 Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Good morning to everybody. Thank you for having me here at the open education global conference. I'm Yeah, delighted to be here after it was a challenge to to get here Due to the international travel restrictions still in place But anyway, let's get on with this. My presentation today will be necessarily Multilingual as I come from Ecuador and many of the concepts and many of the Ideas that I would like to present to you will also be in in Spanish so I Hope that won't be too much of our problem and we can still have a multilingual dialogue as Is the idea of this conference as well? also, I'd like to start mentioning that Today is May 24th in my country May 24th of 1822 so exactly two centuries ago was the day that the Bolivarian forces of independence South American independence finally defeated the loyalists the Spanish loyalists and The what was then called the the great Colombia or the unity of Venezuela Colombia and Ecuador Finally gained their their independence. So it's a special day for us in in Ecuador and It's important that we talk about Also sovereign TN independence in the context of knowledge technology and educational resources Today so with that Thank you again for the invitation. Thank you University of Nantes and Open education and all the other organizers. Thank you Paul for inviting me here to to speak today So today, I will talk to you and hopefully you will have a bit of time to discuss towards the end about buen conocer buen conocer is Roughly translated into, you know, good knowledge or knowledge for good or good knowledge and I Will try to discuss some of the policies that I Implemented together with a very large team of you know hundreds of Courages and professional Ecuadorians and you know thousands and thousands of teachers all over the country and students and artists and so on That were covered by the ministry of knowledge and human talent of Ecuador, so you might start wondering What is this thing that the ministry of knowledge? I will talk about all of this and I've also talked about what buen conocer is so How do we get to buen conocer or this concept that we're going to try to to discuss and define today? first we have to begin from The start of this story Ecuador had undergone a very unstable democracy in the early 2000s In the late 90s. We had a huge financial crisis Most of the banking system went under we had millions of people leave our country due to the crisis there was a basically loss loss of complete faith in the democratic system and and After a an election in 2006 that elected Rafael Correa's president We had his main campaign promise was we're going to call it constituent assembly So we're going to rewrite Ecuador's constitution and we're going to do it in the most Participatory manner possible so a new constituent assembly was called upon people elected the representatives But then the representatives themselves Basically opened the doors of a new parliamentary institution a parliamentary building that was Created for this purpose and received, you know, tens of thousands of people who came with their Ideas their proposals as to what should be written on the constitution? in Latin America this tendency of rewriting the constitutions Follows what is the concept called neo-constitutionalism, which is basically quick rapid change without, you know, changing minor laws but going straight for the constitution Was a tendency at the time and it's still now as you can see from the experience and in Chile with the constitutional convention that was That is taking place right now and that is basically Proposing major major reform so one of the main Transitions from the old regime to the new The new design of our democracy was that we migrated from representative democracy to what's called participatory democracy now that's a mouthful And there are some operational mechanisms to make that happen but the the transition is a bit difficult because you know most of the legal texts and the political culture is not used to Putting so much power at the hands of the citizens the citizens directly so There is a long transition Until people understand that they are really in charge of their destiny sovereignty Thus directly belongs to the people and it involves you know that even after you elect your representatives even after elect your President and so on you have a right to continuous participation in the destiny of of your country So the new constitution was written up. It's a fairly long has many details and It was approved by referendum in 2008 one of the main concepts of the new constitution of Ecuador is called Buen Vivir Buen Vivir is both a utopia a horizon a paradigm and an Alternative to development You see and in Latin America we have these discussions are About you know, how to reach development. How can we overcome under development? How can we You know not be so third world. How how how can we? overcome the difficulties of being of a colonial past and so on and most of the literature Developmentalist literature and the tradition has been basically just follow the footsteps of the industrialized countries So that means basically, you know, just grow capitalist forces Grow the economy try to redistribute some and then you will eventually one day after perhaps hundreds of years reach the level of development of the rich countries Now Buen Vivir is a complete alternative to even the paradigm of development Do we really want to replicate the patterns of consumption of Misuse of natural resources Do we really want to replicate that kind of development that has Put our planet in danger