 So, hi dear colleagues, so you know one of our topics always in this kind of area is we have to be agile so I would like to say that just about one hour ago our colleague Claudine Lim wrote to me that she's terribly ill today and unfortunately can't take part in this presentation which is a shame because we actually thought that most of us these days were a little bit bored of presentations and wouldn't it be nice to have a conversation so we'd set up a nice kind of conversational format which I'm afraid I'm going to have to break a little bit now. So basically what I'm going to do first is Claudine has sent me a video which is a six minute video which basically just introduces you to the principles for digital development and I'll say a few words about them in just a second and then after that I'll just make the link to the project I'm managing which is called a tingy I tell you a little bit about that and then I'm going to pick up the three topics which Claudine and I wanted to talk about which is how to focus on the user how to think about scale and how to think about collaboration and I think those three things are probably relevant to to any of the big projects we're working on at the moment and so I'm hoping then just saying a few things about those will be an invitation to you to make some some comments either in the chat or of course you're very welcome then to to come in and we have a small discussion. So with that that's essentially the format so let me just explain a little bit about the the context itself and maybe the best way of doing that is if I introduce myself and then I say how I got myself to the digital principles for development so my background is well firstly I've been to open Belgium for I don't know the last couple of years for sure maybe a last three years or so and the connection for me has mostly been with the colleagues who are working on open recognition. This is kind of a reflection of the things that interest me very much which is picking up on things to do with digital innovation innovation in general but thinking about how can we pick these things up and start actually using them to influence the mainstream this has been really kind of the the main thrusts of my interest. In the last years I think the first time I came to open Belgium I'm still working at a private research institute where we were looking at how to open up the labour market and how to offer further education and that's why I came in with the colleagues working on the MIRVA project which is about open recognition. Last year where I came and I very much remember it was just before the whole COVID thing began and we were all a bit concerned can we really shake people's hands and I really remember this moment where it was all a bit awkward. Again there I was talking about micro-credentials and open recognition but the context for me had changed a little bit because I was already working for a digital learning platform called Kiron. Kiron is a learning platform centred in Berlin and it's helping refugees get to higher education essentially. During my time at Kiron I also did some advice for a project which was just being developed at the time from the German cooperation and development agency GIZ which is associated with the German Ministry for International Development. The project which I'm now part of is called Atingi. It's about setting up a learning platform and we've got huge scaling ambitions. We're expecting in 2025 to be reaching 100 million people but more about that later. The point for me was I was very interested in getting to this because it seemed to me a way to actually really get to the mainstream really start changing things and also Link the two things I've been working at working on before which was how do we think of learning in many many different contexts and maybe in a more kind of open format. How did I get to the principles for digital development? The interesting thing is when you're particularly if you're building up something very new then of course you need some kind of framework to orientate yourself. You need to have a kind of an idea of that what should I really be focused on and the nine principles which have been developed in the the principles for digital development I find very good and they also kind of I think you'll find as well that they're very familiar to most of us because at least one or two or maybe all of them are actually quite commonplace at the moment but still it's important to I think focus on them and the nice thing for us and more about that as well later I think but I find it's quite an easy way to kind of speed up some processes because you can find something you agree on with many other partners you can say okay we all agree on that now let's move on ahead. This is a bit of the background but I would like to now pass over and I hope this works now to the video with Claudine speaking it's a like I say it's a six minute video so I'm sorry that it's like a a pre-recorded format but I'm sure you understand of course better this way than not having her at all so it gives a small introduction to all of the nine principles and a little bit of of their history they were actually developed in 2014 2015 so they've been around a lot and I've also found in my experience that they're not known very well so I think it's it's nice to give them an exposure so I would move on to the video and then we'll come back and have a few discussions so let me just see if I can set that up and thank you for being there Astrid if this not working then you have to give me some instructions but I think I actually just press the play button that's what it looks like to me and let's see just checking is it possible to hear that yes I I hear Claudine speaking okay good then I shall continue okay so that worked