 Hello, everybody, and thank you for joining us. I'm going to put my video off to reduce the bandwidth. I'm really looking forward to today's session. And Sir Chief is going to be talking to us, and has a fascinating presentation to put to us. And we get the opportunity to talk about open print support, and I can't think of a better way of spending some time today, despite the busyness generally of our lives at this point in the year. What I'd like to do, first of all, perhaps, is just remind people about the OpenEd SIG, and where and what we are. So ALT have kindly provided us with a community space, and you can pop this into the chat. So this is where you will find the OpenEd SIG. And you'll find, as it's a community space, there are occasional blog posts going up there to discuss the whole matter of Open. And I'm just going to switch your mic off a little bit, Sir Chief, for a second. And you'll also see there's a community space where people can join the conversation, continue the conversation. And you'll see some information about our mission. Essentially what we try to do is to connect all things open and to ensure that people really understand the Open Education agenda. And I'm excited about today's webinar because it really sets the tone for the coming year, I think. So that's who we are and where we are. Anybody can be a member of the OpenEd SIG. You don't have to be an ALT member, and there are details on that homepage about how to join us. And there's a form you can fill in in order to join the OpenEd Special Interest Group. I'm delighted that we had a great get-together meeting at the ALT conference recently. And we've got two new members on board in the committee, and I'm sure that will really reinvigorate the team. So it's great to have that. We've got a very lively team on board. So we're very active in social media. That's all important hashtag to look out for, especially if you're on Twitter, but also on G+. Another network is OpenEd SIG. And if you want to know who we are and where we are and what we're doing, then please take a look at that, and we can help join the dots. Tucker, welcome. Thanks for joining us. I'll just quickly remind people a little bit about the interface that we have here. So if you need to check your audio settings, come up to the top left under Tools, and click Tools, Audio Setup Wizard, and just run that wizard to make sure that you can hear everything and join in if you want to speak to us as well in the Q&A session at the end of the webinar. Also on the left-hand side, although you can move these boxes, you'll see a chat box. You can type directly into that chat box, send a message directly to the moderators or to the full room, and just press Enter to send that message in. If you have any questions during the presentation, if you just preface your message with the Q, then I should be able to come back and return to your question after the presentation. You'll also see in the Participants box four sets of boxes. Now these are easy ways of quickly communicating through emojis, your approval or your suggestions. So do use those. We will keep an eye on them. You've also got a way of responding yes or no. Should we ask for information from the room as well, and of raising your hand if you have a question so that we can deal with your question. Okay, so that's pretty much the housekeeping over. I'm going to give Sir Chief his microphone back, and I'm very pleased to introduce you to Sir Chief Anan. You possibly know him already, and I had the pleasure of meeting him last night when we were doing the check, and everything was looking really good. So Sir Chief, I'm really looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much for joining us today. Sir Chief, can I just ask you to press the talk button. Hello everybody. Yes, Teresa. Hope you can hear me properly now. I'm actually connecting from a wireless connection, so I might switch off the video now to make sure the bandwidth is okay. So thank you again for this great opportunity, and it's a great pleasure for me to share my experiences with you all today. I have been always inspired by the Oak Ridge Education Community, and so I hope to connect with you today and share our ideas on this whole open principles in education and the things we have been doing in the year for all. So starting, I would like to start off by giving you some background. Actually, when I got this Dubna invitation from Teresa a few weeks back, you know, I started preparing, you know, what I want to see for this presentation. It also helps me to reflect on this whole geothermal journey, and I'm not an native English speaker. I'm originally from India, and I was looking for a word in English to encapsulate the journey, and I found this word serendipity, and it was exactly what I was looking for, you know, this word. And the first time I was learning about this word, serendipity means it's like an unsought or unintended or unexpected, but fortunately, discovery or learning experiences that happens by accident. It's also a combination of events which are not immediately beneficial, but offering together produces a good and wonderful outcome. And, you know, when I look back at my geothermal journey, this is exactly what happened. It was not planned or anything, we had nothing, but it is just by this, you know, a combination of a lot of things happening together, you know, it just, you know, made these things happen. And hopefully, you know, when I go through the slides, you will get a feeling of how we all started. But first and foremost, you know, I have to thank, you know, all of my colleagues globally, you know, who all have been, you know, really helping this big possible, you know, and they are the key people who help this all possible, and I have to thank the whole geothermal community. And in simple terms, you know, the area of my research is on computer-based mapping or what is known as the GIS or geographic information systems. And you might still have, you know, in some way or form, you know, you must have all, you know, used these mapping tools in your mobile phones, you're finding new spaces, you know, so it's