Hi everyone, it's Giovanni here from WebSummit 2021. I'm here with Tim Draper. How are you doing, sir? Doing great. Thanks for having me on your show, Giovanni. The WebSummit is really extraordinary. And what's really exciting is the energy level is so high because the people who came are the ones who want to live their lives. There are a lot of people hiding behind their Zoom calls, but this is the group that wants to live their lives and so there is an energy here unmatched by other conferences. Regarding your personal interests, are you interested in any specific sectors of the crypto industry apart from Bitcoin? What are the sectors that you are scouting around in the latest time? Well, you said apart from Bitcoin. Bitcoin is really the center of my focus because I look and I say Bitcoin's the way they're in the position of maybe what Microsoft was in back when the internet was getting going or when software was getting going where they could pick and choose, they were the operating system and they could pick and choose which applications they wanted to operate on their operating system. I think it's similar here. So I think Bitcoin will be the big winner, but I also think there's some real creativity that's come from a lot of the entrepreneurs who are trying other things with crypto. Aragon, for instance, is a new jury system and it might lead us to a liquid democracy someday. The Tezos guys, they've created a whole system of governing through proof of stake. I think that's really innovative and exciting. I think that there are some really interesting and exciting new crypto cryptocurrencies, but then there are all these amazing projects, whether they be around smart contracts or NFTs or DeFi, they're coming up with new ways of, in DeFi, new ways of running financial systems and creating more liquidity in all these markets and more liquidity means more wealth for the world. And that's exciting. And NFTs could take on many different lives. I thought about art, of course, but I thought about using NFTs for voting because they are all one of, each NFT is a specific item of only one and can't be copied and that's perfect for a voting system. And it's probably good for about 5,000 other great applications that no one's come up with yet. So cool things are going to be happening. When we talk about the following year, like 2022, we saw that in 2021, it was a great year for Bitcoin, for crypto in general. We saw that the first Bitcoin ETF was accepted in the US. We saw the rise of NFTs as you mentioned. What are the milestones that we should look forward to for 2022 according to you? I think the big milestone for 2022 will be that retailers start using OpenNode or Lightning Network to allow their customers to use Bitcoin. And once that happens, once people can buy their food, clothing, and shelter with Bitcoin, they're not going to use any fiat currency ever again. Why would you? If you can hold a currency that is sort of the currency of the future and a currency that you know is they're only 21 million, not subject to any political whims. Nobody's printing trillions of them. Rather hold that than you would a currency that is subject to inflationary pressure, something a government can pull back from you. I just think you're going to end up with people really running for Bitcoin. But do you think that's going to happen in 2022? Doesn't it look a little bit too ahead of time? Like people accepting Bitcoin in retail for transactions and so on? Well, they're already doing it now. I was in New York and I went and got a haircut and I said, do you take Bitcoin? And they said, yeah, here, you know, we're using OpenNode. I think it was OpenNode. Yeah, here you can use Bitcoin. And they were actually pretty enthusiastic about it. So they were thinking, my Bitcoin is going to be worth more than my dollars are. So, yeah, buy it in Bitcoin. And I think people say to me, well, when are you going to sell your Bitcoin? And I say, into what? Why would I ever sell this? It would be like saying, I'm going to take dollars and convert them into Confederate dollars or take euros and turn them into Greek drachma or French francs. It's taking, you know, a currency of the present and the future and trading it for a currency of the past. I don't want to do that. In fact, I want to move out of as much fiat currency as I possibly can so that I can move it into Bitcoin. If you had to make a price prediction for the end of this year, what would that prediction be? Oh, I only make one prediction every four years. And my prediction about three years ago was that Bitcoin will hit 250,000 by 2022. The end of 2022 or early 2023. And people thought I was crazy because it was at 4,000 when I said it. But they don't think I'm quite as crazy now. We are half the way through. Well, we're at 62,000. I mean, not halfway, but... If it's a log scale, we're more than half the way there. Cool. Thanks a lot, Tim. My pleasure. Go get them going telegraph.


You ever stand with somebody while they were taking photographs and on seeing the results you were amazed about what they saw and you didn't. The more you look the more you find and we're going to explore how you will be able to unlock your potential to see the infinite possibilities for photographs that are all around you. How to be relaxed when looking at the world and when you're relaxed you take better photographs. Rather than seeing the world in one fixed way you'll get break free of the constraints that have been holding your photography back. It's time to develop new ways of looking at what you see before you with increased perception so the possibilities for you to photograph will explode. How's it how's it? By the end of this video you'll have unlocked the seven steps to all those secret scenes you keep missing. We're all capable of creating a reasonably well exposed competently average photograph but you know who wants to be average? There are hundreds of thousands of words that have been spoken and written about seeing photographs. Very few of them however have been devoted to possibly the most important actually vital aspect of the whole process of creating photographs and that's the act of searching. Having the latest camera the fanciest lens reading the best books none of it matters one iota if you're not actually there to take the photograph. Look at this image it's a remarkable photograph not just because of the simplicity or its mood or its composition but also for what the photograph doesn't show. It doesn't show the photographer Pete Turner was there at the scene which was why he was able to create this photograph. Now without you searching for photographs in the first place no images can ever be created you've no doubt been told at some point to seek out different and unusual subjects so your photography can be unique but what exactly is different and unusual you know it can be many things it doesn't have to be a racing car bursting past in a blur or some other exotic subject. Anything can be different and unusual so long as it's photographed in a way that excites the viewer's eyes. The biggest trap you're going to fall into is going somewhere and looking only for specific things you might end up at the beach and just search for driftwood. Jay Maisel said that the most dangerous thing a photographer can do is to go out with a picture already in their head and what happens is why do you're thinking about what you want to photograph you're missing out on what's going on around you next time you out simply take time to be in the moment and to search and seek out the wide possibilities presented to you. There is a fundamental difference between what we see and experience when taking photograph and the photograph itself the scene before us has sound smells the warmth of the sun or the coolness of the mist we've all created a photograph at some point which doesn't really match with the memory of our scene what seems so real and vivid to us at the time has just ended up as a dull and lifeless representation that's because we've relied too much on our senses to carry the moment. Next time you're about to create a photograph of a wilderness of grand mountains or a tumbling waterfall take time to block out all your other senses as you look through a viewfinder filter that scene until all you're left with is the visual elements you can decide what to emphasize what you can choose to include or exclude distill and isolate the parts within that viewfinder they're going to part your photograph with the same feeling that you're experiencing at that exact moment this is my favorite part of looking the fragments of things around us at the start of learning photography as a beginner most of us are told to photograph a whole thing the whole dog the whole building when you go through your own photography you'll see that occasionally you photograph parts of things now they're easy to photograph but they can also be tricky little things to see because of this well-intentioned advice that we were given from an early age we need to break free from the shackle and force ourselves to ignore the whole things and a good way to start this is to confine the way that you look things through your viewfinder only play the lens over the thing to be photographed and see what fragments worth photographing you can tease out of it once you become aware of these parts it's easy to see them you'll find them absolutely everywhere a scene that just recently offered you only a few options now has a multitude of variety within it when photographs are just a fragment of something they aren't just a literal representation of the scene they invite many interpretations and then give your photography more depth of course the opposite of the fragment is the whole you know the whole is most closely resembling the way that we normally interpret the world it's how we tend to make sense of the world and when we place the subjects as a whole it both simplifies but also complicates the picture because you've now asked the sporting cast to stand in the wings while you focus on the main player you don't have to worry about giving that cast any directions you have but one subject to photograph and is that simple but it's also that simplicity that is the complication because there is nothing else to help carry that scene that one subject must do all of the heavy lifting it alone is the reason for the photograph so it needs to be treated with more care and attention you need to fall in love with that single piece of subject and make it stand out and sing and shine by itself everything is somewhere often you can reveal more about your subject to the viewer of your photographs by showing where that object is now it's usually obvious you know a sailboat in a harbor for example or a horse in a field these contexts are expected so they don't really excite us or force us to question the relationships within the scene you know the boat is expected to be in the water just as the horse is expected to be in the field when the contexts are mixed up and changed then we can start to delight and surprise the viewer by throwing out some curveballs from time to time we can keep the view on their toes because they don't know what to expect that these there's almost disjointed surroundings can reinforce a feeling or create an unusual atmosphere the biggest hurdle for you to overcome when trying to create contexts is you now are a number of elements in this photograph you need to keep juggling the key to success is to have a clear idea about composition and to choose your viewpoint wisely if you want to learn more about developing your visual skills as a photographer i put together a playlist of some short tips which you can watch which i know will help you i'll link to it at the end of the video for you if you want to create images that encourage the viewer to spend time on them trying to find their meaning then seek out these unusual relationships between objects adjust your framing change your viewpoint use the visual abilities your camera has that you do not dwayne michael's bill brand they both did this to masterful effect the camera can compress and it can exaggerate distance look for the combinations and you'll see the possibilities are endless almost anything can be paired with something color