 Hello everyone, good afternoon. I'm Urs Kassir, I'm with the Berkman Center and I have the great pleasure to welcome you to Harvard Law School. On behalf of the Berkman team, as well as of course the Hewlett Foundation, it's a real pleasure to have you here. If my information is correct, what is the eight OER grantees meeting? And it's fantastic really after such a long planning process to finally come together. Actually Barbara and Kathy, we meet for the first time face to face, had many conference calls, so this is very exciting. And of course we're especially grateful for those of you who have traveled from afar. Actually about the fourth of the participants are coming from outside the US, including myself being European, and I'm really grateful that you have taken the time to join us here today for what I believe will be a fantastic conference with really wonderful peer contribution. So I'm looking forward to that. I will be very brief in my remarks. I will talk a little bit more tomorrow, serve as your emcee throughout the day. Today we have a very compressed timeline, lots of things to cover, to warm up actually and set the stage for tomorrow. So what I would like to do is just to say a few words about the arc of the program, the goals of the meeting and walk you through the structure of the agenda very briefly so that you get an idea what we're up to over the next three days. So as you can take from the invitation as well as from the program, and I hope everyone got this booklet here, we actually printed it in this format because it's less likely that we lose it if it's smaller than we lose it. So hopefully we'll have this version each of us at the end of the conference still. The goal of this meeting obviously is to focus on the ways we could work together within this room but also beyond to increase the impact of open resources on education. So the focus of the meeting is on education, building upon last year's conference of course, but really trying to address the strategic challenge, how can we team up, how can we collaborate to leverage our impact together of existing as well as future educational resources including of course content and tools and platforms as well as policies. The goal of the conference, and we summarized it also in the booklet here, is to work towards an actionable roadmap. So ideally on Friday or Thursday evening for sure we would have identified some implementable interventions that we could work on together to make OER even more powerful across different educational contexts, both of course within classroom settings but also in informal learning context. So that's the goal. Let's see, let's be ambitious and work hard towards that goal to have an actionable roadmap. Short-term interventions may actually even be addressed on the hack day on Friday. I hope you've all read what we're proposing for Friday. So that's the first opportunity to make concrete next steps but then of course there are also mid-term and longer-term interventions that require collaboration over time. So with that just a brief overview of the agenda. If you look at page 18 and 19 you will find the agenda at the glance. That's kind of a helpful starting point. We start right now after my remarks with an opening exercise in two parts. First Colin McClay our managing director and Rob Farris our research director will play navigation aids through a heat map that is based on your pre-conference submissions of ideas how we could increase the impact of open resources on education. We'll then have our Dean coming in at roughly 4.45 for a few welcoming remarks and after that we will hear from our colleagues and friends from Hewlett Foundation about their thinking of how the overall OER strategy looks like how to prioritize some of the issues that may hopefully be included also in the heat map that we are going to hear about in a moment. Of course special thanks to Barbara, Katie and also Vick for making all of this possible to start with. So this for sure is an applause. We'll then have cluster meetings more on that later and finally for today a dinner together where we will also introduce the Birken Center a little bit more. Of course one of the goals also of the event is to bring together different communities the OER community many of you being of course part of that and bring it together with the Birken network with the Birken community. There is significant overlap but it's also in some respects complementary so this will be great and we have many more guests also joining in and hopefully the dinner will give a first opportunity to kind of mingle and get to know each other a little bit. Tomorrow morning we'll start with segment one which is a stage setter essentially looking at the current state of play open resources in education what are trends what are perspectives from a conceptual perspective. We'll start with a keynote session and then switch to moderated roundtable discussions addressing this question of impact on education from three distinct but also partly overlapping perspectives as you can see from the program here as essentially really an opportunity to reflect on what are the experiences what do we know but also where are potential gaps and where is need for action again from a broad conceptual angle when we talk about open resources in education and try to increase impact. Segment two then is complementary to that is essentially a deep dive from a practical perspective where we hope to learn from all of you about the projects you have been working on the work you're doing in the field. The idea is here of course to identify possible areas of collaboration but also to identify powerful narratives that we all can share and use while we work towards a roadmap for OER so I'm very much looking forward to the second segment. This will be a mix between feature projects obviously we cannot do justice to all the great work you've been doing so we selected a few projects to highlight them but then have kind of more of a breakfast bazaar where we can walk around and connect with each other and learn from each other in an informal mode on Thursday morning actually. So segment three then is the synthesis of the more conceptual view and the practical perspective where we really try to synthesize the experiences and translate it into an actual roadmap and framework focusing on some of the pillars that at least the Hewlett Foundation has put forward as a very helpful framework how to think about our work in the space. So that's roughly the game plan. We'll have many opportunities also with in the program for smaller group conversation for breakouts. More on that later I just want to give you a very high level overview of the agenda there's much more to be said of course but I think for the moment the most important thing again is that you feel welcome here we are just absolutely thrilled to have you here. It's a team of Berkman people here we all wear these kind of things here that you can identify us easily if there are questions there is an information desk throughout the day tomorrow as well whenever you have questions please approach any of us from team Berkman we are here to make this as a great stay as possible for all of you. So with that thank you again and let me turn our to my friends Colin and Rob and I'm really interested in this heat map thing and I assume many others in the room too what is a heat map right we'll see thanks.