 Thank you very much. I introduced myself. I'm Michael Maloney. I'm from the United States. I am from International Business Machines. And I can tell you this, and I'll walk around a little bit, that probably the best introduction I could have is I was on the elevator talking to someone. They saw my little sign and said, IBM, I didn't expect you here. So then the idea is I understand that when you look at Moodle, and you talk about Moodle, you look at many times universities, many times higher education organizations that use Moodle, Moodle Workplace. And I come at it from a different angle, and that is about three, three and a half years ago, I was introduced to Moodle, introduced eventually to Moodle Workplace, and I'm a convert. And that is I spent 28 years in the military, as an education and training officer. I have since then moved on to IBM, where I am the executive in charge of all federal U.S. learning. And I will tell you this, Moodle has a place in government. And I think that's what I wanna talk to you about today. And but government learning and innovation can be challenging. And for those individuals who have ever dealt with the government, many times a government agencies are large and complex, very bureaucratic. I have two clients who work learning management systems. They have between one and two million users. They have 100, they have X amount, 16,000 organization units within their organizations. They have multiple stakeholders. They have multiple charters. You can imagine if you're looking at a university and you're talking about various aspects of university, imagine having 18 major business units, all wanting different things at the same time. And when you look at multiple rules and regulations, we all have major rules and regulations in life. Major government agencies have a lot. They put a lot of emphasis on security and safety, and so they take that very seriously. Public trust dictates that they move cautiously. And as you look at that, you can see they have multiple competing priorities, but we can't let those organizations fall when it comes to innovation. And Moodle and Moodle workplace and what I'm witnessing this week is innovation. So why is it that they distance themselves? And it's, as I mentioned before, there's complexity out there, multiple components, multiple people wanting different things. Interoperability, it's not just a learning management system. It is a system that is used with HR systems. You're gonna have personal information. There are student information systems. There are scheduling systems outside of Moodle and Moodle workplace. And this is probably one of the most important ones, security. If I had a dollar for every time I was told that an open source system is not secure, I wouldn't be here. I'd be on an island someplace because I hear it all the time. And I can tell you right now, there's nothing more secure than Moodle and our ability to create security around it. We have various pieces that go along with it. FedRAMP is the federal government's way in the United States to put security controls around systems. We have risk management framework. Everything we do comes with a price. And that price is making sure that we have industry and we have security around all of our personal information and our sensitive business information. And you can see the other things. Thousands and millions of users. Most of the work that I have in my portfolio, at least 100,000 users. So anywhere from 100,000 to 2 million. The mission achievement, we've talked about that, governance and control. And then you look across the bottom in the kicker box, the focus on the mission and not necessarily on the training. You talk government, they talk training, we should really be talking education. We are educating those individuals within the federal government. And also fiscal challenges. Do you have the money to do it? You have the process by which you get the money to do it. And then lack of enthusiasm. And that is sometimes in the federal government, they focus on the mission. They don't have that enthusiasm around education and training like a lot of us do. So what's the key? And I learned this three years ago and I'm an evangelist for Moodle and Moodle workplace right now. And that is the key is Moodle. The ability to enable and fulfill the government, the needs of the government with a lot of things that I'm preaching to the choir here. We're talking open source and open standards. In the past, the government would look at it and consider it not to be safe, not to be secure. When in fact, it's extremely flexible and extremely secure. And open source allows opportunities, allows those communities that you're all involved with to look at things, to come up with innovative ideas that governments can use and adapt in the future. They also look at plugins. We do a lot of integration in a lot of our work because we have very large units. Plugins are a godsend. Because if you have something that we can plug into Moodle and Moodle workplace, that's fantastic. We look at security not being an issue. Scalability is all in the setup. As I mentioned before, we have a current user right now with over a million people. System doesn't go down. Never had a security incident. And it's all because Moodle and Moodle has that innovative feel to it that we're looking for. Multitenancy. We have units that have multiple organizations. They want that look and feel. We're gonna give them the same back end, but the front's gonna look different. They're gonna get all happy because their organization has that look and feel for their organization. Synchronous training. We went through COVID. We had multiple clients who had brick and mortar buildings. The United States Army, and we have Army representatives here, the United States Air Force, other organizations within the federal government. What do they do? They go to brick and mortar buildings. They get instructor led training. COVID hit, what do you do? You rely more on web-based training and the synchronous training that goes along with it and big blue button. Great partners in Moodle. I will tell you right now, because we are in the U.S., we work with Moodle U.S., a great partner, very flexible, everywhere from our sales executives, like John DeFonzo, all the way through Eric Merrill, who worked the development pieces and all the people in the middle. Innovation at every level, love it, and worldwide events like this drive innovation for us and we can give that to the federal government. There's one other piece that the federal government is driving towards and I heard Martin talk about it when there was an IFEST event in the United States and it was total learning architectures. And in the total learning architecture, open source, open standards are the way to go. And as you can see right here, I gave you an example of one of ours. I took our client name off of it, but when you look at it, you're gonna see