 Hello and good morning, good afternoon or good evening depending on where you are joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for short. Today we're very pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2017 webinar series on the topic of the next generation of standards. My name is Yana Aranda and I'm the president at Engineering for Change. I'll be moderating today's webinar and I'm very excited to be doing so. The webinar you're participating in today is part of E4C's professional development offerings. Information and upcoming webinars in this series, as well as archive videos of past presentation, including the one today, will be found on the E4C Webinar's web page as well as on our YouTube channel. Both of the URLs for those resources are listed here. If you have any questions, comments and recommendations for future topics and speakers, we encourage you to contact the E4C Webinar's team at webinars.engineeringforchange.org. If you're following us on Twitter today, I invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C Webinars. Before we move on to our presenters, I'd like to tell you a bit about Engineering for Change. E4C is a knowledge organization and global community of over 1 million engineers, designers, development practitioners and social scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities worldwide. Some of those challenges include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy solutions, improved agriculture and more. We invite you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to current news, data on hundreds of essential technologies in our solution library, professional development resources and information on opportunities such as jobs, conferences, fellowships and others. E4C members enjoy a unique user experience based on their site behavior and engagement. Essentially, the more you interact with the E4C site, the better we will be able to serve you resources, aligned to your interests. For more information, please visit our website and learn more and sign up. Our next webinar will be on October 25th on the topic of innovation in microgrids and will be joined by three fantastic speakers, Henry Louis, who's the co-founder of KilaWatt for Humanities, Frank Burke, VP of Grid Engineering at Segora and Omar Ghani, the CEO of the startup KilaWatt Labs. That will be happening at 11 a.m. Eastern Center time and we will be learning about new technology and approaches for scaling microgrids and low resource settings. Please see the E4C professional development page soon for additional information and registration details. If you're already an E4C member, we'll be sending you an invitation to that webinar directly. Another reason to sign up. So, a few housekeeping items before we get started. Let's practice using the WebEx platform by telling us where in the world you're joining us from. In the chat window, which is located at the bottom right hand of your screen, please type your location. If the chat is not open on your screen, try clicking the chat icon on the top right hand corner of the WebEx platform. All right. So, I'll get us started here. Oh, there we go. We already have some folks answering. All right. So, I'm here from New York. We have folks from Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Alaska, well, that's pretty far. Are there still whales? Well, thank you so much for joining us and I encourage everybody to share your location. Welcome to everyone from all over the states and beyond. To Canada, we see Tampa, there we go. All right. Use the chat window to share remarks during the webinar. Speak with your fellow attendees and share any insights you may have. If you have any technical questions, just feel free to send a private chat to the Engineering for Change admin. During the webinar, we encourage you to use the Q&A window, which is located right below the chat, to type in your questions for the presenters. That allows us to keep track of them. Again, if you don't see it, click the Q&A icon on the top right hand corner of the WebEx screen. If you are listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any trouble, try hitting stop and then start. You may also want to try opening WebEx up in a different browser. E4C webinars qualify engineers for one professional development hour. To request your PH, please follow the instructions on the top of the E4C professional development page after the presentation. The URL is listed here as well. Again, thank you, everyone, for joining us. I've had some private responses to where you are. And I see that we have folks in the Netherlands, from Denver, from Ottawa, and Canada, and many other places. To send a message to all attendees, just click on the send to down button, and you can share that way with everyone. But I do appreciate you telling me privately where you're from. All right. So I'd like to tell you a little bit about today's webinar and our presenters. Essential technology, which is defined as products and services designed to address the world's most critical challenges, including access to potable water, information, sanitation, and more. These technologies are continuing to evolve. Consequently, so is the need for new standards to ensure performance and safety to end users. Investing in appropriate standards for new and emerging technologies is an important aspect of achieving the sustainable development goals that have been agreed to by the UN. Today, we are joined by Moira Patterson, who is the Global Affairs Director of IEEE, and Sun Kim, who is the Program Officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to learn more about science development in two critical sectors, sanitation and ICT. As I mentioned, our