My name is Anjan Brouwer. I am a software developer. When my father bought a Commodore 64, I was six, and it was fun. You had those floppy drives and those tapes, but the games were so expensive. So I went to the library, got some books, started typing the basic code, and you learned debugging really quickly because the editors of those books were not that good. So with some pencil, you start editing, and you learn how to debug, and I never stopped coding since. I am a professional developer for 20 years, been working for no protocol for the last six years. You might also know me from Badge Team, QTPass, or Angry Nerds podcast. Hello, good afternoon. I'm Lord Berkeley. Other people know me as Mandel Mowach, which is also not my real name. I do weird things with computers. At the moment, I'm also a crypto and security architect at the Dutch Ministry of Health. I'm a Hack42 board member. It's the best hackerspace in Western Europe. I'm a foyer request fanatic to the Nordic government, and I like to talk about weird interfaces and connections. But not today. Today we're talking about something that you might have heard of. Some people call it corona, some people call it COVID-19, and in February 2020, it arrived in the Netherlands. So how this all started and what our talk is about. Somewhere in March 2020, there was an epitome, and that was very interesting for us as hackers because it was live-streamed. The Dutch government, well, mostly Roem Rosendal, who has a talk together with Breno de Winter at Abacus here tomorrow at 1. They did an epitome to do a corona melder notification app, and there were lots of companies with lots of interesting ideas that all could not physically or lawfully work. So a lot of hackers had a lot of big mouth, started talking about laughing at it, so to say. And then Ron Rosendal did a smart thing and said, if you all know so well, prove it. So he started hiring hackers, for example, Breno de Winter. And Breno started looking around and thinking, who do we need to do this kind of stuff? Well, we need people we can trust, people who build camps like this.  So at one point, somewhere in October 2020, just after, I think, the second lockdown or before whatever measurements were there, Breno de Winter called me and he said, hey, Buck, yeah, I have a question for you. Do you have some time left, some spare time? No. Yeah, but it's in for the state and for the world country. And can you do a few hours per week and for a few weeks and said, I could do that. OK, that's fine. I have to work. But no, things need to happen. So it was for GGD Contact. It's a municipal health care organization, and they need better contract tracing app and a web app to do their work correctly. So I worked on that a bit. And meanwhile, vaccines started to appear somewhere in the near future. So November 2020. Working, working. Oh, no, vaccines are here. During a lunch break, there was some chat at the Ministry of Health about registration of them. But yeah, there are solutions for that, right? Well, turns out there weren't solutions for everything. There were solutions for the municipal health care for massive vaccination campaigns, but that's not what the first vaccines are going to. The first vaccines are going to health care professionals, people in old age homes, those kind of people. And they don't get vaccinated by the municipal health care system. They get vaccinated by our doctors. So all of a sudden I get a call from Buck Blue. He patches in Breno in the call and Breno says, do it for the country. We need you just a few weeks. It's a simple web app, but it needs to be secure and safe. You have a proven track record of doing that kind of stuff. We need you. So yeah, I started working. So 15th of December, 2022, it was the third lockdown or the fourth. I really forgot, but we all remember it. At nine, we had the start of the first workday, which was unusual for me because I never get up that early at 10. That was a basic design ready. We never changed it at 11. There were the first commits to the Brani Banani repository because we were plan C. We were not meant to be the vaccination registration portal. No, we had to be a bit undercover. So we took a GitHub organization, 91 Divock LN, which is NL COVID-19 in reverse. And we started in making some interesting repository names there. Later that evening, first review. So what did I do commit first? Well, CI, continuous integration pipelines, linting, testing, static code analysis. And then because we had a design, we knew what had to come in. We knew what had to come out. I started doing it all test driven. And the next day. Yeah, Alnijan needs to go shopping because sometimes you need to eat.  And he gets a call from Brenno. Hey, we need a picture for a web shop because we need to hide it, whatever. So Alnijan takes a picture of the new banana web shop. We put it online and there we have the first governmental in the future to be soon web shop for bananas, which is something that's going to happen. Luckily, help arrives because the second day of work, all of a sudden I get a team. I get two developers from the hacker scene, people you might know. And they do their first commits, they make a pull request and everything gets red crosses because of my very tough CI rules. So that was a good start. Next day, my birthday. Yeah, I do a quick remote party with my family because you can't do it in person. So then we come to the 22nd of December and we're searching a hosting provider for when this might be plan A. That's a little bit of work because almost everything is closed. The government is completely closed in December from the 4th of December till the end of December. You cannot request anything because of the budget is being closed. Getting hosting everything signed is very hard. So what we found three providers and we did assessments, which provider would be the correct one and would could help us the best and we found one. So that was good 23rd of December. We also need to store secrets. All the data that we collect has to be encrypted and where do you store secrets in a hardware security module? So they can't be, can only be used and can't be taken out. Yeah, so hardware security modules is you get the real stuff. They need to burn in test. They need some set up time and it was somewhere like Christmas, New Year's, nothing could be done. It takes two weeks and we had a deadline in the first week of January. So it's not going to happen, but we got the solution. We found very smart people working in our team already. Thank you, Breno. He has friends everywhere that know things and we found a solution. It's called Yubiquis. They are basically also a hardware security module there. You can store in secrets. You can generate secrets in them and not to be taken out. And you can hang them on your keychain. Yeah, but also you can put them in a server in the data center and physically put a label over it and have it all in nice procedures. And it's just like a hardware security module. Yubiquis. Pretty nice. Yeah, they're pretty nice. They're cheap, they're cheap, which is not the biggest thing. They're available. You get them next day order, even on 23rd of December. And they're capable and they have standard libraries and software to integrate with all your software. So, as I said, Christmas. Oh, no. Yep, workday 10. From this point, we have been working for 10 days straight. I mean, the weekends are also workdays, right? And 13 hours a day. But yeah, this is a day like no other. We just continue working. We get our first sysadmin on board because, well, it's nice to have software. You also need to run it somewhere. And we found a data center. But now we need to provision the servers. Luckily, we get a sysadmin and also we get a DBA because what is the best way to store non? Post SQL is just the best. No SQL database for you. No SQL, that's what I was looking for. Thanks. Luckily, the DBA team came redundantly supplied because they're two brothers and they work very nicely together. 26th of December. There was an interesting peak in the number of COVID infections in the Netherlands, and we finally have a good schema of how this stuff should be run. Yeah, it still works this way. So then we skip some workdays because we're working hard. 31st of December. We have been working for two weeks now, nonstop. So we were ordered to stop working at six in the evening and at least not talk to your colleagues anymore. Reintroduce yourself to your friends, family and all the people living under your attic in your house. There were no fireworks because it was forbidden. So yeah, at 12 o'clock, we had fireworks. Do some sleeping. Oh, no, fireworks. Yeah, so do some sleeping. Then on the other side, at the first of January. Yeah, we would not do a stand-up at 10 because all this early stuff, let's just do weekends and holidays. We started one. That's probably a better idea. Also, we got the first machines provisioned by the new sysadmin. And we had to change the application name because someone decided that Brani-Banani is not something they want to present to parliament as a solution for registering COVID vaccinations. So the name was changed to BRBA. It stands for Beveiligte. Totally not stands for Brani-Banani. No, no. It stands for Beveiligte registraties van bijzondere assets or short as we shorten it for Brenno and Barbara. We told them afterwards. Oh, it's not the secret. Then we had a long weekend so you can just keep working. You have no distraction from other people. All management is not all management, but all the government is on holiday and on weekends. So it's double better plus good. And we start continuing. But yeah, now I also get some normal developers. I mean, the ones you can double click order from agencies. And I've never managed the team before. So I call my good friend Ransbak. You might have seen him last time we were here doing a talk together with me about privacy and penises. I gave him a call and luckily we were just bouncing of some ideas, got the whole idea to do simplified scrum just every day, early meeting. Well, 10 is early for me. And ask three questions. What have you done yesterday? What are you doing today? What do you need from anybody else in the team or outside of the team? That worked and we also got our data models from the National Institute for Public Health and the environment to do some data exchange because well, registering COVID vaccinations is interesting but we need some science to be done and they are the ones doing the science. Yeah, so we tried to exchange the data and we found out that exchange should be exchange to secure exchange so we can exchange the data in a secure way to exchange it. Yeah, FTP and CSV files is not something we would do. It's the industry standard, we set another standard but we also got the data models and data models are nice, especially within government they make large, big data models. You feel so dirty after reading them that you need to go to shower. So we got a lot of shower, a lot of showers. January 5th, application is ready, which is a good thing because it's gonna have to be live the next day. We do some last testing in our future production environment because everybody knows you do development, testing, acceptance, production, but in practice, nobody does that. Everybody does it in Dutch, the opta-way or in English, DPTA, acceptance always comes last. Just look at the stages of grief and if you want to know more about doing stuff in production, there's an interesting batch talk this Tuesday at 13.40 on this stage. So, but 5th of January, we needed to have credentials handed out to a lot of people working in hospitals and people's homes and all those things. More in Brenno's talk, but we needed some help to distribute it, not normal companies, it was an obtainium, they had no people, they had no time. So we called the military, seems to have some friends there, which was not the correct way to do it, but it worked out very well in the end, nobody got fired over this. January 6th, this was early for me, seven in the morning, you log into the server, four eyes because everything has to be done with at least four eyes on there.  