rather well including her passing back to us she is now actually the director of the principles so no longer I think it said they're senior associate I think it's I think there's a couple points there where she also mentions for example open standards is the most complicated thing not for this group I would imagine I think that's probably the easiest bit it's also not the bit that I would essentially focus on for our discussion here but if I may I just give you just one slide and just one tiny bit of information as a background to a tinky let's just see if I can actually manage to pull up that slide let me just see if it's now no it hasn't come across yet it started to upload and then it ended that probably because I was being too I did it stop again now or I was just too impatient it hasn't uploaded again let me just see here one second because I tried this just before tells me it's actually being shared now okay good then I'll tell you what then and then I think I would yes now it's now it's down oh perfect okay sorry I'm just not patient enough okay yeah I just wanted to show you one one slide so you've seen already the principles which we I think can come back to into discussion and I just wanted to show you then one quick picture of a number of things with with the tinky platform itself so I've already mentioned a little bit about our ambition of where we want to go so and and you can see already from the picture so before we started that's or when we first started we were actually called Africa cloud this is actually a project which was pretty much dreamt up by the federal minister for international development and the idea really is just there are many learning opportunities which are really going unmet or learning need to also going unmet and then a learning platform could actually help us an enabler here just as very much as Claudine said the whole process is started by doing some appraisal missions particularly in West Africa where I was involved as well I'm working with a local partner called Smart Africa excuse me that's the advantage of doing a homework office kind of then we try to understand kind of what what the actual needs were and we established in 2019 set ourselves up we are now at a stage where we've got over a million contacts with learners we have 200 000 learners registered on our platform and now we've actually which has been a huge help to us we've migrated to the Moodle learning platform the reason this is a huge help to us is because it's open source so there's many many ways we can link out to other systems and this really is all part of our growth strategy and you can see here that we really would like to get to 100 million contacts by 2025 you can see our goal there which I'd just like to mention that briefly a world in which digital learning is inclusive accessible relevant safe and secure for all of course we could have said here learning but I think especially all of us in reviewing what's been happening in the last year in many many countries including I would say Germany digital learning is often because of the technical side it often has many other kind of restrictions which should be thought about so I think it's very important here that we've emphasised digital learning so this is a bit about the background of a tingy and really then I would just like to turn over to three points which I think are probably the most interesting at least for me and also a discussion with Claudine these are the most interesting points of the principles I think all nine are very interesting and I would just like to maybe mention my perspective on these three in connection with the tingy and then I'm super happy to open up a little bit to discussion and just see what your thoughts are and of course you can also pose questions to the digital principles maybe I can answer or otherwise I just pass them over to Claudine and colleagues for later the first point keeping a focus on the learner the reason I want to mention this is on the first in the first instance it seems very obvious but especially in technical projects I think this often doesn't happen the reason it doesn't happen is because we often get involved in kind of the technicalities of how things work and in fact just over this weekend in Twitter there were some complaints about various of the some of the developments of the vaccine app that is being discussed for example in Germany where tech seems to be totally dominating any of the discussions about how sensible something is the tagline was that the vaccine information was going to be saved on five different blockchains and I think there you can see this this point that if we start focusing on the tech very much then we kind of lose the user now the interesting point for us is that we as a tingy as I've just mentioned we understand ourselves a little bit differently maybe the many learning platforms because we understand ourselves very much as a kind of a backbone for learning and you may be aware that GIZ employs I think over 24,000 people across the world and of course across the world many of those are actually already doing learning offering learning or offering trainings and things like that and what we're trying to do is we're trying to persuade these people to actually get onto our learning platform so therefore they can actually scale out to actually the people they're actually offering the learning so the interesting thing for us and I think it's a challenge for us is how can you keep the the user in focus particularly the end user so the learner whilst you're trying to scale like we are and the way we're trying to do that is we're trying to introduce much stronger feedback groups so it's not the case of limiting at the starting point so we do have some focus groups but we say essentially