shape size and texture even working straight lines against curves i've said the word viewpoint a few times now and you're aware that you can photograph a subject from in front above below from the side and a multitude of other angles but are you able to use the viewpoint to your advantage viewpoint performs two tasks that can show the subject from a perspective that we rarely see it from looking down on a landscape for example or you can use it to organize the relationships of the subject within the scene take the time to explore and examine all of the angles the easiest and most obvious way of course of doing this is to get off your own eye line think about it every day you look at the world from the same vantage point lie down on the floor photograph something from below stand on the ladder and shoot downwards don't be lazy and just settle for the obvious of just standing looking straight ahead that is the surest way to make your photographs common and completely conventional often when you're out and about you chance upon something to photograph you just pick up the camera and then you photograph it before moving on you trust upon that subject with the eyes of an everyday person now take the time to look at it with the eyes of a photographer learn to balance viewpoints if the subject itself is remarkable don't feel the need first to photograph it in an unusual way that way you run the risk of drawing attention to your technique rather than the subject of course when you become skilled at this balance you can create exceptional photographs of remarkable subjects from unusual viewpoints to see photographically and to create the very best photographs you're capable of you need to retrain your eyes now luckily it doesn't take years of study and I've created a series of short videos for you which I put up into a playlist it's up on the screen for you right there just click on it and you'll be taken to the next video thank you ever so much for being here


Good morning, Roberta. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. So Roberta had to have some work done on my iPad. So it took me a while to get logged back in. So sorry. I'm a few minutes late. So happy it's not just me. Just don't call me, Mr. Techie. Oh my God. Yeah. The worst was doing a PowerPoint presentation for the outgoing. County administrator and the incoming County administrator. I was the IT director. And nobody knew why the PowerPoint wasn't working. To me. And all I could do is look for what's not plugged in. All right. So Jennifer, do we have everyone I think. Yes, Chuck. And we are ready to proceed when you are. All right. Then we'll call the meeting of the contract review subcommittee to order. And ask secretary. To do a roll call, please. Here. Before. Here. All right. Then item number two on the agenda is public comments. So we'll now take public comments. On item two. If you wish to make a comment via zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Secretary. Do we have anyone. I would have been a shock. All right. We'll move to item 3.1. Director Burke. Thank you, chair Galvin and members of the subcommittee. We are very excited to be presenting item 3.1 to you, which is a contract award for the Laguna treatment plant disinfection improvements. Please be seated. And we'll be back in a minute. We'll be back next week. Thank you. And the next team will be making the presentation. Good morning, Mr. Roberts. Good morning, chair Galvin and board member Walsh. Thank you, director Burk for the introduction. Let me get my presentation going here. Looks like Roberta. Can you enable screen sharing for me? Looks like we have. Hope and Hagan, but my VPN got me in saying I'm from San Francisco, so we're here. Thanks. Thanks so much for making the effort to be with us. Of course, thank you. Sorry for the interruption, I appreciate it. No, no interruption at all. All right, I'll go ahead and get started here. All right, can everybody see the presentation? Okay, all right. Well, thank you again, Director Burke for the introduction. And thank you, Chair Galvin and members of the subcommittee. I'm Jason Roberts, Supervisoring Engineer for Capital Projects Engineering. And today I have a short presentation for you where I'll be presenting details on the construction contract for C00284, Laguna Treatment Plant Disinfection Improvement Project and ultimately seeking a recommendation by the subcommittee to the full Board of Public Utilities for Construction Contract Award. Presentation outline, I'll go over the project purpose. I'll discuss the timeline since fall of 2021. I'll discuss the issuance for bid and bid period details. Then we'll review the bids we received and the identification of the low bidder. I'll go over impacts and schedule and then ultimately bring a recommendation forward. So project purpose. The UV system at the Laguna Treatment Plant is aged. It's beyond its useful life. And in 2012, the capacity was derated by DDW. In essence, the permitted capacity of the system no longer meets the needs of the treatment plant. This project, it will provide a new ultraviolet disinfection system capable of treating up to 67 million gallons per day. It will also replace the aged hypochlorite facility. A new effluent diversion facility will be installed, which will return off-spec water to the flow equalization basin at the start of the treatment process. And a new stormwater pump station will also be constructed to accommodate the future Laguna Treatment Plant blood wall project. In addition, a new trailer will be provided for LTP staff. So since fall of 2021, I'll go over a brief timeline, basically focusing on the UV procurement process. And in September, we received a best and final price from DeNora, formerly Calgon Carbon. Between September and December, city staff negotiated with DeNora to come up with the best and final price, which included price increases from basically increased prices of steel, totaling about $288,000. On December 1st, we received a best and final offer letter from DeNora for a total system price of $5,923,000. That price is good until December 31st of this year. And as you may remember, on December 16th, BPU approved a second amended and restated memorandum of understanding with DeNora, securing that purchase price. This action by BPU allowed the design to be finalized and bid documents prepared. So on January 28th, 2022, invitation for bids was issued with the bid open date of March 29th. So the bid period was about two months. The invitation for bids was issued with an engineer's estimate of $50 to $60 million. Providing a range is becoming more typical these days because of just uncertainty in the markets and materials. And with longer duration projects, there's some uncertainty on the contractor side as well. So we thought that providing a range was useful. There were two mandatory pre-bid meetings where the prime contractors had to attend at least one of those. Through the course of the bid period, five contract addenda were issued, providing clarifications to contractors. And I did wanna point out that this contract is atypical. Our typical water contracts are based on Caltrans specifications, which are well suited for linear construction projects such as roads and pipelines. And I wanted to highlight that this contract was developed using a master format, which is better suited for vertical type projects and more complex process oriented projects such as this. Our consultant attorney and the city attorney's office has been involved with the development and review the contract language throughout the process and throughout the project. So on March 29th, we received four bids outlined here. As you can see, Shimik was the low bidder at $68 million. After the bid opening, the design and construction management team went to work verifying that Shimik was responsive and responsible for the requirements of the contract. And on April 13th, we issued a notice of intent to award. Impacts and schedule. So fiscal impact funding was appropriated for this project in the fiscal year 2021-2022 CIP budget. And additional mid-year appropriations by city council allowed for full funding of this project. Environmental impacts, the proposed improvements are covered under the amended incremental recycled water program, EIR, approved by this board on November 19th of 2020. And as far as schedule, today I'm here before you seeking a recommendation to the full board, which is scheduled for May 5th. We expect to issue a notice to proceed later in May of 2022. And the anticipated project completion is January 2025. So it's about 1,100 day construction projects. So with that, it is recommended by the transportation and public works department and the water department that the contract review subcommittee recommend to the full board of public utilities, award of construction contract C00284, Laguna Treatment Plant Disinfection Improvements Projects to the lowest responsive bidder, Schmidt Construction Company, in the amount of $68,109,000, approve a 10% contingency and authorize a total contract amount of $74,919,900. And with that, I will take any questions. Thank you, Mr. Roberts. This has been a long time coming. So we're very happy to see this thing going forward. Is that my turn now? Yeah, it's kind of an undaunting task, just realize that it's gonna take two or three years to actually finish this project after all the years we've been in development and just everything else that's gone with it. So very excited to see this, happy to support the recommendation to the full board and I'll be happy to open it up for any board member or subcommittee member questions or comments. Board member Walsh. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Also want to thank the water department of staff for continually scoping this project by, sounds like we had to do a lot of work with the request for proposals to make this project a reality. It's the second largest project I think we would have ever done. It has a long timeline, complex scope and a budget that we're gonna wrestle with but luckily we set aside enough money to the fiscal stewardship of Director Burke and her staff. So I appreciate that. And to intending to support this, definitely would defer to Member Baden-Fort because she's in Sweden and she wanted to make the, she wanted, I would follow her lead. Thank you, sir. Thanks everyone and thank you. It is a long time coming and I don't actually, I'm not sure if I was even here for the very beginning, but I appreciate. No, I think I barely was. I appreciate the documentation being included. It was helpful to learn a little bit more about the firm to see that they have a lot of experience in major, even larger contracts and projects. So I'm a resounding yes and what do you need from us to support you? Congratulations everyone, thanks. I would say at this point, if you wanna make a motion to recommend to the full board that we approve the contract, that would be great. So moved, my agenda went somewhere. So if you want me to read the entire thing or I'm happy to see- No, that's fine. I second that motion, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. We have a motion and a second on the recommendation of the full board. So we'll now open it up for public comments on item 3.1. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Aitha. We have no public comments. Alrighty, and then we may we have a roll call vote please. Chair Gowden. Aye. Member Badger-Fort. Aye. Board Member Mosh. Aye. Good motion passes unanimously. By the way, Roberta, you've got a problem with your audio, just so you know. Aye. Thank you. Okay. All right. So that takes care of the only item on our agenda that concludes our meeting. So we'll adjourn the meeting. Again, Board Member Badden-Fort, thank you so much for making the effort to appear remotely from so far away.  Of course. Thank you so much everyone. All right, we are adjourned. Thanks everyone. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you, and thank you, engineer Roberts, I appreciate your concise presentation. And I think engineer Dwaynes walked us through some of the more, some of the complex things that you've hung in there where you guys make solid great. So thank you very much. Thank you, Board Member Mosh.