first presenter is going to be Moira Patterson. She oversees the implementation of the IEEE Center's associations, global strategy in different regions, and various related strategic initiatives, including on standardization, capacity building and policy. She has been driving IEEE essays engagements in Africa and Europe for over five years, and is also responsible for managing the IEEE essays adoption and cooperation agreements with standards development organizations worldwide. By promoting science potential to support sustainable development, Moira contributes to IEEE's mission of advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. And for everybody to know, IEEE is one of the co-founding organizations of IFRC, so very pleased to have Moira here. She will be followed by Sun Kim. Sun Kim graduated from the University of Washington in 1980, formed with a BS in mechanical engineering. So, he'll be very comfortable in the company of fellow engineers on the line today. He's worked in the oil fields of the Middle East as a geophysical test engineer for Schoenberger, a wireline services, and for Boeing commercial airplanes for 20 years on pressurized door structures, mechanisms, and systems design, analysis, test, and certification. In 2014, Sun started working at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as a program officer on the water sanitation and hygiene team. He's part of the transformative technology sub-team developing and managing philanthropic investments in the area of international standards, reinvented toilets, and more. We're very excited to have these wonderful speakers join us today. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and pass control over to our first speaker, Moira, and have her share her insights with you. Moira? Hi, thank you, Yana, for that introduction, and thank you for having me. Hello, everyone, and it's my pleasure to speak to the engineering for change community about standardization and related activities. As you saw from my bio, I work for IEEE and strategic outreach and capacity building globally with a focus on work in Africa. Also, I am engaged in some of our technology policy activities and have attended, for example, the World Summit on Information Society and similar venues that you may be familiar with if you're engaged in the ICT community. Trying to advance. There we go. As you know, ICTs are a key enabler in achieving the sustainable development goals across the board from the very visible application of ICT, such as people using the internet and leveraging it to access new markets and no research prices of goods and be empowered with that information, but also to underline applications, such as how we leverage data behind the scenes to make better and more impactful decisions. Before highlighting some specific standardization projects where we will also encourage you to get engaged if you have an interest, I will briefly speak about standardization more generally. While my focus is on ICT related projects, I will also highlight a few projects in the power sector because there is no ICT without power and so they have a fundamental connection to this. And finally, I want to also introduce some very exciting work that IEEE is doing to advance really a focus on the human needs in technology development. So as we get started, as many in the audience are engineers, you will likely know IEEE for traditional activities such as membership services, also membership activities for students, engineering conferences, publications on key technology topics, et cetera. Building on these foundations of IEEE's technical expertise and global reach, IEEE also has developed a lot of programs to help both our members and also the organization at an institutional level to achieve and contribute to our mission of advancing technology for humanity and having reaching social impact. And I will touch on some of these programs today. Some of the programs though are in public policy, technology policy and humanitarian activities, to name a few. I will first talk about standards and their impact. Our mission is to provide high quality, market relevant standardization environments, respected worldwide. Now I want to elaborate on market relevance a bit. It is a key phrase and I want to highlight that markets are very different depending on the technology and depending on the need. IEEE covers markets from really high tech areas such as finding the next front here of faster and better Wi-Fi, but also we look at standards to bring energy to remote rural areas worldwide. So when we talk about market relevance, it really depends on what market you are looking at, what kind of impact we are looking at. IEEE is a platform for collaboration and consensus building. And one of the important ingredients is bringing the right stakeholders to the table. This includes innovators, technologists, engineers, but also governments, representatives, societal stakeholders and advocates and sometimes even social scientists increasingly as we look at ethical questions. One of the key points in this is also that you really are open to enabling all materially interested stakeholders to participate and that is one of the key principles of IEEE. Some key attributes of standardization is having clear documented and transparent processes. The WTO has outlined some key principles for standardization and these principles are globally accepted. And OpenStands is a group of internet related standards organizations who have also articulated similar principles. And IEEE subscribes to both of those and transparency, openness and consensus are some of the key attributes that we follow. I do want to highlight that in order to achieve consensus, it