 So I'm not doing the welcoming speech, that is Bård Vegard Soljel from the head of NORA that will do, but since we are well known for breaking records, we also breaking record this year, even though it's a digital, again, digital annual conference, we are doubling the number of participants from last year, so now we're over 1500 that have registered for this conference. So, with not further ado, I would then welcome Bård Vegard Soljel to give the opening speech for this 8th DHS2 annual conference. Over. Dear participants and University of Oslo HISP team, it's a great honor to be with you today and thanks for inviting me to open this annual event. Of course I would have liked to be with you today, but video conferencing has also delivered some real benefits in the past year. And since we are discussing digital goods, isn't it time we get past the phase where we excuse to each other for not being together physically all the time? I think so. You are experts, you are citizens and you are activists in the countries we want to partner with. You're all working together in a worldwide community of action to produce value for all countries. We cannot accomplish the sustainable development goals without the benefits of digital transformation reaching all countries. To ensure that countries and individuals can gain access to the benefits of digital transformation, we believe digital public goods are a key. Therefore Norway is taking a leading role in the digital public goods alliance. There is no doubt that the DHS2 is one of the world's leading examples of digital public goods. And we are proud to have supported HISP and DHS2 since the early 1990s. And I myself, I use it as an example all the time. There is an important success story in the digital transformation that other countries and initiatives can learn important lessons from. For Norway, DHS2 is an increasingly important strategic investment for health, for education and of course for digital transformation. What have we learned from you, Dan? Well, universities can be engines of great development programming. That's one lesson. If playing to the strengths of these universities, we think it's interesting to compare the university-led development programs in Norway with those in the US which follows a very different model. And the second lesson is that you work in partnership with countries and institutions like the US President's Emergency Plan for Aid to Relief, Preqfire, the Population Service International and Doctors Without Borders. Over time, you provide solutions, build support relations and expand in-house capacity. These ingredients are critical for scale. And given DHS2 is used for health management information systems covering over 2 billion people, this really is scale. A third lesson. DHS2 is an open platform. There's a wide range of possibilities for countries to architect the information system they want within it. This freedom allows mistakes to be made but also promotes flexibility and encourages countries to adopt the tool and to come up with innovative solutions to local challenges. This is why countries have so widely opted to adopt DHS2. This open approach has dividends of a more defined product which seeks to push our users into a specific path of behavior and are generally preferred by sectoral experts like health or educational experts. Another important lesson we have learned is that DHS2 has expanded beyond a web-based program, focusing on collection and use of aggregate data to include Android, which is of course phone tablet-based solutions, and to include trackers for patient-linked data. The progressive expansion is clearly of importance to keep DHS2 relevant to countries. This is what countries want. And it also explains, and this is lesson number five, the increasing use of DHS2 across other sectors such as education, nutrition, water sanitation, to name a few. Imagine in the future if countries can use a single system of management of all public services at district level. The economies of scale are obvious. We would need to develop IT teams in country who want solutions, not the hundreds of products used in every country today. And this would allow genuine sustainable development of country capacity, a major hindrance to digital development today. To explore potential synergies between the use of DHS2 in different sectors, NORAD is funding a pilot in five countries to expand the use of the system from health into the education sector, from which promising results are starting to emerge already. The HISP network invests time and resources in capacity building as well as research, constantly updating DHS2 tools according to user requests. As a result, the program has helped build a network of experts passionate about IT and its use in social service protection. Provisions, sorry. This means that a range of people all over the world learns to use, modify and develop solutions through interaction with the platform. When COVID-19 first arrived, it was teams in Sri Lanka that first pioneered a DHS2 tool to track COVID cases. Their prototype configuration and apps were shared across the network and taken back to Oslo where they were developed into more generic solutions. Now, the University of Oslo supports a series of COVID-19 surveillance programs used in 39 countries as well as tools to manage the rollout of COVID vaccine in further 27 countries. What I find fascinating is how digital public goods play a key role in achieving the sustainable development goals. Together, you have managed to achieve scale, domestic ownership and local capacity as well as developing and implementing a powerful toolkit adapted for a wide variety of local uses. There is much to learn from the HISP and DHS2 experience for other digital public good initiatives and for countries looking to further their digital transformation using digital public goods. This is why we are highlighting the educational management information system, piloting as important pathfinding activity on behalf of the Alliance. We need to learn that success is built across long-term action. Gradually, building a worldwide network of talent bound together by an activist mentality to use digital tools to help people and countries. Guided by strong principle of local ownership and agency, open source solutions and user-driven development. Thank you. Thank you so much, Bård Vegard and Norad and we have a lot to thank Norad for actually. They were the first that invested in our HISP network and in our DHS at that time and also our largest investors. And we have to tell and to appreciate that only two weeks into the lockdown of Norway, two weeks after each of March, Norad came up with COVID money that say how much can you consume in order to help the whole global community. So we could really speed up the innovations as he mentioned already, things were already going on, but we targeted COVID money. So thank you Norad so much. So the opening has been done and this is for newcomers. I think the annual DHS2 conference very unhappy that is digital. We know how fun