We have to remember that addressing hate speech does not mean limiting or prohibiting freedom of expression. Even if we are not the targets of that hate speech, we need to get involved in addressing it. Simply because we need to stand in solidarity with those who are being targeted.   That is why we need to invest more on educating the people. We need to invest more on the respect of diversity because ultimately we are one world, we are one humanity.


Animated explainer videos are like a double-shot espresso for our neural pathways, combining stories and visuals in a way that our brains can't resist. Did you know that approximately 65% of us are visual learners? We process visuals 60,000 times faster than text, making those cute animations the super highway of information delivery. They're not just eye-catching, they're brain candy, sticking like glitter after craft day. Animated explainer videos are the kings of simplification. They break complex ideas into digestible pieces with friendly characters and visual metaphors that make you go, aha, now I get it. No heavy jargon, just crystal clear visuals narrating a story that makes sense on the first watch. Animated characters aren't just for kids, they bring out the inner child in us all, creating an instant bond. Plus, humor makes the content memorable long after the last frame. The Universal Appeal makes these videos a pause button in our fast-paced eight second attention span world. Animations leverage dynamic visuals that capture our attention better than static images or plain text. They simplify complex concepts and ensure your message doesn't just enter the mind, it stays there. Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text. Animation brings stories to life, tapping into our emotions and enhancing brand recall. Feelings and emotions are the VIP guests at the party of brand recall and animated videos leverage this to strike an emotional chord.  Animated videos have a secret superpower when it comes to influencing consumer behavior. They trigger emotions, simplify complex ideas and represent anyone anywhere, breaking down barriers of demographics. They're not just snippets of entertainment, they're psychological powerhouses driving consumer action every day of the week.


We're talking about the incentives for the work, and I was just wondering, do you feel like when the blockchain reward goes down to zero, do you think that people will still find the same level, and will the fees be the same as a visa transaction, and then we don't have these? The question was, based on the incentives that exist in the network, what happens when the reward for seniorage, for generation of new coins, drops to zero, and the only reward is fees? Will miners keep mining, and will the network fees be reasonable? First of all, just to give you some perspective, this happens gradually between now and 2141. By that time, people on Mars will have to decide if they want to go into mining with their solar panels. Who knows? I hesitate to make predictions for Bitcoin three months out. You're asking me to make some 136 years out, so I'll try. The important thing to realize is that this happens very gradually, and it happens in an environment where the reliance on seniorage drops, while presumably the number of transactions and activity rises, which means the transaction fees rise. What it should do, if you look at it in the graph, is it should do a curved X, so fees go up, reward goes down. Fees go up not because fees are getting more expensive, but because you have more and more transactions paying more or less the same fee. If you imagine a block today, which has 12.5 Bitcoin in it, and a tenth of a Bitcoin in fees, it's a 120-to-1 ratio in favor of seniorage fees. Let's construct a block in 2141. What's the minimum reward? What's a toshi? Let's say this block has 10,000 transactions. Just pull the number out of my head. Probably have more, but let's say 10,000 transactions. What's the minimum fee they can pay? What's a toshi? If you just had the minimum issuance and the minimum fees, you'd have 10,000 toshis in fees and one toshi in seniorage. The ratio of seniorage to fees went from 120-to-1 to 1-to-10,000. This didn't happen overnight. This happened over 140 years in a gradual curve. Somewhere in there, there's a crossover point. That crossover point is the day it's one-to-one. Now miners know that, for the future, they're going to focus more on fees. That happens way before you get to 2141. I'm not worried, because it's not going to be a surprise. This is the same kind of question that happened with the halving. What will happen when the halving happens? We see this coming four years in advance. Everyone's prepared for it. This is part of living in a deterministic currency. We don't have to wait until the Friday spokesperson... from the Federal Reserve Open Committee meeting to come out and tell us what our interest rate is. Mining doesn't stop. Will the fees be the same as Visa? If they are, we have failed badly. Quite honestly, the fees already for most transactions are lower than Visa. We're getting better at optimization. If we introduce things like Lightning Network and other technologies, if we increase the block size and do all of the other optimization and scaling things, we can do Visa. We can do much more than Visa, and we can do it cheaper. I don't think we're going to have any problem. The capacity issue for Bitcoin will be a problem all the time, but we will manage it in a way that is not fatal, and gradually make it better and better. Failing to scale gracefully for 25 years is the goal.


Colombian President Gustavo Petro has warned of a concerted attempt to target his government after a controversy to elect a new Attorney General. We are seeing the usual strategies as a right wing, including a media assault, mobilizations by retired army for officials, and all sorts of allegations being levelled against the president. The government is also being targeted for its peace negotiations with the group ELN. To get a sense of what's happening in Colombia and why there is talk of a coup attempt, we go to Zoe. Zoe, thank you so much for joining us. Maybe first could you take us through what really is happening in Colombia, why is the president saying that there is a possible coup attempt, and what has been the developments over the past few days? Well, the pressure is definitely increasing on Gustavo Petro, who this week, this past week, has found himself in the midst of a very tense struggle facing attacks from the right wing, from mainstream media. This is all around an essential issue, which is the election of a new Attorney General in the country. The Attorney General, Barabosa, whose term finishes on February 12, was set to be replaced on January 25. Essentially the way that Attorney Generals are elected in Colombia is that the 23 judges in the Supreme Court have to vote, and the person who gets the most votes from the Supreme Court is then the next Attorney General. However, on January 25, 13 of the judges actually abstained from this vote, saying they didn't have enough time to study the CVs of these candidates, despite the fact that it's been months since the president, who's the person who's supposed to present the list of candidates for this position, had submitted this list months ago, they did not elect an Attorney General on this date, meaning that if on February 8, which was on Thursday, they also did not elect an Attorney General, this position would go to the next in line to the current Attorney General, who actually is quite politically close to the one that is right now. Gustavo Petro, following the inability or perhaps not wanting to elect this new Attorney General by the Supreme Court, he called the attention of the public to what was happening, and he demanded that actually this democratic process go through as is foreseen. On February 8, following and accompanying this moment of the president raising the alarms about this process, citizens, civil society organizations mobilized in many cities across Columbia to express their support to the president, and also reinforcing the call that a new Attorney General should be elected through this process that's outlined in the Constitution. On this day, in the city of Bogota, there was a very large mobilization of different trade unions and social movements outside of the Supreme Court where the election was set to be taking place, and in Bogota, outside of the Supreme Court where the voting was supposed to take place, a small group of protesters, about three or four people, went up to the gates of the Supreme Court, and for brief moments sort of shook the gates, but this was a moment that was filmed and then that was broadcast really across all mainstream media, and it has been spun by the media in Columbia as an attempt by Gustavo Petro to undermine democracy, to try to overthrow the Supreme Court, and it's something that's getting a lot of airtime, again, on mainstream media and by right-wing pundits, by different right-wing politicians saying that Gustavo Petro is trying to overthrow the country, and so once again, really the pressure is on him, but pulling out a bit from or zooming out a bit from that specific thing, kind of why all these tensions around the Attorney General, so preceding the January 25th when the Supreme Court did not elect a new Attorney General, already the Attorney General Barbosa had carried out two operations, two investigations that seemed to directly target Gustavo Petro and his allies, so first, they raided the office of the teacher's union, fecule, in an allege that they illicitly donated funds to Gustavo Petro's presidential campaign, so this was a raid of the office that took place and they're essentially investigating this charge. On the other hand, also legal action was taken against Gustavo Petro's foreign minister, Álvaro Leyva, who has been one of the instrumental people in his cabinet who has taken forward the rapprochement with Venezuela, who's been instrumental in the peace talks that have been held in Cuba with the ELN, really a key person in Gustavo Petro's administration and he was investigated by different branches of the judiciary and has now been kind of forced to step out of power, so this kind of side by side attacks on Gustavo Petro has to be seen, of course, at the same time that this struggle over electing a new attorney general is taking place. Right, Zoe, from what you say, it does look like it's not just some kind of bureaucratic maneuver regarding the election of an attorney general but a much larger political issue, so why exactly are the people also so angry about this, the extent of protest, it is way more than just an appointment clearly, so what are the aspects that are driving the people's anger here? So a really key element is that while all of these attacks are happening against the government of Gustavo Petro, while this sort of dispute between who's going to be the next attorney general is taking place, the people of Colombia have also mobilized and been really alert about what's been happening, so not only were they mobilizing on February 8th again in major cities across the country in support of Gustavo Petro but also understanding the need to actually democratically have a new attorney general go through this process. For Colombians, the attorney general represents this kind of symbol of impunity because on the one hand you have them raiding the offices of trade unions, investigating, for example, members of Gustavo Petro's government and they also, for the past several years, especially during the right-wing governments, the attorney general has been the body that has been investigating, for example, trade union leaders, social movements, accusing them of all sorts of things, engaging in this campaign of criminalization of students, of activists, people who participated in the uprising in 2021. And on the other hand, again, Colombia is a