is important to have a balance of stakeholders involved. I have already talked about that a little bit that the stakeholders come from all backgrounds and expertise. They also represent countries or come from countries worldwide. And that is really key to have globally relevant standards that you have all the different stakeholders at the table and that you have a balance between them so you can't have one stakeholder group say one type of producers of a device or users of a device be in a majority, you need a balance of the different types of stakeholders. A final note, the WTO explicitly encourages the development dimension and standardization meaning that STOs should consider the constraints of stakeholders in developing countries. And so IEEE has electronic tools to facilitate participation and reduce travel costs to try to address that. And so in a nutshell, why should we use global standards? What impact do they have? Standards are published documents that establish the specifications and procedures to ensure the reliability and safety of materials, products, methods and services that we use every day. They serve as fundamental building blocks for product development and they establish consistent protocols that can be universally used. They also are key in establishing interoperability and helps speed up time to market. As a customer, they have the advantage of making it easier to understand and to compare products and also enable us to have more choice in the marketplace. When products are standardized, we can buy from different manufacturers and different vendors. Standards that are globally adopted also help with international trade and with technology transfer. And I think that's a key attribute as well. Finally, they do reduce risk because we can rely on the proven processes that they were developed through, including the transparency of knowing who the participants were and that there was a balanced set of experts involved. And they also, by being standardized and universally usable, reduce the risk of vendor lock-in of only having access to products from one vendor. And then I will also briefly introduce conformity assessment, which is the process and processes that we use to demonstrate that a product or service meets the specified requirements that are outlined in a standard or in a test plan. Such conformity assessment provides manufacturer a method to demonstrate compliance to the requirements. It empowers the end user to make better purchasing decisions knowing that a product has been certified and so it also helps the supplier get their products to market more quickly. And in the end, it helps a technology marketplace to grow more quickly and it reduces the barriers to the adoption of a technology. There are different types of conformity assessment. The three types are first party self declaration consideration whereby the supplier does their own testing and declares compliance. Second party where the purchaser does the testing. And third party where a third party independent body conducts the testing. The choice of which type of testing to follow will of course be made by the supplier and can take into consideration various factors including time to market, cost of the testing tools and also what level of end buyer confidence that they want to inspire. So speaking of global standards, I also want to give an example of the importance of local implementation. And here we have an example of the national electric safety code which is a standard that outlines the procedures and safety precautions that workers who maintain the power grid take. This document was used as the foundation for Pakistan safety code, enabling them to make necessary changes for the environmental and urban conditions in Pakistan to ensure it meets their needs. They are evaluating the impact of the Pakistan safety code this year. IEEE has several programs whereby we enable countries to adopt IEEE standards and make necessary changes or use IEEE standards as foundation for their own standards with the necessary adjustments so that they avoid having to recreate standards that have already been developed. So this can significantly cut time and also resource constraints for them. So now for a few projects that are currently undergoing and where we would really welcome interested experts to get engaged. And so first I'll talk briefly about TV white spaces. And of course this is such an interesting and important topic in development that E4C recently had a webinar on this topic alone. I will just highlight here that IEEE has a standard in this space. It's called 802.22 and it really takes advantage or standardizes this technology which helps bring connectivity to rural areas where there is low population density and low incentive to build out infrastructure. So leveraging this technology using the free TV white spaces is very beneficial. This standard is undergoing a revision whereby the existing amendments are being rolled into the actual standards documents so that it will be one document only. And there is a related project actually in an earlier development stage 802.22.3 which is focusing on specifying operating characteristics of components of spectrum characterization and occupancy sensing systems. This new standard is being developed in response to the U.S. and British regulators opening up more spectrum for sharing approaches and the working group is developing a draft or has developed a draft that they are already refining but there are still opportunities to get engaged if that topic is of interest. A related topic is frugal 5G and this is a prestandard project where they are looking at developing low cost wireless backhaul that we call frugal 5G for connecting