some things that look very similar. You're gonna see Moodle workplace. You're gonna see big blue button. You're gonna see Intellibord. It's those places, those opportunities to bring in those partners that you have to create a total learning architecture, not just a learning management system, but a system that also includes content delivery. We expect that. The learning record store, the XAPI, the logistics, the additional competency management because now the federal government is moving towards competencies. We're moving to understand better what the individual within the organization has. If you have a government employee who is a security individual who's got 10 years of understanding, what you want to do is you want to train them on cybersecurity, they've got the background and they can work it. How do you train them? Through Moodle workplace. It's a complex system made simple with Moodle. So when you talk about large organizations and I've been through large implementations, there are five basic steps that go along with it. We look at the requirements, we make sure we define them all. As I mentioned before, we have multiple clients, we have multiple business units. We make sure all the requirements are met for all the stakeholders. We then design the system. Data is important, content is important and we drive that as we move forward. As we develop it, whether it's agile or waterfall because many times we have organizations that require development of between 10 and 50 people and many times from three to nine months long to develop it. But you've got to develop it and get the appropriate cycles in and get the government to review it. We then make sure we test the system completely to make sure that that test goes extremely well. We do functional tests, we do unit tests. We let the government test it and we make sure that it works extremely well before we deploy it. And once we deploy it, we make sure everything is taken into consideration. Some of the organizations we have ask us to move 20 years of data. We have to take the data, cleanse it and move it into the new construct, but it has 20 years, excuse me, 20 years of data. We make sure all the content works properly. We have multiple content developers in our government and we need to make sure it works right even though many of them are SCORM. Sometimes SCORM doesn't work as well as we'd like but we really do drive it. And then we help roll out the support and that is what else is going on that we need to make sure our clients are happy with what we have. That skill and expertise, I'm not gonna go down each individual one but you can see we need everything from our program managers to our interface partners down to our configuration and change people and to include help desk. There are a lot of people involved when you have these very big government opportunities and those government opportunities don't have to be US government opportunities. They can be governments anywhere in any country and that's what we're driving for, trying to drive Moodle into those workplaces rather than have those monolithic closed LMSs that you always hear about that they believe are safe. The flexibility and the innovation that Moodle has is driving us into the future. I'll give you just a one example of a system that we put together. We used to have a system that was no longer supported. There was little controls, little content, manual maintenance and many, many security issues. So what did we do? We replaced that closed LMS with Moodle and Moodle Workplace and you can see they got a new system. We put it into the cloud so that they could have it in the cloud, multi-tenancy because we have multiple business units, we could use those. We use lots of plugins. We created plugins and put them in a community and we drove those as well as well as the synchronous and asynchronous training because of the fallout of COVID. And with that infrastructure, the system never went down. We managed 30,000 users at any given time and over a million users were driving that to the future. So this is how we defined our success for one client, for one implementation. We had five million course enrollments. We had over three million course completions. There were about 800,000 to a million active users. We had 16,000 organizations that we had to manage and we could do that all with the ease of Moodle Workplace. Lots of great things. One of the things that I'll point here is the customized roles and customization that Moodle allows that sometimes these large closed LMSs that are software as a service, they don't allow the customization. They don't allow that flexibility but Moodle Workplace does that as well. Lots of great stuff. It ended up being the top site visited for this organization of over a million people and it worked extremely well. So really, I just wanted to get up and talk about that. For three years, we have worked it. We've had a successful implementation in the government for over a million users with seven applications with 90% satisfaction. You can't always make everybody happy but 90% of them is good enough for some folks. We've got another implementation underway right now with two million users, at least three applications in the cloud and we're driving towards a 2023 go live right now. And what are the future steps? We talked about LMSs, we talked about various pieces, is completing those TLA stacks as well as infusing new methods to teach as well. Some of that innovation that Moodle Workplace. So bring an open source, open standards to the government. Is like working in a university. Except that you have certain things that you have to worry about but anyone wants to discuss any one of those, I tell you, if you know of a governmental organization that looks for a learning management system or something more than that, definitely drive them towards Moodle Workplace. I'd preach into the choir, you're all wearing the badge, you're all wearing the shirts but I'll tell you, as an individual who's worked specifically in the government for over 30 years, this is the best thing that's happened for any government, individual, any person that works in the government, Moodle Workplace is great. So with that, I tried to go fairly quickly to keep everyone on track but does anybody have any questions? Yes? I just realized I have the microphone so. You know, it's a combination. One of the things that we have learned and I've learned over my 15 years of working at IBM with governments is you have to hit it at certain levels, you have to go to the top, you have to go to the middle and you have to go to the bottom and you have to be able to work those as well. So we don't just work with individuals who are at the worker B level and hope that it drives to the top. We have and like in my particular case as a delivery executive, I work with the major clients, we have individuals that I work with and that work for me who work the middle and then we