 Welcome to our first CSV keynote. I'm Danielle, I'm one of the organizers based here in Portland. And I'm so excited to be able to introduce you all to Heather Joseph. For anyone who isn't familiar with her work, she's the executive director of Spark, and I have it here on my phone, so I don't mess it up. It's the scholarly publishing and academic resources coalition. And what that means is that she's on the front line of advocating for better data policy in the United States, better access to research data. She's also on the PLOS Board of Directors. And she helps organize OpenCon, which for me was a transformative conference that has changed my career completely. So y'all should go to that conference. This guy in the front is wearing a shirt. So without further ado, here is Heather. Welcome to Portland. Thank you so much. What a great place to give a talk, although I did say that I was really grateful that I walked into a church chapel and the walls didn't automatically burst into flames. So I feel like it's a great sign and it should be a reasonably uneventful talk, hopefully. Thank you so much for including me in this phenomenal conference. I'm really excited to be here today. And if there's anything that's guaranteed not to give you agit or indigestion after lunch, it's talking about data policy in Washington, DC right now. So my apologies for the timing, but what I wanna do today is actually talk about the state of play for open data. I feel like this is echoing here. I feel like a little rock star. I'm gonna step back from my computer. The state of play. And I'm gonna try to do it in three phases to take a little nostalgic look back at the last eight years and sing the way we were in my head while I do that. Take a look at where we are now in the very, very eventful and somewhat transformative months since the recent election and talk about what that's meant to our continued work to open up publicly funded data and then spend the most time looking at where we need to be and where we wanna go and hopefully be able to outline some concrete strategies and actions that we might think about collectively taking together to help us keep the momentum moving in the right direction towards open federal data. And for the majority of my talk, I'll talk about open government data with a broad brush, meaning all government data, but the focus for me is primarily on advocating for open access to research data. And that comes because in my career, I spent 15 years as a scientific journal publisher. And I like to say I was raised by the astronomy and astrophysics community. I spent my first seven years working professionally for the American Astronomical Society. And this has really been important to me in kind of determining how I think about data and how I think about what the default mode should be when we're gathering data. And as those of you who are familiar with the astronomy community know, this is in their DNA, right? From the very beginning, I started working for them in 1989 and they were collecting digital data in large scale from instrumentation, automatically sharing it. This is just the way that that community approach is dealing with data. And my good friend and colleague, Bob Hannish, who worked on Hubble Space Telescope, liked to say, yeah, sure, the astronomy community is all for open data because our data is worthless, right? Which I loved, but which actually is a serious comment at heart because after moving out of the astronomy community, I went into cell biology and neurosciences where data collected has serious commercial, potential commercial value, right? So when Bob was talking about this, he was saying is actually a comment that I've kept in the back of my mind as I've also thought about the fact that not every community approaches data with the same native bent towards, I'm gonna share it unless or until somebody gives me a compelling reason why I shouldn't. And that for me has been really something that's propelled me through the work that I've done since the beginning of my career and particularly the work that we're doing at Spark. As Danielle noted, we're an international advocacy organization, we're nested in the academic and research library community, but our goal is as a global coalition to really try to work to set that default expectation and default mode to open in research and education. So we work on data, educational materials like textbooks, we work on scientific journal articles, but the thrust of what we do is to really try to reset the rules of the road. And there's nothing more powerful that we've found in terms of a tool to help us accomplish that goal than working in the policy environment, right? Policy is very foundational, it's a real lever. Policy is also a long game, which is why I kind of chunk this talk into sort of three different segments to try to illustrate how important it is to have your eye on the long ball when we're working in the policy environment. It's a very incremental game to a certain degree and I'll touch on that in a minute. I swear this is not gonna be a talk that just goes through, here are the policies that were passed and here's the language, but I do have one slide that I wanna show because I think it's really important to understand how we got to where we are now in terms of policy development. Nobody hates to be out on the limb by themselves taking a risk, doing something new more than a policymaker and particularly a politician in DC. So all policy development