we have in our activist approach as Bård Vegard told us about and also how much we share and learn, but we hope fully through this conference of a week in digital way can also be able to share and learn as we have done the last one and a half year. So this theme of the conference this year is designing for data use. Never have so many decisions been made on health data affecting all our lives. And it's not like it's a global south thing anymore it's a truly global the world is becoming smaller. We are all sharing the same use case. We are all sharing the same worries and all sharing the same demand for having good quality data in order to be able to take better decisions for the for the for the government. So the data use has been a key part of our strategies 22 to 22, but we are now putting a step further to say designing for data is not only having a focus of data out on the analytics and equality and the dissemination at all the levels that decision shall be taken. We need to find out how can we design for it in a participatory way on the ground understanding the situation locally, even leveraging even more on the local innovation for for an global response. So, and how can the SS to support that practices on the ground that will be topics for several hour our sessions also later today. There has been an intense year for the DHS to community, and we can celebrate as what I mentioned, great successes in, in being able to disseminate the digital resources throughout the world. The COVID surveillance, the COVID vaccination, but not to forget that we still need to have a focus on the HIS health information system strengthening routine systems. And now we are going into a period where it's important to routinize all these systems. We need to thank the whole DHS to community for this work, especially I would say a great thank to all the his groups that have worked day and night to support countries to support ministry to support the region to be able to have this global, this global resources across countries like the Sri Lanka helping Palestine with their COVID work and they didn't just send us a best practice use case, and we didn't even know they had implemented the COVID surveillance for Palestine. But COVID is not over. We, we need, we call for stamina, but we also call for sympathy and compassion. Us, some of us that have been vaccinated or will be vaccinated soon, we think maybe it's over, but of course it's not over. We can just look to the rest of the world where vaccine nation process a slower and we see more new outbreaks. So we call for stamina, but also some sympathy that we need to continue the great work. This map, you have seen many times, but we also mentioned this great global scale. This is the fundament for our rapid response on global resources on the pandemic. Not only the software behind all these green spots, which is the scale countries is actually not only software system but also people also a DHS to core group, his group, and so forth. So, COVID gradually becoming part of the routine, as I mentioned, embedded into the routine surveillance system and the vaccination become on the vaccination system. And this is all strengthening the fundament of our work. So this week, we will not only talk about COVID, however, tomorrow it will be a full COVID day, but also focusing on all the other cross sector innovations. So this rapid deployment, Bodvega mentioned this local innovation in Sri Lanka already 27th of January, two days after they were able to make an app, a rapid app on Port of Entry, 29th of January. And that was shared with the whole his community and that laid the ground for this global response based on local innovation. And they had a hackathon, you see the timeline here you saw it last year, but we still think it's, it's valid. The hackathon with support from you, however, doing a lot of innovative apps that cut across all the various use cases within the, and within the pandemic, and the flexibility that them that the global group has shown how to be able to respond to in governmental legislations and so forth that we can celebrate. And it's not history because now we are entering into the maintenance, not more countries maybe but more how to improve the quality of the systems, but then we of course are into vaccinations we're all talking about even more rapid, if possible, again, laid on the groundwork, leveraging the Gavi, WHO and his collaboration over years within the immunization, the vaccination of children, and to transform this into a global COVID vaccination and support for delivery. So building an existing routine system has been, and it still is our, our, our success. I want to mention that all the new countries are coming in Mauritius and Timor-Leste are actually coming in. We're not having them, the groundwork of having scaled the HIS or HIS system in the continent still are able to pick up and doing very, very, very good. And that is very, very interesting to see how this kind of this dissemination and inspiration happens in this digital swear. And also we could mention Guinea, because we haven't talked about the transformation of DSS2 to be a surveillance platform started already in, in 2015 in the West Africa during the Ebola outbreak and later with the CDC supporting that work. Guinea has been able to use to, to flexibly transform the COVID solutions with help of his West Africa, with Central Africa and Sri Lanka in order to respond to the ongoing Ebola outbreak that happens in Guinea. We see the local innovation being so important and during this week, we will share all these stories and all this data use country stories and inspire people to pick up innovations and implemented in their own country or support their own, their own region. And later today, we will hear more about the data use country stories. And of course, just following this session, we will have what's new. We all the most popular normally is actually to see what's new actually what kind of new features of do we have both web, Android, tracker, analytics, aggregate and so on. Tomorrow, as I mentioned, full COVID day with country stories showing this local innovation and global collaboration, which we are very proud of. As we say, the, the vote has in one way become smaller by being able to collaborate digitally across all countries. On Wednesday, we look at the HS2 and the broader information ecosystem. We put health in brackets since we haven't the HS2 for education session two hours actually, and also elements and logistics, but we will have a special focus on interoperability as well. Thursday is the designing for data use. And with an a plenary, we will showcase a lot of PhD students research in the research session, we will have an own data use at local level supporting planning addressing the well known denominator to problem. And Friday, it will be what's next. And of course, competitions and the other fun stuff we're doing. Yes, the importance of the HS2 community. We are sad that we are not together in the end that we're not able to mingle that we're not able