now very ubiquitous. But I first came across GIS, again, by pure luck, you know, around 20 years back, I was a student in civil engineering in India at that time. And one day I came across an article in my college library on this, you know, this thing of publishing geographic information system, which was being used by town planners. So that article was mostly on, you know, how town planners were using this new technology. And that was the first time I heard about this, you know, amazing technology called GIS. And I still remember the struggles I went through to get access to GIS. In fact, I wanted to do my pioneer project using GIS. But unfortunately, that time I couldn't, I just couldn't get access to it. So there was a lot of struggles and a lot of feedback initially. I was very lucky as they got space. You know, later I got really amazing opportunities later to learn GIS. I got scholarships from kind universities and a lot of kind people helped me a lot of the way. So it was a really, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot of help from a lot of people that helped me learn this. So hence, you know, when I now got this opportunity to learn this, I was very keen that, you know, I do something back. You know, I need to make sure that a lot of people who don't have access, you know, I need to do something back. And that was how, you know, the whole geophoreal started. So through this webinar, I wanted to share why it's important to protect open principles in education and the vision of, you know, what we have for the future on open geospatial science. I will also share some experiences from geophoreal initiative on the importance of having open principles for involving communities worldwide. Central to geophoreal mission is the belief that knowledge is a public good. And open principles in education will provide great opportunities for everyone. Though the members of our network are all from very different backgrounds, and we all are, but we all come together to seek to eliminate the digital divide and to empower all as school citizens and contribute to build up open knowledge for the benefit of the whole society. So why is openness important? Okay, so if you, just exactly one year back, the United Nations launched this ambitious initiative called Sustainable Development Goals 2030. I'm sure all of you have heard about it. And this is the Sustainable Development Goals or a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and to ensure all people enjoy peace and prosperity. The Sustainable Development Goals work in the spirit of partnership and pragmatism to make sure the right choices are made now to improve life in a sustainable way for future generations. The SDGs are an inclusive agenda. They tackle the root causes of poverty and unite us together to make a positive change to both people and our planet. Service for the benefit and the development of humanity is a key fundamental principle of your parole. And we want to contribute and focus our efforts for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. And for this openness is fundamental for all of these 17 goals to be looked into it. And I will give you one example. I can go through each of these and give you lots of examples of each, on each of these goals, how openness will help us accelerate this, achieving these goals. So Fundamentally, Geo4Or was started to ensure to make geospatial education and opportunities are accessible to all. You know, because traditionally even this, even 10 years back, it was very, it was highly expensive proprietary tools and not many students and even educators worldwide could access geospatial courses or start new courses. And now it's dramatically changing. You know, I can see even through our networks we have lots of new MOOC programs. We have a lot of our colleagues are starting new courses in countries in Africa, Asia, USA. We have, our aim is to accelerate this draft belief and make sure lots and lots of students get these opportunities to learn these amazing technologies. And Fundamentally, you know, so people ask you, what is Geo4Or? And I'll tell them, look, it's education plus empowerment. You know, that's what we are about. So we want to make sure the students are fully empowered. You know, what's the point of teaching them GIS and then taking away the tools after they learn and then forcing them to buy high-cost proprietary licenses? You know, that's why we want to make sure that they are fully empowered. You know, they have the tools for them to, you know, start their own companies or, you know, learn GIS or all these, so openness is fundamental to us. And we are now working on this vision, 2030 on Open Geospatial Science. And I will share also some of the ideas in this presentation on what we want in the future as well. So in Geo4Or, we have a holistic approach on education. And I want to highlight the many dimensions of open. Open to software. Open data. Open standards. Open access to research publication. Open education resources. And fundamentally, we are fully based on open principles, which encompasses all this. So this all coming together of all this is kind of like the magic of what makes openness, you know, all these possibilities happen. So I want to use some examples. And, you know, one of our colleagues, Professor Silvana Kumbhain, she's a professor in University of Parana in, Federal University of Parana in Brazil. And in support of the United Nations Spatial Development Board, she and her colleagues, all of the colleagues in the open source geospatial technologies, I see a commission, you know, put together some work to see, you know, to show some of the broad range of activities that is happening, you know, using openness in geospatial. And on the top right, you know, there's an example from our colleagues at the University of Portugal Milano in Italy, in Italy, Professor Maria Broglie, and she and her team has been doing amazing work on, her lab has been doing amazing work on humanitarian open state maps, you know, and this is very important, you know, just last year in April, you know, as some of you might remember, there were terrible earthquakes