the unconnected. We see that the propagation characteristics are appropriate and will not require expensive infrastructure such as high towers and alternate solutions can be based on technologies such as the 802.11 or millimeter wave technologies. This project is being led by professor Karan Zikar in India. Another project that is being led by stakeholders from India is P2650 which looks at leveraging existing mobile platforms and devices for pre-screening for hearing impairments. The need for this project is clear. Screening for hearing impairment usually takes place in specialized facilities with very expensive equipment but that is of course not accessible to large portions of populations who live in remote areas. This is even more critical because if you don't identify hearing impairments in newborns before they are six months old any treatments or interventions have lower chance of success. So by leveraging mobile technology that exists and that can reach remote villages much more easily to do the pre-screening you can identify newborns and others who need this, the more elaborate testing and then you can ensure that they get the testing. This project came out of Indian experts who identified the need but now they have over 50 participants in the working group representing all continents and the participants include researchers, governments, representatives and also folks with medical backgrounds to really make sure all the right stakeholders are at the table. Now quickly to speak about a power project and this is important to bring power to the rural villages as well. We've just talked about bringing connectivity and ICT but of course without having energy to charge the devices there is no ICT. So p2030.10 is a standard project that is under development to enable DC microgrids in rural areas. And again we see the common theme that in remote areas utilities are disincentivized from investing in creating traditional infrastructure and so other solutions are being found and here we are looking at using renewable resources and creating local microgrids to bring power to these small remote villages. A related standard is 1547 which looks at integrating renewable resources into the grid. This standard has been in place for a while and is just being revised right now. We have stakeholders being driven by the national renewable energy laboratory but we also see interest from many other regions around the world. In fact this standard is being adopted in Ghana right now where the grid operators saw the need to have a standard to integrate renewables into their grid. We are also partnering with Strathmore University in Kenya on a pilot for a conformity assessment test related to this standard. So we see great potential and interest in this standard and the related conformity assessments in many developing countries as well as in developed countries. Now I want to transition and briefly address some other types of work that we do which is more focusing on ethical considerations around technology and on a more human centric approach. We have a group called the globally initiative on ethical considerations in the design of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems. That initiative is developing a lot of different outputs. They have a book that they developed. You see the image on this slide where they have 13 different work streams where they are really addressing all the different themes from public policy and other implementation considerations that need to be addressed to look at this. Another deliverable that they are working on is standards and I'm highlighting one P 7010 that is one standard in a series of 11 standards at this point but this one highlights the need to put human well-being first. So when we look at technology we shouldn't just look at GDP growth but we also need to look at human well-being. One example that we often hear is that GDP may go up during a traffic jam because we are burning gas but human well-being certainly is not going up in such a situation. So this standard is it's a new project and we welcome any new participants who are interested in this and as I said there are many related activities. Similar we have a pre-standards activity to look at digital inclusion through trust and agency and really with the growing need for digital identities and doing things online we need to look at how can we empower people to have control over their digital identity and to choose how and with whom to transact. With this project we are also proactively reaching out again to underserved communities because they need to have a seat at the table to help identify the needs and find solutions. Another similar project is focusing on our identities and on digital citizens in the smart city again related to data and huge amounts of data and connectivity and we need to find integrated solutions. In this project they are looking at doing a test bet to actually start testing some solutions as well. And then finally the theme of digital literacy in order to be able to take advantage of the access to ICT that is provided people need to understand how to use it and we have just initiated a pre-standard project again looking at how to promote digital literacy bringing together the right stakeholders including advocates for digital literacy including providers of services and identify how we can promote digital literacy to all stakeholders around the world including underserved populations. And then I just wanted to highlight a very exciting project on the same topic. This is a site group that I triply have. It's a special interest group on humanitarian technology in Tunisia and they are not developing standards but they are doing digital