country where massive human rights violations have taken place, where the state and where the army has participated in so many different crimes against humanity, massacres, disappearances and the attorney general's office is actually the institution which should really be taking charge of this, trying to get to the bottom of these different cases, but instead, again, for many, many Colombians, it just represents this tool that's used by the ruling class to suppress movements, to criminalize poverty, to criminalize people while at the same time essentially guaranteeing impunity for the ruling class that carries out the real crimes that take place in the country. So when it can sound sort of dry, oh, people are wanting there to be a new attorney general, but really this is really at the heart of what it means to have a government of change and why so many people actually supported Gustavo Petro's project for the country, because a lot of people know and it's become clear in these several years that Gustavo Petro has been in power, that it's not just about winning the presidency, but there are all these different institutions in the Colombian state that have for decades been controlled by the oligarchy, that have been wielded by the ruling class to serve their needs, and that for actual change to happen, and that for a Colombia to actually work for the interests of the people, that all of these institutions needed to change, and they need to be reformed, people who actually are invested in protecting the lives of the majorities and not of the ruling elites have to be in those positions. So this is an issue that has actually galvanized many, many people. There's going to be continued mobilizations for sure. One thing that Gustavo Petro has done is really learn lessons of what's been happening across the continent for decades, but of course in recent years, and that is when the ruling class is trying to use all of its different tools that it has, its disposal, the media, the institutions of the state, which it still has control over, to attack, for example, progressive government, which we saw in Peru, which we saw in Guatemala before even Bernardo Arrivallo was sworn in, that it's important to actually call on the people to defend the government because it was the people that put Gustavo Petro in office, and so it's the people that will keep him there. So this is another, again, this is another attempt by Colombia's ruling class and right wing to kind of destabilize this government. We know that this week as well, the government signed peace agreements, signed another extension of the ceasefire with the ELN. Of course, this is something that the right wing does not like, so it's not, of course, an accident that this is happening, but it's definitely important to keep following what's happening there as Gustavo Petro says that there's a coup underway in this very concerted effort to kind of shake up his government, destabilize it, and who knows, maybe they'll even try to overthrow it. Thank you so much, Zoe, for that update. The conservative government in the UK is set to expand police powers and criminalize protests further. Earlier this week, the UK Home Office announced new police powers, including that to arrest protesters wearing face coverings in public gatherings. The announcement also consists of the government's intention to criminalize fireworks and flares, climbing on statues and war memorials and stripping protesters of the right to protest protections in supposedly serious public order offenses. These powers will be added to the already controversial criminal justice bill proposed last year with the Rishisuna government intending to turn it into a law by March this year. We talk to Anish. Anish, under successive conservative governments, we've seen a number of laws that infringe on the right of people to protest. You've seen a law against strikes, which has seen a lot of opposition, and now there also seems to be an explicit law against certain kinds of protests, which again, like I said, this is not a new proposal per se. It's in the tradition of a long series of proposals. So could you take us through what exactly is on the agenda here? Well, the announcement made on Thursday pretty much includes an attempt or at least a proposal to penalize wearing face coverings during protests, climbing on statues, climbing on war memorials, all for that matter, even blocking public roads during protests. However peaceful they may be, the kind of punishments that are being proposed range from $1,000 to immediate arrest by the police, like face covering, for instance, would actually get you arrested from the protest side. The police has the power to do that if the law gets passed or is brought into effect. So basically, these are attempts to penalize or attack certain kinds of protesters because obviously, they're coming within certain contexts. The whole thing about climbing on war memorials is pretty much a response to the Black Lives Matter protests that are anti-racist protests that happened in Britain pretty much around the same time that Black Lives Matter happened in the United States as well during the pandemic, when statues of known racist and colonial military leaders were being pulled out and they were not being held liable and criminal damages for various reasons, obviously because the law does not exist for that. At best, they can only be held for vandalism. So this is specifically in response to those kind of protests. The whole face covering thing is also something that is targeted against pro-Palestinian protesters. Another section of, another proposal that they're making is to take out pyrotechnics, fireworks and flares, which pretty much does nothing. It makes no damages whatsoever, is very harmless as it can get. But the whole thing about penalizing that is pretty much again targeted against pro-Palestinian protesters who have been using certain colors of flares to match the Palestinian flag to show their solidarity. So the attack again here is pretty much to attack those who are protesting for climate change because blocking roads has been quite a common thing, especially anti-fossil fuel protesters very recently who have blocked roads to refineries and constructing new pipelines. Similarly, anti-Palestinian, sorry pro-Palestinian protesters, those who have been opposing the Israeli genocide, those who are calling out the colonial and racist heretics that Britain pretty much continues and is pretty much very proud of and not really against any kind of right-wing protesters because pretty much their tactics have been different. So these are very specific kind of penalization and criminalization of protests. They are not really outsidely banning protests, but at this point they're limiting the site of protests to a point where it is very difficult for anybody, even for other causes like rape victims, for instance, this is something that has been brought up by several feminist groups and women's rights groups that break their influence, who will not be able to stand in rallies. Most of them usually choose to hide their identity during the protests. So that is something like it is kind of like it can actually have a significant repercussion on civil liberties in the United Kingdom. And this is being very roundly called up by rights activists across the UK right now.


I'd like to add my voice of thank you for, I think this is an important gathering in an important place at an important time. And so Sandy Close from New American Media, thank you for having us, for bringing us here, for sponsoring us. To Dean Sainz, thank you from UTSA's College of Public Policy and to Juan Lafeh Policy Research and Education Center, Juan Flores is the, I think, sort of the spirit of convening us this day. I say this is an important place for two reasons. Juan, Texas, Dean Sainz told us some about Texas, how Texas goes, so goes the country. You might have seen the cover of Time, this last issue of Time, had what I found to be a tad distressing cover and it had the cover of, the map of Texas with all of the state maps in the map of Texas and then the header was the United States of Texas. And the article, the lead article in the last issue of Time Magazine speaks precisely to the issue that Dean Sainz was pointing at in terms of as Texas goes, so goes the country, the article did very little to make the second point that I think is important and that Dean Sainz made and that is as Latinos and African Americans go in Texas, so goes Texas, so goes the country and they made very little of that point in Time Magazine. I hope that they correct that. So it's important from the perspective of Texas and then here we are in San Antonio an old city by standards of how many centuries we've been around and yet a new city in terms of a progressive young mayor and a community that is attempting to reshape itself as a community that cares for all of its citizens including children and so I think it's a wonderful place to have this conversation about the future of children of color. Let's see. So at IDRA one of the things that we do is to take a look at both policy and educational practice in the context of a change model so we can figure out at any moment the detail of information that comes to us or even the issue that comes to us, how is it connected to the change that we want to see and the change by the way is high quality neighborhood public schools for every child in Texas and the country. That is our mission, that is our goal and so this takes you from what do we need and you see in the actionable knowledge that enlightened public policy our topic for today is clearly important. How do we make change happen? The change strategy that I'd like to underscore for you is the coalition building and the community part of this. I believe that it is the power and the public will that is going to make the changes that are necessary in order to improve struggling schools and to hold our public institutions accountable. I think in other words that how do we make change happen that parent and community engagement is not only part of the solution but probably the most fruitful leverage point at this point in the history of education in Texas and the country. Three things about that in terms of the community. Number one is that since about the 1980s early 90s we've been focused on creating competition among schools in order to better our schools. I think we need to get off that track. It is not working, it has not worked. Creating vouchers or charter schools or other such things that are supposed to increase competition really doesn't do it and we need to go to a framework in which we are back to ensuring equity and excellence for all kids. The second part of that is that we need to go to investments and support for education and where that support needs to come is in those areas that you see that research tell us is where we need to change things. Parent community engagement, engagement of kids, teaching quality, curriculum quality and access. And then we need also to look at collaboration versus these sort of top down approaches and in that regard all of the connections. You see a lot of arrows in this change model. By the way the change model is useful for looking at policy, for looking at practice, for looking at research areas that may be fruitful. It is not a rear view assessment of what happened. It is actually a look forward at how we make change happen and for that reason I think it merits consideration. In the packets by the way that I brought for you, the framework is there. So I thought that in terms of today's conversation, I'll focus on just a few of the school data, dean signs shared with us a lot about how Texas population is changing. Schools in particular, this summer national public radio did a segment. You might have picked up a summer, all of it called the Texas Hispanic shift. And they talked about how they concluded that Hispanic two-year-olds rule in Texas, that was their conclusion, Hispanic two-year-olds rule. And so Plenty has been said about how young Hispanics are. But I thought that these statistics really kind of put it forward. 