 Welcome to our presentation titled Establishing an Open Education Community of Practice at a Bilingual University, Year 1 Reflections. Your presenters are Melanie Prené, Open Education Librarian, and Michelle Brown, Head, Learning and Student Success. We are both librarians at the University of Ottawa. The University of Ottawa is a public research university located on the unceded ancestral land of the Algonquin people in the heart of Canada's capital city, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is the largest bilingual French and English university in the world and offers 550 undergraduate, masters, doctoral, and professional programs. It provides courses, resources, and services in both English and French. There are about 44,000 students at the University of Ottawa. 70% of those students study in English, while only 30% of students study in French. The university provides courses, resources, and services in both English and French, but it is not in equal proportion. It is also important to note that the majority of teaching staff at the University of Ottawa are adjunct and part-time professors, rather than full-time and tenured faculty. This can sometimes pose a challenge for communities of practice and other types of group, since there can be a lack of continuity among the staff. We will now speak to the creation of the community of practice. Ottawa's Strategic Plan Transformation 2030 signaled administrative support for the promotion and development of French-language OER and open education in general. This was an important first step leading to the creation of the Open and Affordable Learning Materials Working Group, which found that the campus had pockets of innovation, but the larger university community lacked a cohesive vision for the use, creation, and dissemination of OER. One of the recommendations of the working group was to strike a community of practice on open education. The community of practice was meant to be a vehicle for awareness-building, information-sharing, and support, as well as to lay the foundation for a culture of open pedagogy at the university. The community of practice set out to recruit known OER champions on campus to become members. These included professors, students, and other staff who had demonstrated an interest and advocacy for open education, or those who had already created OER or used OER in their classrooms. After careful planning, the OER community of practice met for the first time in October 2021 and is open to all at the University of Ottawa. For this overview of the first year, we will focus on our membership, the themes discussed, and some of the benefits and successes we have identified. After a year, the community of practice had 60 members, with full-time professors and librarians representing half of the membership, with 15 members each. Staff, administrators, students, and part-time instructors made up the other half. The latter are the most underrepresented group, with only 5% of the membership, affecting two known trends at UO. First, part-time instructors are notoriously difficult to reach, even through official channels. And second, their working conditions are precarious. Finding out teaching assignments a week before classes start is not conducive to adapting a course around OER. By contrast, full-time faculty have the privilege of investing time in OER use, adaptation, or creation. Library employees represented 43% of the membership. Far behind were the faculties of arts, social sciences, and science, representing around 10% each. This overrepresentation of the library reflects the main center of OER support on campus. The community met nine times from October to June. All meetings were virtual, averaging 14 participants. The first two meetings were devoted to reviewing the terms of reference and planning activities for the year, while the others started with announcements followed by a presentation by a guest speaker and a discussion. Students covered a variety of themes and external guest speakers were invited when expertise was not available internally, which contributed to making English the dominant language of communication. While slides were translated into French and participants could ask questions in either language, meetings with presentations primarily in English extended into discussions that were overwhelmingly in that language as well. However, some benefits and successes from our first year include the presence of students, administrators, and even a representative from the university press. These stakeholders were mostly absent from OER outreach activities until then and got to learn from each other. The participation of students was especially enlightening, providing professors with firsthand examples of how commercial textbooks are problematic. The themes were suggested by members and then curated by the organizing committee, which made for a program that reflected their interests and addressed the knowledge gaps they identified. The COP facilitated networking among members, especially with the professor-student co-creation panel that raised awareness about OER champions in different faculties. While the library is overrepresented in the membership, the community has served as a channel to promote the OER support available at the library, at the university, and beyond, such as Ecampus Ontario and Rebus Community. While members and meeting participants surveyed in July 2022 indicated being satisfied with the first year of activities, there are some challenges the organizing committee needs to address and some lessons learned. Since it started during the COVID-19 pandemic, the community has only met virtually so far, which is not optimal for networking among members. However, the vast majority of members are interested in maintaining the option to connect remotely instead of meeting solely in person. While the community still uses Teams to host its documentation and post updates, this platform proved problematic for external guests. The last three meetings were held and recording on Zoom, which was easier to use. The openness of the Teams channel, meaning anyone with a UOttawa email address can join, was also a challenge with some documents being deleted by visitors. A backup folder was created in a locked sub-channel as a solution. The focus on presentations has turned the COP into a sort of speaker series. Some presentations leaving little time for discussion, thus hindering exchange among members. Dedicated time for a tool to tab among attendees and questions shared ahead of meetings are being considered to encourage members to share their thoughts on different subjects instead of arranging to have guest speakers every month. The community is open to all at the university, wherever they may be in their OER journey. The first-year approach, leaning heavily on presentations by experts, may not be addressing more basic issues of interest to members who are new to OERs. Meetings were overwhelmingly conducted in English, in large part due to the topics and guest speakers who were invited to present. Efforts should be made to invite more francophone or bilingual guest speakers, although the persistent gap in the availability of OERs in French is an indicator of the state of open education in these two languages. Focusing on discussion topics rather than inviting experts may be more conducive to bilingual conversations. Finally, full-time professors and librarians representing half of the membership is not a coincidence. They are already OER champions and advocates. In that sense, the community is not necessarily raising awareness about OERs among the uninitiated when we know that most professors and instructors are not familiar with OERs. Thank you so much for your interest in our Lightning Talk.