in Nepal, and again, you know, our community, our geothermal community came together at that time to provide these, you know, develop these, what is known as humanitarian mapatons, you know, for relief, disaster relief. And this particular work that Maria Broglie and colleagues did was actually teaching in the next generation. So they were, they did a record mapaton with more than 210-year-old children in March 2016. So this actually, you know, making sure our future generations, you know, they start, you know, big contributors and they start doing all these technologies and they are key part of all this and Professor Maria Broglie, she has been doing so much amazing work on this and I will recommend you to visit her lab website as well so you can see a lot of work she's doing. On the top right, again, another example is from the University of Pretoria in South Africa, you know, they again, you know, as you might know, in most of the developing countries, one of the biggest problems is, you know, many of the citizens, they don't have access to good quality, good quality basic things like even, you know, extra safe drinking water and all those kind of basic things and the work that the collection Pretoria are doing actually, you know, they have been trying to map this and mapping is fundamental to developments and especially in slums and, you know, they all need to make sure, you know, they have developments happening, they need to make sure, you know, all the infrastructure developments are happening and the work the collection South Africa are doing are on the first step of that and there's another example from Brazil that again, Silvana has been doing and again, you know, there's, you know, looking at how we can use mapping as a, to highlight the inequalities in the society and especially in her area that is in Curcuba in Brazil, so she has been working on that and another example from an education as examples collection Uruguay, which I will come through later, you know, they are an initiative for GVC Batavi. Again, a very important initiative of how we can ensure quality education resources are available for everyone and GVC Batavi is a good example of a national level initiative, you know, with very little resources but, you know, getting some good committed people, you know, what we can do to change, you know, chase and make, provide opportunities for the future and in their sense, you know, I really like the figure that Silvana put it, it's about, you know, the whole open philosophy is coming together, open to software, data, education and standards. So I would like to now give you another example of, there are, I told you a lot of things, but one example from open beta and this is an example from an initiative called Godan, which I am very much involved in, this is the global open data for agriculture and nutrition. And, you know, if you look at it, more than 800 million people worldwide struggled from hunger worldwide, you know, this is a fact. And we have the knowledge, the tools and the data to lower the spirit to zero, but this can only happen if everyone has equal access to data. Access to research and data is critical for feeding the world's hungry. Godan or global open data for agriculture and nutrition was formed to support and encourage the proactive sharing of open data to make information about agriculture and nutrition available, accessible and usable for unrestricted views worldwide to deal with the urgent challenge of ensuring world food security. Godan focused on building high-level policy and public and private institutional support for open data. The initiative encourages collaboration and cooperation among existing agriculture and open data activities and brings together stakeholders to solve the long-standing global problems in food and nutritional security. And we believe location is very relevant to this activity. And geospatial science has a major role to play in securing both food and nutritional security in agriculture systems. Particularly, to address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2, which is to end hunger, achieve food security and improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. So there is a key kind of, you know, this is one good example of how just one open data in agriculture can change, dramatically change a lot of, you know, and give real benefit to a lot of people globally. So that's just one example. And for those of you are new to, you know, for example, the open source software, I know a lot of you are involved in open education. So I want to highlight one example here as well. So this is just to highlight why it's important to, you know, in terms of both research and also for transparency of increasing quality of research. And this example I found from NASA. NASA, as you all know, is one of the world's biggest research organizations. They are one of the most mission critical systems in the park. And the reason why they say, you know, they their key motivation to distribute software for using open source fully open sources to increase peer review, you know, and to increase the software quality. And as some of you already know, you know, if you are working in academia, you know, the reason why, you know, we submit for peer review journals is, you know, that's very important. So if you want to increase quality, peer review is fundamental. So, you know, that's why, you know, it also increases the cost and this aspect as well. So why is geo-education important? Okay, so this is fundamentally where I come from. Okay, in spite of all these technological, fundamental technological developments, it is a sad fact that the majority of the world's porous living in urban areas do not still have access to basic facilities. And I mean, things like clean water, proper sanitation and hygiene facilities, good quality, education opportunities, etc. And I believe GI is a fundamental technology in infrastructure development. And high cost proprietary GIS is unaffordable to governments, town planners and local authorities in developing a low income country. In order to achieve United Nations goals, sustainable development goals in 