that has our species in danger Or should we try something else? Well, Buen Vivir comes from the Andean and Amazonian Cosmo vision of indigenous peoples in in the Andes in the Amazon and It is now The official constitutional objective of the entire state of the Republic of Ecuador So when Vivir goes beyond the traditional thinking of development or economic growth it implies having harmonious relationship among humans and also between humans and other species between humans and the natural environment so it has a lot of complexity in it and most of the operational Details are still to be written are still to be developed are still pending to be converted or instrumentalized One of the things that we discussed When I was in the Ministry of Planning in Ecuador was We need new metrics for measuring our society Otherwise we'll just keep on replicating the standard of You know the OECD and the UN United Nations Economic systems, which is basically GDP and GDP per capita and so on Maybe we should measure something else. Maybe we should measure our mental health Maybe we should measure how we relate to future generations and Maybe we should measure how we deal with Social and ecological conflict among ourselves Maybe we should take into account, you know crime statistics into measuring well-being and so on and Maybe come up with this new metric To really evaluate how we're doing well, we took this challenge seriously and This is where my story begins personally. I was designated as the deputy secretary general of planning for the buen vivir for good living. I tend to have really nice job titles in the past and My duty was basically to think about the future not in the traditional linear linear terms of You know, basically more accumulation and trying to reach a very distant horizon of industrial development But actually how to build something conceptually different and Still try to get there within a defined time frame so my job was to think about the paradigm itself and then how to achieve that utopia that we were creating in in our society and When I was at the undersecretariat for planning for good give food good living We had an excellent team that wrote up a plan It was called the national plan for good living and you can still find it online but in the wayback machine It's been censored by the current government so The the the path is a complex set of of goals and strategies and Very detailed instructions as to what the Government state level but also society in general has to do in order to reach this this paradigm of when we read when there when we want to Try to explain what when we read is to to people who have never heard of it before we try to May raise some comparisons to what perhaps others have heard of and They think at the international level the thing that most resembles it is the international covenant of social economic and cultural rights and So if we can build a framework that takes human rights in the diversity of their Of all these rights that exist then we can try to Reach a similar understanding of what when VVS One of the things that we found when we were developing this plan for the future was That we needed to govern our own knowledge system we found that Even if we made material changes to our existence, we know provided housing and food and shelter and clothing and and the basic material needs of society That wouldn't be necessarily self-sustainable because we needed knowledge we needed wisdom we needed Concepts and ideas and technology to make that self-sustainable in time so the people who wrote up the Constitution were very Explicit in this and we have constitutional level obligations of the state in terms of science technology innovation and ancestral wisdom The Constitution in its say eighth section of the development regime talks about all of this and It talks about science and technology in the context of their respect of the environment of nature of life of cultures in plural and of sovereignty and has the objective of To generate adapt and diffuse scientific and technological knowledge also to recover strengthen and empower wisdom ancestral wisdom Also to develop technology innovation that can strengthen national production elevate the efficiency productivity Improves the quality of life and Contribute to when be here. So as you can see, this is a pretty well thought-out System of science technology innovation and ancestral wisdom that basically told us what we needed to do in terms of the policy of what came to be known as the Quarion Ministry of knowledge Now the Quarion government was divided into six large sectors and The sectors were coordinated by a coordinating ministry so We had the sectors the following sectors the strategic sectors we had the social development sectors we had the security sector We had the economic policy sector We had the production sector and the newest of them all that was created The last sector to be created in the organization of the state was this one the knowledge in human talent sector Now why was the sector named like that the knowledge in human talent? Let's begin with the second phrase we wanted to break paradigms when Sometimes you hear in an organization or in a company or even in an institution Dedicated to knowledge talk about human resources, right? The human resources department the HR people but when you call the department or the area in charge of managing the lives and aspirations and Well-being of the people in your institution in your organization and all of a sudden you call them resources you are basically Making them things and not people when you consider humans as resources You would