 My friend and colleague, Sarah Stewart is our first speaker of the day. Sarah Stewart has been a midwife for many years and currently is the midwifery advisor and manager of the Australian College of Midwives Policy and Professional Practice Unit. Sarah's professional role has many varied elements from developing policy statements representing the ACM on national government and regulatory groups to responding to individual ACM members inquiries and concerns. Her volunteer roles include being company secretary to the Climate and Health Alliance and Sarah has recently completed an MBA and is a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Her research current interests include how open access resources and methodologies can improve governance and management processes within health and healthcare organisations. Ten years ago, Sarah brought together a diverse group from around the world to develop the virtual International Day of the Midwife online conference to celebrate this very special day for midwives. Welcome, Sarah. Thank you very much, Jean. Can you make me a presenter then I can flick the slides through? Oh, that's brilliant. Thanks. And while we're here, can you just quickly confirm what time do you want me to finish? Is that quarter past? I think that is what it is in the program, but I'm not absolutely suit and Sarah, but that would be great if you could. All right. Well, this will be a quick... Sorry to be so vague. There will be a quick flick through. And if anyone has any questions for me once my session has finished, either pop them in the comment box or drop me an email, put my email in the comment box once I've finished speaking. Thank you very much, everybody, for joining us this morning. I cannot believe 10 years ago, when we started this, 10 years ago, I never had any idea that I'd be here talking to you all in 10 years' time. I thought that if I was lucky, this initiative would go one or two years. So to be here 10 years later, I'm just absolutely gobsmacked and absolutely thrilled to be here. So just first of all, I just want to make sure everybody can hear me. I haven't seen any comments to say otherwise. So thank you all very much for coming today. And I'd really like to welcome you all. Before I go any further, I'd like to acknowledge the custodians of the land on which I am personally am sitting in Canberra, ACT, Australia, that's the Nunnamal people. And I'd like to pay my respect to their elders past, present and future. And I'd like to acknowledge the elders of the lands in which we are all meeting today around the world and pay our respect to them. Thank you all very much for coming today. As I said, some of you have been on this journey with me for the last 10 years. Some of us, some of you may be joining for the very first time. I'm absolutely horrified to see there's a picture of me there sitting in a red dressing gown in my house in Dunedin in New Zealand, which is where I lived 10 years ago. And I'm still, I'm sat here now this morning wearing the same red dressing gown. So honestly, it is time I've got a new dressing gown. But we're looking back at the photos and the pictures that we've gathered over the last 10 years. It's amazing how some things have changed, but some things are very much the same. So for those of you who don't know about the conference, it was started with the idea. We started 10 years ago, actually, not with a full 24 hour conference, but it was a one session, one hour session on the 5th of May. And the idea had back in 2008 was that we would put on a series of presentations say once a month over the whole year. But after the first year, my very dear colleague, Deborah Davis, who's online, who's also in her pajamas this morning, we had a chat and thought maybe we'd be better off actually if we wanted to build this as an idea but having a conference on the as a 24 hour idea would be better than trying to spread it out over a whole year. It would allow us to concentrate our communications and so on and so forth. And of course, the most logical day to have a midwifery conference is the 5th of May. So that's where the idea of having a virtual conference on the 5th of May came about. And the idea of having it as a 24 hour event, actually, I have to say we nick that idea from a wonderful group of people working second life, Lorraine being one of them, they had already picked us to the post of this idea of a 24 hour conference. And so we thought we could do the same. And the idea of that was that we would be able to reach from a time zone perspective, everybody in the world, of course, reaching everybody in the world from a technology perspective or a language perspective is another story and one that we're still working on. So these pictures here, the picture up there in the top that was probably Ali and Nikki were probably our first one of our first speakers. And I'm very grateful to everyone, particularly in those early days when we were building up this ideas, a concept very grateful to people like Ali and Nikki for giving us their support. And the picture in the bottom right hand corner, a group of midwives getting involved or a few years ago now up in Queensland, I think, somewhere. And the image in the top right hand corner was a tweet from Merilee Penman, who's an occupational therapist. And I don't know if you can see the writing, but