2030, it's essential to provide free and open source GIS tools to universities, government organizations in developing countries for helping them achieve these targets. With the availability of open source GIS technology, it now offers a great opportunity for governments and developing countries to also implement GIS tools for the decision making without having to pay huge animal licensing costs to proprietary GIS vendors. And help improve the lives of some of the most porous people by giving the special tools to these municipal authorities, it will help in improving the living standards of the people and helping make sure, you know, they have the basic facilities for their needs as well. So it is with these aims the GFOR community decided that we have to do something and we are now working on something called OpenCitySmart which I will introduce you later. So how was GFOR started? We started from nothing really, very, very humble beginnings, we started this building in six years back and our aim was to build research and teaching infrastructure worldwide and we had no funding, there was no funding there. In fact, when I sent out an email to colleagues in 2010 I invited, you know, key organizations in the UK. So I invited people like the Association of Geographic Information which are like the kind of the consortium of industry players in the UK in GIS, Ordnance Survey, the National Mapping Agency the British Geological Survey, ADINA and to my surprise, all of them didn't have the funding and that gave me the energy to start it and luckily later the University of Nottingham supported me, they gave me a couple of internships for students and that was how we found very, very simply and very, very basically but for me the biggest thing was the amazing support I got from my colleagues and students here, it was unbelievable that this changed my I thought that I could not have done anything. So that was how we started. So why did we start it and this is the only one reason and this social responsibility. I fundamentally believe that if you make resources including software and data openly available it just opens an amazing opportunities for everyone to share knowledge and to get this knowledge shared widely and that increases learning opportunities and other educational opportunities for everyone and there are many, many examples of this in geo-corona and I don't have time to go through each of them I told before I thought I will give you one example and that is from the GBC Badobi initiative and the reason I thought I would give you this example is if this the reason I thought to give you this is an example from a developing country and so it shows you how even if you have very limited resources you are able to do this. GBC Badobi is an excellent example of a successful initiative in open principles education and helps us to understand why scalability and cost in sustainability is fundamental. There is a video of it as well so if you want to look at the video you should see that to really see the impact of what has happened but through this focus on open principles in education colleagues at GBC Badobi led by Sergio Lara and his great team Cross Uruguay they are now providing high quality spatial education to students in all schools across Uruguay and they have also another initiative called Plan C through which they can provide free laptops to all primary and secondary schools in the country so that now truly they have the opportunity to reach every student no matter whether they are rich or poor with high quality teaching and learning tools and for me this is amazing this is what we want to do when I hear from all these colleagues what they are doing I can inspire this is exactly what we want to make sure every student gets this opportunity and scalability is key for cost and sustainability especially if you are thinking of national or global scale expansion for providing high quality educational opportunities for all the cost of hardware is getting lower and it will keep decreasing the cost of hardware will keep decreasing internet practice is increasing so even in developing countries I can see from example from India it has been increasing really it is not optimal but still it is increasing and it is going to increase so if you can also provide free and open technologies open data open education resources it will be a big enabler for bridging the digital divide so cost of software is one of the biggest thumbing blocks so we have to do something and we have to remove that artificial value and then lots and lots of students are going to benefit and we just cannot be silent on this we have to do this and another good example actually from Europe these are colleagues from the UNEP the United Nations Environment Program gift program in Warsaw I visited them two years back and I was inspired by the work they have been doing they are doing something called GIS at schools you know it is actually students per se it is actually for the teachers so this whole work they have been doing is developing tutorials and learning materials for teaching materials for teachers not just geography teachers science teachers, biology teachers so that they can use like geo technologies to show their importance in the particular areas for example if you are a teacher trying to teach climate climate change to your students you can use these examples you can use maps to convey in a much powerful way of deforestation and all these examples you know that is much more powerful and all the materials they are making available is fully inferior to common license available for everyone so feel free to share this with your colleagues who are interested in starting new courses in school level for helping students understand these resources so this GIS at schools is a very very valuable resource and a lot from Poland from the UNEP she has been doing she and her colleagues I was so thankful for their work through this project what they have been doing is helping not just in Poland but across the world this will help a lot of teachers be able to teach their students all the technologies in the future so we already have a huge