So, next day, yes. Finally, first vaccination, it was a nursing home worker and she got registered through BRBA. Good, meanwhile, there were some other projects because we're working hard on this, but also there were some other projects as ministry. They were working on QR codes, this one you can actually scan in, it will show you, it's a demo code. We decided together that you can have more privacy with less data, which is not a revelation for us, but for some people in the government, it's very new. In Europe, like this QR code, this contains a lot of data, it contains first name, last name, date of birth, where your vaccination was, all those details. In the Netherlands, we decided, we don't need that much information, but we'll come back to that for you. And we started small in the application, but it got extended with the European connection and now you can travel the world around with it. We also started to have it printable by medical personnel because that will work for everybody. You don't, yeah, you need somebody, a medical staff when they vaccinate you in that hall or test, but we also got, you can request it by snail mail if you don't have anything digitally. You can go to the website and print it or you can use the app. And yeah, those European codes, they contain all that data, but do you need that? Do you need for your cinema, for your pub, for your restaurant, do you need to know someone's full name, date of birth, where they were vaccinated, what they were given? No, of course not. All you need is to be able to check their identity. So we got initials, first letter of first name, first letter of last name, if applicable, and the date of birth without a year. That was all that is in the Dutch domestic QR codes. The app was way more fancy because it made you untrackable between two QR codes which switched every minute. It's very fancy crypto based on Habi by the Irma team if you want to know more about it than tomorrow at nine here. But meanwhile, we just had about truncating data again. Our first data delivery, a lot of people have been vaccinated, a lot of people have been registered, we need to get that data to the National Institute for Public Health and the environment. And we did get it to be sent encrypted this time, public key encryption. And we do an export and because of the very slow HSMs, we use the UB keys, it took us two hours. Well, you do that in a screen because for eyes, two people looking at the screen over Jitsie and we do the export, it runs for two hours and the CIS admin says, well, my screen is stuck. I said, well, mine isn't. So I type poi, space, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. So the next line was command dot found and the output in file dot ang was empty. Because the other guy was pressing enter a lot. Yes. So we run again, another two hours, we copy that stuff over to the National Institute for Health and Environment and the other people in the Jitsie shout date, date, date. I type date and ta-da, we had 10 minutes to spare. Then I walk out in the snow to take a very relaxing walk and I got a nice t-shirt in the mail a week later. So, but back to the serious business, the QR codes. It should be work for everybody because if you are making something mandated by law, then it should work for everybody. What we did was make a basic solution that works for everybody. Healthcare workers just type in everything and press print. But we don't hate healthcare workers. So we did optimizations. It's the AD20 rule. If you can optimize it for 80%, then you have only 20% of work left and then you do it again and then you have 20% of 20% left and you do that a few steps, like four or five and then healthcare workers don't start to hate you. It's very nice. Yeah, and also we try to do credentials for all the images, but sometimes it's very hard to find meme sources. So if you know we'll wait, please tell us, we'll fix it. But yeah, there are exceptions to everybody, every rule. You can make as nice system as you want, but not everybody gets vaccinated by the municipal healthcare or gets QR codes via DGD because it's registered somewhere. Some people don't even have a... Have a way to authenticate to the government via DGID or didn't get vaccinated in Europe? Because they travel abroad by plane or by ship and they get vaccinated in a Walmart in America and then yes, how do you get in Dutch QR code? There are solutions made for that. It's a lot of hard work, but the idea was leave no one behind. But also we try to have a bit of data hygiene because else you get data doh off. Incomplete data really hurts people if you need two vaccinations and only one is popping up. The other one is gone and now somebody says, yeah, but you can print it, but it's not complete. But I need to take an airplane to my family in somewhere for my parents who are on their deathbed. Yeah, no, you can't fly because your data is not registered correctly. Well, yeah, business rules are important. You should define them well. So what does this data mean? What does the data represent? Delete all the data you don't use always because if it leaks, if it's not there, it cannot leak. You cannot abuse it. You cannot use it for things that is not supposed to be used for. We're hackers, we misuse everything what's not supposed to be used for. Don't do that with people's personal data and especially not with sensitive data like medical data. And when you do something with data, always refresh at the source. There's something with caching who come to that. And you should have exception routes because and have them ready day one because you can't have true equity if all marginalized people who already have to do run through hoops have to do it again and again and again. But also you have to prevent those exemption routes that we've built to become the rule.  So we worked hard on getting that stuff done. Also for attributions, you know, newspapers say source YouTube, so we say source newspaper. All that hard work comes to a point of going live again. The European QR code system gets live and our minister of health wants to meet the people that build it. Normally in the Dutch government, all those kind of conversations go through Cisco Webex, which is a terrible chat application. And we said, yeah, that's fun, but no. Just come to our place, come to meet hack 42 Yitzie. And he did. And the first thing he does is send this Twitter image. So yeah, that's easy to get it cleared because it's already public. And the second thing we do is ask him, are you wearing a seatbelt? And yes, he showed he was wearing a seatbelt. So that's of course. And the informal tone was set. Yes. So then you have had, will have lots of discussions about political, about 2G, 3G, 4G, 2G plus, 2G minus, 3G plus, 3G minus, 1.5G, 2.5G. Really, they invented a whole lot number of Gs for this. It's a lot of political discussion and you never know what the outcome is. And for people who don't know anything about the Gs, it stands for geinft, it was all German, but in Dutch, gevaccineerd, get test of genezend. Yeah. And they made different combinations of that and gave it different numbers and nobody knows what it means. So, but we had to prepare for all the options because then the politics might say that next week we should have these rules and it should be enforceable and how we do it. We were doing news driven development in some places because the information was faster through news outlets like new.nl than through the official lanes of communication. Yes. So make it configurable, sign your configurations and have it work that way. Yeah. So then we come to the two hardest problems with computer, naming things, cash validation, especially for maybe off by one errors. So, off by one errors, birth date. A birthday is not a date. It can be a birth year. It can be a birth year and a birth month so you don't have a birth day. Don't store it in a date column. See, everybody does it everywhere and it's giving us real lot of hassles to do this. Some points in the government they do this correctly and that's where it starts to get incompatible. And also, not everybody has a legal birth date. We didn't know that. So, the second thing is naming things. We name a lot of things, this is called the stage. All the things are humans, we name them. Not everybody has a first name, not everybody has a last name, not everybody even has a name or a legal name. And for character sets, my dear friends every government place that use it, Latin one is not an option, use UTF-8. And for one special department, tailor text encoding should not be used anymore since the 90s. Cache invalidation. Yes, so how do you delete data you don't know about? Because, as I already said, don't cache, start as source if possible. But if somebody prints out a QR code or has a yellow booklet and you want to invalidate the information in there, is that even possible? We know that it's not impossible until you start attaching claimors to yellow booklets, which was declined by request. So, it's impossible at some points. So, always assume that once data is out there, it's like oil, it will stay there. But we'll get back to this. Yes, good thing we have all those exception routes because estimates are always low. How many people do you think will need to be registered via those systems? Wow, 10,000, 50,000? Well, it was more like a million. Q started showing up at Schiphol Airport because people couldn't fetch their test data in the app. People didn't even know they needed to be tested and all the test facilities couldn't get their data out soon enough. We had people whose name in the passport was different than in the government database, which is weird because they should have been made from that database. Yeah, things happen. But this is a manual labor intensive process. So, if you want to scale it up, you need more people and as we know all that shortage of workers, it starts to get more expensive. So, try to avoid it. Try to avoid big data. When I was waking up that morning, I read that there were queues at Schiphol. I do a stand-up. Where is our sysadmin? Well, he's at Schiphol. What is he doing? He's buying new inkjet for the inkjet printers. Why were they inkjet printers? Or was it Breno that bought the inkjet printers? It was Breno. He was setting up the network because public Wi-Fi was a bit flaky. Anyway, big data. Yeah, big data. We try to avoid it. We try to have decentralized storage because sources are decentralized and we want to have as source much as possible. We use strong authentication. The client controls the data, so you get to first see what data is fetched from you. You can review it before you even start to use your data and we use as little as data as possible. We try to talk to the European Union about it that sadly failed in some parts. So, ethics and social impact. In the Netherlands, we have a democracy. Well, a constitutional democracy. We have a parliament, they make rules and then we try to implement those laws with as most freedoms as possible. And that is really hard, apparently, for government workers because normally they just look at laws and go by, oh yeah, we could interpret this very strict. Try not to. Also, the COVID virus is hard to battle. I mean, we are missing a lot of people at this event because they got tested positively and now had to go home. Also, outcome isn't sure. We don't know how this thing goes, how long it will continue. So, we have to implement fail-saves for a lot of that stuff and all the temporary restrictions, we have to make sure, in code, that everything that is temporary stays temporary. Yeah, because normally, as we hackers know, nothing is as temporary or as permanent as a temporary fix. Yeah. The cable you duct taped to the wall 10 years ago still hangs there, it works perfectly. You never gonna fix that. That's not an option if you do things like this. Also, when battling the coronavirus, yes, you have your expectations, that vaccines work.  Dancer with Janssen was not a very good experiment. But you don't know if it worked and vaccinations people couldn't get infected it would be very fine and then some of the solutions would have worked better. So, you don't know, but if you wouldn't have built it, you couldn't even use it then. So, then we come to the privacy and the security part of it. We have privacy, we have security, both are very difficult to do correctly. And a lot of people have this false idea that there is a balance of privacy and security. No, there is not.  