 Without further ado, I'd like to start today's proceedings by introducing Dr Martin Duke-Yarmus, who's founder and CEO of Moodle. He's going to be giving our opening keynote address, which is on the future of education technology. Most of you know Martin, but for those of you who have been living under a rock, Martin Duke-Yarmus is best known as the founder and CEO of the Open Source Moodle Project. As CEO of Moodle Pty Ltd, based in Perth, Australia, he leads the company of 70 software developers and educators that guide and support the Moodle Project. Martin's got an academic background, multiple postgraduate degrees in computer science and in education, including an honorary doctorate from the Universitat de Vic in Catalonia, and the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, and he continues his research in focusing on how technology can support teaching and learning in human and open ways. So please do welcome to the stage Dr Martin Duke-Yarmus. How are we for microphones? All right. Thank you, lovely Doug. And look at this big beautiful group of people here. It's so nice to see you all again. It's been probably at least half of you. I know really well and you come every year. I would just love to sit down and have a big long conversation with you, but that's not going to be now because I have so much information I got to dump on you about 120 slides. So I'm going to do it. This is the time where I'm going to do that and give you the overview. Lots of other things coming up over the next couple of days, including the party. So if there's anything you want to talk about, come and catch me. I'm really keen to talk. I am having very busy times at the moment. In the last year, I traveled 380,000 kilometers. It's around the world about 11, 12 times. 65 cities. And what I've been doing is as well as a lot of Moodle events, I've been going to a lot of non-Moodle events and really representing Moodle at other things. And that's been a really interesting change. There were some guerrillas in Rwanda there. There's some conferences. I've been in Africa and India and Asia and everywhere right around the planet. I want to talk a little bit about Moodle philosophy, what we're trying to do, where we're coming from, what I think educators need, what we think educators need, what the current projects are, and then the future. So it's a very stock standard from the past to the future kind of presentation, but somebody's got to do it and it's me. So first of all, our mission. I always need to show this. You've probably seen it a million times, some of you, but this is the mission. We are about empowering educators to improve our world. Stress on the educators. We're unlike other education projects that seek to replace educators. We are about making platforms. We are about making the most effective platform. And that involves a lot of research and development and continue ongoing growth as technology changes. And we're supported by very strong values. We have these five values that underpin the project, and these are the kinds of values we want to see in people who are joining with the project. Education as a value. Education being valued every situation being seen as a possible education situation. With that mindset, you can achieve a lot. Openness. The word openness is abused these days in many ways. Open washing happens. A lot of people say they're open, but openness really means being very as open as possible, making things available, making paid options optional, and things like that. Openness doesn't always mean free. I mean money, as someone was saying yesterday, money is just energy, right? So you need money in an economy around everything. People need to eat and live, but openness means how do you do all of that in the most open way, the most inclusive way? Respect. Respect for everyone in our own community, but also other communities around, and also not only our own culture, but other cultures. Thinking about accessibility, thinking about multiculturalism and all of that. Integrity. We try and be a company with integrity. We're not a profit-focused thing. We are a mission-focused thing, and then integrity becomes critical. Everything has to be connected to our mission, and we want to be fair. We want to make sure everybody is treated equally and has the opportunity to be included. And lastly, this is all about innovation. And in the UK and Ireland, more than many parts of the world, this is a very well-developed Moodle place. And so many of you are innovating on top of the Moodle platform. And I'm really excited to see all these presentations coming up today and tomorrow, because I'm going to see things I've never seen before built on Moodle, and I love that. So I'm really excited to be seeing all the innovations people are doing. I was looking at the stats recently, and these are just registered sites. And I realized that in a two-month period, we added a million courses just in the registered sites. Now, it's true. Some of those are probably universities that are rolling over their courses and making copies or something for the next year. I'm sure that's a lot of that happening. But 200 million new quiz questions, how did you feel when you read that, Tim? Pretty good? Pretty scared? Yeah. Well, that's the responsibility that we feel as developers. We've got numbers like that around. There's 1.6 billion quiz questions in the world. But there was a summary search done last year, looking at higher ed