impact from thousands of schools in countries like Uruguay to Spain and thousands of universities worldwide are now benefiting from open principles and geo-education and I also believe that ideas that start are very powerful actually and keep expanding exponentially the bigger aim is to also advance communication across the world and bring together schools, teachers and students across the world and join projects and help build international understanding and global peace so we are very very keen to build those communities so that's why I kept the title as building builders we want the global community to come together for this and I want to put one slide on the research aspect as well because for those of your researchers the ability for showing the application of general laws operation of general law is fundamental to scientific research so that's why openness is fundamental for research as well and specifically for geospatial science there is a I would say convergence that happened the unique convergence of key developments that happened in the last decade which was really critical for us to have this momentum and that was not just from the software side but also from the data side from top down initiatives like for example in the UK the open data, the data.gov.uk so the governments are now pushing this they are making sure data is made available to citizens so that it creates innovation opportunity so there is like a top level initiative is going on which is very very good and we really welcome it you know bottom up movements like for those of you know like OpenStreetNet, OpenStreetNet didn't exist just 10 years old but it has now over a million contributors and I was just creating the details of the for one of the papers I am writing and they have now you know so it's amazing to see this transformation so these are like volunteer geographic information so think of not just now think the next 10 years then you know when we have a lot of digital natives you know they will all be you know volunteer geographic information they will all be contributing to this and help us enrich the whole ecosystem and also standards are very important and in organizations like OGC for the geospatial field help us bring all these things together so this is one perspective from the research as well so what about our team now you know we are over 100 research labs worldwide in our largest number of labs are in country-wise it's in the United States and you know so much activity happening in the US you know they are doing amazing work they are starting new MOOC programs which are now our colleagues in JOO Academy their MOOC program is benefiting thousands of students not only that they are all the materials are available in Github for other educators to start reusing them or in KT Commons license so it's a very very you know so it's an differential kind of activities we are doing to make sure it's we share everything to make sure we build those synergies and in region-wise Europe is our biggest region we are now very confident by you know in the next 2-3 years we will have more than 1000 labs established and help expand this ideas globally as well so who are we I thought to put some images to help you understand who are we 3 years back when we ran this conference in Nottingham for our post-COG and we are very broad and different our colleagues are from all different organizations from government organizations academia, industry startups, NGOs, teachers students so it's all people coming together that make this happen and we are a very global community and we are very proud of it we are a very diverse community so if you look at the websites of our labs you can see the diversity from the languages the cultures we are all different but we are all united in this objective and that brings us all together for this mission and we are initially we started by scientists and academics basically to build the strong foundation for open view spatial science but we are a very the reason why we started was we wanted to create open education for developing creative and open minds in students which is very critical for building open innovation and for sharing open knowledge which is important for the benefit of the whole society and for the future generation so for us it's all about learning and sharing so this from Nottingham Exams so we run workshops and all the ideas that we try to make sure these ideas we learn from each other and together we are stronger and we have very strong focus on the next generation so we run the summer schools this is one example from our colleagues in Spain in the University of Girona they have been doing it for five or six years open G.I. summer school this primarily aimed at peace students from all disciplines from forestry to health sciences to agriculture so this summer school one week summer school brings together students from all these disciplines and introduce them to these technologies but more importantly we give them away the tools as well so then they are fully empowered they can start their own companies they can start their consultancy they don't have to pay anybody anything that's our philosophy we want to make sure they lead us they are the people who are willing to push this for the future and we want to make sure they are fully empowered and they have the full capacity to do this for the future as well and in Nottingham we have been also doing it for expanding this for teaching teaching government organizations through workshops you know we want to make sure governments also start also important taxpayers money is precious and it should not be wasted so that's very important that as a policy on open source open standards open data action plan so it's very a lot of activities happening and it's actually now saving I didn't put that slide there but I can send you the slides on that where the cost savings are mentioned you know once this opens the open principles have been implemented within the UK government department so that's again another top but there is a lot of I am also that area so because I am very keen to make sure that the taxpayers money is spent wisely and you know