we're open for any of these projects and we're also open for many many different types of learners but what we try and do is we're trying over time to actually learn about these learners so that's how we're trying to do that but of course then we also get this whole case of how do you scale in this kind of setting how do you scale in a the setting of international development because international development is very often focused on context it's focusing on trying to be as relevant to local communities as possible how can you scale at the same time because surely scale means actually abstracting from the specific and trying to become more general again this is a challenge we're trying to deal with the first point is of course if you actually manage to be relevant for many different contexts that's the only way you're going to scale because taking going back to this first point only if what you're doing is valuable to the individual learner will it actually grow and actually become stronger so the ways we're doing this is we're trying to find ways to work very much with co-design of curricula co-designing learning learning units but also trying to have more kind of inclusive learning experiences including also the combination of having digital learning because very often digital learning I've called it recently learning in a box it's a little bit of this thing that's kind of a close thing that's kind of ready and perfect it's not very good at talking about context but if you can combine something like that maybe as background information with webinars with the ways of exchanging and in the end if you have the goal that actually every new learner is also going to become a peer to all the other learners and and therefore a supporter then I think you can get the scale and the final point is being collaborative two points here really firstly of course we know very clearly that we're not the only people who've thought of these ideas or working on so we're actively looking for other people to collaborate with and the question is how do you actually collaborate of course you can cooperate in other words you say okay do you have learning materials that I could use as well and most of the learning materials you would find on a tingy are open educational resources and have been developed by other partners but that's not really in-depth collaboration we are working collaboratively at the moment with the World Bank on some of their work they're doing in Africa and the way you can be collaborative and that's why I think the principle so good is if you've got like a common reference framework and these principles therefore they really help us because they're there are kind of a starting point and I've already mentioned the other element of our project at tingy which is that it's a highly political project as well because it was something which was an initiative of a minister so again we also have from the other side we do have some pressure and also some ideas coming from the ministry about what we should be doing again there these principles are a nice orientation for us because it's very easy for us to say yes we're doing that because it is involved in this principle so for me one of the big successes we had last year was that we managed to persuade the ministry that it's very important for us to have a learning management system which is open source and there were certain people in the ministry who as Claudine just mentioned weren't quite so familiar with why open source makes sense but they were familiar with the principles and that kind of gave us a fast track to some of those discussions okay so there's a there's someone my points I would be very happy also if anyone would like to make any comments these principles about the challenges of them and particularly around these topic areas and maybe just to say what you're involved in at the moment and and why you've come to the session today most people are joining in listen only mode so they can't speak or turn on their camera so I suggested if you want to participate in the discussion that you do connect with the audio so we can actually talk yes maybe we can also ask bga big big telata I think we can can we not I think we can give them the right to speak can we they can't speak if they want to but you do have to connect to the audio which you do by clicking on the telephone icon okay but he is saying he or she thank you is saying they talk fast so let's start with that then so yeah so you're working in in the with the development background in the public sector and you're an open source fan and you're looking for ways to enhance the collaboration with the end user okay but this is this is so does that mean you're actually asking me or anyone else here to to think about how to to enhance the collaboration that's it that's a difficult one so I think it's a challenge I think the main point is collaboration maybe maybe we should just spend one moment thinking collaboration means that when people work then it's kind of more of the sum of the individual parts so collaboration means then you have to try and find something where it's not just kind of user input user feedback or something like that but they're actually designing with you or they're actually you know making some kind of proactive input and I think that is a challenge because you have to try and find out where does that work I think it's always good to try experiments first and and just see how that works but everyone essentially okay I think Lucas yes yeah thank you thanks Dominic for for this opportunities I would love to pick it up I pasted a link of what we are doing it's the biggest citizen driven community related with creating air quality data and we are receiving air quality data from over 14,000 stations in over 70 countries