 get underway. I just want to make sure you can all hear me even at the back of the room so if you can give me a wave in the back of the room if you can hear me okay great thank you very much. My name is Mara and Deepwell I'm the Chief Executive of the Association and it is my privilege to be the first to welcome you to this year's OER conference and just to get us off to the right start please give a big round of applause to welcome everyone. Thank you now you've got some practice we'll be doing that again in a moment when I hand over to our co-chairs but before that a few quick announcements so there are no fire alarm scheduled if there is a fire alarm it's an actual fire alarm please follow the exit signs and go to the outside of the building as directed by staff we will have emergency instructions in each of the rooms also there is restrooms located on all levels most of the rooms that we're using for the conference except for one hour on this level and there's restrooms on both sides of the catering area lunch will be served where you've had coffee and tea this morning there's one room on the ground floor which is the Louis suite which is as you came into the building and you went up the left it's straight ahead and to the right and we're here to help you throughout the conference so please make yourself known to us as the help at the help desk and we do everything we can to make your two days with us enjoyable many of you might have been at last year's OER 16 conference and if you could maybe give round of applause if you were at last year's OER conference excellent I want to give a big shout out to Melissa Highton and Lorna Campbell under whose leadership and this conference was such an exciting two days and I wanted to highlight a couple of the milestones in open that we've achieved since then because as a community we have done an awful lot some of the things I wanted to mention is the open education special interest group special shout out to you guys thank you for supporting and thriving in this community and also a lot of our members throughout the year have come together in December where we run an online conference which was free and open to all to attend which attracted nearly 460 people from 43 countries and that is all done with volunteer effort really making an impact across the globe also our journal research and learning technology which was one of the first journals in the UK published by a scholarly association and went open access in 2012 the readership of that has increased 25% in the last year which is a real testament to how much need there is for continuing to publish research and practice openly but one of the things I want to particularly highlight is that we've really started to recognize at the highest level the importance of open educational practice where for example the winning entries of the learning technologist of the year award and being excellent examples as well as all the runners up as well it's a really strong influence I think from our community and having more influence in general one of the other things I wanted to highlight is the let's make copyright right right now for education campaign which we are proud to support throughout the conference and I'd like to invite each and every one of you to have a look at the campaign website and see if you can support it so we have achieved a lot and openness is really at the heart of the new strategy for the association shaped by our members and I think a really key value now I am very excited to be handing over in a moment to our two coaches but also want to welcome you once again on behalf of myself and my colleagues and all of the volunteers who've made this conference possible we're really thrilled that you have made the commitment that you have given your time and effort and resource to be here with us for the next two days I really hope you'll get a lot out that you will go back and be energized to take action for open education and with that please welcome Josie Fraser and Alec Tarkovsky okay hello everyone hi it's so so brilliant to be here I want to say a huge huge thanks to Marin and to the old team for getting us to this point and for all of the organization work that's gone in Alec and I are absolutely delighted to welcome you today so hello to everybody who's here with us on site everyone who's attending the conference at distance everybody who's experiencing the wonder in real time and everybody who will be joining us from the future and we're delighted to be part of a conversation with you all that really is going to help shape the global direction of the open education movement. On the 20th of April last year we announced what this year's conference theme was going to be that we were going to look and focus on the politics of open in all of its aspects and everything that that represents and that seems in internet years that seems about six million years ago and only the day before yesterday I was saying to myself oh my god it's actually going to happen and in between those two points actually this conference has probably become one of the most timely events and education conferences of the decade and that's not just to do with Trump and Brexit although obviously it's quite a lot to do with Trump and Brexit it's also got to do with the maturity and the ambition of the open education movement as a whole and where we are as a community and a movement at this point in time and it's coupled with the persistence of structural inequality which aren't new they're not new things and the emergence of a web as an everyday social space and what that's actually meant so on my side I've got a couple of quotes once from feminist activist Joe Friedman who 40 years ago in the tyranny of structuralistness was talking about the way that organizations and movements are always structured by power relations implicitly if they're not and the way that if these relations and ways that things work are not addressed explicitly what happens is that we mask power I mean we don't we fail to acknowledge what's actually going on and similarly there's a quote from Tizu, Helen Tizu is a French philosopher