2010 statistics are the ones that really stand out. There were more Hispanic two-year-olds than any other age in Texas. More Hispanic two-year-olds than any other age in Texas in 2010, 197,000 of those. And you know what was the most popular age for whites in Texas? 50-year-olds. And there were 192,000 of them. So there you are. Two-year-olds, Hispanic 50-year-old whites. That in a nutshell is where the state is. That makes it really important that in San Antonio, for example, the pre-K for SA, which is a publicly funded tax-derived effort to provide more preschool education to speak to the issue that you spoke about, was passed. And it was passed with the support of the business community, providing a model not only to the state of Texas, but also to the country. So those 187,000 two-year-olds in 2010, so they're now five-year-olds. So there you are, importance of early childhood education. So in Texas, four years ago, Latino children already became the majority in Texas schools. That was four years ago. White children are now fewer than one-third of first graders in Texas, already, right now. So Latino children really do have the greatest say in our future. It's a matter of educating them, and I'm going to focus on whether the state of Texas is doing this or not. By the way, we don't have to have a lot of suspense around that. The answer is no, they are not. And I'm going to look at four particular issues regarding that. By the way, if Texas could really build a wall around itself, not only along the border with Mexico, but completely, so that there would be no more changes, no undocumented coming from Mexico or those that have already made it inside the country and coming and sneaking into Texas, if there was a wall, if the drawbridge were closed, the result would be the same. Only one in four Hispanic school children in Texas is the child of an undocumented worker, and only a small percentage are undocumented themselves. So this is not an immigrant issue. It is about native born Texan and American children growing up. Does that make immigrants unimportant? No, I'll talk about that in a little bit. But it really is important to underscore that this is about Texas, about native born Texans, about American children, and about where this state and this country are going to head. It's about our shared future, certainly. So Latinos are now more than 50% of students in Texas schools. Another important fact, more than half of Texas student body is poor. So 60% of kids in schools in Texas are poor. That is the same by the way as every single southern state. So it matters the choices that we make about how we educate poor children. It matters that we commit ourselves to fair funding for those kids. It matters that poor kids can live in poor neighborhoods, but they don't have to go to poor schools. All of those things matter. 80% of Latino students are poor in Texas. Over 830,000 children enrolled in Texas public schools are English learners, English language learners. That's an increase of almost 40% over the last decade. And the majority, that is 85% of English language learner students in grades K through 5 and 59% in grades 6 to 10 were born in the US. So when we say English language learners, that does not equal immigrants. So that's another important part of the stories that US journalists visit is to sort of really look at what subset of children we are speaking about. So we can speak with clarity about solutions. So have Texas schools been doing a good job? Let's look at the first question. Is the state of Texas providing an equitable high quality curriculum for all children, right? You remember in the change framework, high quality curriculum was one of the pieces that research tells us is important for high quality schooling. The answer is no. As a matter of fact, Texas is poised to begin massive tracking of Latino students into low level courses. It started already. Yesterday's Valley Morning Star, October 28th, introduced us to Anastasia Ramos in Harlingen High School, who is really already enjoying her automotive technology class. She can earn an automotive service, excellent certificate and go straight into the workforce after college. And they're given, says this report, an opportunity to pursue a trade rather than a four year academic degree. Now we've tried this before. This is not new. Most of the history and the education of Latino and Mexican American children in the state of Texas is a history of neglect and of tracking kids into low level courses. So here we are back again. So says an educator, school districts had their hands tied when it came to offer vocational trades. But our last legislative session made sure that school districts no longer had their hands tied past House Bill 5 and now children don't have to go through a curriculum that prepares them for college. They can go straight into vocation. Tom Paukin, who is running for governor, says that by this teaching to the test top-down system, everybody should go to a university by doing that in the past, which Texas has been doing, preparing everyone to go to college. Trying to. But he says he asserts that we've neglected and almost denigrated the value of vocational education.  So there you have it.  So the tracking gets kind of complicated. There is a policy brief in your packet that we released this month called tracking endorsements and differentiated diplomas when different really is less. And you have sort of this explained. But what has happened is that kids now can go and take automotive courses under business and industry. They can go to public service and become cooks through culinary degrees, all kinds of things that aren't going to be useful for kids and are going to lead them to low paying jobs. STEM are the ones that are most likely prepared. There is a big debate going on right now about Algebra II because the new HB5 pass program does not require kids to take Algebra II. Well, of course, if you don't take Algebra II, you can't get into college. That's just it. You can't get into college. The commissioner of higher ed said so. The TEA commissioner, the Texas Education Agency commissioner outside of public view has said so. But here we are encouraging kids to not take Algebra II and to instead, as this article says, did I read this part about after high school we want them to do something with their hands? That was an educator in Harlingen High School who is thrilled that educators' hands are no longer tied and they can track kids into vocational ed instead of have to worry about and be accountable for them having to go to college. Last thing on this point, this is really, really important data from TG, which is a higher education group here in the state. They looked at all high school graduates whose parents didn't go to college. The whole pool of them, right? And so, looked at whether they were enrolled in a four year institution. If those students took Algebra I in geometry, only 11% made it to a four year college. If they took Algebra I geometry and Algebra II, only 34% made it. If they took beyond Algebra II, 64%. What Texas wants to bring us back to, and actually has passed legislation, is to that first bar, to that 11%.  This is only the kids whose parents didn't go to college. And that is the difference that it makes. So, really big important point about that. The next question is the state of Texas holding on to its students through to high school graduation, a quick answer is no. IDRA has been doing a study of dropouts every year since 1986. I served as the principal investigator of that study at that time. We are today, as a matter of fact at 11 o'clock, we released our newest annual report. That too is in your packet, including the press release. You're welcome to call us about that if you wish. So the answer is no, Latinos in Texas still have the highest dropout rates of all groups. So the short of it is that one in four students in Texas does not graduate from high school. This is 2013, at a time when high school is a bare minimum. The attrition rate, the loss from high schools for white kids is 14%, and it has declined substantially, by the way, since 1986 for white children. Whatever we are doing is working for white children and for girls more than it is for minority kids and for boys. And if you are a boy and a minority, you've got a whole lot of strikes against you. Black students, 26% dropout rate and Hispanic students, 33%. It'll take us till 2036 at this rate of small incremental change. To get there, we will lose another 3 million kids. That's like if we lost Houston and San Antonio put together. More, because cumulatively, since we started studying this, the state of Texas has lost 3.3 million kids that did not graduate high school and whose lives and their children's lives are affected by virtue of that. The third question is the state of Texas providing an equitable education for children who are English language learners. So you probably have the rhythm of this. The answer is no, unfortunately. English language learners continue in underfunded programs that do not produce results for kids. At the secondary level especially, English language programs are very, very weak, as little as 45 minutes of ESL instruction. Get this, just 6% of English language students in the class of 2011 were considered college already graduates, 6% of kids. This is a comparison by grade of all students and LEP students in some circles are called limited English proficient in other English language learners. Notice that the bar goes down as you get higher up into the high school. This is part of the suit that Maldef brought several years ago, was overturned by the fifth circuit, who says, yeah, it's probably happening, but you're putting too much focus on student achievement. I don't know how that could be possible. But David and Jose is here who litigated that case. By the way, the only difference, the reason why the 11th grade goes up for English language learners is that they have dropped out at the 10th grade. That's the reason for that. Is the state of Texas acting as an effective and accountable steward of public funds for public schools? No, the Texas system of school finance is inefficient, inadequate, and unfair. I'm sure David will be speaking to us more about that. Also, efforts to use public money for private schooling further undercut the education of Latino students in the state. Here's what the gap looks like. Poor's 100, richest 100, poor's 100, richest 100 per classroom. These graphics, by the way, are also in your packet. So here we are, lots of changes to make if we are going to change the direction of the state. I want to make one last point, because I'm hearing this lately a lot. The people who are promoting tracking of students in the state of Texas, specifically the chair of the Senate Education Committee and the chair of the House Education Committee, are asserting that they are doing this endorsement approach, this new approach, so that kids will not drop out. So in order for kids not to drop out, we are going to track them into low level courses. That is exactly the wrong approach. How do I know that? In the 1960s, 90% of Mexican American kids dropped out and they were tracked into low level courses. We don't want to go there again. So that is the current state of education in Texas. If we are going to change that, there is a lot of work to do. I commend those of you who are in the business of looking deeply as journalists at these issues. I think your voice is critical and informing the population about what is really going on. And in reversing this trend and others that apparently, according to Time Magazine and according to the demographics, will affect not just Texas, but the entire country. Thank you.


Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Leading the Remote AF Enterprise. Thanks, Andrew, for joining us. Over to you, Andrew. Thank you very much, Shadeep. And also thank you to Naresh and the entire Agile India 2020 team who've made this really easy. I'm loving this platform. It's really good fun navigating around. I'm really looking forward to seeing where platforms like this go in the next 12 months because I think we're going to see some really cool innovation in that space. Hi to everyone who's out there. I can't see you, but hopefully we'll be able to do some Q&A and I'll be able to see your faces towards the end of this talk. I just want to draw your attention quickly to, on the left-hand side of the screen, the second-last link that says Handouts. If you wanted to grab a copy of the slides to take notes while I'm presenting, you can grab a PDF in there. There's also an image in there which is, we'll do a future spective together at the end of this talk. If you want to take that and use it in your organization or with your teams, then just grab that as well. That's in the handout section on the bottom left-hand side of your screen. I'm going to start presenting now. Just bear with me two seconds. What I'll ask you to do, if you have any questions, in the discussions panel on the right-hand side, put your Q&A in there and I'll try and answer those questions and then hopefully we can do a little bit of sort of panel-style Q&A at the end of the talk if I get through things quickly. What I'll do, I'm very aware of how much fun it is to listen to someone on a VC call. I'm going to try and get through this content as quickly as possible. We'll do an interactive exercise together and then hopefully we can have a chat. I'm just going to present my screen now. Today, what I'm going to be speaking about is Remote AF or the Remote Agility Framework. This is a framework that we've created. We kicked the program off in February. We launched a mission team. We were very aware of the fact that to give you a bit of an intro, I'm a founder of a consultancy called Elaborate in Australia. We've got about 100 people and it was a pretty stressful time for us looking at the numbers coming out of the pandemic and thinking about how do we adapt to that as a consultancy. One of the things that we thought would be really useful to the community was to take some of the ideas that we've got from 10 years of working as an organisation and 20 years as individuals with Agile in distributed and remote and sort of hybrid organisations and bring those together into something that people can use to help them navigate a new world. The origins of this are probably at an Agile Australia event back in 2018 where Simon Woodley and Dave Snowden spoke on strategy. We had Simon talking about Woodley Mapping and Dave talking about Apex Predator Theory and Kinefen. That kind of helped us to understand that when you have a big shift like the pandemic, it has a tendency to accelerate things. The reason for that is basically you have all this capital that gets poured into a problem space. We've got financial capital. We've got lots of money being spent on things like Zoom and money flowing in from the stock market to remote solutions. We've also got this massive intellectual capital shift. People are teaching their kids to learn remotely. Teachers are teaching remotely. Older adults are learning how to work remotely and because of that something like remote working which was probably previously considered a bit heresy and something that you would not really be able to do in a lot of organizations of any scale, that suddenly becomes something that's more mainstream than it ever has been before. What we're trying to do with this framework is provide the basis for organizations that are embracing Agility to do it in a really effective way for the remote context. I'm going to go through five steps in this presentation. First of all, I'll talk about why we're doing this. I'm going to give you a very brief framework intro. The third thing I'm going to talk about is leading the remote enterprise. I'm going to go through a series of tools and patterns and things that are in Remote AF that help people to lead in the remote context. Then I'm going to get you to do an exercise with me. We're going to do a workplace future perspective where we try and reimagine what work might look like in the future. That's an exercise that you can take with you, as I said earlier, and try with your teams. Finally, we'll do some Q&A. Without any further ado, let's talk about why remote is something that we think is going to be really great. First and foremost, there are a range of benefits that you can unlock with remote working. We know that you get reduced emissions from transport-related emissions. That would not be more pertinent than somewhere like India where there's so much traffic on the roads over there. Last summer I was in Bangalore. I was just shocked at how much people movement there is in that city in Bengaluru. The story I like to tell here is Kathmandu. There was a photo taken from Kathmandu earlier in the year when people were locked down because of the pandemic. For the first time in living memory, you could see Mount Everest from that city, just because the smog had cleared and the environment was a lot clearer. We've also got the opportunity to reduce urban sprawl. Cities are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and taking out agricultural lands on the outer rings of cities. We can reduce office waste. We've got a bunch of social benefits that we can unlock. I'm in a regional community in Australia. We're already seeing massive renewal in our community. We're seeing parents out with their kids. My three-hour daily commute is now five minutes out to my shed. A lot of people are really enjoying being around their communities and getting to contribute to sporting clubs and things like scouts and community things. The regions are renewing. We've got more vibrant communities. For countries like India and also the more third-world countries in the world, in Africa and those kind of places, we've got the opportunity to reduce the brain drain. You don't have to live in Silicon Valley to work in Silicon Valley remotely. The more that we can get this thing working, the better social impacts it's going to be. We'll have the best and brightest staying in their communities, spending in their communities and growing their communities. Finally, we've got the commercial benefits. Depending on where you are in Australia, we're talking about $5,000 to $20,000 per head to have corporate office. There's a reduced cost. Remote-first organisations have always had advantages in terms of access to talent. The borders disappear. You can engage the best and brightest from anywhere in the country or the world. We're also seeing a lot of evidence of higher engagement in those organisations. There's all these benefits to remote working if we can make it effective and sustainable. We've also got these challenges. First and foremost, we've got to make sure that by virtue of moving people into their homes, organisations don't forget that they're responsible for sustainability for their employees. We've got a lot of really energy efficient buildings in Australia. Some households aren't as energy efficient. We've got to make sure that we don't just shift the responsibility for environmental sustainability off the corporate balance sheet and onto the personal balance sheet. We've got some social challenges in Australia and in a lot of the western world. We've seen a rising family and domestic violence. We've got a lot of people in rental environments or in places with low internet connectivity or just not great spaces to work. Like a lot of the people I've been talking to in Southeast Asia, they just simply don't have space in their homes for a desktop. The final one there is cultural norms. Depending on where you're from and what your gender is, there's different expectations on you in the household. It's really important that we make sure that we recognise that not everyone has the same responsibilities at home and that we work around that a little bit. Finally, from a leadership perspective, I speak to a lot of leaders who are talking about that loss of visibility, the loss of control, the loss of the water cooler conversations, the decay of the informal networks that they use as a sensing mechanism. We're also seeing a lot of people that have been managed by people that just sit on their shoulders. They've got that real learned healthlessness thing where they're waiting for someone to tell them what to do and no one's there to do it. I suppose what we're saying with Remote AF is we want to get the stuff on the top. The stuff on the top is amazing, but in order to do that, we need to make sure that the framework caters for the challenges on the bottom. I'll talk through a little bit how we tackle those. The second primary reason why we'd like to go remote is that you've got an opportunity to design your work around your life rather than designing your life around your work. This picture was taken in Lake Centrants. I'm not there at the moment, but that's on the east coast of Victoria, the state where I live. I could conceivably be working somewhere like that at least once a month or even more. When I was last in India, I visited Kerala. I love the beaches down there. There's lots of places that are far better to live than big cities. This is a great opportunity for us to really redesign how we want our lives to be as we embrace remote working. I'm going to give you a very brief framework intro. If you want to talk about this in more detail, I'll hang around. I'll go into one of the VIP rooms afterwards, but you can also visit the website, www.remoteaf.co, and you can register your interest there or hit me up on Twitter. My handle is AJ Blaine, or the Remote AF, which is just Remote AF Twitter. Lots of ways to get in touch, so just reach out and we'll spend some time with you if you've got some things that you're interested in learning about. This is the... I suppose the... We call this the crop circles diagram, but it's the high-level framework overview. It shows you what's in here, and I'll probably go right to left here because it's just easier for me. We start at the team layer. Over the last decade at Elaborate, we've... Look, I've done a lot of work trying to understand Kinefin and complexity and systems theory and systems thinking. I suppose at a team level, what things boil down to is that there is a lot of... The context and the nature of the work makes a big difference to how you organise to work. Where we landed is that there's three core team archetypes. We've got operations teams. Many of us would have worked in an operations team at some point. This is not IT operations. It could be finance operations, people operations, marketing operations. It could be a tech ops or an order handling operations teams. They're the teams that are the custodians for the revenue of the organisation. They need to make sure that customer requests are fulfilled promptly, that we invoice, that we build, that cash is coming in and that we're running the business effectively. The nature of the work in operations teams is vastly different to the nature of work in what we call product teams. So these could be DevOps teams in technology. They could be teams that are introducing change. They could be teams that are doing regulatory programs. But these are the teams in the organisation that are trying to understand where the organisation has to go, be it an initiative or a change or a new product, and they're working to implement that change into the organisation. So for an operations team, a lot of the work is just unplanned. The demand is flowing in constantly. It might be spiky. It might be seasonal. For a product team, you've normally got a relatively good plan of where you want to be going. And because of that, the how we organise, how we work, the kind of things that we want to measure, the tools and the patterns that we use are necessarily different. The final team type here and the remote AF team, which we launched in February is one of these, it's a mission team. So it's a team that's working to strategy. They're independent. They've been given a mission and they're told to go and autonomously solve that. And the reason we draw the distinction there is it's really important that mission teams are unstructured, that they're led differently, that they're funded differently, all that sort of thing. So what we have is three core archetypes and then we've got basically guidance on how you do planning for each of the three team archetypes, how you review, how you reflect. We've