and have generated the biggest air quality data and its data set which is like over 11 billion data points so what you do sounds very interesting for us because we have a campaign that is like sensor to school so basically we want to highlight every school that wants to be part of this measurement and we want to bring this open data and this open source activity to the schools and libraries in this world so if you would perhaps like give us some tips with who we can talk how we could tap into your network with what you are doing to connect because I think we could give a good fit we have this visualization tool and perhaps like you could show us like how we could tap into your extraordinary growth I mean your numbers are really like impressive but perhaps you could show us like how we could like join your efforts and bring this data to the people thank you yeah wonderful thank you very much Lucas yes so we are actually building up a portfolio on the whole aspect of digital transformation and I you know it's a very very big field I think this is definitely one thinking about open data we're actually working on two levels because we kind of got a focus on informing policy makers and regulators so that they're actually become sensitized and aware of many of these developments on the other hand we're also actively going directly to to our learners we don't have anything yet on open data we have some things already on how to develop for example a learner a learning database for artificial intelligence we have a few things there but we do have some work here within GIZ also on open data so I can see some nice connections here so you're very welcome to contact me afterwards as well and this I think brings comes to one major point which is of most interest to to me and I think to Atinki is there are many things many new things happening at the moment and they don't tend to be picked up by traditional education and also even if they are that's only you know the youth population and only to a certain age so we're very interested in this whole kind of field of non-formal learning where people then become become aware of some of these things and we know for sure for example in Africa policymakers and people working in ministries and regulation offices are very interested in some of these things because they've kind of they're they're hearing about some of them but they don't realize what's possible and I think we don't need to say this is a situation in Africa I think in Germany it would be the same situation so yes so super happy to hear more about that thank you Dominik great we'll do so we'll contact you thanks Dominik you just mentioned the non-formal learning and I was wondering where do you see or do you see the traditional like schools universities picking this up or not in the future in the longer term do you think it will become more important or do you think it will stay on the sideline so I think also I explained a little bit of my background I think the reason I'm particularly interested in the non-formal sector is it's more kind of it's more of a reaction it's it's more of a point of okay new things are happening let's try and think of how we can create learning opportunities around them in other words it's not based on a curriculum it's based on these new developments and these new developments around the stg's around things like open data AI but also many other developments in the world and normally the non-formal is it's kind of freer to pick these up but I think we would definitely hope that many of these learning units would also be then used in the formal sector the interesting point is for us it's very important to have short learning units and also for example we're doing some things like the one course we're doing currently with the world bank which is about digital transformation in particular related to regulations we actually have said we don't want any in the first iteration of what we're doing we don't want to be using any videos we wanted to use open formats as much as possible because we actually think that we need formats which we can be changing as we learn with the learners or with the users so this is not really kind of the standard way that formal education thinks about these things and also my other point often with you know my own little kind of complaint about formal education in a way is that this is only a tiny weenie pit of our whole life if you think of your whole lifespan and especially now you know in Germany I think I heard today you know the expected lifespan is until 83 I think so if you leave even if even if you leave university at 25 look at all those other years where things should be happening and the education system hasn't been very good at picking that up and that's why I think many of us who are working in with with these platform ideas etc we're saying this is how we can actually help inform people and and just provide this kind of information and see what's and show what's available and I'm most interested in using all of this to kind of you know as a way to start people on you learning pathways and just stimulate them to think differently so we welcome other comments in the chat or you can also you're quite welcome to also take the mic maybe why you well while you consider that I just mentioned that there's a lot of information about the digital principles on the website that Claudine mentioned and I think we've either we've linked it here or oh yes we've linked it up here as well in different languages this they seem quite trivial I think but actually to really implement them they're not at all trivial I think that's why they've been still around so long so I think they are a very useful orientation but I would pass on to Gert who's just maybe I haven't said your name properly but