You can't have privacy without security. You can't have security without privacy. So, you make sure it's encrypted everywhere. If your database is encrypted and you had database administrators cannot see the data. When they falsely might see some data, they see encrypted blobs and that's it. And that's protecting them, but it's also protecting the data. So, privacy and security come from both ends. So, we try to implement technical security first. That means that like encryption of data and then procedural security like database administrators are not allowed to view the data. That's the second one. And we implemented them both of course in every occasion because that's the best thing you can do. Security is like an onion layers. Oh, yes, finally I got my vaccination. Oh, and I can load it into the app. That's awesome. Next. Yes. In the future, because what are you still doing there? No, we're helping out. We found out that there are some big, yeah. Outdaring? Challenges. There are some very, yeah, challenges. This was a challenge. Thank you. There are some big challenges within the government to replace smart cards with authentication methods. We need to open source all the things. And thanks to the question, everything we open source is European public license. But we have more to do because at one point our government decided that we don't use QR codes in the Netherlands anymore. So the whole privacy preserving night thing, yeah, it's gone. It's still open source. It's still in the source. You can still build it, but it's gone. It's not used anymore. You're not allowed to use it anymore. But what about those printed QR codes then? Yeah, they still exist. And you can rebuild the source and then check them. Because the public key is available so I can see, oh, yeah, they were signed by the Dutch government. Yes, yes, yes. So we found a solution. It's a wall talk to explain why this perfectly makes sense. But the idea is that it might be a very good idea to publish the private key. Because once you have published the private key, you can do everything with it. You can check the integrity. Was it a real good private key? As you promised always. But also you can make any QR code in anything in the past or the future with this key. As this key is no longer in the trusted list, it's not. It's nothing anymore. So tomorrow night, I have a talk. Sorry, tonight in Clairvoyance, I have a talk at 10. I'm not going too deep in this, but if you have questions about it, please ask me after my talk. Well, I have a question. Why is that key not in an HSM? Oh, yeah, we did fancy trip though. And the HSMs don't support those. Yes. So that's why you need to go to the Gaby talk. So we have some time left, I think, for the questions. Sir Harold, yes. And if you don't know a question, you cannot come up with a question. We provided you with an array of example questions. And I think that's very, very kind for the audience. But I'm also curious if there are other questions than these or people have questions which are related to this list. Perhaps first I'll also check if they're from the signal. Any questions, not yet? Who wants to start with the first question? Tom, running for the microphone. Of course. What was the most complicated thing that you had to do? What's the most complicated challenge that you gave? Because you now had a story of all the challenges, or at least the bigger ones. But what was the hardest one to solve? Government. Try to talk with normal civil government workers who have been there for years and do everything in procedures that have been existed since the Stone Ages. Yeah, I kind of agree, yeah. So the whole 2G discussion then went going on. A lot of people would say, well, 2G excludes people from society because they would have to be vaccinated to get in somewhere. Did you have any discussions within the team? Yes, yes, yes, not only with the team because this was a real discussion point with us. And we did have a discussion with the minister, Hugo de Jonge, about this. Because he knew we as a team were very vocal about it and we had our opinions. And we had also a discussion with the minister. It was an open discussion which was not recorded and there are no notes from. But so we could really say what was on our mind. Yeah, we could tell our points of view why we thought 2G was a very stupid idea and we got answers why the government wants or at least the thought about it. Yeah, why they did want it. And it came down to lowering the number of cases in hospital because vaccinated people get less seriously ill. So it wouldn't stop the number of infections, it would just lower the pressure on caretakers. You're welcome. Some more questions. So you had a slide about government models and I gather you don't like them, but could you maybe elaborate on that or is that much of a trend? No, no, no, I can explain this. It's because they make data models and they make data models all the life and some people have the job of making data models. So their only job is make more data model in the data model. So you get pages and pages of very old made to be printed on matrix printers, data models that are extended with different images to be printed on needle printers and really that's what's existing right now. If we print some of the data models of the RRVM, what is it? The public health and environment database they use for COVID tracking, if we would print it in readable print it would take this entire screen for that data model of interconnected lines with all kinds of weird combinations of older data types. So they put every exception in the new version of the data model and then. And every time it was, have you seen this bit in quadrant A35 and I'm looking at, ah, fuck, I have to take another shower because. So. Does this answer your question? Okay. So how many systems did you guys have to develop to get all this working and are you still developing new ones? No, we're not really developing new ones. We started with. We're combining older ones together because some of it, because of the speed of development had a lot of shared code and why not just combine them into a shared code base for maintainability? So we started with Hari number three and we got to 12 and then we started with Ingen number three and we went to 10 and then we have some other systems so you can calculate like. I think it's 35-ish different GitHub repos. Yeah, something. Unfortunately, not 42, no, but there are other teams working. Are you even allowed to give this talk? Because, because, because, because very easy, you need to know how the government works. We were told upfront that you need permission. So we know that, yeah, without permission giving this talk is frowned upon and we could get some warning that was the worst that could happen, but okay. So what we did, we asked somebody who was allowed to give some clearance and he asked advice at some other person. The other person said, yeah, my advice is to do it. And he said, yes, and as this government, they didn't read the documents because they didn't have the documents. That's how it works. I believe in the beginning, there was also talk about the tech services being the hosting party. That was for Corona Melda. That was before we started. And yes, the Dutch tech services do a lot of IT. And so they have hosting and they might have something available that didn't go very well due to some things in parliament in the press. It was not the people there. It was more, it was politically not doable. And then the team then found the solution. So, so fixable. The tax office does work for us. As we said, there's a way to get printed documents sent via snail mail. We wanted to get the CEBG to print them because they're the most famous for getting envelopes on Dutch people's doorsteps, like all the traffic tickets and stuff. They didn't want to, couldn't, whatever. Who's the second best at printing and getting it on your doorstep? The Belasting Deans. So the tax office is our postal service. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. And I really, really want to know the answer to the last question. Oh, that's very easy. I can explain this in detail. What is magic? Yes, at once we had the minister of justice, Mr. Hopperhaus. And he said, those people at RDO, they're magicians. And then our reply was, it's only magic if you don't know what you're doing. It's very good question. Yes, hello. Corona check is currently shutting down or at the end of development. And I was wondering that published private key. What if Corona check ends up being necessary in some form or shape? Then you just... Then what happens? Then you just generate new private key, put a public key of that private key in the trusted list in the app. And you can continue working. Only everybody needs new documents to prove against what the rules are. Yeah, new codes and stuff. Yeah, the printed codes are expiring anyway in the near future because of the date restrictions that were on there. So everybody would already have to print a new paper, then do it with a new key if it needed to be used again. Thanks. You're welcome. Some more questions. We have example questions left. Please, please. Does? Does the pub exist yet? Yes, yes, it does exist. And it is running in trial now. Well, we were talking about exception routes. Some people in the Netherlands don't have a social security number. For example, Ukrainian refugees. If they come here and they are not vaccinated, they are asked, would you like to be vaccinated? And then they get vaccinated by the municipal healthcare organization of the municipality of wherever their asylum seeker home is. And how do they get their data? Well, they can now with their patient ID and their date of birth and the second factor is either SMS or email. And pub is not a flaw, but it's a product of the FLA team. FLA is not a pub. Fairly clear. Yes, next question. So I wonder why the European cure codes are bigger than the Netherlands cure codes even though they're still... Because that's not true. The Dutch cure codes are sometimes bigger, but the Europeans contain a lot more data. So that was my question actually, why the Netherlands is bigger in size, but has less data. Because of the encryption that's being used to provide you more privacy. So yeah, go to the Gaby talk if you want to know all about how they use it. Yeah, that's two more, no, Sunday at 9, I think. So more questions. Can you repeat the question? Yeah, what's with all the cats? Yes, what's with all the cats? Now, it's very simple. We have Breno on our team and Breno really likes cats. As we said at the start, the first application I started working on was called Brani Banani and that wasn't for a big loaf of bananas or anything, but one of Breno's cats is called Brani and the nickname is Banani. So Brani and Banani became the first two parts of the stack and then later his other cat, which is a really whiny, whiny cat called Zyko. Oh no, Keiko. So we got Keiko and Zyko in there as modules and we just started naming everything cat names. So if we had a new module, we'd just ask in the team, does anybody have a cat name for us? Oh yeah, we have Casper. Oh yeah, we have Mittens. The good thing is I have a cat that's called Monster. So that's with all the cat names. Question here from the back. Is it a good idea to block the recall certificates using GVCI specifically? Is it a good idea? Yes and no, it's very hard to identify which certificates you need to recall and it's only possible with the European certificates because they have an identifier in it. The Dutch ones are privacy preserving, as said. And there are ways to block the UCIs and there's now a scheme in Europe to do that. And currently the only ones I know that are blocked are the very obvious fake ones. We had the Adolf Hitler QR code in the media, Mickey Mouse, but also ones that are found in some stings with massive collections of fake documents. Yeah and also the QR code from Emmanuel Macron is blocked in the Netherlands because it protects. Is it a smart way of blocking? I don't know. There are not so many ways you can do this because privacy also makes risk, but can you take somebody's passport when it's stolen, if you don't know who stole it? It's hard. Does that answer the question? More left. Well you can find us afterwards for more details if you want. More questions? Otherwise I do have one because you have this really nice list and you know all the answers because you prepared them. Are there any questions where you would not know the answer to or would not be allowed to answer? There are two questions I'm not allowed to answer, but they're very private. All the rest is, no, let's make this very clear. We work at the government. The government is open. There are laws about it. There are laws about reusable documents, codes, all the things. There are laws about being open. We know that we work there. We know and you get used to it that your email that you're sending there can be published in some point in time if somebody requests it. We're very open. So if you say is there some secrets? Yeah, the password. But I don't have access to the computers so it would be my login password. The only NDA I have signed is for medical data that I see, so. Nope. All right, anyone for the final question? I mean, yeah. Yeah, final question. The question is monkeypox. Well, monkeypox, the question is, oh, sorry. Does this also can be used for other diseases? Well, yes. We already have monkeypox check, monkeypox, melder and everything linking to the current corona infrastructure. And we've made it very configurable. So, yeah, it's virus agnostic, so to say. So, and since it's open source, yeah, it's very easy to fork and make a monkeypox variant. Yes, we anticipate it on reusability. Yes. I'm not gonna repeat what said he was here in France because... So if people really want to know, perhaps they should check on you because indeed that's end this talk with a very big applause for the speakers. Wonderful. Thank you very much. Very well deserved applause. Thank you. Thank you.


