 All right, well, welcome everybody. This is a workshop today. It's a two-hour workshop on building a support network for implementation of the UNESCO recommendation on OER, which we'll talk more about in a minute. But to get us started, why don't we do a quick round of introductions? I'll drop something in the chat here if you could type in your name or you're from. And then what we're really interested in is what is your interest in the UNESCO recommendation on OER? And while you're doing that, we'll do the panelists, we'll do a quick round of introductions as well. And let me call on the general to go first and then Paul, Igor and I'll go last. Sure, so hi everyone. It's great to see familiar faces and new names anyway. I'm really excited to be here as part of the panel and also just get a sense of your insights as we move to the brainstorming part of this program. I'm logged in from Mount Rainier, Maryland in the US and I work with Cable Green at Creative Commons. So yeah, I'm just delighted to be here. Thank you. Over here. My next door is the corner. Okay, thank you. I'm still waking up, so you gotta bear with me. Hello everyone, I'm Paul Stacey. I'm the executive director of Open Education Global and I'm based in Vancouver, Canada. And this particular workshop and the topic of the UNESCO OER recommendation, we've been seeing as a sort of major, the recommendation itself is like a major milestone. And of course now the challenge is how do we take a recommendation and encourage governments to implement? And so I think that's both exciting and challenging and we look forward to engaging you all and helping figure out how to do that. Thank you. Thank you, Paul. So I'm next, so Paul is waking up and I'm beginning to fall asleep slowly. It's lovely to see so many familiar faces here and welcome to the new ones as well. So my name is Igor Lesko. I am from Slovakia, but permanent resident in South Africa for the past 20 years. I work together with Paul at Open Education Global and I think that Paul you have contextualized together with Jen in the activity quite well. So I'm not gonna get into the specifics around the OER recommendation, but it's a pleasure to be here and welcome everyone and we look forward to your feedback. Thank you. Hi everybody, I'm in Paul's time zone. If you can see out my window, it is pitch black and I have a very, very large cup of coffee in front of me. Hi, my name is Cable Green. I'm the director of Open Education at Creative Commons and I have the pleasure of working with these other fine panelists on a regular basis. And this, a couple of things about this session and then I'll give a very quick introduction to the recommendation before we jump in. The first thing is that we've actually been running this session now, this is our third time over three conferences. And so we started this at the CC Summit last week. We were at the Open Education Conference and then now at OE Global. And so we'll talk a little bit about that arc and we'll be actually building on some of the work that folks did before. So I've been at Creative Commons for I guess 10 years now, it's been a fair bit. I work with Jenrin on Open Education at Creative Commons and spend most of my time working with institutions and governments, mainly helping them move from either free to open or closed to open. And but I would say that most of our really important work is done in partnership with folks like OE Global and other NGOs and institutions and governments because all of these challenges that we work on in Open Education really can't be done by an individual. They can't be done by even one organization. They really require a lot of collaboration which I think is a good theme for today. So a very quick introduction. If you're on, we should also share this agenda doc that was linked to the main session on OE Global but I'll share it here. Oh, Igor's already shared it, thanks Igor. Way ahead of me. So if you look down on that agenda, where it says summary of the history, you'll see a link to the UNESCO recommendation on OER. So if you need to reference it throughout today that's where it is. Quick background, UNESCO's been in the Open Education game for a long time. So and what I mean by that is way back in 2002 there was a meeting at UNESCO. One of the things that came out of that meeting was actually the term open educational resources. 10 years after that, UNESCO hosted a meeting in Paris at their headquarters and out of that multi-day meeting came the declaration on OER. And in UNESCO speak, a declaration is an instrument that is a bit of an announcement. It's a heads up to national governments. Their member states, this is a really important topic that we ought to pay attention to, should discuss and should be part of our conversation going forward in this case in education. And so that was really powerful. It got a consensus yes vote. It was the first time for many countries that they had thought about open education in a strategic way. So that was a really good first start. Five years after that there was a meeting in Slovenia in Libiana called the World OER Congress in 2017. And that was, okay, now that we've had the declaration for five years and there's been a lot of activity around the world, what let's report out on what has been happening. And 40 or so national governments showed up a bunch of NGOs and other advocates. And it was a really great, again, multi-day meeting. It was kind of half conference and half government meetings. One of the things that happened at that meeting was some additional drafting of what ultimately became the recommendation on OER. In UNESCO speak, when you look at their instruments, a recommendation is more powerful, if you will, or more important than a declaration. So a recommendation is UNESCO's member states actually saying, this is a recommendation. These are a set of specific actions that as governments we ought to take. And so we started drafting it. There was a multinational drafting committee. And in the end, last November, in November of 2019, the UNESCO member states unanimously adopted this recommendation on OER. And so if you've, I'm sure all of you have seen the recommendation has multiple sections in it. We'll talk more about that later in today's workshop. But this now exists. And I'll stop by saying that this is, as Paul said, a really, not only an important document, but it is an opportunity for all of us that work on open education and would like to see greater adoptions, would like to see greater awareness of open education. And in particular, would like to see governments with their funding, with their support, with the political cover that they can provide, with collaboration between governments. We'd really like to see them fully implement this instrument, this recommendation on OER. And so with that, let me turn it over to Paul, who's gonna talk a little bit about what we are doing as NGOs in the world to move this conversation forward. Thanks a lot, Cable. And yeah, so just to add to the context that Cable's provided, when it started to become apparent that the member states were likely to adopt this recommendation, I think all of us that have been working in the open education space thought, wow, this is like really exciting. It is a major milestone for open education as it shows governments around the world are supporting moving ahead with OER and adopting and implementing it. And I also think that we felt that having some high level support like that for open education resources will really help many of the initiatives that have been underway at the grassroots level to flourish and grow. But at the same time, we all began to realize that implementation of this kind of scale, if we have 193 member states or countries around the world starting to move forward with open education, it's a big undertaking. And UNESCO realized that too. And in support of that, UNESCO formed what they're calling a dynamic coalition of member states and open education advocates that are working together to create roadmaps and plans associated with each of the action areas in the recommendation. But in addition, those of us that are kind of organizations that have been advocating and supporting open education around the world decided to join forces. And so I kind of tried to bring together a network of what we're calling open orgs made up of organizations who've long played a role in enabling open education around the world. And so the idea is, can we join forces to provide support for the implementation and be able to provide support at a scale and capacity that exceeds what each of us can do on our own. So we've been working together now to bring together organizations like that. For example, Open Education Global, which is on my organization and the one that Igor works with, Creative Commons, where Genren and Cable are from, but also Spark North America and Europe, the Commonwealth of Learning, OER Africa, the OER World Map, ISCME, Merleau Skills Commons, the International Council for Open and Distance Education and so on. And one of the things we'll be asking you today is that if you are representing an organization like that and would like to be part of the network, we're going to encourage you to become part of it. Or if you know of other organizations in your part of the world that you think should be part of it, we'll be asking and inviting you to identify who those are. So that's kind of the motivation around forming this network of open orgs. It's a little different than the dynamic coalition in that it's primarily organizations like the ones that I just listed who are eager to provide services and products in support of government who are implementing the UNESCO OER recommendation. It's effort to try to collaborate, essentially, on providing those services in a way that makes sense for government and provides them with more of a kind of seamless end-to-end solution, if you will. So that's the kind of background around the creation of the network of open orgs. And I'll just stop there to see if there are like any questions from people so far about like the history or what UNESCO is doing, what we're trying to do. Feel free to drop questions into chat. I don't actually see anything yet. People understand what we're talking about. That's good. But if you have anything, feel free to drop it in there. So let