and what is the main LMS platform used. And globally, Moodle's around 60%. And unfortunately, most of the people who write news about LMS tend to be in the US. So they're focused on that situation where Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard are level pegging it. But in most of the world, Moodle is just the thing. When I go to eLearning Africa, it sort of starts turning into a Moodle conference just automatically because everybody's using that there. So that's where we are. We're in a place where we have some software that is used very widely and has a lot of people building on it and great values and emission and so on. So what about the future? What do educators need from here? Well, let's break it down. Let's look at the mission again. We're about empowering. What does empowering mean? And why did we pick that word? What gives educators power? It's very interesting. You can't translate power very easily in all languages. Power is one of those funny human concepts that is quite a tricky one to grasp. Well, when I talk about power, I talk about tools. I talk about resources, having people to reach out to, having content, having money, having things around you, and skills. So the skills to use these things in an education situation, how do you actually apply it at the actual coal face when you're trying to make some people learn? So let's look at Moodle's projects through that lens. These three things. So these are all the things we are working on right now. And it's quite a lot for if you just looked at the Moodle company, which is currently 75 people, we've doubled in about the last year. But still, it's 75 people. We're not talking about 100,000 at Infosys or Google or something like that. 75 people in the middle. So we're very lean operation. But we have the support of all our partners, of this community, of all of you, and more that I'm going to talk about. These are the major projects. So let's talk about Moodle Core. Now, we've started calling Moodle the LMS product, just Moodle Core. Internally, we were calling it Moodle Core anyway, but we weren't doing that on websites. Now we are. So when we say Moodle Core, it's just Moodle that you know. So let's look at Moodle 3.6, the last release. Anybody upgraded to 3.6 already? Anyone? Oh, I will get about 20 people. I understand big organization cycles. And a lot of you might be getting 3.6 next year. But something that was new here with 3.6 was we dedicated it to somebody in the community. Previously, you may remember, I used to use a little picture of my kids ever since they were born. And they grew up and now my daughter's 18, can you believe it? So I've decided to stop putting my kids on those release photos because it's a little bit, it was a bit of a Well, they're not embarrassed. They loved it. They were really looking forward to it every six months. No, no, but I think it's a personal vanity really that I wanted to get rid of. So we released, we dedicated it to Tom. And Tom Murdoch, many of you may know him. He died, unfortunately, at a Moodle Moodle, at the Denver Moodle Moodle, the U.S. Moodle Moodle. And he's a very, very good friend to many of us. And he and I founded Moodle Rooms together back in the day, a long time ago. And he was used to number 596 on Moodle.org. So it gives you an impression. He was right there from the beginning. And we were very, very sad to see him pass. He was also working at Moodle HQ. And so we did that. But this release is looking pretty, quite pretty. I don't know if you've been using Moodle late, if you're up to recent versions, but we have quite nice looking dashboard. We've broken up the dashboard into different blocks. We now have a focus on improving the group messaging inside Moodle because, well, if you think about how you use your phone and how everyone's using your phone, 50% of the time you're in some sort of messaging system. So Moodle's messaging is going to grow significantly. It's very controllable in Moodle because not everybody wants their students' messaging. So you can control it by group, by course. We have integrations with NextCloud. We all love using Google and Office 365. But NextCloud is an option that's actually an open source option, a replacement for these that's becoming very viable. We have audio and video improvements, especially in assignments. So you can now record audio and video feedback to a student on an assignment. And there's improvements in queers with drag and drop questions. And when you make copies of things in the course formats, there's a bit more improvements here. There's a feature that's been floating around for a couple of years that finally got implemented, which is you can freeze a context. You can freeze a course or a course category or even an activity, locking it into read-only mode. So you can still see it, but you can't change it, which is useful for lots of scenarios. And if you look at the plugins database, we're up to about nearly 1,600 plugins from nearly 900 developers. So that's the innovation part. That's so much stuff is being developed, and a lot of you have a hand in that. Middle 3.7 is what's coming up in a month or so. And some of the things you're going to see are there's been a lot of work done on the themes. So we've now brought all of the themes into line. They're all bootstrap. So there's a new classic theme that replaces all the old themes. So even if you don't like the boost look, you can still keep the old-fashioned look, classic