then stop to think their resources for what or for whom and You come to understand that the history of the term is absolutely linked with the primacy of capital over human beings When we change the denomination of human resources to human talent And perhaps we are not overcoming that completely But at least we are now putting the humans at the center of the discussion of human talent policy how to improve human talent how to foster it how to Put use value into into that Enconocimiento or knowledge it has to do with this intangible asset this intangible element that allows us to Avoid permanent dependency on natural resources or Societies in Latin America, especially are very dependent on what is called extractivism So basically taking things out of nature and physically same thing I'm elsewhere to Provide for exchange value to get a few dollars and then buy something else with them when we talk about knowledge we talk about Slowly but surely replacing this dependency on material nature and Trying to make our economic system more dependent on our brains on our knowledge which is of Infinite and not non-competitive nature So the Ministry of coordination for knowledge and human talent Had a lot of duties. I was in charge of coordinating education policy But also the higher education institutes Universities and so on the the councils that were in charge of higher education policy also science technology and innovation policy ancestral wisdom and ancestral languages policy intellectual property was how we redenominated that as intellectual rights we wanted to get away from the definition of of property the qualifications and competency framework policy and the laboratory policy Culture and the arts policy heritage and social memory policy so everything that has to do with museums libraries and so on and the creation of new universities for our Aspiration of one be read the creation of entire new city called the city of knowledge Yatcha and The public service Career of our public officials or public servants people that worked for the state so as you can see there was a lot to do and We organized our work into what we call the prospective agenda for the knowledge and human talent sector called the Ecuador asial 2035 Equator towards 2035 we set a 20-year plan to achieve our goals in terms of getting a bit closer to to when we read and that implied basically democratizing knowledge through very Heavy investment in education and all the sectors that I have mentioned this plan was a quantitative based planning exercise with a very rigorous Framework to to you know, basically quantify how many teachers we needed how many students were going to be in the system in every one of our very diverse territories and how many Students we thought that we needed in each type of Career in the universities And so on so it was a very demanding a work took us a couple of years to do but it's there It's available there to be used replicated Used as a reference as well, and I think It's perhaps one of the most important references that our country has in terms of a long-term planning In in sort of knowledge policy right in knowledge policy And there were many many things that were Frankly beautiful when I was in charge of this ministry of knowledge and we had the council meetings You know like here in France there's that the cabinet meeting right all the ministers meet Well, we had a sub cabinet meetings for our sector where all the ministers and people responsible of the following agencies were there and we created a lot of in trans institutional Cooperation that whilst may seem logical in the real-life public sector It is sometimes very difficult to get two institutions to talk to each other so that was basically our job to try to get that to happen and we had a lot of fun while we also had major successes in Managing this this sector. I think we had important Successes there important Elements that were recognized around the world we improved our educational System from perhaps one of the worst in Latin America to be in the average of Latin America in a few short years we had any extremely quick increase in Our science outputs and our technology Development as well in a decent intellectual property framework and trying to rescue the ancestral wisdom as I will try to Detail in the following a few slides. So One of the things that we decided to do in our council of knowledge and human talent was when connoisseur so when connoisseur was a project that Counted on experts from around the world It was organized also as a as a project, but it had a conference component Where people from different countries in the world came to discuss what free Libre open knowledge meant in the context of a developing country in the context of when be real and a lot of Good ideas came out of this and it basically meant You know if you were going to have this paradigm of when be real of Harmonious relationship among humans and with nature and with the environment and so on how would that translate in terms of knowledge policy and Of course open knowledge Open education open resources open source and so on was definitely one of the categories one of the main elements of what when connoisseur would would mean So we translated again the paradigm into concrete Instruments of policymaking one of the things that we led was The and we called it updating to free software right a Lot of times the people or at least in Spanish they use the concept Migration or migrating to free software We thought that in the context of the mind of Ecuadorian migration Which meant the expulsion of millions of people from our society It wasn't the