me talk a little bit about what the workshop activity is going to entail. You can see it described in the agenda. Essentially, what we wanna do is tackle each of the areas of action that the OER recommendation defines. And we've created a Google Doc for four of those areas of action. There's five areas of action, but we're gonna look at four of them today. And we'll be describing what the action area is and then inviting you to identify, help you at your institution or you at your organization or your government even might need to implement that action in the recommendation. And we'll also be inviting you to identify what existing resources or projects or initiatives that you're aware of that we could kind of aggregate and make available to support governments with their implementation of the recommendation. And then we'll also be again asking you whether you know some organizations globally or regionally or locally that could become part of this network of open orgs and assist with the implementation. So we're gonna take each of the action areas one at a time, there's a Google Doc which has been used, the same Google Docs been used in the other events that have preceded this that Cable mentioned. And so we're building off what others have contributed and we'll be inviting you to kind of work on those and make recommendations yourself or suggestions around what resources, services and organizations could be made use of. And then we'll be inviting you to share back with everyone what you've provided. I think that's more or less our activity. Does my team wanna add anything Igor, Jenrin, Cable? That's good, okay, we're good. And so with that, why don't I invite Cable to go first with the first action area around capacity building? Great, thanks, Paul. So as we mentioned before, the UNESCO recommendation is blocked into five sections. So what we're doing today is we're looking at four of those sections. You may ask, well, what happened to number five? Number five is essentially an action for collaboration and for governments to work together around the world to share what they're learning and share processes. And that's kind of what we're doing. So this is an effort of multiple NGOs around the world to work together to collaborate and share. And then the UNESCO OER Dynamic Coalition is doing a similar set of activities, including reaching out to UNESCO member states. And so we're gonna really focus on the four activities, the real meat of the recommendation, if you will. And you can see those four on the agenda, those four areas spelled out, capacity building policy, encouraging effective, inclusive and equitable access, and then discussions of sustainability models. And so I'm gonna go ahead and kick us off with capacity building. And if you look, I'll highlight the agenda item there. You'll see a Google Doc. I'll make it bold so it's easier to find. There's a link there that says GDoc. If you go ahead and click on that, if we can all get on that document, that would be helpful. And then once you're on that document, we'll talk about the categories here in a minute, but just scroll to the very bottom of the document. And what you're gonna see highlighted in green there is it says building capacity of stakeholders to create access, reuse, adapt and redistribute OER. So what this section is below the dotted line. This block of text, and you'll see this on all the other Google Docs as well. This is the actual text from the recommendation that talks about this first topic area. And so I'm gonna just do about 15 seconds here and hit the highlights, but then I want everybody to take a moment and read this. So part of this is about building awareness. We all know that there are a lot of people that just don't know about this and that's also true of governments. They haven't heard of open education or OER. Talking about capacity buildings. So what kind of professional development opportunities, mentorship opportunities and other capacity building might we need to do. Talking about exceptions and limitations. So not just looking at works that are in the public domain or that are openly licensed, but actually leveraging exceptions and limitations to copyright that may exist in one country or another. Leveraging the existing tools that are out there. So leveraging creative commons, open licenses, other open license platforms and tools, understanding the standards. This is a, let's leverage the good work that's already there. Let's not recreate the wheel as we're moving forward and implementing. Making resources easy to access and to find on not only finding OER stakeholders and topics, but also copyright open licensing materials. So let's make sure that it's simple for people to find the resources they're looking for. The OER world map plays a major role here and then promoting digital literacy skills. For those of you who've worked with UNESCO, you know that that's a big part of what they do. And a lot of the work in open education sits in a unit inside UNESCO that works on digital literacy and learning and online learning, et cetera, their information technology and communications group. Okay, so I'll stop talking for a minute. If everybody could just take a moment and read this section of the recommendation. Come back to you in two minutes. Okay, did everybody have enough time to read that? Okay, all right, great. Now, if you go stay on that same Google doc that's talking about capacity building and scroll back to the very top, if you would. We're interested in, and we hope you're interested in several big categories here. And I've got these highlighted in purple. So the first category is specific help that you or your government might need with implementation. So as you look at the recommendation and you think, I'd really like, so here's Paula. She wants to work with the Italian government. She's thinking, what do I need and what does my government need for assistance to implement the actions that are in the UNESCO recommendation on OER. So that's what this category is about. Within the category, we've got three kind of subcategories of getting started, ramping up or full scale. Now, if these make sense to you and you can think of resources that fit in one of these, great. If you just, if you don't wanna worry about those categories and just say, here's the help I need, that's okay too. You can just type it in anywhere under that purple. We'll sort it out later. But this idea of getting started, ramping up and full scale, it's a way to subcategorize resources. And what we're talking about here, and we've got a little bullet list here, which I'll highlight in a, I don't know, I'll highlight it in yellow. The idea there is there are governments around the world and institutions where they're just getting started. They haven't heard of open education. If you say to them, OER, they have no idea what that means. There haven't been any major efforts in the country that the government knows about. They're really getting started. You're starting from ground zero. So for that category, what resources are out there that you might use? Could be slide decks, could be speakers you wanna bring in, could be the idea to hold a national open education Congress in your country. Any idea is okay. But the idea is what resources would you need for a government that's really just getting started or if you're just getting started. Ramping up, the idea is my government's got some things going on. Maybe there's a grant program from the national government or there has been in the past. Maybe three or four of my universities and colleges or some schools have run some local open education initiatives and there's a bit of awareness, but we've got a lot of work to do still. And so what's the next, what are the resources that we need to take those next steps to implement this recommendation? And then full scale would be if you are in a country that has been doing this for a long time, there's a lot of momentum. Maybe you've got multiple open licensing policies in place at national levels, at provinces and states. So I think our lead for open education from Colorado is here. They might say, hey, we're working with the governor. We've got funding coming in. We've got projects all over the state of Colorado. I would say that's a full scale model and they're really now looking at the recommendation checking boxes off and saying, oh, we haven't done that yet, but let's talk seriously about how we can implement those elements. So that would be an example of full scale. And feel free to think about this at a national level for your government. It could be at a state or provincial level or it could even be at an institution level. As we the open NGOs are talking about what resources we might provide and what services we might provide. We're actually thinking at all three of those categories at government levels and with individual institutions. So that's that first bucket, specific help you or your government needs with implementation. The next category also highlighted in purple are existing resources, projects or initiatives that you think would help with implementation of the recommendation. So what's already out there that other people are doing that you know about, maybe a project that you run that you'd like to share with others. And again, same categories, getting started, ramping up or full scale. And then the last category is what organizations are out there globally, regionally or locally, which could assist with implementation. So maybe you are an OE Global member at your institution and you say, hey, we've got, we're actually worked with OE Global on XYZ and this is a really great opportunity for us to get involved with this. Or maybe you're a Creative Commons chapter and you say, hey, this is a, this could be a great chapter activity for us in 2021 or working through the CC Open Education Platform is something that we're starting to talk about. Could be other organizations, maybe you're a Wikimedean or a Mozillaan or other organizations you work with that you think could be useful to you or your government in implementing the recommendation. So that's what that's for. And these don't have to be the usual suspects. These could be entities that you know about and you think would be really good partners in this. So I've talked long enough. Let me pause for a minute and see if there