is incremental and depends on having strong policy precedents to work from. And in the open data community, whether we know it or not, we've been incredibly fortunate to have a very strong set of policy precedents in the United States that our open data policies have been able to be built on. We heard a little bit in some of the talks earlier about the importance of things like FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act and the foundation that it has helped us lay for ways to get access to information. But there's also been a series over, roughly a 30-year period beginning in the 60s and culminating in the late 1990s of other foundational policies that have given us language that we've used and we've relied on to build effective, strong policies for open data in the U.S. And weirdly, you've probably never heard of OMB's circular A-130, right? Live it, learn it, know it, love it because it's actually our best friend in the open data world. Almost all of our open data policy language that we've been successful in sort of imbuing in the United States to underpin the work that we've done comes out of this little circular which basically just sets the expectations for the U.S. government, federal agencies, their operations in how government information and particularly government information as we interpret it in the digital age is utilized, right? And it has phenomenal language in it from a policy perspective. Government information is a valuable national resource, right? And its value is only increased when it's made available to all in a timely and equitable manner. And this little circular also lays the groundwork to say what does that mean? Well, it means it's open, it's unrestricted and you can't charge any more for it than the cost of marginally distributing it, which in the internet age is, you know, should be zero. So it's wonderful that we have this foundational language. It's extremely valuable. It really has, you know, again, built a solid foundation. But going back, you kind of notice that a lot happened during this period, but then in 1998, we kind of went into a little bit of a hiatus. And that's not unusual. You have a foundation. You really need a precipitating event, something that's gonna help catalyze action to keep momentum going forward. And we got one. We got one in a beautiful way when Barack Obama was elected president. This is the open data catalyzing event. You know, he's elected president. He takes office and open data fabulousness ensues for eight years. And I'm only marginally being facetious about this because when I look back and think about the breadth of changes and the progress that we've been able to make because of the dedication of this administration towards making open and open data a centerpiece of their agenda, a priority in the policy environment. It's quite amazing. So I want to talk a little bit about the way we work. I tried to embed, somebody's got to help me with keynote and PowerPoint. I wanted like the little Barbara Streisand music playing in the background and I was gonna toggle back and forth and kind of listen to the music. But next time, next time. The slides are beautiful enough because of the policy. So we'll enjoy the sweet music that they bring to our ears. This administration couldn't have hit the ground running more strongly in terms of presenting the notion that open was a key construct. And you all know that the open government directive was issued on the first day of the Obama administration's coming into office in his first term. You come out of the gate and what he talked about and what this directive did was make open the presumptive mode for the federal government, not just for operations but also for information coming out of the federal government. And at the time, I remember thinking, wow, this is really great. Somebody's speaking our language and it's really nice. Looking back as we'll talk about now, it's more than nice. It is a seminal moment, I think, for the United States and for the operations and the propelling forward of the movement to say at the center of it all, the public deserves access to information that the government produces, whatever it may be and certainly data is at the centerpiece. In the open government directive, there was a few sentences that basically said that in DC speak, each agency should take prompt steps to expand access to information by making it available online and in open formats. No government had talked in the United States about making information available in open formats until this directive came out. I mean, this is really extraordinary stuff. I was in the talk that the lovely woman from the DC city open data government, are you here? Did earlier, where are you? She's not here. She did this wonderful talk on open data and she had, oh, there you are. Sorry, your talk was fantastic and I loved the fact that you highlighted data.gov as something that's in use now for all of its works because I actually went back to the way back machine and pulled out one of the early iterations of data.gov as an example. The open government directive asked federal agencies for the first time in US history to identify two high value data sets and to make it openly available through data.gov. I mean, and that was groundbreaking, right? In 2009, asking agencies to find and make two data sets available openly had simply never been done before. And data.gov came under fire then and rightly, probably rightly so, it's not perfect, but