that that has been invested not on buying proprietary software but in other important things like healthcare or you know education and improving all these things so that's another part and we are very much in this program so if you look at our labs websites you will see examples from you know our colleagues from to you know to geodesy to geomatics to civil engineering so just you know mapping and technology mapping and geospatial science is very broad so we are very much in this program and we are proud of that fact and one thing that United when I look at all our police globally we are all passionate about research and education so it doesn't matter which country you are from which language you speak to teach and learn and share this fantastic technology with other people so that's what that unites us unites us all so now I want to give one example again I send the video of this to Teresa and you can see the video of it but this one example remember the example I told you why we need these tools for empowering especially the urban citizens in developing countries and to do that we started an initiative again we did not have any funding just joining together good people together we started an initiative called open city smart the open platform for smart cities and you can watch the video link that Teresa put but this is again thanks to colleagues Patrick Hogan from NASA and Chris Pettit from the University of South Wales in Australia and a great team of amazing colleagues volunteers globally who are all working in this initiative called open city smart open city smart builds and uses open solutions to build richer toolboxes that empower organizations and people around the globe to handle spatial and also non-spatial data we believe this will create innovation opportunities globally and locally and you can find those details and if you are interested the video will give you more ideas of what we are doing with that and also thanks to again many of our colleagues globally we have now dedicated research labs and also dedicated journals which are now in place to advance our open view spatial science for the future it is this global research outlook that is fundamental to the success of any disciplines and we are very very keen that we maintain that global outlook so it's now time for us to think and plan actions for the future and it is important that we bring together ideas and inputs from the wider community and harness the wisdom to help shape our vision for open view spatial science for 2030 and future and we want to do that by building synergies with the three goals of the European Union's research and innovation policy that are the open innovation open science and open to the world so that's what we are doing in the so we are now harnessing ideas to bring this open the vision for 2030 synergies with the United Nations SDG goals as well so I want to highlight one important fact especially for those of you as scientists science is not a black box the tool kits have to be open and it has to be built upon so transparency is fundamental to scientific research and advancement so this is exactly what our colleagues are all working on and the societal challenges we face are all multidisciplinary in nature whichever challenges you face from the agriculture example I told you from the Godin if you want to feed 800 million people or if you want to give good quality of life to again millions of families across the world living in very poor conditions in urban slums these are all multidisciplinary challenges we cannot have style of mentality to bring together people and the network approach is essential to bring expert researchers scientists, stakeholders together to solve these problems and for our vision 2030 there are three fundamental things the transparency of research is fundamental and so there should be no black boxes or proprietary barriers artificial barriers advancement of science and geospatial science should be fully built upon open principles geospatial science should be open geospatial science that's what we want to look on and we want to align with other synergies, synergic activities like the European Commission's policy on open innovation open science, open to the world and also to the the United Nations SDGs together we are very confident we will be able to do this because when I see how this chart is nothing and that's what I told this word which I learned is called synergic activities when a group of people come together on a common objective so many amazing things happen so why why open to a special science and there are lots and lots of examples and hopefully you are some ideas of work from my presentation from the examples I gave you before but again from a government perspective not just from the European governments and European Commission but also governments worldwide they are all constantly seeking a greater return on their investment in research and part of the answer is to ensure the better reuse of data, software and technology between research programs broader cross disciplinary and institutional participation in major research projects and more frequent and rapid updates of research results by startups, SMEs, industries and government and open use special science I believe is fundamentally helping empowering staff and students and also built capacities in poor countries developing countries and more importantly it develops creative and open minds in students and this is very critical for if you want open innovation for future we need to make sure we make sure our students have that open mind fundamentally and that's what we are all about it contributes to building up open knowledge for the benefit of the whole society and for our future generations so it's one of my fundamental beliefs is that quality education opportunities is everyone's birthright it doesn't matter where you are born you have to use the right for education and quality education is everyone's birthright and so to do that and now we have opportunity to do that for me technology is a big level so we should not put artificial values high cost proprietary values because now we have a truly great