look, let's call it. I think that's a nice name for it. And you can build themes on that while still having bootstrap for at your fingertips. And that means in the content, we can do whizzy things with animations and all that cool CSS stuff in the content within that theme framework. There's been some work on discussions. I'm just highlighting a couple of random things. There's 100 new things. I'm just picking a few at random. You can do personal replies directly into foreign posts. There's a lot of improvements around messaging. Messaging is being pushed forward every release. There are improvements around open badges. You can now use competencies to release badges. And you can also now connect the badge export to not only Mozilla's backpack, which was really the only option before and is now closed down, or will be closing down. You can connect to Badger.io or any backpack that's out there. There are improvements in the analytics. You can now create new models and export and import models. And the analytics is always being pushed forward as well. Analytics being the analysis of log data so that you have actionable results coming out of it to help guide you. I would love to see this eventually turned into a kind of an AI chat bot that's sort of assistant and assistant saying, hey, this is happening. This is happening. Why don't you try this? Yes, I'll do that for you, sir or madam. And course custom field types. So these are the kinds of things that are landing in core. Some of them are being developed by Mudo HQ. Some of them from the community. Many, many, many features. And the reason why I've got this logo is up here is because we've decided to dedicate this release to a very important member of our community, which is the Open University. Can I have everyone from the Open University stand up here? Thank you. Now, it's like about six or seven of you. I just want to say thanks to you guys. These guys didn't know about this. So this is a bit of a pre announcement. It was going to be on the, you can sit down there, Mark, if you want. But yes, Tim. I did not. So even better, 50th birthday. Yeah. Cool. Thanks, Tim. The Open University has been a huge supporter of Moodle for many, many years. Tim is in the, personally, up in the top three or four programmers of all time of contributions to Moodle. Sam Marshall as well, big contributor and Mark and many others. But as an organization, they've been very, since 2006 or something have been a real supporter of ours. They funded the development of roles and capabilities back in 1.9 or something, 1.7. Gosh. And you know, have always been there and are still using Moodle and still a huge supporter of Moodle. So thanks to the Open University and I'll write up something better and I'll send you guys a lovely certificate you can hang on your wall. So Moodle 3.8 and beyond, there are lots and lots of things coming down the pipe. Since about four or five months ago, we now have a chief product officer at Moodle. Someone who has that role of coordinating all of the products that we have and looking after roadmaps. Her name is Gree Steen. I should have a photo of here but I didn't put it on this presentation. G-R-Y. You're going to be seeing her a lot more. And she'll be publishing a public roadmap keeping you up to date on what's coming. And the idea is that we're able to do this for a year in advance. So you can start seeing for the next couple of releases what's coming in and the bigger features. But we are very much dependent on you to help drive that roadmap. This afternoon, we're having a session, a roadmap session. And as I tweeted earlier, what's going to happen is I want all of you to bring your best ideas for roadmaps, not only in Moodle Core but all products. And we're going to go through a process where one of those ideas will emerge victorious as the most popular idea. The person who presented that idea will get a free registration to our global moot in Barcelona. So there's an actual prize attached. One of the things that we'll be landing that I might excite a lot of you is we're working on the H5P integration and inclusion into Moodle Core. Someone said yes. I know a lot of people would like to see that. I would love to see that too. But we really want H5P to be at your fingertips in the editor, in the quiz questions, integrated properly so that grading and any assessments that happen in those rich content modules will flow through into grade books and all of that stuff. Of course, Moodle.org is where you go for Moodle Core. I'm going to go over time with this presentation. I can feel it. All right, Moodle Workplace. Anybody here heard of Moodle Workplace? Half of you? So we have been working for the past year on a Moodle that is focused at organizational learning and development. What I mean is more internal learning development. It's sometimes called corporate learning or training. And you might not know that about 60% of the royalties that Moodle partners pay to us from all their activities around the world actually come from that sector. Not so much from the higher-ed sector. I know most people here are from higher-ed, right? How many people here in higher-ed? Just kind of a show of hands. Well, it's looking like about 80%. How many people here would say that this is more interesting to them than Moodle Core? Probably about 15, 20 of you. So we've put a lot of effort together with our partners to build a flavor of Moodle. So it's Moodle plus a bunch of