what it did was really sort of set the tone. More of the way back machine. High value data sets in 2009, the most used data set on data.gov was the White House visitors log, which if you're like me and you're nosy, you want to know who's in and out of the White House, I thought it was pretty great, but there were a lot of stories about like really is this high value? Again, we sort of flash fast forward now that the visitors logs to Mar-a-Lago are not being released. It's not quite as funny, but it is I think ever more poignant that this was information that really sort of laid the groundwork. Again, not perfect, but it set the expectation from day one that open data was a key priority. And with this administration, the open data hits just kept coming, right? It wasn't just in terms of putting out policies or edicts or saying that shall share data, we're going to use the right words. This administration backed up the policy actions with specific policy constructs, with specific actions, including sending signals that this was so important that we need a chief technology officer. I love this picture of the three CTOs. Some people like the three tenors from opera. I think that Anish, Megan, and Todd Park are like rock stars in their own right. We had never had a chief technical officer. The message that that sent, however, that this was a key priority is something that's simply never been done and it's unmatched. Ditto for bringing in a chief data scientist. We hadn't had that in the United States. This is so important. We need leadership, we need talent, we need visibility. That was the signal that was sent. That's what helps build momentum, right? You can write all the policies you want, but if you don't back it up with the energy and the cachet that having somebody in a leadership position brings to the role, this kind of stuff dies in D.C. all the time. This movement didn't die in D.C. Do in large part to these lovely folks but also do in part to an infusion of young and talented and continuously moving and growing people into the pipeline through the presidential innovation fellows. Through 18F, shout out to the two people from 18F that I just met sitting over there. I hear there's more. Amazing, amazing, taking that energy, taking the leadership from the top, infusing it with people with expertise and putting them in positions where they can really make a difference and raise the visibility of the impact that open government data across the board could have in a positive way on citizens' lives. I also have to give the props to people like the Department of Commerce, which was the first department to implement an open data advisory committee to a US sitting secretary, the Secretary of Commerce. That little CDAC logo is for the Commerce Data Advisory Council, which brought together leaders in the open data movement from business, from research, from code from America, from civil society, to directly advise a sitting cabinet secretary on effective open data policy. Fantastic, really amazing things happening. In terms of propelling momentum forward during his administration, President Obama didn't just stop and say, I'm doing one thing and that's it, I'm bringing the talent in and then we're never gonna talk about it again. He did this beautiful thing with the administration in terms of starting big with a sweeping open government directive and then getting ever more granular in terms of the prescriptiveness, descriptiveness of policies that were put into place. In the first year of his second term, this executive order making open and machine-readable the new default for government information came out. And for us, in terms of the advocacy work that we've been doing to really try to reset the DNA of a community, of a research community, these words are amazing. They are words that don't just speak to one community but rather to our nation as a whole that says this is the way we should be thinking about it. It's not resetting one small subset of DNA to considering that we should be sharing this stuff unless there's a compelling reason not to. This is in fact the way that the entire country should be moving. And he followed that up just a month later with in case anybody was in my community and our community and the research community was worried that we're not covered fully enough with a memorandum out of the Office of Science and Technology Policy which further described open access to research data and the terms and conditions under which that needed to be made. So a really heady time when we look back and say in an eight-year period we went from no action on open data in the US government, really no policies to having this series of interconnected mechanisms that really helped us move the ball forward. And just as an aside, Congress was in on the action too, lest you think this was only the administration. At the same time we had Congress in flux where we had Democratic control and Republican control at different times, Congress was also moving pieces of legislation that were following the open data ball and helping it to move forward like the data act which went into effect just last year. So the most important thing about those eight years is that it really changed the landscape and helped us make open data to be considered foundational. Foundational for scientific discovery, yes, but also foundational for better health, for innovation, for economic growth, for equity, for all of the kinds of things that are priorities in