she, she with a group of her friends internationally was so impressed with this idea that they took on the similar event for occupational therapy. So this has been a very successful initiative, not just in midwifery, but also extended into other health professions. It's been very much an idea that we developed the idea. We wanted to reach out to as many people as we could. We wanted to provide education opportunities to midwives who otherwise couldn't get away from practice, couldn't afford to go to face-to-face conferences, but we're very much driven by principles of open access, free open access. And we're also interested in wanting to not just deliver content, but to provide, but to build up a community of practice. And we very much still stick to those ideas. We're not a heavily sponsored conference. We're very grateful to the people over the years who provided that free access to the technology, such as a target polytechnic through to the frontier university. They gave us free access to the web conferencing, but all the work that has gone into this has been given freely by the volunteers who help us out. And believe you me, it's a huge number of people over the years who've helped us, the facilitators, the speakers, the organizing committee. And unfortunately, I've run out of time to name everybody. But I just want to point out that we have used technologies that are freely available. For example, up until a couple of years ago, all the work we did was in this wiki. I'll just finish by saying that I literally, I'm just getting into things and I have literally run out of time, but I do want to thank everybody over the years who've helped us. And particularly the wonderful organizing committee who themselves have become a community of practice. And these are the pictures of some of the people involved in the organizing committee. And there's more pictures of us and we actually got to meet the picture there of Deborah and myself with glasses of wine in our hand. We are scattered around the world and on the odd occasion when we do get to meet up face to face, it really is a wonderful experience. We're very grateful and this was one of my aims for us to be picked up by the ICM and I'm just absolutely thrilled to bits and very grateful to the ICM for advertising this initiative and supporting us. Which leaves me with the thoughts around where to from here. We have got barriers that are reflecting back over the 10 years still are just as relevant now as they've always have been around access to technology. We very much tend, we have been a very much a white English, an English based conference, but the organizing committee that are working with this facilitating this conference now have been extending it into other languages. So getting out to people who don't speak English is a challenge and getting it out, making it accessible to. Be source poor countries is also a challenge and one that we're continuing to work on that being said, we've had some wonderful sessions and presenters from people in India, Kenya, Brazil, Latvia, so this technology and community of practice is slowly, but surely extending around the world. I could talk to you about this all day literally, but I'm going to have to hand over, but I just want to finish by thanking everybody who's been involved with us over the years for all your support and congratulations to you all. And I look forward to seeing how this community of practice is going to extend into the world across the world in greater ways over the next 10 years. Thank you. It's a wonderful legacy, Sarah, and the comments in the comment box have reflected the appreciation from a wide range of medwives across the world who really sort of applauding what you've done and how you've got your vision for getting this going and how it's now even taking into account some of the language interpretation that might go into the future. There was just one question that I picked up and that one was from Deb, is the OT group still going there? Did they get that underway? Yes, they did. They run the six months behind us, so they'll be celebrating their 10th year this year as well. Oh, that's wonderful. Are there any questions for Sarah? I see that Hilma has put me a question wanting to know about the number of participants. It's been a bit varied, Hilma. And it's actually very difficult to say because people come and go over the 24 hours and also people just because you have one person identified in the conference doesn't mean to say it's just one person watching. We've had many stories over the years of people who stream the event up on a big screen and they'll get a big gathering together, so it's very difficult, Hilma, to be able to tell. But we have had a number of research papers published over the years, so if you Google Virtual International Day, the midwife, in Google Scholar, you'll come up. And Annette, one of our organisers is also doing her PhD around this event. So do a bit of a search and you'll find, in fact, actually Annette's there, put a comment there for you. So thank you. Yes, the comment there from Annette around the attendance during the last six years. Thank you, Annette. That's helpful. Thank you, Sarah. That was amazing. And as I say, a great legacy for us to keep going and keep these connections happening across the globe. Thank you very much. Now I'd like to...