plug-ins that addresses that need. All of those partners had been working on various bits and pieces of it. There's been many other attempts at making Moodle more suitable for that. This is the definitive one. And we've worked together to get the best of all of that and have a new baseline. And this will be tracking the development of Moodle every release. So as Moodle develops, this will be developing on top of it. And in fact, a lot of the features developed for Moodle workplace will be trickling down into Moodle Core over time. Because a lot of these things are quite useful for higher-ed in things as well. So we're talking about things like multi-tenancy, which means you can have multiple departments or companies running on one Moodle instance, but they appear to be separate. Organization hierarchy, so you can have managers who can see what their teams are doing and they can approve things. You can have certifications, which are common. And, you know, often in a corporate environment, you might have to do a health and safety training every six weeks or six months or something. We have a new report builder, a graphical report builder. You drag and drop in fields and build reports on the fly. Programs, which are really exciting. A program is when you say, as a student, you have to do this course and then you have to pick one of these three. And then you have to do these two. And only then can you do that one. And then eventually you'll get some certification. So you can run a whole sequence of things. Dynamic rules and more. And there's other presentations about this. I'm not going to go into too much detail about workplace. In fact, I'm going to skip this video for time, but I'm talking about it this afternoon. And I think Ruslan is talking about it tomorrow. There is a bit of a difference. This will only be available through Moodle Partners. And I know that's contentious, but this is part of the sustainability of our project. The partners and I, partners of Moodle have built this for a, this purpose to generate revenue for the Moodle project. It's what's helping pay for Moodle core. And delivering it this way lets our partners have something of more value. It brings value to the partnership program, while also stimulating development in core and everything else. So that's how we're doing it for now. And I hope you'll be really happy when you start seeing these things drop in future versions of Moodle core as well. Moodle apps. So we have our apps, we have some of our apps team here at the conference. If you want to talk to them, they're on, there's a booth out there with Juan and others. Our app is really a big focus for us. We really want to make it a strong thing. And I think it is the strongest app of any learning platform in the world in that 100% of what students need to do can be done just in the app. They never need to go to the website. And last year, we really improved how third party plugins can work on the app. And there'll be more of that talk at this conference this time. And we have a desktop app which is always there as well so you can run it on a laptop. If you think you might need a branded app, I really encourage you to get one. We have a lot of institutions now around the world, growing number, taking up the branded app option and it's really working well. Google, sorry, Apple started changing the rules on their app store. We had to change how we do it but we've worked all these issues and so we're full steam ahead again. Apple don't allow one company to make a lot of apps for other companies. Everybody needs to have an app store developer license now through Apple. So that's made it a bit more complex but we've got it all working. So, yeah, we can make an app that looks like your institution. And the value for students is immense. I mean, they're going to search the app store for your institution and download the app with the logo and log straight into your site. Now, that's all tools. So, resources. I've already mentioned Moodle Partners. I just realized how to Moodle is left off there. I'm really sorry, Ray. That's just my error, drag and dropping. So, it's also how to Moodle, one of the oldest Moodle partners in the U.K. and Innovation, eLearn, Titus Learning, Catalyst and Citigie Learning. And what the hell have left off eThink as well, the new Moodle partner. That's what happens when you do things in a rush. So, shout out to eThink as well who are here. Sorry about that, guys. A lot of partners in the U.K. And we've also got integration partners and this is something that we're really building up in the future is to have an arrangement with other companies and put a lot of development time and focus into the integration to make sure it's a good integration, a strong maintained integration that you can rely on. And we have a lot of people in the queue that we're working on and it's not an easy process. We're not just signing them up and saying, yeah, you're an integration partner. We're making it something really meaningful. So, you can find out about them on Moodle.com partners. Moodle Cloud, we're up to about 32,000 Moodle sites running on Moodle Cloud. It's a huge big machine and it runs incredibly smoothly. It's a small team running it. But if you just need a Moodle site for a quick demo, you want to try the latest version or you just want to have a little side course or something, it's a perfect for that. It's like a good place to have a small Moodle and we have a lot of take up