are any questions about these activities we're going to do. Does that make sense? See, Paula's rolling her eyes a bit at me. Does that make sense, Paula? Okay. All right, excellent. So that is the intro. I'm just looking back at the agenda here. Yeah, so let's go ahead and I'm not gonna take a bunch of time reviewing the contributions. I just wanna call out, as we said before, that what you see on the Google Doc now are contributions that people have put in from these last two conferences from the CC Summit and the Open Education Conference last week. And so let's all take a bit of time and I think we'll take around five minutes. Is that right? For people to write in. And we will, so everybody think about these categories, start adding resources if you will. Put as much text in there as you'd like. If you have links to resources or organizations, that's a bonus. And let's all just go ahead and add to the document. Last thing I'll say, and then I'll turn off my mic, is that all of these resources will go into a matrix of resources that align with these parts of the recommendation. And so something that we're working on in this group of NGOs is we've created a matrix that's like a grid or a spreadsheet. And each individual action has a line. And then we've got a space for what resources might be useful for governments, what resources might be useful for institutions and then what services might different NGOs and organizations provide. So with that, we can all type for a bit and then we'll loop back and let people report out on what they added. Two more minutes. Okay, I still see lots of good typing. Please don't stop. If you have other resources you'd like to add, go ahead and put them down. And we should also say these Google docs will remain open for, well, we'll leave them online in perpetuity, but feel free to leave them open for comment for quite for several days. So if you have other ideas, please add them. Please keep adding ideas. Let me just open the floor. Is there anybody that wrote down or contributed something that you'd like to share or highlight? And feel free just to open your mic. You don't have to type in the chat. We'd love to hear from you and see you. Just to help things along, okay. Well, I would like to call on either Paola or Jacques Dan to please take the floor and explain their contributions. Thank you. I can go with it. Hi, everyone. Nice to see you smiling, first of all. Well, as you can easily imagine, I'm the one who wrote the first part around getting started because as far as I know, and I'm not sure that I'm really updated actually because you never know if you know what's going on. This is the basis. But we tried with the CC chapter in Italy and you cable know about that. And thank you for your support to forward quite a good recommendation to our government directly to the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of University and Research which should be the most interested. And also in my optimistic perspective when the recommendation was published, I thought that they would care. I mean, they were in some way compelled to care, okay. Well, nothing, no answer either. So we really don't know. And on that, I believe that two things count. One thing is that we are often working very, very locally. I don't believe that I'm the only one. I know that there are other people around Italy. We are trying to work in a network but it's always groundwork made by people who don't have any decision making power anywhere. So what happens is that we continue doing this with different initiatives. And you know that in Polytechnico, we tried to do whatever we could so far and we are still doing, but it's always one professor at a time, one resources at a time. We don't have any policy, not at the university level, nor regional level. Let's not talk about the national level. So we really need to get started. That's the situation. And so I believe that in our case, English as a second language might play a role. You know, because in Italy, not everyone talks in English fluently enough or at least in order to understand it properly. And I believe that having Italian versions of different key documents might really help. We already have the version of the Creative Common Certificate for Educators and Librarians, but it's not enough. We need someone who suggests to use it and have the power to decide that it's worth it. So anyone who is willing to join and come and help is welcome. And Paula, I'm looking, it looks like the recommendation itself is, it has not been translated into Italian by UNESCO. Do you know if it's been translated into Italian by someone else? No, I can help. If you want, I can help. You know that I'm not a professional, but we can ask for the support of someone who revises it if it's needed. Well, that may be a good first start, right? So I thank you for first, thank you for being called on by Igor. Igor was that, he would be that teacher, right? Nobody would raise their hand and he would just start calling on people. So thank you for sharing. And I think you've brought up really, so here are the languages by the way that the recommendation is translated into. So we should add Italian to that. That could be a really important contribution. I think you've highlighted two critical points though that are not unique to Italy. One is that the national government may not be aware, obviously national governments, especially ministries of education are quite busy at the moment with other pressing topics. And so it's a difficult time to engage them on anything that's not COVID related and related to making sure that children and other students can learn at this difficult time. So to say that they're distracted is an understatement. And you make an excellent point about translations to make sure that the resources that are provided across all of these categories are in languages that are first languages for the people that we're seeking to persuade. Thank you. Is there somebody who else did Igor call on? I forgot who it was. This is Jacques. So I'd like to reassure Paola, having a national policy is not enough. We have policies in France, but ministers and civil servants come and go. So the focus shifts from resources to courses to digital campuses. And in the end, it's up to us, the organizations, the academic institutions to ensure that we achieve long-term sustainability because we cannot rely on the long-term approach from our civil servants or ministries. So the issue for me is to achieve this long-term sustainability and to solve a number of issues, such as getting the funding when the ministers are no longer interested, when they do not invest enough in infrastructure. And also we are the French-speaking market. So one word, but let's say, availability of resources is far smaller than the English-speaking market. So achieving a critical mass is more tricky. And if we don't achieve a critical mass, we may have to manage the life cycle of resources. Either we put up an update framework and policy, which is costly, which is difficult with the various contributors, or if we're lucky enough, we can have a critical mass and just throw away the old resources and the old technologies, but we haven't solved that yet. And lastly, we're not in a world where we can have only open content and how we manage the relationship with the content, with the users of commercial content in our institutions is also an issue. So getting an insight into that would be helpful. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anybody else that would like to comment on this topic before we move on? Yeah, Sean, go ahead. I'd like to, because I think he hit on something that I was also been thinking about, which is that licensing is often between multiple systems and disparate systems is often a challenge, I think. And it's certainly a challenge in the open source software kind of industry that I work in. But I think it's also increasingly a problem in the OER industry where you have multiple types of licenses. And the way I was thinking about it is how can we create a workflow or an automation system that will allow us to bring in multiple different types of licenses and reconcile those between the multiple parties to allow you to use and remix content of different licenses, right? And how do we bake that in into OER? I say they're all open licenses, but they're just different. How can we bake those in into a framework that allows you to kind of merge and remix and kind of normalize the licenses over time? And I think this partially goes into the next area what I was talking about a little bit around federated or centralized identity, right? So you have universities that largely know their faculty, but what about all those teachers at home or parents that are teaching with open education resource that want to create something? How do we get those people and the identity of those people into the OER system and as contributors and track them through time? So those are just my thoughts anyway. I'm kind of going off in a tangent, but there it is. I'm a techie at heart, so bear with me. That's okay, we're gonna need all hands on deck as we implement this recommendation with 193 countries. So there are no sidebars that's all critical. Anybody else? Final notes before we move on to the next topic. Yeah, Paul, go ahead. Okay, but yeah, I just want to make a quick comment because I added something into the getting started section. And this is just really more of an observation perhaps, but it's this, which is while the 193 member states all agreed to the OER recommendation, I think it's becoming increasingly apparent that they're going to need to be encouraged, maybe even pushed to implement it. And a lot of energy around trying to hold our governments accountable or encouraging action around this is going to come from us, I think, from the grassroots. And one of my hopes is that there'll be at least one government that decides to move forward in a significant way. And it would be wonderful, I think, if we could have an example of implementation of the recommendation that could serve us an exemplar for other governments to see and follow. And I think that there might be some potential sort of kudos and admiration that will go to a government who or governments who become sort of first movers, if you will, around the OER recommendation. And