to go to the island and play football and and swim and fish. However, we have other, we have a COP we would encourage you, and we have other things that Max will tell you so how we can mingle. And almost all of the sessions are actually global community members we have 163 speakers this year. That's a lot. We will still have the use case bizarre without pizza though, but and that competition. The COP will be the place you you question and where you can continue to communicate with the presenters and with the pairs. And this time, are we really hope that we are able to continue to collaborate within the community practice it's a successful but more, more like user support, but we really like it to be a fundament for for also an alumni for this fantastic conference that we know 300 participants are listening in now. And in addition, the last thing I will mention before I hand over to Max is actually the large variety of daily technical sessions and interactive expert sessions. And today it's after, but tomorrow I think it's before. So then you can actually talk talk to expert interactive, and you can be able to communicate also within technical features. So, Max, this is for you. Yes. So, first we'll talk about the social aspects and how to keep in touch with presenters and other participants after the conference is over as Kristen mentioned we have the community practice, which is a our platform for the community online, and that's available 2470 around, but for the conference we've created a tag DAC 2021, you can use to find topics that are really related to this conference. And I'll show you that in just a second, but that's a way for you also to ask questions to presenters to engage in discussion, including after the conference is over. And as Kristen mentioned, we also have a virtual conference platform this year we're using a technology called gather and that's a place where you can go and mingle network. That's also where expert lounges will be held. So starting today you can go in there and join one of these rooms. And there you have this kind of video game like environment where you navigate around and talk to people. So we hope that works and we're not. And then we just have some technical information about where to find information on the sessions in the conference so you skid as our main scheduling platform, and you all should have this link, and that will allow you to go into different sessions find a description see who's presenting access their PowerPoints where those have been added. After the session is completed will add a recording there as well. We also have a playlist for recordings on the DHS to YouTube channel. There's a link in this PowerPoint which will be uploaded to skids you can access their organs go directly to YouTube and find our playlists there. And all the sessions will be recorded and posted there, ideally within the same day that they're recorded. So with that I'm actually just navigate some of these to show you where you can find them. Yeah, bring this. Okay, so now you should see that I'm at the DHS to community practice site. We've added this helpful banner at the top. It allows you to quickly go from the COP the various sites within the community within the DHS to annual conference. So this will take you to conference website and this will actually give you a list of the. This will take you to schedule and schedule and this will give you a list of the topics on the community practice that are related to the annual conference. So this is the easiest way to find them you can also just navigate to them like you would normally. They're generally in categories that relate to the topic. And so then if you haven't been to community practice before before the way this works is you click on a topic looks interesting to you. Like this one from Bangladesh. You can read the topic. And after you read it if you have a question or comment at the bottom you have options to add your own comment or I don't question so if you click the reply button that will then allow you to comment on this topic yourself. So we really encourage you to do that if you have questions and like I said this these topics will be available for you. And both right now before the presentations happened and after the conference you continue there. So scared as I mentioned is this site which is where you can find the schedule. So here this is also an interactive site and click on a topic like this one. Max, there's something that they cannot see your screen. I can actually. So are there more people that cannot. Okay, so yeah. So people can see the screen. Okay. So, yes, this is scared. So this is an example one session within scared we can find the presenters you can find a summary of the information that's going to be presented. And we will add any PowerPoints through related here so you can then download them later. And like I said we have our YouTube channel. So this is a way to find our videos to play list feature. And right here is the DHS to annual conference 2021. And finally I wanted to show you the gather platform. So this one you can get to actually through scared. And so if you go to the main event schedule. And click on any of the expert lounges or the meeting group session. These all take you to the same place. So we go here to gather. And then you'll be able to enter this platform that you'll be able to design your own avatar. And then join the gathering. And then here we are. So this will take just a second to pop up. And then you can see that I'm in this virtual annual conference space. And so I don't walk around. And if there are other people here, like I see that there's one personality here. So you can go and talk to them. You'll see their video screen pop up if they're on video or audio. So if you're ready to join expert lounge, you go into one of the expert lounge rooms as you can see they're labeled on the outside with what the topic of the day is. And then they're going to join the conversation about that expert lounge. And that's it. That's pretty much how that works. So we hope you enjoyed it. This is the first time we're using it for the annual conference. So we're hoping that everyone likes it. It's kind of fun way to get the networking by back and the sort of casual by back to the conference. And again, I really encourage you haven't used any practice before to go there and add your questions at your comments. And we think about that as a way to keep the discussion on these topics going even after the conference is over. And with that, I think we're going to wrap up this session. So I will pass it over to our setup team for the next one and I'll put up a slide with the title of the next session and we just need to wait few minutes to get ready for that. So thanks for your patience and we'll be back with an accession in just a couple of minutes. And that you can see that we are still innovating even though we are in the digital world we try we would like to do whatever we can do in order to collaborate and also in this gather. That would be cool. So check it out.