opportunity because the forwarding hardware cost increasing software increasing internet penetration we now truly have an opportunity to provide quality education opportunities for everyone and I've seen this when I each time I go to India I visit some of the poor schools it's amazing even in one of the schools three years back they had just three four computers they don't have proper library or anything but these three four computers all running open source software connected to the internet now the students are practicing Wikipedia it's amazing how when I saw this I need to do something we truly can give some opportunities to these we can open the doors for all these students not just in one place but globally if you all think globally and we can all come together it's truly possible and I truly believe in just ten years time if you want to do it we can do it we can provide these opportunities amazing technologies out there it's just that we'll cover and coming together with good people that will make this happen that's why I gave you the example from Uruguay to show you that it's not like you need big funding or anything it's just some good people coming together with good ideas we can do it and I want to thank again my colleagues across the world even though I presented it all the work I presented it's actually my colleagues amazing work they have been doing so it's unbelievable the work they all have been doing and we are all working on this big terrain to eradicate extreme poverty and enable shared prosperity I really hope the Oakland Education Community will join us for this because we really need you as I told you in the beginning the synergies of joining minds and communities on a common mission make the seemingly impossible possible and I can tell you because without any funding initially you will laugh because some people if you don't have any funding nothing is going to happen but again it's when you step it's something like that serendipity word it's unbelievable sometimes things happen even if you don't have funding or anything else if you just start doing it it's like saying that you have to have faith and you have to just jump and the net will come below you so it's like you have to have faith and do things it doesn't matter if you have funding or not you just start doing it and that's what we are doing it and hopefully I really hope more and more colleagues will start building ideas for this so again thanks again for listening to me and for this opportunity to share these ideas with you if you have any questions there is a little storm going on on twitter at the moment I've seen from colleagues reactions in the chat we are just so overwhelmed by your passion and your enthusiasm and it's contagious which is wonderful thank you so much for giving us so much to think about and so much to inspire us but have been a few questions in the chat I'm going to come back to those now and I'll start with a question that came from Therese Burt who's very experienced in the open community and she's particularly now involved in pharmacology and medicine so she asks, has GEO for all encountered any setbacks from institutions or bodies entities who perhaps felt threatened by the work and by the philosophy it's interesting because initially we have a lot of difficulties especially from some big proprietary vendors GIS vendors so for me when I think about it it's you know I believe everyone has a place in the world so it's like you know we have to provide opportunities for everyone we cannot just create artificial barriers next time I told you when I see these students in India or some of these tourist schools you know why should someone provide artificial barriers for them to not it's not like a real barrier it's an artificial barrier hardware cost I can understand the cost for making hardware there is a cost to it cost for internet connectivity there is a cost to it but software cost it's exaggerated the cost of replicating software technically zero artificial barriers for me when I think about it even though we faced a lot of difficulties that's why I always think we didn't have funding and we faced a lot of difficulties so we came through all this it was a difficult journey there were a lot of times I was even though we have hundreds of laps and all these things happening there was lots of difficulties in my colleagues because I would not have done anything for some everything when we wanted a website I sent an email out and colleagues from University of Southampton they set up a website for us when we wanted webinars it was colleagues from the University of Denver in the USA they are running the webinars for us our newsletters are run by our colleagues in Greece so it's all these distributed so whatever tell us there might be a big vendor interest who want to stop this but I am very confident it's very something which you do for global good it will keep going however big powerful the vendors are I really hope they will understand this and they will also try to help us at least try to stop us that's my request to all of you please don't try to stop us what is the point students in what does anyone gain from stopping learn they don't have access to till now they don't have access to anything no proper library the school I went to they didn't have access to even a proper library now for the first time the three computers they are getting access to Wikipedia and I don't know one question I was asked by one of the students she was my son's age now she asked me this question I was actually telling them about the importance of education and moving forward because one of the things I always remember is even 10 years back when I used to go to these schools I used to think in my head I used to think in how many of them will go for higher studies or even go for jobs not because of their fault their circumstances they don't have access to basic things so very little they can achieve but when I saw the school in 2010 that time with these three computers having access to this Wikipedia and all those ideas that was the time when I realized this is going to fundamentally change if you can work on this