literacy training in schools in Tunisia in a hands-on manner. So I wanted to just highlight that I triply also have more hands-on activities that people can engage in. We have such site groups around the world in many different countries. So I know I've covered a lot of projects and a lot of activities. I have some further reading here. The first few links will help you identify the status of the projects that I mentioned and then at the very end the last link is standards university and it provides resources on what are standards. It's targeted both at academia and students but also at other users of standards. So I encourage anyone who wants to learn more to look at that. And then finally I just wanted to say that engineering for change is an important platform. I triply is one of the supporters and I thank the engineering for change team for the opportunity to highlight all these exciting projects. And I invite everyone to work with I triply on ICT standards and other activities that take a human-centric view of technology development. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much more apologies and thank you for taking the time to share these exciting initiatives with us. With that I'm going to pass over the slide control to our next presenter, Sun. Whenever you're ready, we're ready for you. Great. Thank you. Can everybody hear me? Loud and clear. Great. Thank you. Let's see I'm trying to advance the slide here. Here we go. There you go. Yeah. Great. So my name is Sun Kim and I'm a program officer here at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and it's a pleasure for me to be here and to be able to share this, some of the work that we're doing. I'll start with talking about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation real quickly and the work we're doing on sanitation for the poor and also the role of standards. As Moira just mentioned, the many benefits of standards and it's one element of a commercial opportunities and we fundamentally believe that it is through the commercial activities, excuse me, commercial activities that we can scale up potential solutions to benefit the many. And I'd like to thank Engineering for Change for the opportunity to share this with you all. So at the Gates Foundation, we have four main missions that we're going to be working on. We're going to be working on solutions to ensure more children and young people survive and thrive and empower the poorest. Particularly, we tend to focus on women and girls because if we are not intentional, oftentimes it's the women, girls and young children that ends up suffering the most from poverty. We also work on solutions to ensure that children and young people don't have the means or the finances to be able to take care of those medical needs. Polio is a great example of one of the big pushes that the foundation has been working to eradicate and we're getting so close and also to inspire other people to take action because it's not just the foundation or other philanthropies and NGOs, but the work. And we do this by funding our partners work on the ground whether it's research, technology development, commercialization of vaccines, medical devices, in our case, sanitation products and services. We also work with governments at the national and international level policy makers looking at the market. We get involved in quite a lot of different areas and it's quite exciting to have an organization that's able to fund this kind of work and just real quickly the gate foundation is primarily funded by two streams. One is a trust fund that Bill and Melinda Gates put together and out of that a certain percentage every year is spent and last year I think it was about $2.5 billion was available to the foundation for the number of initiatives that we have going. And then in addition, Warren Buffett has also made a very generous contribution that essentially doubles that amount so almost $5 billion a year are being spent currently for these different efforts and one of them being sanitation. And one of the things that I think is really important is that we have to think about the value of everything and why do we do this? We fundamentally believe that all lives have equal value. And we think of it from the perspective of regardless of where you're born or who you're born to, should not keep you from an opportunity to live a healthy and productive life. This is what Melinda Gates said. You don't have to be born to a rich family or in a rich country. Your opportunities are almost boundless. Whereas if you're born to a poor family or in a developing country, oftentimes your potential, your opportunities are so limited. And it's this lack of economic opportunity that is striking when you have an opportunity to see how people end up surviving in many places. So I'm going to move into sanitation. And when we think about toilets or sanitation, today's goal standard is the flush toilet connected to wastewater treatment plant via sewers or what we'd like to call big pipe. And often at the end of that pipe, either there's a plant, a wastewater or sewage treatment plant that is either not functional or maybe not even there. Just dumps directly into the environment. And if you think about the flush toilet along with the sewer and then the treatment plant, huge costs to build, the initial non-recurring cat-backs. And then also high recurring costs to operate and maintain. The op-ex for manpower, energy. Think about all the water we use, typically potable water to flush a very small amount of human fecal and urine. And then the spares and the upkeep of degrading infrastructure. Huge expenses. And oftentimes, development banks and NGOs and other governmental aid will