Women of all ages have been called upon to be tech savvy, aligned with the Z generation and lend your voices to make a difference in society. First Lady of Lagos State and Chairman of Committee of Wives of Lagos State, Kauso Ibija Kesson Olu made this call by speaking with journalists shortly after an awareness war corralled in the 21st National Women Conference. Lagos State Government House correspondent Love Ikuku Ayodoku has more in this report. Bearing placards with different descriptions, they walked from the Marwa Garden in Ikeja through CBD roads and terminated at the State House of Assembly. In unison, they chanted and drummed home one message, a wake, stop the violence. Highlighting more on the theme of the conference, Ibija Kesson Olu said all women must wake up to the reality of the 21st century, be well informed and proficient in the use of modern technology. A wake stands for a call to all women, so that they can wake up from their slumber, be a voice to the voiceless, to ensure that the economy moves forward, to not think that they don't have anything to do, they have a role to play, every woman. And so for women, whether you're a market woman or not, this is a time that we must become text-waving. This is a time we must be able to talk up. This is a time which aligns with the Z generation. This is a time we need to Soro-suki. This is a time that every woman, whatever you are doing, wherever you are, you need to lend your voice and make sure that you are waking another woman out there. The Amur National Women Conference was an initiative of Senator Uluremi Chinubu in 2000, then as the First Lady of Lagos State, where committee of Wives of Lagos State Officials Council converged as supporting partners in governance. From Lagos, Love Ikuku Uyidoku, reporting for Plus TV Africa.


Try to look at names that are correlating with the Nasdaq 100 again, especially used to be trade on Nasdaq 100 names And if the Nasdaq 100 starts building above the 10-day moving average Welcome to Access a Trader the number one community for those who are committed to taking control of their trading in order to achieve success profitability and longevity Thank you for joining us. Here's Dan Shapiro to help you find your edge master your process and own your future Hey guys getting your buddy welcome to another edition of the access a trader calm nightly wrap-up show Everybody is doing well. Hope everybody had a good day of trading if you are bringing to the channel Thank you very much for spending a few minutes with us To getting to know us to kind of understanding our content of where we are coming from or at least where I'm coming from But more important guys. Thank you very much. And once again, we appreciate it like subscribe And share help along the cause of unbiased technical analysis. Let's get right into it I think tonight's update is going to be pretty direct and right to the point Okay, so we had this really great run Of about a month and a half two months worth of run We came back into rising support on the 20-day moving average if you guys remember yesterday just an absolute phenomenal day Tesla and the video the cues everything under the sun just imploded into the rising 20-day support And if you watch the last night's video, I kind of didn't have an opinion right if you just go back to last night's video I really didn't have an opinion or a strong sense of what the market was going to do because we were so close to the 20-day moving average It was super duper important to see if the market can bounce off the fifth of the 20-day moving average Or if it start if it started breaking down below the 20-day We kind of would know it would be a bigger move back to the downside and the market You know to the market pretty much say grind it up the whole day, right? It grind it up grind it up grind it up and you'll see here This is going to be a very very important Measuring point or point of reflection going into tomorrow's session You see now three days in a row that the cues have got rejected off the 10-day moving average everybody see that guys You got three days in a row that the cues got rejected at 365. This is it absolutely Tremendous and important level for the for the bulls going forward if tomorrow they could finally reclaim the 365 That means this whole area here this whole back test Into the rising 20-day moving average will be reclaimed and the bulls can reclaim back that the 10-day moving average It's got rejected three days in a row then we can start going back to upper The upper channel in this 372 upper Bollinger band. There's the flip side to this as well, right? And it's a very very basic flip side today was an inside day Okay, as much as the Nasdaq rallied 1.6% and today was literally the first day that the Dow Jones has seen green in the last seven days That's a very very important area to understand the most important part was this was an inside day for the bulls and meaning It didn't take out the previous days high again They got rejected off the 10-day and it didn't take out the previous days low So I could literally let I was saying this in the webinar today I could literally speak to a hundred people in a room divide them 50 at a piece and I could convince I can make a very convincing Argument for tomorrow's session that hey, we had an inside day We're gonna resume going lower and I could also make a really really good argument that we held the rising 20-day moving average Just like we did on May the 5th that we talked about yesterday and now we're just one day away of reclaiming the 10-day That's kind of where I'm leading doesn't mean no happen But that's kind of where I'm leading the only problem was when you go through chart after chart after chart You'll notice two things okay You'll notice that a lot of these stocks were really really oversold in the last two weeks And they just had a dead cat bounce a lot of them right not all of them But a lot of them and another very important aspect in kind of a discussion kind of preparing for your day for tomorrow is The most basic essence of technical analysis and we discussed this In nausea for years and years and years if you've been watching this broadcast There's no possible way a stock for ETF or index wherever the case may be can go higher If it doesn't start building above the previous day's channel. Well, that's the problem. We didn't despite this rally here We did not get above the previous day's channel, but we're close right again Somebody's gonna turn around say well closest is is important in hand grenades and and was it called the shoe horns A shoe throws a little bit cold. So it's really not that important until we reclaim the 10-day moving average or lose the 20 It's gonna be deemed Delta neutral However, the way we did close today you are going to start seeing many more names Starting to creep up towards the top of the channel than the bottom of the channel because while we closed You know within striking distance of the 10-day moving average. Here's the problem again Here's the problem look at names for example like Amazon right Amazon is very very strong Didn't take out the previous day's highs at Microsoft pretty strong didn't take out the previous day's highs Tesla Right dead cab bounce no way near the previous day's highs look in the video, right out a nice strong day Inside day didn't take out the highs didn't take out below. So tomorrow when you're doing your watch list tonight Try to look at names that are correlating with the Nasdaq 100 again especially to be trade on Nasdaq 100 names and if the Nasdaq 100 starts building above the 10-day moving average The stocks that are above the 10-day moving average already have a higher probability to Expanding versus the ones like an Amazon or a Tesla not that they can't go higher tomorrow At least continue this dead cab bounce from the bottom range But a lit thing has still need to do a lot of work just to get back into their supply zones So for example look at some names that are oversupply apples oversupply Metas oversupply Letter you today had an upgrade really really big move had a great run in earnings big move today on upgrade That's oversupply. So it's very very important to concentrate on those names. Is it possible for example? Tesla has another date dead cab bounce absolutely right absolutely for Tesla to really go nuts again It would have to reclaim the 10 just like the Q's again It's almost like a mirror image of the Q's But is it possible that Tesla gets another dead cab bounce tomorrow and just trades into the 510 They moving average for some cash flow absolutely So when you're doing your watch list and I guys try to find names that are above Try to find names that are above supply They're not a lot. Okay, there's always always remember when you're getting a pretty big sell-off Like we did in the last two weeks You're not going to get an Exorbitant amount of charts, but the ones that are obvious are standing pretty closely Well, look at a chart for example like Airbnb, right? Airbnb has been actually holding up fairly fairly well We discussed this chart in the past in the last couple weeks or so all it needs to do is get above this channel here Keep an eye on this thing look at a name like Roblox right Roblox the same thing one of those scenarios that again another chart They got rejected at the top of the range three times again I'm assuming if the NASDAQ starts waking up tomorrow Well, why can't Roblox right? Well, we're definitely watching Roblox above this top of the channel as well Look at a name like ENVX It's a name that we discussed a couple of weeks ago It finally had a really really big breakout today The most important part of is if you look at the weekly view right if you look at the weekly view You could see that it went the consolidation was going all the way back to January, February March, right? So this is a very very big breakout This is a name that you want to watch either in into a rising dip of this I'm a profit taking tomorrow morning or above today's ranges So there's definitely things to do meta has been holding up really really well. It's closing at the top of the range So we're definitely set up tomorrow But the key metric the key number to watch tomorrow guys is the cues nothing will happen I give you my word if the cues get rejected once again at the top of the range at the 10-day moving average at 365 I'm telling you everything else is gonna start getting hit and start going lower.  It's a very very important level if we could close Especially above the 10-day moving average that's going to reclaim supply And if you've been watching any of these videos or any of the ps60 workshops You kind of know that it is the birth of the trade And so the most important level there for the bulls is the reclaim of 365 the bearers if they want to Seize another opportunity for the market to go lower. They have to keep rejecting them there If not, we're going to have another bull parade. So I have to cut this a little bit short guys. My son has Basketball practice tonight guys have a great night everybody. We'll see what happens tomorrow We have a dead cat bounce today a lot of names still didn't reclaim the previous channels But this is what's great about the market. You don't need to recreate greatness every single day Yesterday was very aggressive a lot of value today's just a lot of dead cat bounce Let's see if the dead cat bounce could technically seize this supply and we could further a further massive run that we are holding In 2023 guys. God bless everybody. I'll see you tomorrow I'm sorry for the little bit of a short video, but daddy duty calls and I got a run. Have a great night


