all the other nodes are not running on this node. When we remove a resource, the runner is not inside this resource when we delete it. We just have to take care about this not affinity. When we remove an intent, we have to remove the variables, the variables, config map, or secret after the Terraform intent. It goes when the Terraform runner is starting, it just needs to access these variables. Just take care about that. The last one is not the only alternative to manage the infrastructure. We can also have cross-plane, for example, but here we just need to reuse our Terraform in a GitHub way. It's just the reusing of all scripts. I hope this talk gives you some information and some good feedback that you can bring to your own needs. I wish you a good day.