so I know that's not a call for action. It's just kind of an observation around what I think is actually going to happen. Because I think it's wishful thinking if we believe that the governments are just going to, oh yeah, okay, we're going to go ahead with the recommendation because I don't think that's really going to happen. Yeah, it's interesting. A couple of years ago, there were a bunch of us for a meeting in Malta for a different meeting. Open education was part of it. But it was before the recommendation had passed. We knew the recommendation was coming and Malta was hosting multiple other, what they call small states. So in UN speak, there's blocks of small states that vote together on various topics. And the idea of the recommendation came up. And directly to your point, a lot of multiple small states, including Malta said, we are simply, because we're smaller, we're more nimble. We aren't such a large ship that we have to turn. And so what if we, the small states became some of those first movers and we help each other in that? That was a, I think it's still an interesting idea. It doesn't have to be small states, but I completely agree. If we can get one, maybe five countries to block together, you could imagine us as NGOs throwing a lot of support to that small group of states and helping them be the exemplars for others to follow. Good idea. All right, well, we've taken up our time on this first topic. We've got three more to go. Now for the really exciting one, we're going to talk about policy. Let me turn it over to Igor. Thank you, Cable. Excitus, Igor. Make us excited. You should all go get some coffee now. So thank you very much, Cable. And thank you all for your contributions. All right, so if you go to the agenda document again, you will be able to get the link to the second document to the topic that is called Developing Supportive Policy. So lack of supportive policy environments at the institutional governmental level has been frequently identified as one of the major impediments towards mainstreaming of OER and the related practices. So this second area of the UNESCO YAR recommendation really is related to that. It calls on governments and institutions to create a more sort of open supportive policy environment for OER and related practices through the creation and adoption of applicable policies and strategies. Thank you very much, Gendrin, for the link. So if you scroll down further down in that document, you will be able to get the entire sort of text of the recommendation related to this area. There are eight different subsections. You can take a minute to read through that, but I'm just gonna provide a sort of high level overview of what this area of the recommendation is about. So for instance, it recommends a possible kind of action areas here include rules or regulations requiring that all educational resources develops a public funds period list openly. It also calls on the allocation of applicable resources financial for the implementation of policies. For instance, I mean now many examples around the world that actually implementation is the challenging part, especially if it is not sold through and if applicable resources are not allocated to the implementation of policies either institutional or governmental levels. It also for instance calls on OER to be embedded within national sort of education strategies or strategies at transforming education or ICT in education strategies. That's actually another I would say a trend nowadays. So organizations are advocating less for standalone OER policies because it's a bit more tricky to argue for and I agree more for embedding of OER within existing policy frameworks or changing existing policy frameworks that are impeding OER or related practices. It's also calling on OER to be aligned with other existing sort of openness policies, especially when it comes to open access, open data, open science. I think Paola you made that comment earlier on that there is an open access policy and not necessarily the same attention is given to OER and I think the same can be said about some of the existing open science policies in other countries that are not necessarily paying enough attention to OER or open education in general. So I think at the institutional levels you can find some examples where especially at an institutional level where some of the open access policies actually do include open educational resources too. So this component really calls on government and institutions to investigate existing open policy frameworks that they have already in place and see how they can be also expanded to include open educational resources instead of creating additional policies in this regard for instance. This area of recommendation also calls on the creation of communities of practice or networks of experts and OER related capacity building activities. And I think that this is also important in the context of I think what Paul mentioned earlier on that it's important to support those grassroots initiatives in order to get some of the policy developments in place. I think you can find lots of examples that are around the world actually where many of the policy, the positive policy movements or movements can be attributed to the work of these kinds of networks of experts of practitioners and even in Europe for instance. I mean, you can find examples in Poland for instance. We have Alexandra here that is looking like Alec Tarkowski from Centrum Zifrowie. One of the networks was in Poland, in Netherlands there is another network. There was one Slovakia and Czech Republic as well. So all of these sort of networks, open education coalitions can actually achieve quite a lot. So it's important to support them. But last but not least, this area also calls on more research related to OER and that's extremely important because often this really supports or feeds into evidence-based policy making. So this would be in a natural summary of what this area of the recommendation is about. I hope that you had a chance to read through it or to go through the main points but I think that most of you here are actually familiar with this point already. So now according to just to move things along according to our agenda, I think you can review the input that was already provided from the past to even. So you can see that it's the same methodology that Cable has already explained in great length. So I'm not gonna spend too much time actually explaining it but you can see there are three main areas there. So any kind of help that you or your government might need in terms of moving this area of the recommendation forward. It asks for your recommendations regarding resources projects that are in place that could help with the implementation and also any organizations that are working in this space. So you can list them that could assist with the implementation of the second area of the recommendation. And you will notice that there are many, there's quite a bit of contribution already from the past two events from participants. I mean, there are different areas there. In terms of the needs that people have identified for example is how to prepare advocacy strategies for policymaking, like how do you structure these kinds of arguments, what works, what doesn't. So this would be like, for example, one of the areas that people have identified in the past events or articulated during the past events. So this is now really an opportunity to again from your side to contribute your ideas under these three overall broad themes. And I think that we can maybe now take five minutes the same way like we did with the capacity building and then we can give the floor to participants to express their views on the contributions. Sounds good? Yeah. Are there any questions as far as, you know, so far in the context of this topic? Doesn't look like it, but I mean, so in the meantime you can contribute, you can continue contributing, but if there are any questions, feel free to unmute yourself and start speaking. We've got two minutes left. Okay, thank you very much all for your contributions. At this point in time, I can see there is a lot of information being contributed on the desert of first overall area, which is the kind of help that you or your government might need, which is great. So I would like to call on anonymous Coyote to please explain his or her contribution, this specific contribution. And I think it's still being worked on. So it's about the specific linkages between OER and open education policies implementation to professional development. Who contributed this idea, please? Don't be shy. Calling on anonymous Coyote, please. This is amazing. If anonymous Coyote is not available right now, there was actually a really great question that was posted in the space that might be worth highlighting. I posted it in the Zoom chat space, but I can read it if you're interested. Yeah, please go ahead. Okay, so let me see. The question was, how can governments help foster policy at local and institutional levels with a local control model? For example, how can we better promote open education policies and tenure and promotion processes for faculty when it is only the decision of the local institution? What incentives can we provide? How can we plant the seed locally without being too prescriptive, but also in an attempt to align with our overall goals and objectives in open education? I thought that was such a great question and a really important challenge to bring up with, policy that's generally top down with the needs that are more local. Thank you, John. I'm not sure who contributed this specific question. So we could invite the contributor to explain it further. And I see that, thank you, John. And I see Monsieur Dionne also contributed more about developments in France. Also, you will notice that some of these contributions that are made under the different areas are somewhat transversal. So they are really touching. So there are some comments made under the capacity building activity that are actually directly relevant also for the secondary of the recommendation. And they're also touching on the sustainability models in some ways too. So it's great stuff. Thank you for your contributions. Monsieur Dionne? Oh, sorry. Yes. What would you like me to comment on? Sorry. It seems like you contributed your ideas