come in and be able to use it. And then there's the government aid will come in and build a wastewater treatment plant. And oftentimes, within a few years, they're in disrepair. They're not fully functioning or oftentimes just shut down because of the lack of this ability to keep them up. And then in rural and especially in informal settlements, the norms are pit latrines or holding tanks. Having seen quite a few of them, they're very hard to use. They're dirty, smelly, visually unappealing. And I'm saying that in a very nice way. And often, very hard to empty or oftentimes left to overflow into the environment. And then there's open defecation. Almost the only choice for millions of people, almost a billing actually. And oftentimes, I think there's a judgment call about why do people open defecate. And the reality of it is that it's oftentimes the better choice when faced with unsanitary conditions or pay toilet that you can't afford. Or potential for sexual violence. Or a variety of other rational reasons. And when we look at the current state of the way the fecal flows or what we call the ship flow diagram, this is an example of one city, Dakar, Bangladesh. So on the face of it, it looks like they're doing really well. If you look at the amount of toilets are connected to sewer, 20%, 79% on-site facilities, pit latrines, septic tank, so forth. And just 1% open defecation, you think, wow, they're doing great. But in reality, if you look at the leakage in the pipes and the way that even the sewer is not effectively treated, or the unsafely empty pits or septic tanks. And in the end, in this particular city, 98% of the fecal waste is basically going into the residential or greater environment. And so if only 2% of the fecal sludge is being properly disposed of or treated, we think of poor fecal sludge management as akin to institutional open defecation. So today's sanitation crisis is effectively the joint monitoring program report that just came out in July of this year from the World Health Organization at UNICEF. It talks about 2.1 billion people lacking access to safe readily available water at home. A more than double that amount lacks safely managed sanitation. So the two are linked in that if you don't manage sanitation properly, it also tends to impact the groundwater and the surface waters that may be available for use at homes. And then also, as I previously mentioned, almost a billion people still defecate in the open. And dire over diseases kills over 350,000 children at the age of five every year. And again, it impacts women and girls particularly. And if one were to be able to resolve the sanitation crisis, it would actually provide freedom for women and girls that are imprisoned by daylight. In many cultures, the only time available for women to go and defecate is after dark. So you basically end up not drinking, not eating, and holding, which is very unhealthy until its privacy is afforded by darkness. Also, impact of schools, especially when girls start to menstruate and inability to take care of themselves properly when there's no facilities. The burden of caring for the sick oftentimes falls on women and girls. And pregnant women are particularly impacted by diseases such as hookworm. And when we think about standards, almost 200 years ago, Sir Edwin Chadwick was promoting plumbing regulations in England. In London, they were basically swimming in their own feces and diseases were pronounced. And this basically unlocked the modern sewer technology. But even then, the sewers were basically just moving the sewer downstream. And, of course, subsequently treatment plants have come into place. And when we think about standards, we approached it in a free-tiered manner. So the foundation worked directly with Tooth Sood and also started working with ANSI for ISO standard. But the initial work was to create a private standard for the sustainable launch sewer sanitation systems. And it defined the requirements from the perspective of pathogens, environmental requirements, as well as aesthetics and smell and noise to make these future systems appealing and aspirational. And the private standard was then the basis for the ISO international workshop agreement, IW24, which published subsequent to the private standard. And it was the led by American National Standards Institute, or ANSI. And it's an international consensus guideline document via individual experts from all over the world. And we had great participation in the writing of this document. And in fact, this particular document was used by the CNTA, the China National Tourism Administration's request for proposal for more than 30,000 new toilets. I think there's a realization that when people go to a tourist site, they expect some level of cleanliness and aspirational toilets. And the IWA was used in turn for the development of the current ongoing ISO 30500, excuse me, through project committee 305. This is also led by American National Standards Institute with twin secretariat from Senegal, the association Senegal uses in the Martial Edition. It is Senegal's equivalent to U.S.'s ANSI. And this one, the ISO 30500 will be a standard for the non-sewer sanitation system. And it is by process a international consensus via participating nations, not individuals, but it is through each individual nation's national standards bodies that this work is done. And it is a consensus document. And what's really great is that there's a high level of participation in developing countries and that's based on the work of the American National Standards Institute, as well as the association Senegal's normalization to reach out to a number of Sub-Saharan African nations and also great participation from Asian