around the world for that. That feels a lot of gaps. There's a lot of people out there who can't install Moodle for whatever reason. It feels that gap. Moodle Net. I'm going to talk very briefly about this. Doug will talk all about it this afternoon. But the key purpose of Moodle Net is to start connecting Moodlers and educators around content and around professional development, around making learning about how to teach online through example, looking at best practice, talking to people who are already doing it, and pointing each other to resources that really make their job easier. And here's some few screenshots. It's really coming together. Last year we were just talking about it as a kind of an, it was just an idea. Now we actually have prototypes and things are actually happening and you can start trying it. So it's a pretty exciting to see it coming along. Still got a way to go, but I'm really excited by the potential of this project. It's something that no one else is doing in the world quite the way we're doing it. Lastly, I want to talk about development partners and this is where things are starting to get very interesting. Moodle as a community is what it is, but there are many, many other actors out there involved in the future of education. I've shown these people before, but since last year, things are moving with these organizations and we're becoming partners with them. We're working on projects with them. These are mostly NGOs who have a lot of funds to put into particular projects, in particular parts of the world, and they usually use Moodle. Last year I was in e-learning Africa and a very lovely sweet lady comes up to me about this tour and Indian lady and she says, I'm your biggest fan. And I said, hi, who are you? And she goes, I run the e-learning division at the World Bank in Washington. And I said, okay. She goes, we've been using Moodle for 10 years. Every time we do a loan to a country to help fix some disaster or whatever it is, they usually want their money back. It's a bank, right? It's a good sort of bank, but they don't just give out money for free. That's how they work. So they need these projects to succeed and achieve the sustainability goals that they have and pay them back. And so to make sure they succeed, they have to educate everybody. And so to educate everyone, they always use Moodle. And I was like, should we not be talking more? So I went to Washington and spent a couple of hours with the whole team there and all these things are coming out of it. These are the kinds of people we need to be working with more. And I know a lot of you have connections with some of these and maybe some of these. People building infrastructure because what we're all doing with Moodle and with other software in education is we're building infrastructure at our institutions. We're building the platform on which our students are going to learn in the future. And Moodle is one example where the energy from all those individual activities is being centralized into one piece of software that we all can benefit from. But there are so many other things around the world. And I really want us to start thinking about the infrastructure level and how we work together better. I'm also getting involved in a similar way with other associations. As of last week, I'm now on the board of the Open Education Consortium, which has 300 or so members around the world that are focused on open education in a wider context. So that includes OERs and things too. But it's just the whole concept of teaching online and being open online, MOOCs and all of that stuff. E-Learning Africa is a really good thing to be involved in. And I'm going every year. Moodle is one of the main sponsors of that now and we are really being very active in there. Alt, we remember, but I was at OER19. Anyone else was at OER19 last week in Galway? No, no one from here. But these are groups that are really sort of focusing on what is the future of academia, of the practice of education, of sharing content and how to be mindful and aware of those different contexts around the world and what it all means. And things like IEEE. I've been going to IEEE edu-cons. So in IEEE, there are a lot of, frankly, older professors who teach engineering who are sharing their techniques for how they teach engineering at scale. And they're pushing forward boundaries in research that are really interesting. And if you think about it, IEEE is responsible for the fact that I can plug my computer into this cable and make it work or that this electricity stays on and this is infrastructure. This is international engineering. That's what we should be thinking about with education. And lastly, the Moodle Foundation, which I keep talking about, is actually being created. It's just in final stages now and will be up and running in a couple of months. There was some change in association laws. We had to wait till the new laws came in to start this new association, the foundation. And that will be the center, it's a non-profit and will be the center of all these kind of connecting together, grant funding from EU, a lot of research projects, a lot of development projects, and it'll be a body that will be out there connecting things. Let's go to skills. One thing I did in my thesis, my original PhD around Moodle, was I hypothesized that if you built a platform that was built while thinking about social constructionism and collaborative learning that people would naturally