the federal government. So we were really on a wonderful trajectory and frankly we were spoiled. It was not that hard to advocate for open data during the Obama administration. So things were going pretty well until we had another precipitating event. And I chose this slide because the headline I think for the open data community rings unfortunately pretty true, right? When the election happened, no one really had much of an idea of what would happen in the open data environment to the momentum towards open data under a Trump administration. We're finding out in the way we are. Just as an aside, at Spark, when we say we do advocacy we do pretty heavy duty political advocacy. So we spent a significant amount of time over the 18 months leading up to the presidential election meeting with every single declared presumptive presidential candidate in both parties which meant we met with all 15 of the Republican contenders to talk with them. Someone's laughing. I'm like, you should have been with us. Talk about, I was gonna say Jesus wept. I can say that in here. So yeah, yeah, yeah. We talked with all of them about open data and the importance of open data, open access, open everything. And we had varying degrees of receptivity depending on who we talked to. And we also established a really strong relationship with some of the strategists on the Republican side which we were hopeful would be helpful to us in this new world. We are roughly 103 days into the administration, Saturdays, 103 days into this administration. And I don't think any of us were prepared despite the legwork that we did for the effects that we would see coming out really from day one in January. We've had to kind of work through fake news on a large scale but also fake news and science and in data, alternative facts. I don't think these were terms or concepts that we could have in any way, shape or form prepared adequately to face in January and in February. We've had to deal with 404 errors, right? Things being removed from websites, not errors because oops, we just let the connection die. But things like open government and the information about the open government directive actually being taken down from the White House website. We've had to deal with agencies having data scrubbed from their websites. The EPA is probably the one that people are most familiar with but certainly this was not something that we were prepared really to see to the degree that it's happening. We had to deal with in the first three days of the administration, agencies being told that there was a moratorium on being able to share data and talking to the press about scientific data they were collecting, the FDA, HHS, EPA, really things that were completely antithetical to the spirit of openness in this arena that we had gotten used to under the last administration. And frankly this is really built up to the point where we have a real sense that an empirical data-driven fact-based operating mode that we had enjoyed is really endangered. The world in DC, the world in the US in this environment for open data and frankly for most other things has completely changed. That's a depressing part of the talk, okay. Which leads us to thinking about working on the way we need to be. And at Spark and in the community that the communities that we work so closely with we always try to look for pragmatic, proactive, solution-oriented, action-oriented solutions for how we can deal with the reality that we find ourselves in. And one of the things that we've known, I'm gonna try to give three potential paths forward but before I do that, I think the thing that we've settled on in going through the stages of grief since the election in terms of trying to deal with where we are in the open movement is that we've really come to the conclusion we need to up our ante in terms of being activists for open data. No matter how difficult it may be to speak up and to take a stand for something, we really need people to come out of their shells and be willing to be vocal sort of superhero advocates for not only protecting the data that we've become used to getting access to but also being willing to go out on a limb to continue to ask for more. One of the most effective advocacy strategies and again, I'm really sorry I can't remember your name Lovely Woman from DC who I'm gonna just keep for. Kate, one of the things that you said in the question and answers, someone asked you about how to be an effective advocate what can you do to be an effective advocate and your answer was I ask the government for things like I literally will just ask. That's advocacy and I'm gonna talk a little bit more about how we can do this in a coordinated way but I really do believe that this is one thing that we all need if we care about protecting the momentum towards open data that we really need to become more comfortable with doing because public data is endangered data right now in the US. There's no other way to really spin it. So what can we do? Well first, as I said, I'm splitting this into three buckets. The first thing that we can do is play active pragmatic defense. We don't wanna lose the gains that we've made under the last administration and the gains that we've worked so hard to enjoy. So what do I mean by this? We're already seeing steps that individuals and groups are starting to take. So if public data is endangered data, it's something that we're seeing on a daily basis and early in January, we started to see people really