as far as the contributions, as far as developments in France are concerned. I think that's from your... I was just giving an insight on the point that was made about the issue of recognition for creation, adaptation, or ER in academic merit. So what I could... Perhaps I misunderstood and I will send it more from how all ER could be recognized in this national degree. So which was not really a focused point. So I apologize for this misunderstanding. Sorry. No misunderstanding. Thank you very much for the contribution. Regardless, we will readjust the information where it belongs. Thank you. But yeah, I think that the point about how to incentivize involvement in sort of all your creation in general, especially at an institutional level is something that is really important to address. And I think there are some examples now of policies where all your creation or all your related practices has been incorporated, been in tenure and promotion policies or frameworks, which in turn incentivizes people to contribute to these kinds of activities. So there's definitely a need for more. Yes. Cableye would like to say something. Egor, I was just thinking last week a similar question came up about how to provide incentives and how to persuade policymakers, whether it's a dean at a university which controls promotion and tenure policies or a government official. I can't remember what the exact question was, but we talked about how as open advocates, one thing, a strategy that we can all use is to do our research before we meet with that person. And what I mean by that is to identify what their vision and mission is at the institutional level or the department level or the ministry of education level to find out what goals they have, what are their key performance indicators that they monitor, that they care about, what's in their strategic plan. And then to look for alignment between what the OER or the recommendation on OER is recommending. And then if we can, of course, bring data and research that shows how a shift toward open education or implementing specific actions in the recommendation will actually move the institution or the government further along toward their mission, further toward their vision, helping them reach their key performance indicators in better ways. That's a great way to start. So specifically around promotion and tenure, as this is something we do of quite a bit at Creative Commons is we'll meet with education leaders within an education institution. So we'll meet with the deans of a university, for example. And when we're in that conversation, we'll start with basics. So what's the purpose of promotion and tenure? Well, the purpose of promotion and tenure is to advance scholars and teachers who are doing a good job, who are doing the best. And they're graded on three areas, right? Research, teaching and service. And so we spend a little time talking about what do those things mean and why do we care about them? Well, we care about service because it's service to the community, to the state, to the institution, to the country, to humanity sometimes. Why do we care about teaching? Well, for a whole bunch of obvious reasons. Why do we care about research? Well, we're disseminating knowledge. And so once we get back to the basics of why we care about that stuff, it's much easier than to say, this is why we care about open access publishing. Because through open access publishing, we get more people will read and it will have the opportunity to read and learn and benefit from the science that you're putting out into the world or the writings about the science. Why do we care about open education resources? Well, we care about them because it's going to lower cost radically. It's going to improve the quality. It's going to allow for open pedagogy. Like we can have the conversations about the values of open education with those folks once we know what their goals are. And if we can align those things, then persuasion is much less difficult. Not easy, but at least we're properly aligned. Yeah, well, thank you very much. This is not really important. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah. Now, I just wanted to acknowledge that these are really important comments that you made. And I think definitely I agree also from my side. I think the generic argumentations around, you know, are good or it's that I think to do it, this just doesn't really stick that well with policymakers at the institutional governmental level. It does really point to the need for a more nuanced approach to sort of policy advocacy in general. And also, like you said, aligning all your related activities within institutional mission, vision goals and the same thing with the governmental level. So what are the existing challenges, opportunities and how can all your can help address or resolve such challenges or opportunities, right? And approach policymakers from that angles. But it does require a bit more work and more nuanced approach to how you advocate for policy changes. So also I'm mindful of the fact that we are a thing out of time for this specific action area. And so thank you very much to all of you for your contributions that this is great. And again, as Cable has already mentioned, these documents will remain open beyond this session. So please feel free to contribute additional ideas. And now I would like to call on Jenrin to take over with the third area of recommendation. Thank you, Jen. Thank you so much. So I just posted topic number three, the document in our chat space. So hopefully we can all log in there and we'll run through the same thing that we just did a couple other rounds. So I won't go over the architecture for this. You know the drill. Topic three is encouraging, effective, inclusive and equitable access to quality OER. So this topic relates to how we can use, create, adapt, share OER for all stakeholders and be really aware of the context in which stakeholders are coming from. So we need to make access and engagement with OER as inclusive as possible. Contexts to consider include things such as formal and informal learning contexts, whether communities are offline, gender, age and socioeconomic status, whether learners are in disaster areas or fleeing from conflicts, whether they are in cultural or contextual sensitivities and other issues such as learners' local languages. So there are a number of different contexts to consider. Topic three also relates to the public and private investments in infrastructure that can help us increase access. So when you think about providing access to OER to folks in really low bandwidth areas or offline communities, what kind of infrastructure do they need to best kind of bridge that gap? And then also topic three looks at development and research and the kind of quality assurance mechanisms that we can put in place for this quality OER. So I wanna give us a little time to look at the text in full, but I also wanted to just make a quick side note if you don't mind. One thing that has been really inspiring to me has been looking at a kind of a thread emerge and a number of these different conferences lately. And that's been kind of a renewed focus on challenges that we face with inclusion practices in our open education work, especially when we are working with traditional systems, whether those systems are copyright systems or governance systems or otherwise. So I think it's incredible that we are very deliberately focusing on opportunities for inclusion and also these new threads of conversations that I'm seeing and maybe it's just new to me, I'll fully admit that. I think broadened the conversation even more. So if it's of interest, there is a session later today focused on some of the challenges and considerations called OER ontologies, a dialogue on decolonializing digital knowledges. I would love to see what you come up with today right now in this session for this really important topic area number three, but then also I'd invite you to join that session, think about this kind of broader framework for inclusion practices and then come back to this document with fresh eyes. That's what I'm planning on doing myself. Okay, so I'm gonna mute for a few minutes. You can take a look at the text, which is again at the very bottom of the page and then we'll open it up to questions and our brainstorming. Oops, I just realized I was muted. So I just wanted to reconvene and see if there were any questions on this topic area before we dive into the document and share some of our ideas and questions and considerations. Actually, I have a question generating, sorry. I am thinking right now in this area that being us in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea and the being that we have a huge movement as you all know from Africa up to Europe, that would be wonderful to support all those people who are moving while they are waiting for a place to stay, learning something at least as an interaction because it's incredibly painful to stay somewhere when you don't, when you are moving and you are compelled to be locked and because it's being locked. And I miss some words in English, but I think you all understand what I mean. So I don't know where to put this anyway. I think that this is something that through the OER recommendation, governments could really contribute to and this means that you cannot be online because there's no, I mean, you would increase the need of technology, et cetera. And even if there is the bandwidth, you require technology, but if you can arrange something in camps, I don't know where to put this. That's such a great point to bring up. And I think as Cable mentioned in his section, even if it's in the wrong spot, we can always rearrange. So I would just, if you have ideas for resources or otherwise, feel free to put them in the getting started or ramping up because I think that particularly vulnerable diaspora communities and refugee communities definitely need assistance. And I know there are a number of NGOs that look at ways to not only provide offline OER to refugee communities and in different refugee camps, but then also offer some kind of badging or something that would continue with them so that their information and credentialing isn't lost in the location in which they got credentialed or they did their learning. So I'll, yeah, I'll see if I can