start doing those things and my thesis was false. People do not start doing those things. People start doing whatever they were used to doing or what they know and that's quite obvious when you think about it. And there was an education piece missing in there. Just putting tools in people's hands isn't enough. You need to know how to be an online teacher. And what we've built is a certification, a whole curriculum around helping someone be an online teacher. And what we've, we're trying to standardize training in a way. We're trying to put a, again, a baseline under all the training to say you should know about these things. And this is not just about knowing where the switches are in the forum settings because that's going to change over time. This is more the underlying skills of being an online teacher. And it's broken down into 22 competencies which are themselves based on a framework from Europe, the digital competency, digital competencies for educators framework. And those ones that are in orange, we call them the core six or the foundational units. And you get badges for those. And if you get those six badges, you start getting nice certificates. And there's multiple certificates depending on which subset of the 22 you choose. And they'll be, I assume we haven't designed it yet, but some super mega certificate that you get when you get all 22. It should have gold on it and stuff like that, I would say. So you can find out more about that. That's only just launched it. So last time, I think we were talking about it, this time it's actually out. So partners can deliver that training. And as it gets more embedded, we're going to look at more creative ways of getting it out into developing countries and other places around the world. And lastly, I want to talk about Moodle Moots in terms of their Moodle activities. Last year, we had a lot of conferences around the place. And this year is no different. And these are good things. I don't need to tell you what a Moot is. This is like one of the most, the most established Moot in the world. And they vary in size and flavor around the world. And I get to see them all. And I'm so lucky actually to see what a Moodle Moot is like in South Africa or in India or in the Philippines or in China, there's one in China in a few weeks, Taiwan, in Brazil, in Uruguay. And I get to see it. And they're all similar in some ways and very different in other ways. And I really love that. And I really want everyone else to experience that. And so we are finally having our Moodle Moot global. And what we hope this to be developing into is a way to send people from all of the Moots around the world and bring them together into this one place. And this is always going to be in Barcelona because we have an office there and because we like the city. It's fairly central in many ways. The first one is in November from 18 to 20th. And we're still developing this, but we're going to be finding ways for the groups, the Moodle Moot groups to fund the best presentations from each to send them to Barcelona so those people can all meet each other, talk to each other, and we get more sharing and we'll get some really interesting things. It's going to be like our big annual conference. So the big, big announcements are probably going to happen there. We're going to have a partner meeting, get our partners all together there, and things like that. So that's the place to be. I'm not saying you shouldn't come also to the UK Moot and you should. But this is a new thing and it's really coming together. So moodlemoot.org to find out about that. But now I want to talk to you about the future. That's all the Moodle stuff. That's all the things we're doing in tools and resources and skills. The future is where my head is at mostly because it's guiding what we're doing with Moodle, but it's really, I'm really thinking about this more and more and more, improving our world part of the mission. There is a lot of really crappy stuff going on. I'm going to avoid the B word. But the more we're looking at it, the more you become aware of how we've constructed society, how we are able to live as fairly wealthy members of this planet, where our resources come from, how everything is being run, the more you look at it, the more you think this has got to be, we've got to fix this. We are in a bad state. And we've got inequality soaring. And this interesting research that shows that every civilization that died in the past that ended towards the end of it, there was massive inequality, inequality soared. Emperors got super rich and powerful and the people revolted at some point. Or the Romans, the Chinese, Aztecs, all around the world, this has been happening. So who knows? Maybe we're heading for a crash here. We've got climate change. I don't need to talk more about that looming issue. We've got refugees. We've got pollution. Microplastics are seeping into everything. And they're all summarized on this slide, which should be in every presentation, I think, the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This is our global agenda. And I talk about this, if you were here last year, I talked about this a lot as well, but I'm going to talk about it until it's all fixed. These are the big things, right? Now, just having nice platforms is not quite enough to tackle these things. Yes, quality education is what Moodle's about and we're squarely trying to help education have quality. But education is really all of