got a really nice pattern for launching teams and a pattern for health checks. In the centre of the diagram, then we've got a team of teams. So this is General Stan McChrystal's concept. It's basically a team containing many teams, that fractal concept. Teams of teams, I suppose, contain direction and they look at what a group of teams should be doing in order to achieve largest slices of value for an organisation. And here are the patterns that we have. We have an all-hands planning pattern, which is basically how do you take strategy or a big programme of work or an initiative and break that out in a virtual setting with remote teams. We've got a virtual abeyer, which is designed to basically visualise all the information that's necessary to effectively lead and participate in that team of teams. Finally, we've got a pattern for reviewing how our progress against our plan. And the two down the bottom there, we've got an approach for how you design the teams that are in the team of teams. So it's kind of what teams do I need to execute the objective that I've been given. And we've also got a programme or team of teams launch pattern, which is how do you take a range of teams and set them up for success. Finally, we've got patterns at the enterprise layer. So we've got an approach to strategy. Again, we've got a virtual abeyer. An abeyer room is, I'll talk about that in a little bit, a little bit down the track, but it's basically a visualisation of critical information for decision making. We've got an approach to scoring the strategy and how we're going against it so that we can make interventions. And then we've got a few things down the bottom there. So first and foremost, you can't just take your existing operating model, move into a remote or a hybrid environment and pretend that it's going to work. You can't lift and shift someone else's operating model. There's a lot of organisations that are taking the Spotify model, which isn't a model and rolling it out in their organisation at the moment. That doesn't work. So this is an approach for designing a fit for context operating model that respects the constraints that your organisation has. We've got a pattern for remote governance. There's a lot less visibility of the physical work in remote and hybrid organisations. So we need to make sure that governance, that we govern the system effectively. And finally, the area that I'll be focusing on today, patterns for leading remote enterprises. So you can kind of see there's a whole lot there. We've designed the framework as something that sort of, it's not meant to replace agile frameworks. It's meant to be a remote layer that sits on top of agile frameworks. And the other thing is meant to be modular.  If you just want to design a remote or hybrid friendly operating model, you pick up the operating model design pattern. And basically the way that we're rolling this out is that there's range of training courses. We've got a bunch of guides who are going through an early adopter programme at the moment. One of those is Manoj Khanna, who's servicing the Indian region. So yeah, if anyone's keen to talk to Manoj about what his plans are, I can make that intro as well. All right. So now let's get into the meat of this presentation, which is leading the remote enterprise. I'm going to anchor this around a very simplified version of Wilbur's all quadrants, all levels, the integral framework. Basically what Ken talks about is that you have four dimensions and that people tend to focus on the bottom right here rather than focusing on all the things that you need to improve leadership in an organisation. So first and foremost, you need to be able to lead yourself.  And you need to be able to actively disrupt those patterns when they're getting you into trouble. Secondly, you need to be able to lead your team so you need to show up as a leader, be effective, have the hard conversations, create an environment where people flourish that's contextually appropriate to the problem that they're trying to solve. You need to lead together as a team so you need clarity, consistency of message. You need to be able to argue as a leadership team and forge a direction that you all agree on. And then you need to hold in behind that direction and really commit to it and be accountable to what you've said you're going to achieve. And finally, we've got the idea of leading the system. So this is how we work, what our operating cadences are, what our hierarchy looks like, who reports to who, how we measure things, KPIs, system measurements, all that sort of thing. And what we're finding, speaking to a lot of leaders, is that there's an awful lot of fatigue in the leadership community. A lot of people are finding that they don't have the tools to do some of the harder parts of leadership, and that's what we've tried to solve here. So I'll walk you through some of those. Leading yourself, now, what I will point out is that there's not much that we can do with a framework that's going to be better than some of the really great tools that are out there for helping you to understand other people's perspectives on you and work out how you're going to adjust your behavior over time or kind of work through becoming a better leader. I recommend the leadership circle, which is Bob Anderson's tool. It's a fantastic tool for getting feedback from your team that's actionable. What we do do in remote AF is give people a lot of guidance around personal productivity. So how do you set your home up? How do you get your ergonomics right? How do you build really good habits so that you're doing time and task management well? How do you keep yourself in an engaged and fit and well state, those sort of things. And we've also got the idea of these StoryMe cards, which are a little bit of a window into people to make onboarding easier and also to sort of reveal to people a little bit about yourself. So this is my StoryMe card. As you can see, if you didn't know anything about me, and this is really critical in teams. I've worked with a lot of distributed teams in India, in China, in the UK, in the US. And in the Philippines. What you don't tend to know is you don't really get a window into who your teammates are. So what we're trying to do here is just give people something that they can reveal as much or as little about themselves as they'd like to. And it enables you to kind of go, where do I want to have a conversation here? So for me, I live in the Macedon Ranges. I've got my wife, Nis, my two kids, Jasper and Evie, and my beautiful Kelpie, Nelly. On the right-hand side at the top, you can see what I do at work. Bottom left, I am a winemaker. So I've got a little winery down the road, and we buy about 20 ton of grape in and make some really nice Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. And then there's a little exercise in the bottom right, which comes out of Robert Keegan and Lisa Lay, his book, An Every One Culture, which is kind of getting leaders to show people that they're working on stuff as well. So I can rely on myself for strategy. I can rely on myself for optimism. I can rely on myself learning things quickly. But I need to work on making sure I stay focused, so not chasing squirrels. Optimism can be as much an advantage as a disadvantage as a leader and also need to watch out for inconsistent energy levels. I can go at a million miles an hour, but then I can fall in a heap if I'm not really monitoring how I'm managing my energy. So you can kind of see how this is something that allows people a window into their leader and also starts to create that environment where their vulnerability is okay. And people can see that work is not a place where you have to be perfect. You shouldn't have to hide your flaws. You should be open about your flaws so that other people can help you work on them. So the second part of Wilbur's model is leading teams. What we're going to talk about here is basically how do you take what you're intending to achieve and make sure that that gets down to the teams? Remote teams are really effective if they've got bounded autonomy. So teams that were already doing agile had control of their backlog or working through things. They moved into remote working relatively easily. It's the teams that get their work handed to them, get sat on their shoulders and that kind of thing that really struggle. So in remote AF we've built a whole bunch of stuff to enable you to take strategy into planning and then down into the teams so that the teams can work out what actions they're going to do. And we've also built a range of metrics, advice based on probably the last five years we've been working on this stuff. So how do you observe the system effectively from a data perspective so you can see the flow of work through the system? And then as a leader, you don't have to sit on people's shoulders. You know where the place that you need to intervene, the place in the system where you need to interrogate is, which is a very different way to look at a system. So these MIRO boards, which were basically built up but they'll work in any digital whiteboard tools are basically things that help you to do that as a leader. So you can articulate the long term and more visionary aspects of your strategy. You can explore where you are and what movement there is in the system that you need to be aware of. You can define your long term strategic planks. So the things that they challenge the possible, they should be really hard to achieve. And then you use OKRs to take those down into things that can go into the teams and then come back up in a bi-directional fashion so you get the back brief that shows that people understand and are committed to be going where you're going. We also have... I'll show this quickly. What you can see here is a bunch of teams across a 70 or 80 person program who are taking a telecoms, a large telecoms transformation program and using the all hands planning pattern in remote AF to bring things into a group plan. So similar to big room planning but conducted remotely, it's a really good way to get everyone aligned and make sure that you understand as a leader what's happening, where the constraints are, that kind of thing. We've got leadership team, launch canvases. It's a process for launching or relaunching your leadership team in the remote context, thinking about how you're performing as a team, what demands are on you, how decisions are going to be delegated, how you measure performance, going through a process of building a team alliance and working out what behaviors you're going to accept, looking at when you want to work, when you want to get together and also how we're going to communicate with ourselves and with the broader business. So this is a pattern for launching or relaunching the team, which is, I forgot to mention, we're in Wilbur's leading together quadrant now. So this is the leadership team working together. We've also got the virtual abaya. An abaya room is something that we use profusely as part of the engagements that we do as a consultancy. It's a room where you have all the information that's necessary to make great decisions. So the virtual abaya in remote AF, I'll show you some of the patterns that live underneath. We've kind of got data, the key data pieces that we need. We've got connection to strategy. We've got connection to plans. We've also got team agreements and story, me story us cards to kind of hook everything together and make it really easy for people to see what's happening, where things are and where things are going. There are some really good tools out there that support this. We're really liking where a lot of the existing tools are going as they're getting investment and really pushing into this remote future. Finally, we've got leading the system. So I won't go into this in great detail. As I said, you can come and have a chat to us and we'll show you around. But the core thing here is making sure that you sit down and work out, all right, I've got all these new constraints. I can't do the things that I used to do. So how am I going to design my operating model, my operating cadences, governance, leadership, all those things? How am I going to design them differently so that I can make the most of this new situation? And that's the operating model design and the remote governance patterns. So yeah, you can start to see how from a leadership perspective if you're leading an organization that's remote or hybrid or planning on being remote or planning to go hybrid, there's a whole range of stuff in the framework that'll help you with those problems. What I wanted to do now though, is show you a little tool that we like to do before we do operating model design. And this is a workplace future-spective. So it's basically something that you can do to think about where you want to go. The basis of this is the futures cone or the cone of possibilities, which was work of Herman Minkowski. He was one of Einstein's teachers. It was introduced to us by Eladad Hamedi via Jay Bloom, who I think presented on this at DevOps conference a few years back. Basically, humans can get a little bit stuck when they're trying to think about possible futures. We kind of get locked into what's immediately visible to us. So the future-spective is designed to try and take you out of that constrained thinking and get you to think a little bit more into the future. What I'm going to do, I will stop this presentation now, and I'm going to pop into the discuss on the right-hand side, a link.  