right term and we use the term updating because we think it's better technology. It's more it adjusts to our principles and We had you know a very dense policy framework for the software Libre policy and basically Deciding that our entire sector our schools our universities the Public institutions and so on had to move to free software. It wasn't an easy task the cultural practices of using Proper Tyre software and proper Tyre technology are deeply ingrained in our societies and It was a very conscious effort to try to move forward. I remember we even had a Installation of the Linux operating system in in the government institution computers and The public servants were complaining that they weren't used to it that they wanted to go back to The the dominant Technological providers and so on but you know you have to develop policy around it And one of the things that we found was that we had to start at the very young age, right? So you had to start in the school systems You had to at least teach both, you know when you were a young student so that you would be comfortable in this environment of more freedom of governing your own technology of having technological sovereignty so we that took a lot of our time as well Perhaps one of the most interesting efforts was the development of Wiki legislation, right? So it was the construction of our Knowledge law, which in Spanish is called Código orgánico de economía social del conocimiento e innovación And this law was Constructed it was built collectively with a wiki Framework so we put up the texts of the law and on a on a on a wiki System and then people from all walks of life could Contribute to the law to the draft of the law by suggesting articles modifications Changes and so on that would then be Delivered together with the final draft to our national parliament so that then they could discuss I think this is very very important and I think in fact they should be raised as a to to a sort of Transparency standard of lawmaking so that you know when in parliaments there are modifications to drafts of laws you can see What sector is putting what right because otherwise Sometimes laws come out and you say where did that come from? Oh, and then you find out that it was lobbied by somebody else or an interest group and I think it gives a lot of transparency to the lawmaking process So we call this effort and the wiki koesk Which Was a very important in the construction of this law. It took a long time But we thought it was it was worthwhile This effort was led by the secretariat for hydrate higher education science technology and innovation We didn't stop there and then the law was eventually passed by our parliament. It was one of the the last laws that was passed during the Korea government and We decided to experiment with many other policies one of them Was to try to democratize one of the most conservative forces of the government of the state Which was the central bank? right, I was I started my My public service career at the central bank when I was 21 years old and I saw from within how Extremely conservative That institution was So we said how can we use knowledge policy to try to democratize one of the most conservative institutions that you know, basically Controls the power of the economic system in a society and in Ecuador we implemented a policy of Electronic money system, right? This was 2014 and then the pilot that I will explain happened in 2016 Way before the current discussion of what are now called central bank digital currencies But what we did was basically Push our central bank to open its accounting and core banking system so that transactions could be done directly by citizens and We basically organized the hackathon for that purpose To my knowledge, this is still the only Definitely the first, but I still think the only hackathon developed by a central bank Totally open to social innovators to develop Permanent and appropriate technologies for the use of our society We are very proud of this effort we had Amazing developments in a very short time span Basically solutions for people who had some sort of handicap people who had disabilities people who had Who wanted to use the bus services and so on with electronic money Issued by our our central bank. So it was a An interesting effort and this is the kind of things that We pushed with open innovation systems, right? So basically forcing the government institutions to open up with APIs With interfaces so that innovators could access this very valuable and secret knowledge That used to be secret and then use it for the social purpose We also organized The first Ingeniatek contest, which was basically a Analysis we did of the procurement Policy of our country, right? So we analyzed what were the main purchases of our government, right? So printers Cartridges computers and so on and we said, okay, is this are these printers being you know made in Ecuador? are the repairs Provided in our country are they imported and because we are developing a small country We have to try to save our hard currency as much as possible and we Analyzed our government purchases and how much of that was imported from abroad and we said look we need to try to Do import substitution for these specific categories. So we organized these contests for local a Technology developers engineers together between enterprise and academia to develop local solutions for government purchases and We did a really good job. We replaced Over a 300 million dollars worth of imports in a matter of two years, which for a country like ours is a lot of money and of course that meant that we Local technology