dig up some examples and add that here. Thank you for raising this. And really anywhere that you put ideas is welcome. Any other questions? Otherwise it looks like we're already jumping into the document, which is excellent. All right, well, let's dive in. I will reconvene with you all in about five minutes or so. Okay, thanks everyone. Feel free to continue when you have more stuff to share. I know Cable wrote something in the chat related to how the UN is already looking at open education and educational opportunities for refugees. So I would assume they're aware of some of these. I'll read what Cable wrote in the chat though. UNHCR, how can open education help provide educational opportunities for refugees and help refugees with academic credentials retain those credentials when they reach their new home? Education 2030, a strategy for refugee education access to education for refugee and migrant children in Europe. All right, thank you for sharing those. Just to be clear, Jenren, I don't know if they're talking about open education at all. I was just writing down what Paula's and your idea was. And then those two final sentences which are linked in your Google doc, those are reports that have been put out by UNHCR on the topic of education for refugees. I'm just trying to connect the dots. There may be an opportunity to reach out to UNHCR and have a discussion about their goals with education for refugees. How does, how might open educational line with that and what are the opportunities? That's a great idea. Yeah, thanks for sharing. Great, so I see we've over the course of these three conferences, we've developed a lot of really wonderful resources and ideas. I know some of you might still be thinking but does anybody wanna share a note or even a question about something that they see on the document or that they've contributed? I added a couple of things, Jenren. So I know Kiran who was one of the key notes at Open Education Global Conference last year is doing a lot of work with refugees. So I've added them to the organization section. And I also added learning equality who does a lot of work with offline learners and also World Possible who's doing work in Guatemala and it's part of the OE Global Latin America Regional Node. So these are some organizations that I think are already kind of well invested in supporting this kind of effort and need to be brought in to the table to provide support and resources that could help enable all of this. And also I added the BC Campus Indigenization Project. They're doing some really interesting work looking at decolonization of resources. And then you and I were talking earlier about the grant Open Education Global and CCC OER just got for developing anti-racism OER particularly in the US context. So I think there's some really good stuff happening that we can build on. Yeah, thank you so much for raising those. I'm sure we can continue the thinking and discussion on this. And I'm particularly interested to reframe some of my thinking after the afternoon session that we'll be learning from. Yeah, I think this is great. I think we've got a really good basis on which we can organize a little bit more and then share in the matrix that Cable noted that will go directly to the dynamic coalition. So really thank you all so much for contributing to this and also to building on this kind of larger arc of brainstorming that we were trying to create with this trilogy of sessions across different communities. So this is great. I think now it's over to you, Paul. Sure, some people are probably getting a little bit tired now but just to deal with the fourth action area which is about sustainability and I'll drop a link into the actual document. So this action area is around creating and nurturing sustainable models for open education resources. I know from the various meetings that we've held as the kind of network of open orgs that this particular area is perhaps the one that's had the least attention. We have very few existing models that represent exemplary ways to sustain open education resources. And so open business models of course have been part of the discussion around this but in terms of the recommendation specifically let me touch on some of the things that it talks about. It recommends governments consider reviewing the ways in which they procure goods and services related to education and enable those procurement policies and provision regulations, et cetera to enable the consideration of creating OER, archiving OER, making use of existing OER. So this whole notion around how we provide resources into the education system whether it's K-12 or higher ed could be reviewed by both governments and institutions let's face it in terms of how they engage in provision and procurement. So that's one area. Another area is around looking at sustainable models not only through traditional funding sources but also looking at the open business model space which is around building on lessons from other advances in openness that have happened as predecessors but that includes things like reciprocity models that look at crowdfunding and other such aspects that could change the way we think about how education is funded. There's also I should say an emphasis as well as looking at your existing funding for education and rather than thinking about the need for open education resources being additional money on top of that it actually the recommendation encourages governments to look at how to make use of the existing funding they have to use those funds in a different way a way that could be more directed toward open education resources and enable and support the use of open education resources without requiring additional funding. And so there's also some emphasis on looking at how to promote models across institutions. So how do we get institutions to collaborate with each other and participate in co-creation and generating value collectively? How do we think about that? I know from my own work in this space that many governments fund institutions in a kind of competitive model where your funding is based on enrollments which of course encourages institutions to compete with each other to get students. And that's another example of something that could be reviewed and instead perhaps creating models that support collaboration instead is also a need of course to look at linguistic translation of things like open licenses and how those might contribute to sustainability. And then finally looking at models that put in place mechanisms for encouraging feedback and constant improvement of OER. This is a topic that was explored earlier this week by David Wiley and I which was looking at how do you sustain open education resources over time and should all open education resources be sustained over time? And do we need a global system for doing this or could it be kind of a series of micro ecosystems? So this is a topic area or an action area that needs a lot of input and work and you can see that very little has been added so far to this action area. So I'll stop here and encourage you to think about what might serve as a foundation for us to build out some sustainable models. I'll maybe give just a shorter amount of time for this one because there is one other thing I wanna move on to before this workshop is over. But let's say four or five minutes to kind of add any ideas you might have towards contributing to sustainability models related to the OER recommendation over to you. I'll stop talking. You can see the activity is slowing down on that document. So why don't I call people back and just invite anyone who contributed something to say what they added and then we'll see what good ideas have been provided. Anyone wanna say something? I hear the seagulls, yes. Great, good shot. One of the organizations that I've kind of followed over many years is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now I know that they've done a lot of work in licensing and things like that, not directly related to open education in any way, but they might be an interesting one to get their ideas and kind of engagement around how our two industries are kind of similar in trajectory, right? If you look at open source software 15, 20 years ago, I think there's a lot of the same type of questions. And now even the biggest companies are moving towards open source and open source internal development and continuous integration, continuous development pipelines and those types of things, which all support content creation and content integration in a very seamless and productive way. And so maybe they have some insight into where we are in open education and our level in our growth, how targeted intervention in certain ways by help, I don't know. That's great. Yeah, I think one of the lessons learned from open source software is that those who have a vested interest in using a piece of software tend to invest in ensuring that it maintains its vitality. And so I think that same premise can be applied here to open education where if we could reduce the redundancy and replication of resources, whereby institutions all develop a similar course for a particular topic and instead combine those interests and uses together to create one better product than I think we'd be better off. But yeah, that's a good suggestion. Anyone else? Paul, I'll jump in and fill the space while people are thinking. So when I think about sustainability, I think it largely depends on, a lot of times we just think it's about money. And money is absolutely important and people need and should be paid for their work and it is a critical component. And the policy section that Igor went over is critical to that, right? We should make sure that we have policies in place that are directing funds toward the most efficient and effective routes for providing educational resources and professional development, et cetera. But when I think about sustainability, I think the rest of the recommendation, sustainability will largely be determined on the overall success of the entire recommendation. So as we think about, if there isn't awareness raising, if there isn't support for creation and adoption of materials, if there isn't training and mentoring and professional development, if we don't have those things to sustain becomes very difficult. So as I read through the document over and