these things. You can't improve any of them without some education somewhere. Remember, the value of education, you know, it's not necessarily a teaching situation. How do we bring education about these issues into every situation, like perhaps a quinoa and a moodle mood? Well, we've got to think about long-term thinking. We've got to start moving into long-term thinking. And again, I'm not going to mention the B word, but that's a classic case of short-term thinking. There's a lot of the short-term thinking going around. You rarely hear people on the news in positions of power and influence talking about the next 100 years. Let me know how often do you hear that? Everyone's focused on, oh, this morning or tomorrow, right? Or at best, maybe the next election in three years. What we should be thinking about for next generations is people like that. Like we are trying to make a people who live on this little planet who are like that, who are globally-oriented, who are multi-culturally aware, and not only aware, but supportive environmentalists. We've got to care about every action. You're drinking water out of a plastic bottle. That's a decision you've made that multiplies through millions of us into pretty bad stuff. We've got to care. We've got to give a crap. And we've got to be citizens. We've got to be empowered to actually go, hey, I can have some change here. I can do something. Wherever I am, wherever I'm working, I can do something to help this situation or help the next generation. I'm not seeing governments be effective here. Yes, there's lots of programs, and lots of things are happening in many areas. But in general, they're bound by the structure of democracy in these short-term cycles. And the next mob come in, and they just wipe out all those programs and start something new or shut down health systems, and who knows, all sorts of things. So they're kind of bound. Of course, governments are involved in everything, and there's a lot of funding and projects that we can be involved in. But we have to steer our governments. It's not coming from the top, I'm finding. The Silicon Valley companies, oh my gosh, this capitalism can be good in certain cases, but when it goes out of control, you have things like the US, 5% of the population consuming 30% of the world's resources. It's like a big guzzling. I don't want to say, I could get very strong language about this. But anyway, it's set up, and it's not anybody's fault. It's just the system that's evolved, and it's running out of control. And you have billionaires and billionaires. If you take just the top few billionaires, just their personal money could solve so many problems in the world, but they're not going to solve those problems. NGOs are a good part of the solution, and there are millions of them around the world, or nonprofits anyway, and social enterprises, and people who are trying to fix big problems, sometimes at the scale of UNESCO, and sometimes at the scale of a tiny recycling company or something. And there is a lot of good things there, but unfortunately, they're all working independently. There's not enough infrastructure to help them be coordinated. And standards like the IEEE I mentioned before, also a good angle, good people working on good solutions here, but in the education space, we have things like IMS Global, which, if you look at who runs IMS Global, it's kind of a boys club in the US. It's all mostly commercial interests. You can't get hold of the standards unless you remember. It's not very open, and they have to sustain themselves too, but it's just not very global and not very open. And I do believe in standards. I love the fact I can plug my laptop into any country I go and charge it up. That's amazing. I can turn a tap and I can get water. I can't always drink it, but I can get water. And that's really cool that we've worked that out, but that's the basics, right? How do we do this on a higher level? So we've got to work together for the common good here, and the common good is education to attack these goals. And so I'm really interested now in how we can use the platform that we all have, the Moodle world, to get SDGs into the curriculum, every curriculum, every subject, right, via some global open infrastructure. We can't go through governments all the time. I mean, yes, we are also trying to do that through UNESCOs and various things, but if you look, I mean, Moodle had been on 60% of higher education around the world with a tiny little budget that we've had. It wasn't done by policy. It was done by open technology, right, throwing open technology out and letting it grow and letting people run with it. So I really believe to get to this next level of having open SDGs into the curriculum, open technology is the way to do it. That's how we can actually help the world be a better place. And it's a small place. I'm going to keep putting photos of it because that's where I keep all my stuff. So open education, open technology, this is the bigger movement that Moodle is part of. And what do I mean by open technology? I mean, things like you can customize it, you can localize it, remember, respect for different peoples around the world. You can choose your service provider. You're not locked into one company because that way leads profit focus in a bad direction and eventually services drop and you're beholden to one company and eventually you have to switch away from that situation and then you have to change your