and most of which was actually applying open source technology elsewhere to our Benefit now One of the contradictions that We faced in in our knowledge policy was How open you know the degree of openness? How far do we go in terms of opening up? Open government and so on but especially How far do we go up? Open in terms of our genetic and our biological resources as you may imagine Ecuador is a It's one of the most biodiverse countries in the planet It's a very small territory, but it has a huge biodiversity Including in the Galapagos Islands and the Amazon rainforest and different Climates and ecological environments and This biodiversity If there is no specific legal framework by default is basically open Now who can take advantage or who has taken advantage of the openness of our biological and genetic Resources specifically for example that of the Amazon and I don't have to say much but the pharmaceutical company Pfizer Published this book called el sueño májico de shaman the magic dream of shaman which explains the development of medicine and the story basically tells of of Pfizer Scouts that go to the Amazon and ask the local indigenous ancestors on tips as to what the medicinal plants are and Then they develop medicine and then they basically Leave and indigenous People stay there in Basically poverty right So this is not something I came up with this is actually a book by the pharmaceutical company Showing exactly what happens in our societies one of the issues we have is Why is this knowledge completely open? Why is there no protection? why isn't why isn't the discussion on patents and and Intellectual property around biodiversity and ancestral knowledge should the knowledge of Ancestral peoples indigenous peoples of the Amazon be open for anybody to take advantage of or should it be relatively closed or should there be a regulated openness where It benefits those communities and the state Well We came up with the first international index for biopiracy and we analyzed Ecuadorian biodiversity Especially medicinal plants and some vegetables that only grow and are endemic to Ecuadorian ecological floors and We compared that to patents that were being filed around the world and we saw that basically Pharmaceutical companies were patenting knowledge either directly or derived from a Ecuadorian biodiversity and Associated ancestral knowledge to that biodiversity, right? So it's one thing to put a scout In the middle of the Amazon and have to try you know, every one out of ten thousand different plants out there to see what happens with ten years worth of studies in laboratories and It's another thing if that scout can interview the shaman of the community and ask Which are the valuable medicinal plants? That saves the research efforts decades So how is that? Retributed to the community that did take millennia to find that out Most of the time through trial and error of actually living or dying well, the international system has a an agreement called the the Covenant for biological diversity and And the associated protocol Nagoya protocol, which is supposed to benefit the local communities with You know some money some royalties for the use of genetic and biological material From those communities or from that country however, there's still a discussion around the world whether the road those royalties should only go to the Direct uses of that biodiversity or whether they should they should all also be paid when there are Derivative uses of that biodiversity. So for example, if they put that to make basically a chemical component Sure, maybe they will have to pay but if from that chemical component there are other solutions like cosmetics other medicine or something else Then should that also pay royalties to the original source and that's where the discussion is around the world So it's it's very contradictory that the the rich countries of the world industrial industrialized countries Are very strict in terms of demanding You know basically property rights around intellectual property and enforcing anti piracy measures and so on But when it has to do with biological diversity They say oh, no, you should keep that open because it belongs to the world right, so this is one of the things in the contradictions that we found and We we call this by piracy and we associated with the other Andean and Amazonian countries including Peru to try to come up with a solid position around the world, especially in Waipo and Geneva and to defend the right of communities and of states to benefit from this Because if if we have this Responsibility to reach when we read if we have a challenge of trying to leave extractivism and not exploit oil or you know Timber and so on but then maybe we should make nature in its Biodiversity Solciating it with knowledge and science and technology be the alternative. I Mean there are all these rich big farmers around the world the cosmetic industry makes a lot of money But none of that is going to the local communities and it continues to be a pressure for extractivism as you can see and the countries that have Encouraged in biopiracy and at least in the case of Ecuador the most are the US Germany the Netherlands Australia Korea and others okay, so and this is something that Should continue to be studied in the context of Okay, but open but for whose benefit What we decided to do Was to create a new university? We said if we want to really transform our society Away from extractivism away from oil production and mining eventually into having biodiversity be an actual means of survival and of Making ends meet for our society. We need to put resources