Okay guys, this is the Rayphoto RD881 projector. You can buy this on Amazon at £160. This is a native 1080p projector with 9500 lumens of brightness, which I think is a very good brightness level for projector of this price range. It has 4K upscaling support and this can project up to 300 inches as its max projection. This also has 2D keystone projection as well. It's not as quite as good as the ones that have 4D keystone, but nonetheless it's going to be really good to test this out to see the capabilities of it and in terms of the quality as well it also has 10,000 to 1 contrast ratio which I think is great. Inside the box you get this very nice backpack. I say backpack because it does have straps there at the end as well so you can carry this with you making it a little bit more portable than larger projectors inside here. Let's go ahead and see what we have. So just on the back pocket there you have yourself the user manual and some cleaning kit for the projector. Then there are some cables just at the end here. Let's take a look so you have your AV cable set there. You have your power plug, HDMI to HDMI and then you have the remote control just to quickly showcase this to you guys. There we go. Pretty standard remote control that controls all of the main functions that you'd expect and it does take two AAA batteries which are not supplied in the box. It is quite smaller than a lot of the projectors I've reviewed in the past and I have reviewed quite a lot. I'll also leave a link in my description to check out my projector playlist if you guys wanted to check out some of the other models. So here you can see they have touch capacity buttons at the top of the projector and you also have just on top of that the manual focus and the manual keystone. On the back of the projector you only have yourself the power port. Traditionally you will usually have all of the ports on the back but I think it's great to have them on the side as well because you just have the infrared there for the remote control which I think actually is quite nice because sometimes the IR is on the front or the sides and if you are watching it from behind the projector then it might not be so easy to control the projector from behind. So these are the ports on the back you have the headphone port, the AV port, two USB ports and two HDMI ports. So plenty of connectivity options. Right at the bottom if you wanted to elevate this and angle this you have a screw kickstand that you can turn and just point it at a certain angle and then use manual adjustments to get the keys done and the focus absolutely correct. Okay so I'm going to go ahead and set this up. I'm going to showcase a few things first of all I'll run through some of the menu and the settings in the options and then I'm also going to showcase two different types of videos one with the brightness in the room a little bit higher so I'll have the shutters and the light coming in and then afterwards I'll showcase the difference this makes with all of the shutters completely closed and I've just blacked out the room completely to really give you the experience of how this performs just a side note to remember how I view the videos and how I hear the sound of the projector is going to be slightly different to how you guys are watching and hearing this video so just bear that in mind and I'll try my best to showcase and give you an opinion of how good this is. Now I'm really going to test that 9,500 lumens of brightness hopefully that gives a very clear picture in conjunction with 10,000 to one contrast ratio and I'm also going to test out the low noise levels on this projector like it does mention in the description of the product on the amazon listing and just to generally see if it has you know good heat dissipation and I can hear everything clearly it does have hi-fi stereo audio in there as well but let's go ahead and test the sound quality in addition to the video quality and see how it performs okay so I've got it set up now I've corrected the focus manually using the buttons here so you can see this is the 2d projection and this is the focus wheel and it's very easy to do the first thing I just wanted to showcase to you guys is the noise levels that comes from the fan because one thing I've noticed is when I've turned this on compared to a lot of the projectors that I've tested in the past this is very quiet compared to that I know it's something that you guys might not be able to hear that clearly on the video but in my opinion it's one of the quietest projectors I've had especially in this price range so I'm just going to show you a video going to take it very close to the projector and see how quiet this is for you guys to hear so hopefully you guys tried to hear that as clearly as you can if you do have some headphones then that would be the best way to watch this video and to listen to some of the sound tests now I do have a lot of sunlight coming into the room as you guys can see and I wanted to showcase to you guys the brightness levels with this projector allowing you to still see everything quite clearly just going to quickly run through the menu here so the first option here is multimedia this is for USB so when you go into that you can select movie music photos or text so like documents for example and I'm using the remote by the way it is pretty responsive and I really like using this this also allows you to cast your iPhone and Android phones using iOS cast and mirror cast which I think is a great option this gives you instructions on how you can very easily do that like so then you have the AV input you can actually connect your iOS cable and have a wired connection as well which I think is great and then there's your two HDMI ports just a quick run through the settings so you can configure your wi-fi if you go into system settings here you'll find all of the common options and it does have bluetooth as well so if you're wanting to listen to your movies using this with wireless headphones then connect to bluetooth and you can do that as well and then if you go to projection settings projection mode allows you to switch between where the projector is located so you have front desktop which is where I've got it on the tabletop right now you can mirror it and reverse it like so you can switch it around upside down and flip that around as well and then you're back to the start you can also change the focus settings from here so very minimal amounts of settings compared to a lot of the projectors but I think sometimes simplicity does go a longer way which I think is great so what I'm going to do is I'm going to connect my Apple TV with the HDMI port here because this doesn't have any inbuilt OS that allows you to use on-demand apps there's no Android TV on this so you would have to connect something to watch on it so whether that's your laptop your fire stick your Apple TV whatever it may be plenty of different options so let me showcase an example of showing a demo video in this level of brightness in the room and then what I'll do is turn off all of the lights all of the shutters make it a blackout and really show you the quality on how this projector performs okay now I have my Apple TV connected I've connected it directly to the HDMI port so I'm going to go ahead and open up HDMI one from the front menu and now this is my Apple TV so let me showcase a demo video I'll just pop over to YouTube okay you can see it's still quite clear I can see a lot of the vibrant colors in this demo video and there's some music playing in the background so I also wanted to showcase the audio as well but I'm going to focus on that with the next demo video that I'm going to show you but just for reference while this is playing I'm going to turn off all of the shutters and make it pitch black to really showcase how clear this video is there we go look at the detail in this I know it doesn't do justice in the video and how you guys are watching it whether that's on your phone your laptop or your TV but this is very sharp and very clear for me personally it's probably one of the brightest colors I've seen in any of my previous projector reviews and I'm not just saying that because this one I feel like 9500 lumens is probably one of the largest amounts of brightness in this price bracket range for a projector of this size as well and as you can see you know it's doing an excellent job displaying all of the colors I feel like I'm going to really enjoy watching my movies in this and even in a lot of the darker scenes it would be quite clear so the next video will have a lot of darker scenes and it will have some vibrant colors and it will have some really good audio as well so I'm going to give you like the whole demo in one so let's switch over to that and really showcase how it sounds and I will put the volume up I'll stand very close to the projector so you guys can hear the audio and showcase you guys how that performs so there you have it guys that was a really great demo and for me personally if I'm going to be watching movies at night time when it is already quite dark this is super bright and I'm super happy with the way this performs even this little demo video I'm showing you now it feels so clear because this is a 4k video that I'm just playing off of YouTube and I feel like this has upscaled it a little bit from 1080p because it is ultra detailed it's super sharp the colors are vibrant and I feel like this will be great for pretty much anyone that wants to connect their own HDMI source to a projector and really enjoy their TV shows and movies like I do so take a look at the description below hopefully this helped you guys decide if this is a very good buy to have the link for the amazon listing is down in the description as always make sure to like this video make sure to subscribe I've got new videos out every week and I'll be reviewing plenty of other projectors in the near future check out my projector playlist as well which I'll put down below and I will catch you guys at the next one take care


You're welcome. Hello, everyone. Cool. Great. We'll just do a three, two, one, and here we go. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Everybody that is tuned in, welcome for the final time this year to the last episode of our series, The Stories Women Carry. Once again, this is one of our special recorded episodes, so we're very, very excited to be sharing this space. I'm your official question asker for the last time of this series, and I'm very, very excited to be introducing our panelist today, Sheba Haest, who's with us. Hi, Sheba. I suppose we're in the middle of a little bit of a tech challenge here. You may have to bear with us throughout the series. There's just a lot of network issues that we're having in the country today, so thank you for your patience. In the meantime, as we wait to get Sheba back, again, just want to thank everybody that's here, that's watching and listening, and also want to thank our sign language interpreters, our American sign language interpreter, and the whole company, and then, of course, Lucy and Raphael, who have been with us from the beginning of the series. It's really, really special to us to be able to present both American sign language and Kenyan sign language interpretation as part of this series. Again, with the support of HowlRound, thank you so much for making this possible for the first time, and we hope that it's something that we can continue to do in the world of accessibility. Of course, just to mention also that the series is being co-produced by the Tabiriats Foundation and the Nairobi Musical Theater Initiative, so thank you all so much for all your producerial support through and through this time. It's great. It looks like we have Sheba back. Hi, Sheba. Hi. Hi, Karishma. How's it going? It's good to see you. It's going great. It's having all the drama of trying to schedule Zoom conversations with phone calls and all the other things that are part of this space and re-learning how to use everything that we literally know how to do again. Yeah, it really feels like picking things up from scratch all over, and everything we knew isn't really helpful anymore because the world is operating differently. Absolutely. I feel like we're doing the most dramatic season of learning and unlearning things, and while it's terrifying, it's also opened up such interesting creative possibilities, actually. I'm trying to look for the silver linings all the time. Always.  