becoming concerned over in particular the fragility of climate change data. And we started to see individuals taking steps and kind of taking the page from the open source, software development community, the open data community in terms of how they were thinking about dealing with it. So I don't know whether you're aware of these but I'm assuming this community has been fairly intimately involved at least some of you in data rescue events. I'm really proud of the library community in particular as they have been sort of at the center of recognizing the fact that these data sets are out there. They may in fact be in someone's spotlight in terms of being vulnerable to being taken down. So what libraries and interested folks are doing is kind of getting together on a weekend. It's like a hackathon but instead it's called a data rescue event. They're identifying data sets, they're bringing in people with the expertise to help scrape the data and putting it into libraries on our campuses around the countries where it can be protected, preserved, and access can be insured. And this happens spontaneously and organically. In the intervening months, I can't believe it's only been four months but in the intervening months we're starting to see a little bit more organization coalesce around these individual events. And this is something that I think is really great, right? Yes, it is simply protecting existing data but as a first step it's super important that we look out for opportunities to do this. The data rescue community is starting to kind of move under the umbrella of trying to communicate, become more organized, get a strength and numbers approach and look to see what we can do to really sort of provision these individual efforts to become more large scale collective efforts to protect more and more data. And there's actually a meeting in Washington DC coming up next week which was supposed to be, initially it was designed to be a meeting of just a small handful of groups who were interested in looking at what infrastructure is needed, what investment is needed, and what we could do to actually make this into something that's more organized, sustainable long term strategy for protecting data. The small meeting now has 50 organizations including US federal agencies, research funders, library organizations, the internet archive, all working together to try to come up with a strategic plan to make sure that this strategy can be enacted going forward. It is a wide open process. So if you see data refuge or you see something that is now being referred to as the libraries plus network and you're interested in being involved, this is the kind of activity that it refers to and wide open invitation and plea, please think about getting involved. The second strategy is that we don't only wanna play defense, right? That's never the position that you wanna have to be in for the long term. And I think the good news is that we don't have to only play defense in this environment. The second thing I really wanna to emphasize is that progress is still possible in the policy environment. We're not just relegated to rescuing data and hoping that nothing else happens. We need to recognize that we can also run positive pragmatic proactive plays. That's a lot of peas in one sentence that just came out there. Yeah, I kinda like that. But we really do need to recognize the opportunities that are in front of us to drive the momentum forward. Single party control of the House, the Senate and the White House is unusual. And we have to be clear eyed and realistic and recognize that it does present opportunities to move legislation. Having those ducks in a row is not something that happens every day. And if you can find ways to take advantage of it, you actually can get things done. And that holds very true in the data environment. So there's a piece of legislation that has been introduced in Congress, identical versions in the House and the Senate, called the Open Government Data Act. And what this piece of legislation does is actually takes President Obama's second memo, making open and machine readable the default for all federal data. And it would codify it into legislation. And it's really interesting to think about the fact that this piece of legislation was introduced. It was introduced with bipartisan co-sponsorship in both chambers. And it is actually moving on a nice clip. It is likely that this legislation, or I would say it is possible too likely that this legislation could clear in this first session of, this first year of this session of Congress. What's fantastic about this is that it shows the way in the policy environment to move from having a directive that's associated with the previous administration. The Obama M1313 memo making open and machine readable. The law, the preferred path forward. To having Congress say, this isn't just the preference of a president, it's the law of the land. And this is actually the game that we're learning that we need to be very proactive in taking advantage of in order to be able to move the agenda forward, not just hold ground, but advance the agenda. Moving from an executive directive which are ephemeral and they are vulnerable as we all know to being overturned with the stroke of a pen to legislation that's codified and is much more difficult to turn over is a really powerful thing. And that this piece of legislation is actively moving in Congress is a very hopeful signal. And it's something that Spark is