I'm not political we all know what that means it's just another word saying my politics are someone else's typically the politics of organizations and and movements that emerge without scrutiny are mimicking and adopting the existing forms of discrimination and domination so this conference is a really really important and timely event for us collectively to to explore reflect and challenge issues of diversity in quality and inclusion within the community within our community and in relation to the work of our community. Hi I just realized maybe you should have been a bit smarter in switching roles and then it would seem very natural but just to follow up on what Josie said I am very happy to be here and I'm very proud to be a co-chair because I know this conference for three years which is moderately long I hope and I always appreciate that for several reasons first that it's a it has a very strong community feel I'm looking for from outside I feel that the community you have here focused around the United Kingdom but also people coming from Ireland and other English-speaking countries it really feels like a community and I always have a sense of glee looking at the Twitter of this community I'm unable to follow it there's so much happening but it really feels like it's very alive and and I appreciate that a lot at the same time I really appreciate the fact that the organizers are really making an effort to make this an international event and I understand that me being here is part of that effort and we can see that also in the numbers of speakers and participants from other countries that's what we need we need to take your model which works really well build on it build on your community and broaden it because this is a unique event I think at least in Europe and maybe even globally for the open education committee and more broadly for educators thinking you know about good and innovative methods of working with technology I want to share with you very quickly just some ideas I have about politics of open since that's our theme and I hope that we'll continue to think about it throughout the sessions we hear and finish it with a panel that addresses these issues I'm particularly interested in politics as policy as the big level things and I can see oh here are my slides I'll start with a very short story hi my name is Alec and in Poland we sometimes like to call ourselves openers a funny little title which didn't actually catch on that well instead a different word became kind of popular in the public debate and that's openness it's a kind of a neologism that works moderately well in Poland and what's interesting about it it rhymes with communist this was at a time when we started introducing the idea that open educational resources that are publicly funded should be open and we suddenly realize and by we I mean open education activists and in particular people from creative comments Poland that our work which until then was sort of a happy grassroots work turns out to be very political it can get people angry and that we can even get them to backlash against us and say really sort of nasty things comparing us with a former regime that wasn't really very good at working with the commons because this is not the original comments they were clearly saying these are like the people from before ad9 and this was a bit shocking but I think was a very strong reminder that openness can be political which leads me to several issues that go into that first I want to say that I think there are internal also politics within our movement which we discuss a lot but sometimes not explicitly and basically it's a question what really is open education is about resources is it about practices maybe our policies important some people say they're not they're really important change happens at human level I think we should also think about this level this is sort of an internal politics of our movement they're very important I think to discuss at the moment for instance at the time we're looking after 10 years at documents like the Cape Town Declaration or the Paris UNESCO Declaration after five years second point I want to make is that I would suggest that within this internal movement politics we need to consider whether we haven't compartmentalized open too much into open education open data open science open metadata open heritage we sit a bit in boxes maybe it's not as bleak as it looks here but I think maybe if we start thinking about the big open and look at the connections and not necessarily add all these words and just say we're talking about openness it'll all bloom into a very nice garden and the last point I want to make is is relates to what Josie said about brexit and trump and the situation today this is a quote from a introduction to the polish edition of Larry Lessick's free culture which we published in 2004 and basically he's speaking about freedom and control when he wrote that he probably was mainly focusing on copyright issues but I think this feels very pertinent today to the way social media function big online platforms function government surveillance is an issue and so on I find this quote from over 10 years ago sort of very fitting for today but I think it forces us to ask a question how does open education a stake we believe in really addresses the issue of open societies are we really making a change at that level are we really addressing these fundamental issues or are we maybe just changing education which I'm not saying is bad but I think this is something we need to understand and I sometimes personally feel that we should take the values at the heart of the idea of open education open educational resources but do a bit of a pivot and tell ourselves that we cannot solve some of really crucial issues today just with this approach and ask ourselves how would we extend it to maybe some completely new forms of working together on different issues but are in line with this spirit and with this thought I will leave you and I hope personally to hear some answers from you because this is also an event that that I really feel will enrich me personally thank you very much