over after we have these conversations, it really hangs together and it requires that all of these elements be in place. A story I think I shared a couple of conferences ago, we've been doing this for a while now. I was in a conversation with our team at CC India a few weeks ago, and they were very frustrated because they've worked for years with the national government to get policies in place, to get a national OER repository in place. And their frustration was that people changed jobs. So a new government came in, this sub minister left a new manager took over the repository, licensing changed. Some of the importance and the vision was lost and it wasn't due to any ill will. It was just new people came in who were unaware. And so I think part of sustainability is our continued efforts in diligence in making sure that the systems we set up, the policies we create, the resources that are generated that we're, it's like a constant, we have to be constantly thoughtful and attentive as a community to sustain not just content, but all of those people elements as well, because without them, the house of cards can crash fairly quickly. And I think all that's part of sustainability. That's what I had to say. Yeah, I think that's true cable. And once in my career, I had an opportunity to create a new university from scratch. And one of the things I sometimes think is sometimes it's easier to start something new with these ideas than to transform and evolve and nudge an existing school or institution to adopt these things. And so one thing I sometimes think of is any new investments in creating additional schools or institutions could start with the foundation of open at the very beginning. And I think that certainly my experience in doing a new university from scratch was that like you could really blast ahead when you're not encumbered by trying to change what are very well-established and sometimes rigid processes and practices. Doesn't happen very often though. Big new money going into education, but we'll see. Anyone else have comments? Things that they wanna bring forward. All right, well, thanks so much for your contributions. We're approaching the end of this workshop, but Igor, you're sort of on the end of the agenda for wrapping things up, but maybe I can just talk a little bit for a few minutes about something Cable mentioned earlier, which was that the network of open orgs has been with the help and leadership of Neil Butcher from OER Africa, been essentially taking every statement in the UNESCO OER recommendation and mapping a set of recommended activities that could be undertaken by governments and institutions so that when you read the UNESCO OER recommendations, it's a bit overwhelming, like there's so much stuff in there. You could easily imagine a government going, well, how am I ever supposed to do all of that? I'm just giving up right from the beginning. And so it's helpful, I think, to identify some steps along the way, which we've been doing with these documents, but in the agenda document, I pasted at the end of the agenda document, the work that's been done so far towards creating this, what we've been calling a matrix, which is sort of essentially a set of actions or activities that an institution or government could take toward making progress against these recommendations. And there's two links in that section at the bottom. One is to a PDF version of that matrix. If you needed to just put on the table, here's some possible ways our institution or government could begin to implement the recommendation, but there's also an editable version. And maybe I'll invite you to have a look at that. I'll just drop a link here into chat. This document is providing a set. You can see the area of action on the left in the first column. And then the second column lists some possible government initiatives that could be undertaken to realize that particular area of action. And then beside that, possible institutional initiatives. So this is an example of the kind of work, the network of open orgs is doing to begin to develop a set of resources that could help both governments and institutions. The invitation for you by sharing this here at this workshop is that all of us have been sort of populating the possible government initiatives, possible institutional initiatives, but we wanted to open it up to the whole community. And so if you have some suggestions for what government or institutions could be doing, which you can see lots of bullets have been entered against each action area's sub points, we invite you to add them. And we'll also be taking what you shared in all of these Google Docs with us today around each of the particular four areas of action. And using them to include in these possible government initiatives, possible institutional initiatives. And the plan, and we're just kind of moving into this phase next is to add additional columns to the right of this matrix, a column for services and a column for resources. And again, the information you've been sharing in the Google Docs will be greatly used in terms of populating out those additional columns. The intent here really is to say, look the OER recommendation says all of this stuff and here are some steps you can take that would assist your nation or your institution in moving forward in terms of implementing the OER recommendation. And this is kind of stuff coming from the community that we believe could be tapped into and used to help make that possible. So I'll just stop there and say what, I would be curious to hear what people think about that and whether you have any suggestions for what we might do to improve this approach. And no one wants to talk today. It's like, I need you or to call out anonymous Coyote or somebody like that. I just like made like a general comment from my side. I think that people sometimes find that the recommendation text, even though it's text, even though it's a really important document, they find a bit overwhelming, especially when they're trying to imagine the possible actions that the governments could take in the context of the recommendation itself. So the metrics here is actually an effort to create a sort of more, a lot more sort of palatable scenarios that people can then take and decide like, okay, well, these are actually the sort of concrete sets of actions that we could actually propose to either our institution or to our government. So hopefully it's going to be really useful for the people here and any other people involved in the process. I think potentially for you, Paula, another document to translate into Italian. In your spare time, Paula. Yeah, but I think it's good to get some feedback and also just to elaborate on what Paul said that the commenting on this specific document, the period for comments is open until the end of November. So. So it may be to just build on, just to say a little bit more about what we're thinking about. It's really still at the thinking stage is that potentially this matrix, which itself is actually a bit overwhelming, could become like a database, right? That you could say, okay, I'm interested in moving forward with capacity building. And then you could say, well, I'm really particularly interested in the first bullet point A around capacity building. And you could type in that and get a kind of list of possible activities that you could undertake. And then also a list of services and resources that already exists that would help with the implementation of that. That's the kind of game plan. So it's not likely to remain a Google doc or a spreadsheet, but instead be converted into something that has a simpler, easier interface that provides a starting point. Like one of the concepts we've been talking about is that, okay, we have this UNESCO recommendation, it's really targeted to governments. But those of us that have been doing this kind of work in the open education space have been primarily working at the grassroots level. We've not had a huge amount of engagement with governments at a regional or national level. It's not that there hasn't been any, just not a lot. And there is no one stop shop, if you will, for a government to go to, to find how to get going with all of this. And so part of what we're trying to build out is something that could be useful for government and institutions to go to to get advice and guidance on how to implement the recommendation with real practical services and tools that they can make use of. So anyways, I wanted to share all that with you and just say that what you've been working on throughout this workshop will feed into that, but also make it directly available to you if you'd like to read through it and add to it, you're more than welcome. That'd be wonderful. And just to put a fine point on what Paul and Igor are saying, so we've been picking on poor Paul all day long, I'll use her as an example as well. So Paula, for example, and her colleagues in Italy might say, we want to engage the Italian ministry of education in discussing, implementing parts of the recommendation, maybe not the whole thing. And so she and her colleagues might say, we think these particular parts of the recommendation will be palatable to our government. We think there's opportunity here, there might be some funding here. She could go in, not only get the resources, but see, oh, it turns out that Creative Commons, OE Global and OER Africa actually provide direct services in the areas where we need support. And so Paula and her team in Italy might say, we're not going to do the whole recommendation right now. We're going to do parts one, 17, eight and five. We're going to put together this block. We're going to focus on that, that set of work for a year. We're going to work with these NGOs to do that. And then at the end of that year, we'll celebrate and look at other parts of the recommendation that we might do next. And we expect every country to be different, right? Some countries will just be starting out and we'll need to start with awareness raising, other countries are further along. And so, as Paul said, we really mean to put together a menu of services and resources that will help governments wherever they're ready and whatever parts of the recommendation they want to work on. Thanks, Gable. So this is all really early stage work, I would say, on our behalf, really the