I mean, it's the experience, I think, all of us that work with you have of you, and yeah, I think it's so marvelous to be able to be connected in the world much more closely because of the time that we're living in, and so I think that the world of technology brings a lot of advantages to creative connections across the globe. So on that note, thank you so much for being here with us today. Thank you for making time to speak to us in the midst of crazy production schedules, which hopefully you'll be able to tell us a little bit more about later on. But I'd like us to dive in and start off by just hearing about who you are. Tell us about your journey. I mean, I know you, I first, so for those that are tuning in for the first time, the last time of the series, I first met Sheba in 2018 when she was in New York producing Tingatinga Tales on Broadway. And we've been working together ever since as part of the Nairobi musical theater initiative and a lot of other projects. But Sheba, tell us, for our audiences, tell us how you got into this field. I'm still trying to figure out what this field actually defines itself as. I'm kind of like a jack of many trades, many, many trades. But I really, I run the, I'm the director of a production company called Rainmaker, which I run together with my, my business partner and husband, who is a musician in Kenya, called Eric Waidaina. And Rainmaker basically is a management and production house that we set up about more than 10 years ago to basically support his career and to create like, you know, a production outfit that would reinforce like his creative production. And so that brought us into owning a studio, building and owning a studio, having a record company. And then because he went into writing musical theater, I also started to produce musical theater, kind of really landing on the job and figuring out how to make that kind of, make those kinds of productions for our audiences here in Nairobi. And then I later also started a film festival because that wasn't enough, right? So I also run the Nairobi Film Festival. It's one of the other projects I do. And now you're doing Map Theatre Kenya as well. And now I'm doing Map Theatre Kenya as well. Yeah. So everything seems to kind of birth another thing and birth another thing and you kind of find ways to adapt and move. Yeah.  It's really, I don't know how you do it, because I think there was some, at some point we were seated together and I think we counted 12 different responsibilities in both your personal and your professional life that were taking up all your time. So it's incredibly, incredibly admirable and something that I think us young people look up to. Oh, thank you for that, Karishma. Sometimes it feels like, yeah, I mean it can feel overwhelming at times, but I think one of the really interesting things about working in Nairobi and in a place where there are not a lot of well-established practices in the different creative sectors, you find yourself having to develop skills that expertise basically in completely new areas and sometimes having to really invent the pathways that are going to get you there. So it's not really about just making your creative content but really having to build the structure through which that creative content will then reach audiences. And so, yeah, I think in a sense what seems like an overbearing amount of work in one context has then turned out to be quite useful because we're innovating all the time and we're not sort of restricted to the practices that we've specialized in, which I think is models that exist elsewhere in the world, but by necessity we're having to be very adaptable to different situations. And that's turning out to be something of an asset in this particular context, actually. Yeah, I'd love to hear you speak a little bit more about that with specific examples from your life.  So how is it like as a music producer, as a record label producer, and then also being a theater producer, and then also being a film festival producer, can you speak to a specific example of how those skills were transferred in your personal life? Well, I can say, I think that I would say like with the theater production space, for instance, because the music production space, like by necessity, you have to reach like hundreds and hundreds, like thousands and thousands of people to be able to have like a sustainable craft and a sustainable career. We already had built a lot of competencies, for instance, in how to reach audiences with ticketing platforms and things like that. Whereas Nairobi has a theater scene that had quite would do its productions are quite a limited amount of time. I think our expectations of the numbers of people that we wanted to reach with our productions was already quite like aspired to a higher number than that, just because, you know, we know about producing concerts with like hundreds and thousands and thousands of people and the mechanics for making that happen, which we've been part of building and being able to bring those worlds into our world. I mean, to be sorry, to be boring and talk about ticketing so much, but it's such an anchor of my work. A lot of like the ticketing platforms in Nairobi, for instance, were very much geared towards selling single day tickets. And so the whole like software engineering behind the scenes that those those platforms had was really here to like one or two or three days of a single product. Now, when you're talking about producing, say like I produced the Tinga Tinga Tales, which is a family musical that we put on like two years ago and at the National Theatre. And suddenly you're demanding of like your ticketing partner that they have to now create like individual tickets for like 30 days, four categories, five categories of tickets with the possibility of individual seating charts, which was not something that they had innovated yet. And I mean, it's a grueling process because you're helping them to innovate to towards what you need, but you really have to be part of building the tools that are going to allow you to be to be free to actually focus on doing the creative work. So you constantly having to bring skills from this area and knowledge and insight from this area and using that to build tools that will serve this other new sector, for instance. That's very interesting, particularly for our Kenyan scene, right? Because we're always having these conversations about creating a culture for theatre going, which is something that we're doing as we're also creating work, which may not necessarily be the same experience elsewhere in the world. What happened when you went to do Broadway with Tinga? How is that different from when you were producing it at the National Theatre here? I mean, I have to say that sometimes it's really interesting. We had done an earlier edition of Tinga Tinga in a very much smaller place. We've done it in a tent in our own space and then we transferred it to the National Theatre in the year that followed. But part of the thing that made us be able to scale our National Theatre run to the levels that we wanted to get to really professionalize was that we had the opportunity to take it to the New Victory Theatre in New York. Our production team had an incredible learning experience by just preparing ourselves to present in that space. It gave us so many insights into processes that now we're talking about people with decades' worth of experience in producing these kinds of works. Because we were having to rapidly learn not just the language, but the culture, the practice, the professional processes that they involved in, we were incredibly upskilled in a very short space of time just because of trying to meet those expectations. Even the amount of planning time in advance was so much further ahead than we would normally do. But that is because that is how that practice works in the New York context. In the end, it ended up expanding what we were able to do and really resetting the standard for what we were able to do. And it made us grow our culture around our tech like maybe 10 or 20-fold. We were incredibly mentored and upskilled by basically working to this other criteria. We also had a very powerful experience taking the cast. It was a huge fundraising experience to just get enough resources together to be able to take this cast of 15 or 20 people. In the end, I think it was such an eye-opening experience for all the band members and the cast members who had an opportunity to see that their work resonated with audiences far beyond. They had a successful run in Kenya, but to see their work then connecting so seamlessly with children in New York and children from who are regularly exposed to a grand and wonderful production, that to be able to hold our own in that space was quite a powerful experience for everybody. We believe in ourselves. We would like to get that affirmation that we're producing content that speaks across spaces. And there was also a really just interesting thing that happened organically just by being in another person's space and learning a lot, for instance, about the union rules and the way that performers and practitioners in the field are carefully protected by years of having to, I guess, to gain those levels of protection. It gave us a lot of insights about how to improve our own health and safety and fair work practice culture, just which we transferred a lot of that knowledge back into the way that we do things here now. So it was great. I mean, we also had a lot of a chance to see a lot of inspiring productions. Everybody had tickets to go see once on this island while it was running on Broadway. And it's mind blowing, you know. But inspiring and also interestingly brings things that seem quite far, quite close in accessibility because you can see what the inner workings are. Some members of our crew had the opportunity to sit in lighting boxes and sound boxes in other productions that were arranged for us through different friends in the US. So our tech teams also got to sit inside, behind the scenes kind of context and get to see the inner workings from that perspective. It was amazing. Yeah. I can't recommend it enough. Yeah, that sounds like such a wonderful exchange as well. And just hearing how the tech teams were able to learn from each other as well, because I'm sure that just how you've spoken about the agility of what it means to be a Kenyan producer, working across various different contexts, I think the same is applicable to our tech crew here, which may not necessarily be the same over there. So it's exciting to hear you speak about how that exchange was, you know, in person and fruitful. In that sense, I look forward to the day when we're able to fly out again like that and be able to be in the same space or in the same enclosed capsule without catching whatever viruses are in the air at the time. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. But just to go back to one thing that you spoke about ticketing and how that is so central to the work that you do as a commercial producer, even as you know, music and theater as well. How do you foresee, of course, this pandemic shifting the way that we look at ticketing or the way we look at audience buying for productions and music? Yeah, I mean, of course, there's been a lot of like, everybody has been forced to take a good, hard look at the world that they live in. And to be honest, like really have a crisis of confidence about like whether our field has adequately prepared itself to weather a situation like this and whether and the reality of needing to really consider how your work lives across different platforms. But in doing that, sort of realizing as well that things don't have the same automatic entertainment value when they shift from in-person to an on-screen experience for example. And so beginning to explore very intentionally what content that is, you know, looking at what their on-screen experience needs to look and feel like and beginning to create content that goes directly towards that. For instance, like we normally produce a big like Christmas concert at the end of the year, that's what we're in the middle of like making right now.  