platform. It should have a sustainability model. I love hippies and I'm a bit of a hippie myself, but the world will not run on just goodwill. We need to pay for everything. Things need to be sustained. The project should not disappear if one company does. The electricity should not go off just because one company failed. And we're talking about standards here. These standards allow things to connect, allow us to be efficient, allow us to build bigger things that we can't even imagine individually, but through standards you can lock things together and cool stuff can be built. And if you look at the web, most of the internet is running on open technology already. Look at open source. Look at Amazon and Azure, some of the biggest cloud hosting systems in the world underneath. It's all Linux and all of these things that are making stuff work. And that's why we're doing this. So we have a Moodle sponsoring a new conference and it's going to be directly after our global Moodle Moodle for two days where we want to get all the people interested in building the open education technology infrastructure of the future for the next 100 years. Let's shoot big, right? Let's go large on this. And you might be saying, well, Moodle's based on PHP and that's not going to last 100 years and we should be using Ruby on Rails. Oh no, that's gone now. We should be using what... That's not the issue. The issue is we have Moodle on 60% of platforms. So how do we go from that situation to some other situation in the future, right? Just think big. The other situation can be anything. What I'm hoping is that this group, the sorts of people I'm looking for to come are open source developers, people who can do stuff who are interested in building things, who want to have some meaning in their lives. Open source CEOs, there are lots of companies who are built on open source, who are in this industry, all the different aspects of it should be talking to each other more because we're not that much. People who build infrastructure, people who build the networks, people who are building all their levels of infrastructure, researchers, if there's anyone who's a researcher who's been thinking about this stuff, you know, and I go to conferences and I hear lots of people going, oh, we could do this, we could do that. Well, I'm just like, okay, how? I want to make it done. I want to make it actually happen. So we get those ideas, but we've got to hook them up with the builders. Development NGOs, as I said, some of these projects are crying out for this technology to be put into them and whole platforms. One of the projects that we were involved with is one in Vietnam, Cambodia, in Cambodia, which is about getting, in the end, Moodle apps on phones that are handed out to homeless kids so that they can learn out on the street for whatever reason they're not getting into the school system. So the ministry attacking that by giving education to them on devices, direct. And these kinds of projects involve the coming together of lots of open technology and funding and governments and all that stuff. Philanthropists, you know, if you've got a lot of money, you want to put it somewhere good, here's a good one. OER repositories, many of them around the world, lots of OER initiatives, open education resources. But we want to connect them. MoodleNet is one way to start connecting that stuff. We want them talking together with us on this platform idea. And we just want generally smart, open-minded people who can start working and connecting and making stuff happen. So there's a lot of networking to be done. We've got to start to know each other because I'm finding conversations amongst all these people or not. I'm very fortunate that because of Moodle, I can approach something like the World Bank and just open the door and go in. And I want that to be something that the open technology movement has more access to in general. At the end, I want this to be a working conference, still working on how the program will work. And I'm going to throw it open to people to start helping with that. But it's a working conference. And I would love to see at the end like a declaration of Barcelona that's the strategy, like a high-level strategy for how we're all going to be working together on these problems to make that. That's the goal. The goal is how do we make people like that for the next 100 years? I could have said a thousand years or 10,000 years, but let's stick with 100 years. It doesn't sound too wild-eyed and crazy. So I think that's me. I hope I've communicated to you the importance of what we're doing, the position that we are in to influence things. People our age are starting to run the world. Right? We don't have to look elsewhere. It's up to us. And unlike I hear some people saying, ah, the next generation is going to fix things, I don't want to do that either. We are here right now. We are in place. We are connected to do this. So I know this hasn't probably been a very funny talk, and I know I have a lot of jokes in it, but it's super serious. This is super serious stuff. And I just wanted to make sure that we had that as a baseline. I'm looking forward to the next couple of days to really learning from you about what you're working on, talking with you, catching up on all your own projects, whether or not you fit into this. If you think you want to come to Open EdTech, openedtech.global is the website. And thank you very, very much. Let's enjoy the conference.