So this is in the audience public section of discussions on the right-hand side. You'll see the Miro board and the password is remote colon AF to that board. And I'll bring the board up. Good. We're starting to see some people appear here. I'll just bring you all to me. So as I said, this is something that you can take from this talk and you can use with your teams. I'm going to go through it very quickly. The instructions are pretty clear. So you should be able to take this and run with it. I'll just give it a couple more minutes to make sure that we've got everyone. You can see that now. So if we move in, how do we run this? So the problem statement for this exercise is how do we make the best of now and then purposely evolve towards a more productive, flexible, engaging, sustainable and equitable approach to work? I'm going to bring everyone in to the current state. And for those who have joined us in the Miro board, I'll bring you to me. What I'd like you to do is on the left-hand side of the Miro board, you should be able to pull some sticky notes in. I'd like you to think about your current state. Use a green sticky note for something that you're really liking about your current situation. Use a pink sticky note for something that you're not liking about your current situation and kind of think about these eight lenses. So what's life like at home? What's life like at work? In your community? Your personal wellbeing? Equitability? Safety and sustainability? And risk? That's the eighth one. Black monotonous, I like that. So we don't need to spend a whole lot of time on this, but you can see how you can start to get some really good insights into how the current state is, which is really important. So if you're a leader and you're seeing people say things like monotonous and stuck and that kind of thing, risk of getting COVID-19, it's an opportunity to really empathise with people and try and understand how you can create an environment that's better for them. The worst thing that you can do in remote working is take all the things that you used to do in your physical workspace that were designed around the constraints of being in a building, having a set of rooms that you can use, having floor space in a certain configuration, and just roll that stuff into the remote environment. Meetings need to change. You need to rethink the way that you do things with remote at the heart of it. So if we then scroll over, I'm going to bring you across, what you then do with your teams is ask them to project forward. So basically say, if nothing changed about the current situation, so if we did nothing, what mess do you think we'll get in? So what problems do you foresee? And you can challenge them with a few questions around the edges there as they fill things in. So I'll get you to start bringing in some sticky notes now. But as people are doing that, you might challenge them as a leader or a facilitator by saying, is the mess stable? Will it improve? Will it get worse? Are any of these problems related to each other? How are they related? Why are they related? You might also start thinking about more of a larger systems view. So are there powerful external agents acting on the system? We're already starting to see in some places that there's a big push for people to return to the city. The reason for that is there is a lot of money tied up in corporate real estate and in retail in the city and that kind of thing. So we will see as things start to move forward that there will be a big push to get people back into town, into the city. Great. All right. So once you've done that, we then ask people to take the shackles off. And we ask them to move out to the outer edge of this exercise and just say, what would an ideal future look like? So if we just got rid of all the constraints, if we just said, let's do this differently and build a workplace that is perfectly suited to where we want to go, whether that's fully remote, whether that's hybrid remote or something in the middle, what might that look like? Again, I'll get you to bring some things in there, but it might be something like, I'd like to be at work one to two days a week. I'd like to live somewhere a bit further out of the city closer to my family or closer to my hobbies or something like that. I'd like to make sure that we are subsidizing our employees or paying for them to have ergonomically safe work tops. I'd like to have a series of hubs. So maybe not a big corporate office. Maybe it's a series of hubs that are closer to regions, that kind of thing. So whoever's put that water cooler chats in, I'll move that out to, we're just in the purple circle now. Good, I think everyone's getting the hang of this. So then finally, we then ask people to go, all right, well, between that ideal future and where we are now, there's a more plausible future. So how about we start to look at what's plausible in our context and then look at what interventions we're going to need to make in order to take us closer to that ideal future. So you can kind of see how the exercise focuses you in on the now, makes you cast forward to see the issues with not acting, then resets you to think about something that's ideal and utopian before bringing you back to something between current state and reality. And through this, you can have some really good conversations about the kind of workplace that you want to create and what that's going to take. You can do this at a team level, at a group level or at an organizational level. So we'll close that off now. As I said, if with your own organization, you can go into the handout section and you'll find a copy of it to chuck in your own digital whiteboard, whether that's Miro or Mural or Atlassian or Google or whatever you're using. You can hit me up on Twitter, A.J. Blaine. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can visit the website and make contact with us via that means. So plenty of ways to get in touch. Always happy to talk about this and talk about how we can make this work in the future.


Let's start with Alice. So in her frame, the light clock is stationary. So when the photon is moving towards the right, it's traveling at speed C, the clock has meant LA, so it'll take LA over C. And the same for the trip to the left. Therefore, TA is given by 2 LA on C. Okay, now let's look at things from Bob's reference frame. The two mirrors are initially separated by a distance LB. Now the photon is moving to the right at speed C, but the rightmost mirror is moving away from the photon at speed V. Therefore, the time it'll take the photon to reach the right mirror is LB divided by C minus B. On the way back, again, they're initially separated by LB, but the photon is moving to the left at speed C and the mirror is moving towards at speed V. And so the time taken is LB on C plus V. Now we can simplify this like this. So it's always good to get into a habit of checking your work. So I've got this expression here. Is there anything we can quickly do to see if it's obviously wrong? Well, in our everyday life, we don't notice special relativity effects. Everything works according to Newton's equations, when the velocity is much smaller than C. So let's see what would happen if V was much, much smaller than C. Then the denominator C squared minus V squared would be pretty much just equal to C squared. And in this case, we get a result that looks similar to the result TA. This is a good sign because in Newtonian mechanics, you know, before we've heard any of this strange special relativity, we'd expect Alice and Bob to measure the same times for the ticking of the light clocks. Okay, I am going to take the answer we got and I'm going to write it in a very suggestive manner like this. So because of time dilation, as we derived in the previous section, Alice's clock will be ticking more slowly than Bob's. So we've got an equation that looks like this and there's a gamma involved. So think about it, if Alice's clock is ticking more slowly and gamma is greater than one, which side of the equation should gamma be on? Pause the video and see if you can guess. Okay, so if Alice's clock is ticking more slowly, when Alice says one second elapsed, Bob will say no, more than one second elapsed. So gamma should be on the left hand side. This is the expression. It's always a good idea if you can to try and get some intuition for these equations, that way you're not stuck having to look through a formula sheet every time you come across any problem and gamma is of course given by this. So here's a question. How do LA and LD relate to each other? Give it a try and if you get stuck, there's a hint in the next video.


In this training video, we're going to look at the use of custom slides within PowerPoint. So, for example, if you wanted to, you could go to the slide show tab and choose an option called custom slideshow. Now, what this is going to do for you, it's going to give you the option of not showing the entire presentation during a slideshow. So, you might only want to see certain components of a presentation, or you might want to split your presentation app into multiple custom slideshows to show to various parts of the organization before you do a big presentation to a big customer. So, we're going to look at this option. So, custom show on the slideshow tab. I'm going to click the arrow and I'm going to choose Custom Shows. We're going to call this, so we're going to give it New and Name. And the name is going to be Visual Slides. So, we're going to look at slide 4. I'm going to add that one. We'll look at slide 6, slide 7, slide 8, and slide 9. So, only these slides, I want to show people for our visual slides within the presentation. I'm going to click OK. Now, we can show this ourselves right now to see what it would look like. So, you can always edit a custom show by adding more slides to it. You can remove it. You can copy it. So, let's show it to see what it looks like. So, there's the first visual slide, then the next one, and the next one, and the final one. And that then shows us what the presentation is going to look like with this particular custom show.  Well, let's have a look. So, we're going to play the slideshow from the beginning and see if the custom show is now available to us or whether we've got to do something to set the custom show app. So, from the beginning, and we can see it goes to the first slide which is called Holiday Snaps the heading, and it starts going to the text slide. So, even though we've now created this custom show, we can see in the slideshow itself it's not available to us at present. So, we've now got to set it to a custom show if we want to show that custom show to our audience. So, I'm going to press Escape. Now, to set the custom show to display to your audience it's the slideshow tab, and it's in the setup slideshow. And then you can show slides all from one slide to another slide or custom shows. We're going to set it in this example, the custom shows. Now, if we had lots of custom shows, we can then choose which one we want. In this example, we've only got one custom show which is visual. We've now set it. So, when we press from beginning, it's going to show the visual slides custom show. So, okay. That's what happens now. Slideshow from beginning, and there's the first of our visuals because we've set it to custom shows. I'm just going to go through it. There's a second custom. So, the old visuals next, and there's the end of that show. If you then wanted to set it back to the entire presentation, slideshow tab, setup slideshow, and then change it back to all. Click OK. Now, if I go from beginning, it's going to go from slide one. And now we're back to the text slides. And I'm going to press Escape at this point to come out to the presentation. But this completes the use of custom shows within Microsoft PowerPoint and displaying custom shows within the presentation, as well as setting the slideshow back to all slides.