the question that students asked me was if I translated like will this be always available to us that was one of the hardest questions I was having a lot of conferences but that question I remember when she asked me I looked at her I was looking at her I looked at herself into their shoes these students for the first time they are seeing an opportunity they are seeing this amazing kind of magic window for now their biggest fear is will this be taken away from them I told her straightaway you don't have to worry about it because there are thousands of people globally who are fighting for you so you can be assured that this will be available for you for the future So it's important we all join together and don't worry about big vendors trying to stop you or whoever. But we have a moral responsibility because these students don't have a voice in the system. So they are the people who desperately need this and they don't have a voice in the system. So I and people like you are as a voice. So as I told you, I got an opportunity to learn this pure by pure chance. So it's now my duty. So everything in my power makes you what I do then. That's just amazing and you're so inspiring. I love this idea of distributed cooperation and the fact that, you know, individuals, we have this sort of mindset that is that there's going to be a project with the project comes funding, with the funding comes a hierarchy and then things happen in a kind of an enclosed but logical and listed way with sets of outputs and I've been involved in lots of projects like that. What I love about this is the connectedness and the fact and I've seen it both in the open badge conference that we did and in other aspects of work that I've done voluntarily where serendipitous connections in my case through Twitter came about and everybody just says well I'll do that bit for you and I'll do that bit for you and I love the humility of your approach to Chief as well where you're acknowledging that, you know, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts that we all have a little bit to play a part to play here and just to sort of highlight a comment that came up in the chat from Lucy who says there's no question that demand for open education and open source exists but as one individual how can I still contribute and still support myself because many of us get involved in these sort of endeavours without any pay so yeah I can see that dilemma but I think what I can see happening is that you can put in what you're willing to put in and if everybody does that it is possible to achieve something even as enormous as you have achieved here something global and something huge it's kind of you know I suppose if we think of the analogy of the ants if we have lots of little worker ants doing their bit you can make a huge termite mound or you know you can achieve a great deal is this aspect as well that came through in your presentation of mutual support because sometimes it can feel for those of us in research intensive universities and who don't have the vision that Nottingham have shown here it can feel as though you're battling huge sort of sets of interests who just don't get it. I was quite inspired and I tweeted yesterday about the launch of the open models book that has just come out and I think if we've got greater collaboration and cooperation across the open community all things open as you have pointed out open source, open standards, OER, open data all of these things together we have this open word in common so let's not silo ourselves let's connect and share our support across the board. Really inspiring and absolutely wonderful I think that your talk has been so comprehensive we don't have a lot of questions in the chat but we do have lots of reaction and I'm sure we're going to have lots of reaction to this recording as well and I'm really grateful to you for your time. We have just five minutes left so if anybody has any further questions please pop them in the chat or feel free to just raise the hand if you want me to pass the mic to you so you can speak to Sajith directly. There's a little reminder here of the Association for Learning Technology who have provided us with an online space for the open education special interest group and support what we do in that way and I have been tweeting using the hashtag open ed SIG so if you are on Twitter and you want to revisit that I will do a little story for today's event as well to pull the messages together because you've provided us with some great media to Sajith with the videos and the various screenshots along the way so I'm just going to open the floor as open is the key word so if anybody would like to ask a question or speak to Sajith directly I'm so in awe of Sajith because thank you Lucy. It's great to have you here and I hope you'll participate and join and continue this conversation and find things that you're happy to join in with. I speak French and Spanish but I know just how daunting it is to make presentations in a language other than your own. You have been totally or inspiring in your presentation in your second language so thank you so much for that. Thank you. You have so many Indian languages as well so we wouldn't know where to start so I'm grateful that you've learned English and you've shared through that medium today. Thank you so much and I can see all your expressions of thanks coming through the chat. I'm going to add some applause there from the emoticons and I think we all want to give you a really big hand so thank you so much for starting our open ed series in such a passionate and impassioned way. Let me just pass you a mic so you can speak to us if you'd like to. There we go. If you press the talk button now you can just speak to us if you'd like to. Thank you very much and thanks all for your responses. I'm going to switch the recording off now so that we can make the recording available as soon as possible and we'll be sharing that widely. Thank you so much to Chief for your time, your energy and your passion. Don't forget to join us on the open ed series which Therese has just shared for us there as well in the chat. Thank you all for