working very hard to advocate for with a set of coalitions that I'll talk about in a second. As a bonus, right, as I mentioned, that piece of legislation has bipartisan support. Open data in general has garnered bipartisan support fairly regularly in Congress. So this isn't a one-off. This is an opportunity to really kind of hold on to this and to look for other opportunities to move the ball forward. Last week we had two senators, a Republican from Colorado and a Democrat from Michigan introduce a piece of legislation that's giving the data rescue and refuge communities a boost. Which is basically saying, look, nobody was expecting what happened in the first few weeks of this particular administration. Nobody was expecting data sets to be taken down or gag orders to be potentially issued. So let's get our policy ducks in a row to make sure that that doesn't happen. So this piece of legislation has been introduced. I can't remember it was literally just introduced. I can't remember what it's called. But there's information about it on the website. Oh, the Preserving Data in Government Act. Which really basically says, once the data sets up there, we've got to take steps to make sure that it's permanently up there. We don't want this stuff available just for one generation but for future generations as well. To do this successfully, to support or to introduce or to drive, if you will, in a positive direction. One of the things that's a lesson that we've had to learn for how we need to be is that we need to actively understand what the new priorities are for this administration. It was very easy to see the Obama administration's priorities with that directive on day one. And honestly, the message that we have seen as we've done over the last four months, really as deep a landscape analysis as we possibly can is that the notion of open and transparent as priorities are out. We're not gonna get anywhere open. You could get a meeting in the White House. I mean, it's almost seriously as simple as this in the last administration saying, open, yay. You know, you would be heard. That doesn't happen with this administration. However, when we look at those, when we look at their priorities and we look at their language, we recognize that other things that are interesting are in, taxpayers are in, in a big way. Good deals are in if you saw the news today. That's the language we hear all the time. Big wins are in. Right. Right, however, yeah, so they are. So how do we take advantage of that? Well, one thing that we're doing is a pragmatic strategy and I issue an invitation again so everybody here is to try to take advantage of this is what resonates. We're re-spinning up a coalition that we actually used under the Bush administration to successfully secure legislation that requires that the National Institutes of Health have all the articles that are reporting on publicly funded biomedical research made openly available online to the public called the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. So taxpayers are entitled to the research or results or outputs, including data of research that their tax dollars support. That is something that no one disputes and it is actually language that resonates in this current Congress and with this administration. So this is a coalition that doesn't cost anything to be a part of but that there's a strength in numbers approach in going and saying we're promoting this particular approach. We're also learning that we have to position open data not just as open for open sake but open as an enabling strategy to achieve the priorities of this Congress and of this administration. So again, open as a calling card isn't going to work but taxpayers being entitled to data that their tax dollars have supported does get you in the door and then once that data is available it can help you achieve a good deal in this way or whatever, fill in the blank here. With this administration again and with this Congress a lot of it is about jobs and the economy and that's fine, right? That simply is what's at the top of the list for them. This is a bill that was introduced this year called the Financial Transparency Act and you may say, what does that have to do with us and open data and this conversation? This is actually a bill that is asking or would require that reports that are filed with the SEC any financial reports that the government produces on the viability and productivity of different businesses and companies in the United States be made available in forms that are structured, standardized and machine readable and searchable. I went to a meeting that the sponsors of this bill had Republicans and Democrats and when I tell you that members of Congress stood up at a microphone and said PDF is not a searchable enough document. We need structured markup language, right? I got a little teary, it was a little crazy. They didn't use the words XML but they're there. Like that's where almost there come little woodlands creatures come to the eat the food. They're almost there and it really is remarkable that this is a piece of legislation that speaks their language, right? Open in order to achieve the aims that they care about, right? It's speaking directly to them and they wanna make this reporting data available for a reason, right? Not just because open is better than closed. What they see is that if these reports are available for text and data mining, they'll be able to find trends and patterns that can help