And we have, we took the decision to like work really hard to make a an experience that is designed from the onset to live on television and that has shifted a lot of parameters for us but it also has opened up also in like wonderful possibilities of what we can do, you know, using the lens of the camera and the spaces that we create and collaborating with a whole new version of like a whole new group of like creative people who come from a cinematic background in a cinematic tradition who are adding a whole other layer on top of the thing that we already make. And that is very, very satisfying, very gratifying. What's really interesting about moving on to these other platforms that then have the opportunity to reach not hundreds of people at a time but millions of people at a time, you begin to see how much earlier you need to start to work on this content so that it does have that sticky effect. And it also opens you up to the two different possibilities of financing this work, you know, because now you're able to speak to commercial partners who are very interested in accessing that much larger potential audience. We're working very closely with the broadcaster for instance on this particular show but it's really got the cogs in my head thinking about like how do I bring this whole experience that I'm having around this concept to creating theater productions that are designed from the onset, not to be films but to be theater that's designed for living on digital and broadcast media. So it's kicked off this whole other line of thinking that I think was really the preserve of the most elite theaters that could afford to have the most like high tech people come in and do these, you know, we watched some of those beautiful productions I think coming out of them and forgetting their name, the National Theater was doing those beautiful filmed Shakespeare I think is what I watched earlier this year. And again, sometimes the standard production seems unattainably high but going through this musical, this Christmas musical experience, suddenly those parameters have become much more accessible to me and I'm like able to imagine what that would feel like if we were applying that to a stage production. No, yeah, I mean, you know, it gets me to think about this other question that is really present in the scholarly world of performance studies which is this idea of archival and how, you know, within the Western world, within African traditional performance as well, what has been written of course is not enough but what it is is that it's primarily written. So how central would you say in your process as you think about incorporating film and broadcasting and all of these other elements, how do you think that's going to change the way what is happening in the contemporary Nairobi scene or contemporary African theater scene will shift in terms of archival?  And maybe it's an interesting moment to talk about like the project that we've been working on together which is this MAP theater project. You know, we realized that because everything in the theater sector in Kenya, which is such a fragile ecosystem anyway, came to a complete halt and, you know, people's livelihoods were on the line and everything was just completely like we couldn't see the future in any kind of way. And so we're just in a sort of like hold mode. And we kicked off this research project to basically map the space and to begin to like dig into understanding what the challenges are of the space and what the threats to the sustainability of the Kenyan theater space are and to really articulate that from a practitioner perspective and really get as many voices heard as we could. And I think as we discovered during that process, like one of the things that there is so little continuity from one set of experiences to the other and there's needing to be such deeper investment in getting the work that you do written about while we're making it, documenting some of those processes behind the scenes so that that knowledge is somehow available and accessible to other people and really considering like what portals of like archiving to use your word can exist. Whether it's like, whether it's in sort of magazine type format, but also engaging more directly with people who write academically about the space to continue to take an interest and really kind of trying to break down the silos that exist between the space.  And this big pause allowed us to do that to take stock of where we've come from and to really consider collectively and together where we're going. I mean, those conversations by necessity because of the Zoom platform or by convenience were able to be recorded. So suddenly we have this record of really people like a documented exploration, you know, interrogation of like where we are at now and where we're trying to get to. And I think, yeah, that's, I don't know that I have an answer for it yet, but I certainly think it's really, it's really brought you to the forefront, not just for myself, but for many of us in the field at the moment. Yeah. And what I find so valuable about what you've just said is that it's very practitioner driven, meaning even the process that we've spoken about or that you kind of highlighted in terms of research and collection is focused on what exactly will be helpful in the next 5, 10, 15 years to build an economy that is practitioner focused, that is sustainable for the folks that are in, you know, in the moment all the time at that time. And I think that also presents a very different perspective toward the way we think about sustainability in a creative economy because oftentimes I think it can, that can be so lost in the cultural policy world of things, which is still valuable, but to have this other side and hear from practitioners is really, really interesting. And I'm sure it's been, well, since we work on it together, I know that it's been very, very, given us some like powerful insights, but also powerful solutions, you know, and we found lots of low hanging truth things, like the fact that narrow be just doesn't have a centralized prop shop, like, you know, that where people can hire things from. So you're like having to buy everything every time from scratch and then store it in your mother's garage, you know, and like, is this, is this really the way that we, is this, is this really all we can do narrow be, you know, all of us, all of us producing in the theater sector can get together and practice one. So it's that's been, that's been really useful in terms of just coming together to, you know, creating a hive mind around something that says like, oh, this is really something that we should talk on the head quite quickly, and need to be improved the experience and the sustainability of the state. And I think one of the things that is very exciting about producing in a place that I'm not very well established, not not very well, not very long theater practice tradition in the contemporary theater, then is that you cannot escape from the work of you don't have the privilege of just being like, well, I know, I just want to, I just want to write my plays and put them up for audiences, you do have to be by necessity part of creating the environment. But it also means that you can create it how you need it to be. And you can create it, you don't have to inherit something and then adapt yourself towards that. But you can create things that are agile and useful and built on built very much in this contemporary moment. And that, you know, have the usefulness of all the tech innovation and all the different ways that we're thinking about labor and all of these new insights and thinking, I mean, and even around the culture of their practice of policy and that kind of thing, we have the benefit of like, you know, starting us out from a very strong position of having built a lot of consensus to each other. That's really, yeah, I mean, I think that freedom and flexibility to create our own system is really, really, really exciting.  Just in terms of the next generation of theater makers and in terms of thinking about creating this sustainable economy that hypothetically will last to support this new generation of artists. How do you, how do you, what do you see the ideal version being for us in Kenya? Do you feel like it's more aligned towards what we see as a Broadway model? Do you feel like it's different? And if so, why? Well, I think that it's, I mean, I don't, I think that, you know, you have that Broadway model there as a reference point of what one society has done with its thing and used something that sustains, you know, millions of hundreds of thousands of people. I don't know how many there are in the theater system, but there are many, you know. And that's something that's an interesting reference point. Of course, we live in a very different economic context. So that already becomes something that what is your thinking to work a different way. One of the things that I think is really, I learned just the other day, I was talking to some friends who are live music presenters and this guy that I was talking to he owned a company called Life Beats, he's called Shafiq and he was saying that in order for there to continue to be audiences that want to go to live gigs and that don't only have an appreciation for live performed music, kids have to learn music in school. They have to have this connection to the fact that it's hard to play the guitar well, but it's also a joyful and rewarding thing to experience. You have to kind of cultivate that love for the thing from quite a young age so that when you're faced with the expertise of Benjamin Kabaseke playing, you know, expertly in a gig, you have this profound appreciation for what that excellence is and, you know, you can access that. You have a way of reading that, you know. And I think that there's something quite fundamental that we as the theater sector who are like, you know, in this end of the professional end of the as practitioners, we have to really take a very keen interest in how we get things started right from the grassroots in cultivating children's love and appreciation for and access to the language of theater. Now, the theater in kind of still lives in schools, but in very much like, you know, part of the drama music festival, but it's not considered something that's called the learning experience. And if we don't get involved in being the most rigorous advocates for that experience to be part of what we cultivate in children from an early age, that we're undermining our own future audiences, and we're undermining our future practitioners.  But like, you know, we also have, we have to take that responsibility. It's not going to just happen automatically. And part of like, having a sector that is organized around like the futures that it wants to see that you can start to really champion these values right from like seeing the education system. And then at another level also championing those values to like our arts and culture, our arts and culture ministry and ensuring that our arts and culture ministry is not being for the right amount of the national budget allocation so that we can build spaces and we can equip those spaces and that we can provide professional level training. It's really working at the grassroots level. Yes, with like, with kids and people who are having a first access to theater experience at a maybe very rural level. And then also working at this other end, this other end that now celebrates excellence and shines a light on things that are, you know, have risen to the top basically of the practice and really investing a lot in expressing the value and the esteem that we hold that. I don't know if that answers your question completely, you know, but that's been on my mind quite a bit since that interesting conversation. