 Hi there, I'm Paul Stacey, the Executive Director of the Open Education Consortia, and I'm inviting you to become a Fellow at the Open Policy Forum, which will start this year, will launch this year, on October 7th, 8th, in Warsaw, Poland. We're really delighted to be partnering with Centrum Safrowa and with Spark on offering this year's Open Policy Forum, and I'm delighted to say that it's structured in a way that it's kind of more applied and pragmatic this year, with the emphasis being on providing not just a two-day workshop, which will happen on October 7th and 8th, but then an ensuing six-month period of time where there'll be mentorship and support from peers around development of Open Policy to be actually implemented. I want to say a few words around the need for Open Policy at this point in time. Open Education has been growing and being adopted across all sectors around the world, and a lot of that adoption and use is happening at the grassroots ground level, and in order to ensure that those initiatives are successful, are sustainable, we need some top-level policy that incentivizes and appropriately recognizes those efforts. So the Open Policy Forum will give people a great opportunity to put in place policy like that, and it could be a variety of different kinds of policy. There's a whole range of ways in which Open Policy is playing out in Open Education. It might be policy that ensures that open education resources that have been funded with public funds are openly licensed and made available freely to the public that funded them. It might be policy that looks to reward and recognize and incentivize, even from a performance review point of view, educators who are taking advantage of and engaging in Open Education. Or it might be Open Policy that looks at the many different ways in which Open Education is being developed across the board, not just Open Education resources, but things like open access on the research side, or open science or open data. Even the use of open source software in education could benefit from some policy that ensures that it's playing on a level playing field with some of the more traditional practices by which education has been provided. All this to say that the Open Policy Forum provides a fantastic opportunity for you to get a head start on creating policy that would be really useful and relevant for your institution, for your region, or your nation. And lastly, I want to highlight that UNESCO has an OER recommendation which has been drafted and will go forward this November to the General Conference of UNESCO for adoption by all countries. And that OER recommendation includes in it some guidance around support of policy. So if you were to participate in this year's Open Policy Forum, you'd be in a position to create policy that positions you as being a lead exemplar for how to align yourself with the recommendations that UNESCO's putting forward. Hope to see you in Poland and to work alongside you in creating Open Policy for the ensuing six months after that leading up to Open Education Week in March 2020. Bye for now.