investors find small businesses and companies that might actually return more back to the economy and produce jobs. So that's fine. This helps us understand how to talk about our issues, the issue of open data in a way that resonates with Congress. For those of you who are veterans of the open access and open data policy wars, the co-sponsors of that bill are representatives ISA and Maloney. I don't know whether the names mean anything to people. Robin's laughing because they co-sponsored a bill called the Research Works Act but eight years ago that would have overturned the policy that NIH has requiring essentially the same thing for scientific reports. They didn't understand what we were asking eight years ago but they understand it now in the context of financial reports and that's, I kinda get a gig a lot of that. I think it's great, I think it's funny but I also think it's great because we're now able to go into their offices and saying, yes, yes, yes, you like this for financial reports, you're gonna love it for scientific research. You're gonna love it for, you know, fill in the blank there. It's been an education and a real opportunity to stop and think about using the language, reframing the issue in a way that resonates with the powers that be, if you will. And to support this, I think one of the things that we've really had to do is to think about building stronger cross-sector relationships, right? They care about what's happening with the economy, with jobs. We need to build our partnerships and open up our doors in terms of really being much more inclusive and sort of outward focused in terms of the organizations and the people that we'll partner with. We need to be working with business and commerce a lot more closely in promoting the interests of sort of pure open data or scientific open data. So Spark has actually joined an organization called the Data Coalition, which is a group that has been working on promoting things like the Open Government Data Act, the Financial Transparency Act. And they've been very successful in bringing businesses to the table. So in going to meetings and working with them to promote things like the Financial Transparency Act, they're starting to see us as allies to understand that we understand what they're trying to do. And it's given us wonderful opportunities to try to educate them on what it is that we wanna do in other sectors, including science and research, and we're beginning to build those bridges. We need to do a lot more of that to be successful in keeping the momentum going forward. And finally, I just wanna close with one final strategy that we've been working on and that I think is really important for us all to think about. We concentrate on policy and oftentimes we think that DC is the only game in town or insert your country capital here. Publicly funded data isn't the only game in town. And right now in the environment that we're in, I think it's really important that we look at the whole board, we look at the whole playing field, we look at any pieces that we can move that might help us in our efforts to both preserve the gains that we've made and also to potentially promote the gains, additional gains. In particular, private funders and foundations invest in work that produces an enormous amount of data. And these foundations are increasingly understanding the message that open as an enabling strategy helps them increase the impact of what they're investing in. So for example, the Gates Foundation has an open access policy that went into effect in January of this year that not only requires that articles that report on their funded research be made immediately available, but that the data that underpins those articles also be made available on day one when it's published. And they're doing that because they've explicitly said, look, Gates Foundation has the Global Health Initiative. The aim of the Global Health Initiative is to save lives. Any delay in getting this information out to anybody who can help to save a life is unacceptable. Open in order to save lives, open data in order to save lives. That's really powerful. But they've been able to connect this as an enabling strategy back to their core mission. And we've seen in the news, where's Carly and the Moore Foundation? Because I really wanna say congratulations on your open policy. Lots of foundations are really beginning to get this. And interesting foundations, sort of non-traditional new players like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, for example, are showing a real willingness to engage and to jump into this space. The Schmidt Family Foundation, Eric Schmidt Foundation, which focuses on climate change as well and global environmental issues, is also kind of playing around in this area. And I think it's up to us to really work to encourage them and to help them understand what it is that they can do to make a difference in this field. And what they can do is kind of go the route of the Moore Foundation, go to the route of the Gates Foundation, talk about open data as a leveraging strategy to increase the return of investment in what they're investing their foundation dollars on. Really kind of try to take it home. We need exemplars, right? These are organizations that are viewed as peer organizations by the federal government, right? They're investing at the same, almost at the same level that we're talking about, billions of dollars in investments, they care what happens. Seeing other people