into that. So we created a new university called Iquium which means a a jungle in Schwarz and an Amazonian language and It's created in the middle of the Amazon. Yeah, the university is My favorite my personal favorite and as you can see there and the university is endowed with 93,000 hectares of biological reserve So it has eight different ecological floors up from the Andes down to the Amazon for the scientists of Iquium They have basically the best library in the world and they have the duty of finding the potential of the rich biodiversity of the region to Basically offer an alternative future for those communities who live there and also for our country Now the the university is a bit larger now. There have been new buildings constructed, but the idea remains the same 93 hectares of live laboratory and The Iquium University is now the second university with most publications now even by undergrad students that have gone into taxonomy and investigating the Potentials of the rich biodiversity that we have Now as you can imagine Doing this is pretty hard. It's not easy because we have to Struggle with an international Context that basically avoids countries from developing these pathways It's not as if it's only political will that we have to deal with We have to deal with the WTO restrictions, especially the trade-related international property rights the patent convention treaty and some decisions of Andean nature But we have done a lot to try to overcome this international framework I personally read led the ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty which allows exceptions, for example, so that Access of of authors of Sorry of Intellectual property rights can be a there can be exceptions to them when we want access for people with visual impairment or disabilities Also other flexibilities that what I will not get into the detail here, but There's been a huge effort to try to regain some sovereignty in knowledge policy As you may be aware right now internationally, there's a discussion of what's called the trips waiver Because around the world there's been a what's called a vaccine apartheid Right the technology to produce the COVID vaccine is not democratized even in the context of a pandemic that has represented a earthquake in terms of our species Has there been enough willingness to share the knowledge of vaccine production? But what few people know is that there was also a respirator apartheid Orphan drug apartheid testing kits apartheid chemical apartheid and the huge technological dependence of Big pharmaceuticals that have benefited in the context of the pandemic because the knowledge is not open because there is strict Compliance with the international inter intellectual property framework Even in the context of a pandemic What we did was use knowledge policy progressive knowledge policy to try to overturn this and we allowed ourselves to save over a billion dollars in purchasing medicine Just with progressive knowledge policy that I will explain in a second This allowed us to save a tons of money. How? Basically putting standardized generic requirements on our medicine purchase policy Inequitor and this has to continue forward. Hopefully it to allow us to increase access to medicine so we have actual written sorry actual real-life experience by Democritizing knowledge and having that represent huge reductions in budget and more access for Medicine just with knowledge policy with adequate knowledge policy that avoids harsh intellectual policy restrictions now There are many other things that We wanted to do that we didn't have the time to do that. I will only mention here but This is an ongoing struggle for developing countries What we can do in terms of knowledge policy to actually have a little bit more of a say In terms of our destiny in terms of our our future. I'm going to conclude with What has been My story in the last year or so and it's that I didn't expect it But in 2020 around the middle of the year in the middle of the pandemic. I got a call from our political Leader who led what we call the city's revolution Rafael Correa and he said hey, you know, I really like the policies that you've been pushing during the government and so on and I Want you to be the candidate that represents the progressive forces in their future election and Of course, I said yes So I had to campaign around the country for almost a year I did win the first round of the vote. Unfortunately in the second round I Lost by a small margin I got 48% of the vote against 52 But what we would have applied The type of policy that we would have applied had we won is exactly what I'm talking to you about today that of a sovereign technological Bwembe vid oriented policy That would have worked with the knowledge community not only in our country, but around the world to try to Change our reality to try to approach to our paradigm of Bwembe vid and as a small demonstration of that I want to finish with a video That was part of our political campaign what we called democracy 3.0 Which was basically citizens participation in our common destiny We developed what was called the wiki plan Con la democracia 3.0 Construye tú también el plan de gobierno para recuperar el futuro Se parte del wiki plan ingresa a triple wu punto andres araus punto s Slash plan de gobierno a través del wiki plan podrás revisar tu aporte para el gobierno de todas y todos es de libre acceso de participación horizontal y democrática como puedes participar es muy sencillo Regístrate crea tu cuenta ingresa tus datos y confirma tu correo accede y edita tus propuestas participa de las discusiones en los