network of open orgs, representing kind of the grassroots work that's been happening around the world. It's been trying to come together and say, can we collaborate and join forces in providing government with assistance? That's really what this all is about. I've got a question for you. Would it be, I guess it's an idea to have also registration, not for how to track, how to identify services and resources, but how would people who want to offer services and resources get engaged and become part of this distribution network? How can you engage individuals in providing those services and being pulled into this network as service providers, not just as service consumers? Totally good, Sean. And so part of the activity we've been doing today is like identifying organizations who are already doing work in this space. And the intention is to kind of list everything that everyone's providing and also provide a means for people to say a couple of things. One is I would like to be part of the network of open orgs that's working on this, right? So to invite organizations to come and be part of it, it's currently wide open. Anyone can become part of it. And then secondly, to provide, let's say a database does get built that provides this kind of matrix of activities and products and services to provide a mechanism for people to say, oh, hey, I individually can help with such and such a thing or my organization provides the following products and services that I think could be listed in this section of the OER recommendation. Those are all perfectly great ideas and definitely in play as we try to move this forward. It's a big undertaking. And as I said, it's still very early, but it's a good start. And yes, the open advocate, as Paula says, like sometimes it's all about people, right? Connecting people to each other. And so everyone in Italy is coming your way, Paula. Okay, well, thanks. I just wanted to bring that forward. That's something that we actually just released yesterday or Neil brought forward yesterday. Jonathan, you wanna talk about the point you're making? So I don't know, it's, I really, this is probably the nature of the beast that this is all government level and like people were picking on Paula and imagining that she's gonna be going to the ministry in Italy. It seems like I often think that a lot of times we take a too big a picture here. Like, so for example, all the obsession with, I'm in higher ed of a session with promotion and tenure. It seems to me is kind of a weird, you know, from my campus, we're probably gonna be able to get OER into promotion tenure because it matters so little. It'll be just on a list of an optional things that could possibly count for promotion tenure. Then it really matters is your disciplinary colleagues within your department or within say a good disciplinary organization on a larger scale, but focused on your discipline. I was, I often wonder why we, you know, I think lots of people have mentioned this about, you know, like the network of open orgs and the community, but the grassroots level that you were talking about, Paul, it seems like maybe we need to convince, you know, the people who are, who may get to make the decisions, right, we like in higher ed in the United States at certain levels in particular, it's the classroom faculty that get to make the decision. You need to convince those people, you don't need to complete, my department chair can't tell me what to use in my classroom and certainly Dean can't tell me and certainly the state of Colorado can't tell me and for heaven's sake, the federal government is just totally out on another planet. So the kind of focus on higher level, it would be nice if there were some, some single person you can convince in the ministry of education, but what matters is the disciplinary level. And I think it seems like we're not really concentrate, which we're talking about tools at maybe the wrong level. That's just one example of where this matters, but I think, you know, in K-12, like I know in the United States, I think it's, it varies a lot from region to region, but it's often it's a state or it's a district level and that you have to talk to the people who make, you know, curricular decisions and not so much the state policy. Anyway, so I just, I worry that- Yeah, yeah, I know, it's a good observation. Yeah, I hear what you're saying, Jonathan, and I actually agree that it's important to get to the actual root and enable that, but I also feel like the UNESCO OER recommendation itself was designed for governments and was designed to encourage governments to pursue this. It is just a recommendation, though it's worth pointing this out, it's a recommendation, it's not a mandate. It's not like governments have all said, we are committed to doing this. They're just, they like it as something that they're going to consider. Although I will also add that as a recommendation, as Cable was outlining it at the beginning, it's a little stronger than a declaration. And so there will be an expectation that all of the member states report out on progress against the UNESCO OER recommendation at some regular interval. I'm not exactly sure just now what that interval is. I would expect it's going to be like every two years, every three years, something like that. So at least there's some kind of expectation of engagement in progress, but honestly, I think the push for governments to engage with this is going to have to come from all of us. I mean, maybe just in closing, I'll invite my colleagues, Cable, General Igor, anything more you want to add or say about this effort. I would just personally say thank you to everyone who's at this workshop for sticking with us for two hours and providing your generous input into these ideas. It's super helpful. And I hope we've unpacked the recommendation for you a little bit more so that there's a bigger understanding of what it entails. It's one thing to know UNESCO OER recommendation was adopted, but what does it actually say? But over to my colleagues. Happy to hop in. I just also wanted to say thank you. And I really appreciate the questions that Jonathan and others have raised that get into the meat of the challenges that this recommendation will face in implementation. So I think because we have the chance to look at something that's traditionally just a policy level guidance at more of a grassroots level, we have the chance to raise different perspectives and share different possibilities for actual implementation. So I think these kinds of conversations are really powerful to me and I hope to everyone involved. And I'm really looking forward to seeing what emerges in the coming years as we start to get deeper into implementation efforts. So anyway, thank you all so much for the time. I know this is a lot of information all at once but I really, I love gleaning the expertise that you will have to share. So yeah, just a big thank you. We'll call on Igor now. I'm going to be very brief, but actually I would like to first show this. It's too good to pass. Oh, beautiful. Wow. It's a sunset on our side. Hope you're enjoying it, okay? So thank you all for your participation. It was great. I'm just going to be very brief basically to say that all of this input that was provided over the past events and this one will be consolidated. It will be reviewed. We will bring it back to the network of open orbs. And also if you have any questions about the network of open orbs, I think you can contact any of us or you can send an email to Paul also, gender in cable. And so please share your email addresses in the chat window. And yes, this was wonderful. I really appreciate it. I love your thoughtful responses and feedback. Thank you. Gable closing remarks over to you. Oh, thanks everybody. So I just, a bunch of us are dropping our emails in there. If any of you would like to, you know, talk more with any of us for reach out, specifically at Creative Commons, Jenner and I are on point for the work with the recommendations so you can reach out to either of us. We're happy to work with you. We, this is an important part of our work going forward. CC is about to launch a new strategy. I know OE Global is working on their new strategy as well. This will be part of our main work, both at CC writ large and in our work in open education. I guess the last comments I make is that we as a movement, as a field have made a lot of progress and forward momentum in the last decade. And the fact that we have this new international instrument, I think is extremely positive and is gonna be helpful to accelerate us even further and that to do this properly, to implement the recommendation at all levels at national government level levels at states and provinces, at institutions. And as Jonathan was pointing out, you know, down to the individual teacher and faculty member, this is quite literally an all hands on deck exercise. It's going to take all of us. And if we're sort of the premise, as a bunch of us got together at the beginning and said, you know, we really all need to collaborate, which is, you know, where this network of open orgs came from, we collectively realized that this collaboration is necessary for all the obvious reasons and to make sure that we're not confusing governments and other implementers as we come at them. So it'd be, if we can come with a consistent message, a consistent set of services, it just makes it easier for everybody. And collaboration is hard. A lot of our orgs have, you know, our own programs. We all have various funding sources that were obligated to do certain projects. And so collaboration is difficult for all of us. It's hard to collaborate across institutions, even within a state. So, you know, Jonathan can attest to that, that that's hard work. It's hard to work across the country. It's certainly hard to work across multiple countries and it's difficult for, you know, NGOs to come together and really focus on some work. And yet we have to. It's going to be necessary for us to be collectively successful to move forward. And so I'm really excited about this work. I hope you are too. And welcome to the party. You didn't know that when you came to this one session today, you were gonna get recruited, but you're all now part of the team. Yeah. So thank you all. Actually, I should stop recording. It's a long recording.