doing the actions that promote open data is a really important and potentially productive way to also keep pressure on the US federal government to be moving in the right direction. And I do wanna note that the research funders are also talking amongst themselves. They're beginning to coalesce. There's a group that started in December called the Open Research Funders Group that includes Gates, Soros, Arnold, the Arnold Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson, Sloan Foundation, a set of folks who are really thinking about how can they make a difference using open as an enabling strategy? And they're starting to meet regularly to talk about not only what they should be doing with policies covering their own research, but also what collective action might look like if they were to get together and actually think about putting some linking arms and working together muscle into this space. And that's a theme that I think you probably have seen running through this talk. One of the reactions to the recent election that I saw sort of on a personal level but also on a professional level was a real sense that people wanted who are interested in the same kinds of things like open data, like open, but fill in the blank have really sort of kind of come together and at first sort of just taken solace that we could be together and talk about like, wow, this is really unexpected. But as the months are passing, one of the things that is developing is a sense of we wanna stay together and we really wanna link arms and see what we can do together. What are their actions that we can do? We're much stronger together when we think about moving forward. And that is really what I wanna close on. Leadership is local on this issue. Sometimes we think about national politics as being something that somebody else has to do in D.C. And I hope what I've been able to illustrate is that individuals make a difference and we have to be willing to break out of that egg shell and step up, speak up, speak up. Let me try this again, rewind that tape, speak out. We have to learn to speak first, Heather. Step up and take action. And there's lots of ways that we can do it together. The coalitions that I noted before are wide open. The data refuge, data rescue projects are wide open. Ideas that you have, expertise that you bring to the table is sorely needed. Your voice matters, your actions matter more. We have a lovely representative, many representatives actually with us here in the audience from another opportunity. The other group of influencers that I cannot emphasize the importance of enough are OpenCon. I call them the OpenCon kids, right? Go ahead, Robin, throw something at me. Encouraging young people, early career folks, whatever the discipline is, from libraries to research to political science to medical students, there's an opportunity to get them together under the umbrella of something called OpenCon, which is something that Danielle mentioned when she did my introduction. Spark is loosely one of the organizers of OpenCon. This is a spontaneous sort of community organized event, but also year round community that can help interested people develop the capacity for leadership and leadership in advocacy on open issues, including open data. You could get a cape if you participate in OpenCon. I can't guarantee it. Roshan is from, he started Open Access Nepal. So he got the cape for efforts that he had done, but really the community efforts, the linking arms and working together is the most important thing I think that we can do to keep the ball moving forward. So we've got 103 days down by my count. Depending on leap year, we might be able to knock a couple of days off 1357 days to go. So I hope that you'll keep thinking about this and please talk to each other, talk to us, talk to any organization that's in the mix of this about what we can do together. So thank you so much. Questions? I don't have the cape with me. I wish I did. Who has it? Roshan doesn't have it anymore, does he? Juan Pablo? Okay, could be, yeah. One minute. Woohoo! Oh, where am I? Yeah, sorry. I hope so, we're honestly not sure yet. It's been true to, I think, form very low profile, very hesitant to step out and step on anything early. Young leadership is really where we're seeing an emphasis so far in the discussions around the foundation, but I do think this notion that he was responsible for all of these amazing steps, it would be highly likely that it would be something that would be resonant and it would be an amazing contribution to the discipline. We have a, yes, go ahead. Thank you. Yeah, and privacy is obviously an enormous concern. That isn't our specific purview, but we work very closely with organizations who have that like epic, that have that right at the heart of what they do. We try to stay as deeply connected as possible to organizations that have that interest at heart. I mean, I think for us, sometimes we'll say with data as open as possible as closed as necessary, and I do think there are shades of gray in terms of privacy with data that we're not talking about everything open to the 100th degree all the time, but thinking about the default being open unless or until that there's some reason, including privacy reasons that you might not want to have everything available to be aggregated so that identifiers can be found. There's no perfect solution, but we're aware of it and we try to work very closely with organizations who are helpful in that space.