 Okay, so I'm Marty Dillberg, I'm the Senior Coordinated for Learning Technologies at NC State, and we are in a group at NC State called DELTA, and I'm going to run through this normally. I spend about 40 or 45 minutes talking about this, and I could go on for hours because governance is my life, but DELTA is a unit, a division of the provost office. We're separate from the IT group at NC State, so we're kind of our primary focus is learning technologies, so we're really able to kind of do it ourselves to making sure that the campus has what it needs, and it's totally separate and distinct. But let's talk about what's governance. I'm not sure, you know, I don't know why all of you are here. I would assume that some of you are fairly new in getting Moodle started, and some of you have been doing this for a while. But I mean, I could read the slides to you, but I'll let you read them. What I want to talk about is, more importantly, what governance is not. So the idea behind governance is that you're getting some external body to check up to make sure that you're responding to the needs of the university, that you're doing what the faculty, what the students need in order to handle their educational mission. But it's not shared responsibility. A lot of people get the idea that governance is you're handing over control of what you're doing to an external unit. And that was something that we initially struggled with at NC State when we first started our governance program nine years ago. So it's not shared responsibility. It's not giving up the day-to-day control over what you're doing. So we still maintain that control. We still make the decisions, the day-to-day ones. We're still responsible for the implementation. What we're looking for is help with guidance. We're looking for a strategic assistant. Where should we be going in three years? What sorts of things should we be including in our system? What sort of decisions should we be making to help facilitate learning at our institution? And ideally, it's inclusive and collaborative. Now, we have a great deal of difficulty getting faculty to actually come and participate, even though they like to criticize. But it's important to try to get faculty representation. We've tried to get student representation. That's also very difficult because they're usually very busy. But we have a lot of IT directors, instructional designers, and people from units across the campus and training that work with us to help make sure that we're being responsive. So why is it important? You know, who cares? I mean, we know what's best for the university, don't we? At least I do. I have all the answers. I mean, I'm a legend in my own mind. And the fact of the matter is that I frequently, like I remember looking at the internet back in 1994 and saying, well, that's kind of cool, but I guess you could download software patches and things a little faster. You know, it's a little easier to get to them. So clearly, I missed the whole boat on what the internet was all about. So just like I may have missed that, we typically, working from our own little cubby, thinking that we know what we're doing, delivering technology, are not doing a very good job of responding to the needs of the folks, our innovators, the people who are out there who are trying to do things or are doing different things, who are trying to use new educational strategies, we need to be getting input from them in order to make sure that we're responding to the landscape of technology. Not that we're always the early innovators on the bleeding edge, but that we are responding appropriately to things like making classes more interactive, for example. So we want to get transparency. We want people to understand what's going on. And what you'll find is if you do things in a silo, people will say you're great, you're great, you're great, everything's wonderful, everything's terrific, and then one day the tide kind of turns and the whole world turns against you and suddenly your unit is awful and they're not responsive to what's going on. So you kind of have to be your own worst critic. You kind of have to keep pushing to make sure, you know, people are very polite, they're nice, they'll tell you you're doing great, everything is working fine, but you need to go poking and prodding to find out what's not working. You need to get folks in there who are your critics, who are your, quote, enemies, who have an axe to grind with you. You need to get them in as well to find out what's going on. What would they like to see? To make sure that you're not blindsided one day. So here's a simple little chart that shows our organizational structure for our governance. This is online, so I mean, I've only got a couple of minutes to talk to you, so you can take a look at this stuff online. But what's of interest to us is that pink area, that's the actual learning technologies governance, and the rest of this is how we interface either with Delta, our internal group, to make decisions known or with the rest of the campus. So we have three basic units, a best practices of sport that's primarily made up of technologists, customer needs and policy, which is stakeholders from across the campus, most the IT directors, and a technical group that tells the other two groups that they're crazy, this can't be done. So how do you promote transparency? Again, I'm not going to read this and we don't have a lot of time, but you need to make them a part of the process. It's very easy to try to load the agenda with things and just kind of push things through, but you have to listen. You have to understand. You have to overcome objections. You have to hear what people are saying and you have to actually respond to them. If you approach this in a dishonest way, then I'm going to form this committee just to tell people what we're doing. It's not going to work very well. So what are the downsides? Man, this is really tedious. It takes a lot of time. It's a lot of effort. There's a lot going on between scheduling meetings, between having to talk to folks and form, go through the whole process. It takes a lot of cycles. I mean, that's how I got my job. I mean, this is what I do pretty much full-time and I know that not all of you are large enough institution you can afford to have somebody do this full-time, but it does take a lot of effort and progress can be painfully slow. So some resources you can go take a look at. Our portal to the LMS is wolfwear.ncsu.edu and all the way at the bottom there is a little link that says governance and you can click there and get all the information that you want. I am happy to answer any questions or if you want to send me email, be happy to help you appoint you in the right direction. We have a number of SOPs, things like that up there and you're free to kind of copy and paste and do whatever you can with them. That's a lot in seven minutes. You're doing a very good job. Does anyone have any questions for Marty? I definitely have one, but does anyone else have one if you want to raise your hand just to get the ball rolling? We've got a question over there. Don't shout, use the microphone for the video. Thank you. How long has the governance structure been in place at NC State? I want to say nine years. And so it's, you know, it's matured. I mean, there's a lot of things I could tell you that we've done poorly, that we've tried to fix a little bit. There are a few things that, you know, we've learned from, you know, about trying to not be as bureaucratic and in some cases we want to be, like with things like feature requests. You know, we have an open forum. Anybody at NC State can make a feature request. Unfortunately, we have to say no to most of them because we don't have the resources, but it gives us an avenue for evaluating them. Any more questions for Marty before I ask my question? So I've just come from the Mozilla Festival in London and we've been doing some work around sociocracy, which is a way in which you can come to decision-making without the highest paid person's opinion, the hippo, as it's known, the highest paid person's opinion, dictating what happens. It's a very, it's an unfair question really in the time we've got, but how are decisions made within that organization? Is it literally a show of hands or how do you come to making decisions in different forms? So it's a very interesting thing. So obviously I have a lot of influence over the process since I am the person that creates the agendas. I welcome getting topics from everyone. For the most part, you'll find that in any of these types of things, you have a few people participate a lot and a lot just show up and will be involved in the meeting, but they're not really doing anything outside. And that's just one of the effects of these types of bodies. I would like to be able to say that I have successfully in the nine years, I think there's only been two votes that have passed that we're not unanimous. So I really strive to be consensus driven. I don't like to move forward with anything until I feel like all of our partners are at least accepting, if not embracing. We're gonna have to leave it down for you, Marty. I actually find this a fascinating subject. All the slides are gonna be available from Marty and also you can catch them during the conference if you're interested. Thank you very much. Thank you.