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's a very complex answer because, you know, and that is the nature of the kind of work that we have to do because it not only all of a sudden means that we're focusing on the practitioners, you know, working at the moment, but we're thinking about education and we're then thinking about statistics and then we're then thinking about national budgets. So it's a much larger ecosystem to think about than just the current cultural practitioners and people that are, you know, moving and shaking now, because the now won't be the now tomorrow, you know. Oh, exactly. And, you know, just to focus a little bit more on, and this is, I guess, is more of a personal question now as we've spoken about the philosophical, to focus still on the next generation of producers specifically or folks that are interested in the administrative side of making theater, making any sort of art happen.  You know, let me kind of switch it around a bit instead of asking what advice you have to give? What sort of advice did you wish you had when you were 20? And for that, I think it would be really helpful if you're able to share a little bit of your journey as well from where you started so that our audiences know what amazing things you were doing when you were 20 and you were like a director at that point. You were not just, you know, apprenticing. Apprenticing, it was you were running an entire trust. What advice would I wish I had? I mean, I think that what I, well, let me say what I think I did right, you know. I think there's a fearlessness that comes with youth and an audacity that comes with youth where you just don't have the experience to know that it's not possible. And I think particularly in this ecosystem where things still are there, they're available for the defining and for the making, I think leaning into that energy and continuing to lean into that energy of if it doesn't exist, let's make it is incredibly, incredibly useful and will allow you to make a lot of headway, you know, will allow you to make leaps that are not obvious to people who become then very well established in the tradition. I think that you get to a place as you become more experienced where you know all the reasons why things won't work and you spend a lot of energy. Sorry, this monkey's running on the roof. I don't know whether you've heard that. Okay. I live out in the wild. We live out in the wild a bit. So there's always a little bit of wildlife yet trying to do something. I think that so I think that audacity and holding onto that I think that is very useful. And saying yes to situations you are going to have to learn how to do it by doing it. And so the sooner that you can get involved in helping somebody else who's trying to do something, do that thing, the sooner you can insert yourself into situations where you're seeing the practical application of ideas turned into actual things because I think that's what producing is. You know, you an idea happens in someone's book or in someone's song and in their head and then your job is to basically marshal the resources to make that happen. And literally anyone can do that. Right? The more powerful your phone book becomes the easier it becomes to do that. But that's literally the practice of learning to become a good producer is producing. There isn't another simpler. There's not a school. There's not a book. There's not a manual. There is the accumulation of your own lived experiences once again, especially in this context where you're having to make those things happen from scratch. I think I might have wanted myself, and I still challenge myself to do this, to not stop looking to keep on looking very dedicatedly at what else is going on in your field and keeping on feeding the creative part of yourself.  And it's creative in the sense that, like, you have to be able to have this, like, to carry this vision, basically, of what the thing could be. Sorry, I just got a phone call. It was my mom. I pushed it away. I'll call her back. Hi, mom, if you watch this. So just to put it was, I say, yes, you have to keep on feeding your creative spirit. You have to keep watching stuff. You have to keep listening to stuff. You have to keep reading stuff that challenges what you think you know about, like, how things are supposed to be done. There's too many times where, again, in a small context, like a smaller context like ours, things have been done a very exact particular way. And before you know it, you will become one of the people being like, this is how it's all done. The play that was done from Saturday and Sunday only. Audiences won't come on a Monday, you know. And suddenly you're, like, here making self-fulfilling property. That stage has to be done in this space, only this space.  And you do, and we have incredible resources now available to us both in things that are printed and things that are, you know, that things that are living online and things that you can go see in person. You have to stay connected to what's being made in your world. And you have to carve out time to internalize that stuff. No, it's shopping for ideas. So whoever, so whoever thinks producing is just administrative, actually, there's an art. Who said producers were not artists? Who said that? The biggest one, a master artist. We just paint with people who are like, yeah, let's see, I think this person and this person will have this wonderful energy together and make this thing. Yeah, and it's such a profound way of thinking about it because, as you said, we are the vision carriers, right? And, you know, it's a true form of leadership in that context because it allows artists to actually do the work that they're doing. But without that sense of consolidation or being able to question yourself in that space, it becomes very difficult. So thank you for that. Thank you for that jewel. You always drop so many jewels for us. I have to say, I think there was one other conversation we were having and it changed my view of ticketing because I come from very non-profit fundraising style producing background. And you said at that moment, when an audience member buys a ticket, it's like getting a vote of approval for whatever work you're doing. That also stuck with me because, again, you're thinking about infrastructure as not just being one that is sustainable for development of artists, but one that actually feeds the people that we're making this for. Because without the people, what's the point of the art and vice versa? Yeah, I mean, that thinking comes very much from my dad with a cartoonist. And I mean, there's a lot of development corporation funding in this context. And in a way that development corporation funding because it's the resources that are available to make stuff start to shape the conversation about what's going to get made. And the same thing in the comic book world. And so you have a lot of what you would call like programmed issuing. Here's a nice comic book. It has a nice story. There's an underlying theme about like water or sustainable forests or something. And these things can be done quite elegantly in a very useful education tools, but it shouldn't squeeze out the other voices. There's so many other stories that need to be taken. They should be they should be reinforcing something that is also speaking directly to an audience and creating a space for that audience to like, you know, negotiate its cultural norms and and interrogate them as well. And have a chance to see, you know, how how, yes, that that transported thing that stories do that allow us to see the outcomes of a set of choices that we might be grappling with in our lives, you know, seen to the conclusion. My dad would always say that it's so important that one point you've got to put your comic on on on that you've got to put your comic on the stand, you know, on the newsstand. Because that thing will tell you like if a kid is willing to be like, I won't have break today so that I have, you know, I'll sacrifice my lunch money or my pocket money to get this thing. That's a really strong endorsement of the work that you're doing because, yeah, for, you know, well, here we are in this transactional society. This is how we express value at this moment. That's not to say also that there isn't a huge value in, I mean, you always have to think about what people are putting in to get that thing. So again, I mean, I don't think that the not-for-profit world is not challenged by those things as well in terms of the fact that like, you know, you put up this show and yes, maybe you have a whole bunch of like tickets that are available at concession rates because you're also trying to always meet people at the place that they can afford to participate. And I think you have to have a real, I mean, I'm definitely a, you know, a social change activist on one level and I'm always looking for that. Like how do I make sure I'm making as broad a range of possibilities available to people who can participate in this?  No, I mean, the person who needs that free ticket still has to figure out how to get there. Still has to figure out like what they're going to do with their kids while they're going to have that experience. There's a cost to them.  And sometimes people are negotiating between those two choices, you know. Yeah, so we've got to be constantly thinking with our audiences about where we can meet to have this exchange. Shiba, I think that's such a wonderful note for us to let our viewers reflect on. Thank you for sharing your experience and your journey and, you know, these valuable insights with us just for us to, for those that are artists that are watching this, to be able to think more deeply about their contribution and their work and the infrastructure they're creating. And for those that are not to really reflect and think about their involvement in the cultural space wherever they're at in the world. So thank you so much for giving us your time, bang in the middle of production hell. Thank you really for dedicating this time to speak to us and sharing your journey. It's a pleasure, Karishma. I have just like enjoyed like just being in your spaces and also learning so much from you as well. I love the series that you put together. I think it was a brilliant thing to have done to bring all these voices online. I've learned a great deal by listening to the others as well. And yeah, I just, yeah, onwards and upward. Thank you so much. Thank you. And just to, just to end, I just wanted to ask if there's any social media or any other platforms people can follow you on to learn more about your work. And of course, feel free to, you know, reach out to me directly if you're interested to speak to Shiba or pick her brain about more things. But curious if there's a space for us to follow you anywhere online. Well, I am on Twitter as myself, Shiba has. And I'm on, I'm on Facebook and I'm on Instagram. And those are easy places to reach me. I'm a very frequent stalker, maybe more of a poster. But you can also find my work. You can also see a lot of our work through my husband's, through Eric wininer.com, which is my husband's social media thing and a lot of our work together. So you'll see some there. And of course, there's a Nairobi musical theater initiative, which will tell you all about the work that we're doing in developing new musical content for, for the continent first, and then for the world outside, alongside that. And I may be encouraged by you, you, you probably have, but we're on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter with NBO musical theater initiative. Yep. And actually, this will be streaming on that platform. So hopefully you'll be able to check out this platform. Yes. Thank you so much, Shiba. I'll let you get to speaking to your mom and running rehearsal and the 12 million other things you're doing. But thank you again. Right. Thank you. Take care. And thank you every way. Bye. Bye.


And he's strong enough to carry the whole movie talk about an underrated actor kind of mirrors Sylvester Stallone because he was friends with Stallone. He was in Rocky and Stallone wrote Rocky Stard in Rocky.