countries. You can see that there's also great participation from North America and Europe as well, but we really did want to make sure that there was great participation in developing countries. The ISO 30500 is scheduled to publish end of 2018. But of course that depends on how well the subsequent meetings go. So when we think about the toilets, we're talking about non-sewer sanitation where it is not connected to any sewer or treatment plants at the end, it would all be accomplished, we call it the front end and the back end and the actual elimination of pathogens, reduction in environmental pollutants, operating off-grid and also having low life cycle costs as well as being aspirational, being attractive, all of the processing would be done in situ. And our goal, our internal Gates Foundation goal is that once these fully scale up that these would be affordable even by the poor in developing countries. I mean you'd be astounded that cell phones, cell phone technologies that 20 years ago most of us in developed countries could not afford are now readily available. And in these developing countries, I'm not aware that anyone is waiting for the government or company or utility to string a wire so that they can talk to somebody either across town or around the world. Cellular technology is a transformative technology and we're looking to these types of toilets, these aspirational toilets to be similarly low in cost and also effective. Moira I think talked about real quickly about sustainable development goals and the United Nations in 2015 established a series of them and goal number six is to ensure availability and sustainability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. And this is different than the millennium development goals that were put out at the beginning of this century relating to just being able to have, everyone have access to toilets which is just capturing of the fecal waste. This is about the whole value stream and how to make sure that the impact is positive. And we firmly believe that in order for this to scale, it has the non-source sanitation has to be viable business. It has to be business opportunities for small and medium enterprises and it has to scale. The only way millions of these toilets in the future will be used and will be helping communities is if there's a business available and key parts of that are enabling environments as well as marketplace readiness and some of the elements for enabling environment are collaboration with local governments and through regulations and through policies they can actually enhance demand for sanitation. And the topic of our conversation today supporting implementation of quality standards. Moira mentioned the benefits of standards to the consumer, to the manufacturer, to the entire market stream and then as well as the marketplace readiness fostering like I mentioned regulatory, supportive regulatory environment as well as leveraging our work with development banks and aid organizations. These are just some examples of reinvented toilets that universities and other organizations have been working on from the upper left and corner research triangle institutes, gasifier system, university or nano membrane toilet systems in the upper middle on the upper right that's caltex system which is an electro chemical system. And then the one below that is a color is known for white wear and gen set develop gen sets and they built a unit using the California technology and attached it to some apartment buildings in India as tests. To the left of that is the University of Toronto's smoldering toilet and then what we call the water wall water wall, sorry about that from eovag and then lastly Loughborough University's hydrothermal toilet and these are all in different stages of prototyping and commercial development. And in the end, you know, the reason we're working on this and many, many other areas is we envision a world where every person has the opportunity to live a healthy and productive life. So with that, thank you very much. Thank you so much, Sun. This was a very rich and close to home hitting presentation and as a graduate of the University of Toronto myself, I am actually pretty excited to see that U of T is in the running with one of these new prototypes. So with that, we are arriving at the Q and A portion of the webinar. I encourage everybody to enter their questions into the Q and A window so we can go ahead and address them with our speakers. Just to get the ball rolling, I wanted to find out from both of you, if you could speak to obviously the nature of the science development process is quite lengthy and I wanted to hear from you. Are there alternatives to standards for ensuring quality? What are some examples that you can share? It could be either Moira or Sun. Hi, this is Moira. I'm happy to, you know, try to address that. And then Sun, of course, can add to that from his perspective. But yeah, I think it depends on the need that you have and the scope of the challenge as well. You know, sometimes when you need global interoperability or global solutions, you may have a different approach than if it's a more localized challenge. But there certainly are other areas such as more lightweight, I know some people call them guidelines or specifications or prestandards, so that you can address issues. I highlighted a few prestandards activities that IEEE does where we enable people to come together and, you know, maybe develop white papers to address challenges or come up with solutions in that way. You don't have that same process with, you know, that same guarantee of how it was developed, but it can certainly help you come up with good solutions. And then just one comment