Gert would you like to I'm here from Parmel I am a member of Wikimedia Belgium yes I have a question I saw in the individual that there was a project about sustainable development goals is this specific for your company or is there just the UNESCO project you were showing so I think with the sustainable development goals as firstly they were using in the with the digital principles it was an idea of how can you connect the challenges posed by the sustainable development goals with the opportunities maybe that digitalization can provide and of course one of those is one of my favorite principles which is Reuse First which I'm sure is for Wikimedia is like one of the foundational principles as well there have been some nice developments recently also in sustainable development there was there's an academy called the Sustainable Development Goals Academy I think STD Academy and a number of us complained about two years ago to say this is very cool but none of your materials are open open educational resources I think it was the end of last year they actually said now they are so but what what was your interest in that Gert? Well the Sustainable Development Goals is also a project of the Wikimedia Volunteer community which is rather active in a number of countries I know for example Sweden is very very active in that sense in Belgium yeah we do not for the time being we do not have specific projects but our work with heritage and museums and cultural institutions and the universities is about yes education and training people how to document and to reuse knowledge yes indeed so yeah yeah I think that's really good and for me I mean in 2015 I think I wrote a background report for UNESCO also about some of the indicators for the STGs and again they've been also super useful I think as a framework because it's really interesting you can talk as you say talk to people in the cultural sector and the people involved in civic society but you can also talk to business about the the STGs and and somehow they provide a great orientation I think for for you know where we're trying to go with many of these things okay thank you thank you very much maybe again I can mention an interesting challenge we've had which is again back to scale so one of the principles says designed for scale and it says if you are going to pilot things and make sure you're piloting but with the big picture of where you really want to get to and it's it's very interesting because again I think in the international development community we often have this idea of piloting in one community and then if it works maybe we establish something in the next community and there's certainly been a great interest from the side of our ministry to say if we start making things if certain things work in in small communities can we not just say probably the things that might make that community you know special in a certain way can be found in many other communities across the world as well so this is a really interesting thing we're going to we're trying to do I think with our platform is you know you can find similar communities which are geographically really quite just a small rather trivial example of this was a number of months ago I was talking to some colleagues in San Paolo who developed a really nice cause for women in tech and they explained the course they explained also that they were using or they were planning to use open badges as a recognition form and I said okay that sounds really amazing how many people are you offering this course for and they said well it's for a hundred people and I said you know what why is it only for a hundred people and they said yes we've been having a problem because we always have to select and that they also recognized actually why select maybe you can actually offer it for even more and then they also said well actually we've also been in contact with Mozambique because Mozambique speaking also Portuguese has said oh can we not actually use it for our own context so it's really interesting that something's being developed in San Paolo possibly then we'll move over to to be used in a much greater scale in Mozambique and maybe in other countries as well so I think it's I think this idea of being ambitious and you know trying to think of how you can scale up but still kind of stay true to the context of the problem itself I think is a challenge but it's an interesting one and I think really it's done too little and I think if we really look at many of the things that are happening around COVID at the moment and Germany is a great example with 16 states and every state trying to find their own digital solution to the same problem this kind of idea of like being collaborative is a huge challenge and I do think frameworks such as the digital principles such as the STGs can really really help us but sure we have to all work on it as well but I I think also many people here are many of the the organizations which named here also the open knowledge foundations I think those are the kind of foundations which are really working on this stuff great well thank you very much for your attention I'm sorry that Claudine wasn't here but I of course Astrid was a great support thank you very much Astrid and do look into digital principles and also into a tingy in both cases we're looking for collaborative partnerships and yes so I wish you a great rest of conference I really must say I really like the idea by the way that open Belgium has actually spread the sessions over many days instead of just saying let's pretend it was a physical one but now it's digital because I think nobody wants that anymore so thank you very much and greetings to all the colleagues at open Belgium thank you Dominic for the interesting very interesting session I will stop so I did