have the individuals on the ground who are what I call turning the wrenches as well. So we do keep that going. And yeah, you asked about skills. One of the things that the government is trying to do right and they are taking advice from industry, from academia is going back to that competency piece, looking at those skills, realizing that upskilling and re-skilling is the wave of the future. It's if you can take someone who's got that governmental experience but needs to be trained and needs to be upskilled or re-skilled, that's what they wanna do, rather than have somebody leave government service and bring in somebody brand new because people do have the skills and competencies and now they have the way to do it and it works extremely well. Yes. Well, the first thing is wow, you know? That's a real implementation. The second thing I saw from your key successes that it seems that the government bid on almost everything from the infrastructure with two different clouds, public cloud, I imagine, to all the rest, which means that you have contracts for a specific number of years so you have to plan also if somebody will win the next bid, is that correct? Yeah, I think one of the things you saw was and one of the things that in the US and I'm sure everywhere, right? The cloud is everywhere that the concept of hybrid cloud is really the way to go and that is you don't tell an organization, excuse me, that they have to go to AWS, they have to go to Azure, they have to be on their private cloud. We have worked LMSs where a piece of it is in what I call a private cloud and that is that organization's piece but there's also been one piece in AWS and one piece in Azure to make that happen. You are using the government domain inside those clouds. What we do is because of that security I talked about, they're all using the AWS GovCloud in those various GovClouds. Or the Azure GovCloud, exactly, or the IBM GovCloud. Right, and I'll tell you one thing that we have learned that I know the Army is interested in is the avoidance of vendor lock and that is you don't want to be tied. The Army doesn't want to be tied to IBM forever. If in fact there is something else, they love the software but maybe they don't love us, they'll move to another vendor and they have created a scenario by which proprietary is gone. This is all government cloud, government owns the equipment, they own the licensing. So we have to do well, you know, good work begets more work, that's what we have to do. If not, you're right. There's a lot of flexibility about keeping away from that vendor lock that no one wants to talk to. Shuffle. Any other questions? Over here? Hello, thank you, very special talk and do IBM offers such kind of consultation services in different countries because I think all governments need to hear that because as a partners we see that there is a different maturity of government understanding. Someone is creating their own clouds and say that it must be specific software. What are you saying is great for our ears because you understand that there is a lot of stable community, there is a technology, we can be used with that. And do you have any plans or from other countries? IBM have any success stories about this kind of projects with the Moodle? New Zealand, Singapore. I guess you want that turned on. So at least the front row got at least part of what I said. But we work with a lot of people. In fact, I had a consultation with my partner, IBM partners in Romania, who were looking to bid Moodle for the education system within Romania. So the short answer is yes, IBM is all over and there are multiple learning system people everywhere that can help you really figure out what it is you really want, what is it the client really wants and then try to drive that as well. Congratulations. Two questions, whether there are any reports or any material that it's published related to this amazing work that you have done that we can use as reference for how Moodle has been successful with the government? Yes, well one, we are working that right now with one of our two clients as well. So we have implemented into one organization and they're working on the documentation now to publish to be able to talk about that and send that out. Yes. The second one is whether you worked with your own IBM team on everything or you also had the Moodle partner, Moodle US or any other partner with you? Yes, in fact my Moodle partner is sitting in the front row, Moodle US, John DeFonzo has a team. He is our sales executive but he has a team of very competent technical experts. Now I'll be honest, when you work Moodle for two or three years, you get very good at it. We've been given the access to Moodle Academy but when it comes right down to it whether it's Eric Merrill who is the head of development who works with us and a couple other folks that were that are in here, we're in here, we deal with because we're not gonna try to tell you we're Moodle experts, we have Moodle experts and one of the things too that I really didn't get into but when you have something of this size you do have teaming partners. And we find the best teaming partners to help us with the government organizations. We're not trying to do it all ourselves and most definitely don't try to work the Moodle piece even though we're getting very good at it. We're getting it so we understand it. We're implementing Moodle 4.0. Thank you. Other questions, back here. Hi, you mentioned earlier how you run a bunch of your own clouds and private clouds owned by different organizations within the government and that you also run plug-ins developed by third parties. I was wondering how you handle any security issues related to a plug-in or Moodle itself and how do you deploy that when you run on so many different types of infrastructure? Yeah, from what I get, a little hard to hear but what I get is have we had security issues with any of our plug-ins? Yes, and how do you handle that if there's an own security issue or something, how do you deploy effects on so many different types of infrastructure? Well, what we do is one, we traditionally don't have any issues with security when it comes to plug-ins. What we do is we do test it. We do have an individual who works with a Moodle subject matter expert to make sure that it is there but when you go back and I talk about multi-cloud, the hybrid cloud and I talked about the risk management framework and some of those things, we have a very strict set of requirements. We go through anywhere from 500 to 1,000 controls to make sure that your personal data, that your organization's personal data and business data does not get compromised. So we don't really have problems with plug-ins. We do check them. If we do have a concern, we run them through all of our testing to make sure they have no concern then we run everything through risk management frameworks and we have not had a security incident ever with Moodle, ever.