 Okay, my name is Philip Schmidt. I am the free courseware project manager at the University of the West of Cape and a board member of the Open Courseware Consortium and today, just after the board meeting, we ran a South African Open Educational Resources Open Courseware Workshop where we invited people from all the other South African universities, not all of them came, but we had a good selection of people here, both senior management and practitioners who are active in open education and we wanted to spend half a day with them talking about some of the benefits of having an open education project, some of the challenges that are particular to South Africa, some of the strategies, how the practitioners are addressing the challenges and really foster a sense of community so that people feel like, oh, there are other people working in the space, exchange best practices support each other. We broke the day down into two panel sessions. One panel session was a conversation with international board members where I invited Steve Carson from MIT, Andy Lane from Open University UK, Anka Mulder from TU Delft and Yoshimi Fukuhara from Keio University to join me on a panel, I moderated the panel and I asked them with relatively general questions about their projects, about the benefits to their projects and we actively invited the audience to participate, ask questions, make comments and also the way we had structured the room, we weren't sitting up on the stage behind the table, we were sitting on chairs in front of people and I think it created a nice atmosphere of conversation and then we had a second panel where we invited some of the people in South Africa who were very active to speak about what's happening in their institutions and share experiences and the two panels were really very much connected, the same issues came up, sustainability, legal questions, how does this help my institution, how does this help my students and so we just talked about them from different perspectives. I was very happy with the outcome of the day, we also had, I should mention, the Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University come and open the event which was quite important to get the senior management buy-in but I was mostly happy because I felt the conversation was engaging, people were genuinely interested and the international perspective that some of the board members brought was very different from the South African perspective but there was enough common commonalities that it was very relevant for the South African institutions and as I looked around the room I could see in the faces of the South African participants that they they were starting to think, well you know this makes sense for my institution or they could see how open course we can help them in what they're trying to achieve as an institution anyway and now we're having lunch right now, you can maybe hear it in the background and there is a lot of conversation about collaborations and what can we do now and what areas do we focus on and that is exactly what we were trying to to accomplish so I'm quite happy with how the day went and I would encourage you if you have a board meeting or if you have an opportunity at your institution to to run a workshop like this and the benefits for the local work I think are significant, thank you.