on standards being lengthy, I think that is often also related to the degree of consensus that you have when you start the work. Sometimes stakeholders and industry have already converged on a direction before they start the standard process, and when there is such high-level consensus, it can actually be a faster process, maybe completing in a year to two years versus longer timeframes that we sometimes hear about. Thank you for that context. And just out of curiosity and in terms of the participants in this process, is there a preferred ratio or a mixture of representatives from various sectors such as industry or academia or standards development? Yes. So one of the things that I highlighted, a key principle is balance of types of stakeholders. And that means that you can't have more than a third coming from one group. Now, the groups are different in each project because, you know, it depends on the question you're trying to address. Sometimes you're looking at having manufacturers, users, general interests. Sometimes you have researchers academics. So who they are is different, but you do need a balance and no more than a third from the same type of group. Awesome. Yeah. Go ahead, Lisa. Yeah. And if I could just jump in on the question about, you know, other ways of standardization or motivating the market, from our perspective, you know, we looked at a lot of different options and you'll notice that we kind of went in stages and I think there are places for all sorts of different kinds of standards, whether they're industry standards, private standards, industry standards, national standards, regional standards, international standards. And from our perspective, you know, the work we're doing, we felt that this was the best way to have a tier system where developed countries get great toilets and developing countries get, you know, crappy toilets. Right. And so we wanted to set one bar and we've been working extensively at PC 305 to try not to tier these into different levels, but to just really come up with one standard. I mean, to me it's kind of, I know standards do this, but it's weird for me to have to see that have different levels of standards or different levels. So to us, an international standard in this particular situation was appropriate. But we could see other opportunities for guidelines, as Moira mentioned, in different applications. Thank you. Thank you. A question that I actually come in on our website ahead of the presentation and I found interesting and could be controversial. Was that regarding access to standards themselves? Often standards are to use them to access the information you have to pay. In terms of standards that are addressing these essential needs, is there a construct relative to payment? Is there anything that you could share and help to enlighten us on that? Yeah. I'd jump in there because we at the Gates Foundation typically anything that's done by research universities or even companies, we ask that research be published in peer reviewed journals and be open access. So that's a fundamental belief that we have for global good. We want the information to be shared. But we also recognize that these standards are created by a consortium of individuals who are volunteering their time and that whoever owns the standard has the copyright. We are very interested in having wide dissemination. So we have been working with our partners to figure out ways of either pre-purchasing blocks of standards. But it's a great question. We agree with the premise of that question and we're working towards, you know, it will not be the majority of standards, but we think there are some opportunities. So we are working on that. Thank you. Moira, is there anything you want to add? Yeah, sure. And I think similar to what Sun said, I think, and I appreciate that Sun also acknowledged the challenges of we have to fund the development in a manner somehow, right? And the sale of standards is part of that. But we do also see that it is important to make standards as widely available as possible. And we are looking at different options. IEEE more broadly has open access type activities and open source activities as well. One program that we have is called the get program and we try to encourage stakeholders or potentially funding agencies to offset the cost and to make standards available. For example, the 802 standards which include Wi-Fi and ether net, you know, they have decided to do that funding so that their standards become available for free six months after publication. And other groups of standards this happens as well and we could envision that, you know, we can work with stakeholders to try to come to an arrangement and make that happen. Thank you. That's very interesting and it's great to see that there are already pathways for ensuring accessibility to these essential standards. With that we have approached time. We do apologize for actually the extra two minutes over but I appreciate all of the attendees who have joined us today and thank you so much to our fantastic presenters for giving us kind of a behind the scenes look into this critical work that you are doing. Thank you all. You can find the recording will be available on our professional development page. For those of you seeking professional development hours please use the code listed on this slide. If we didn't address your questions and you would like us to do so, email us at webinars at engineeringforchange.org. With that I will wish you all good morning, good evening or good afternoon depending where you are and encourage you all to join us as you see members to get information on our upcoming webinars. Thank you all. Thank you to our presenters and goodbye.