distintos temas de debate la democracia 3.0 nos permite estar conectadas y conectados a recuperar el futuro se parte del wiki plan This is the equity that would have been thank you very much questions Thank you very much for this inspiring presentation I wanted to ask how do you balance the technological needs of society? when with with obviously national sovereignty digital sovereignty energy sovereignty educational sovereignty when a lot of these technological advances and developments are being made by big multinationals Condemnation state actually half its own means of production of that Technology that will help to advance or do you need to compromise somewhere? Yeah, I mean it is a challenge, you know when when I was there for example, we had You know one of the largest big techs in the world Google basically give out their entire software tool the educational software to the Ministry of Education and Minister comes to me and says Why am I not taking this if it's free? Right if it's it's completely free. How can you be so crazy to say don't accept this and and of course because Ministers and the people in in the public sector say I need to save us a few dollars from the budget Maybe that's the right Choice so it's very difficult to try to make them understand that there is an issue of dependence beyond just the budget issue and this can be replicated in many other areas of government policy and so once you have and I mean once you put a value into independence and especially into Generating an epistemic community within the country or in partnership among Countries in the region, which was what we thought that we had to do because we were too small to do it all ourselves And especially with other technologies open-source technologies and communities that exist already around the world You could build an alternative to all that so that's what we ended up doing we ended up Building our own alternatives and partnering with both companies academia and communities in the region to try to find Our own options, you know sometimes They are not the most avant-garde technologies, but they are the appropriate technologies for both our level of Development and our intent at keeping and maintaining technological sovereignty Sorry to say though This only lasted for a few more months after we left when the new government arrived that were much more conservative in nature and new liberal in orientation and That are basically giving everything away to to big tech Thank you for your presentation. I just have a question and it's about how the government of Ecuador is aligning The policy of openness policy ecosystem that they already have because they have the gobierno abierto So of course they have an open government approach But also they have a policy for open education for the primary sector for primary and high school level Where is the alignment or where it's kind of this trend for for Ecuador looking towards the future in in the context of Opening up to knowledge and education and governance Well, I think there are many challenges there, you know Like I said that the perhaps the most important change has to be at the cultural level at the day-to-day habits and practices of the use of technology and also of the citizens demanding That these these practices can be kept during for a longer time for example in terms of open government If you don't have an active citizen an active social society that demands that the government keep on publishing the the material or making everything available as before then they will stop doing it right because of what for whatever reason and it intends to Basically get get lost, you know for example something so simple as an archive of the institutional web pages and Government documents that were official documents, you know only five years ago You can't even find them on the web anymore. Fortunately. We have the internet archive and so on and some of that stuff is there But there is that the official repositories And are not keeping that information and countries like ours are extremely vulnerable to You could even say in terms of for censorship or for hiding social memory From the public by basically taking things down from from the web Hola un gusto conocerte personalmente muy admirable I'm going to switch to English I was thinking about how this model of the democratization of knowledge Has been able to be consolidated. You told that it's not but how Can be self state a policy beyond the government one government and be as a State policy and If it is possible to look far beyond the political ups and downs of our Latin American nation, what do you think of that? the the main weakness that we found in our political project was that We put our best Minds and our best leaders From years and decades of Social and militant work into the state and we left civil society you can call it sort of empty, right? The leaders from civil society Went to work in the government and then when we lost the government. We didn't have civil society anymore so even though on in the Theoretical construction of our political project. We knew that Popular power right so the power of the people and citizens participation was absolutely key in the practice That was lost over the years So more many of the leaders that I mentioned from civil society who participated in the construction of the new constitution with time went to work for the government and Then there was nobody to keep the pressure on either this government or the next government or the next To keep the policies in place so I'm convinced that any future intent both in Ecuador and elsewhere in Latin America implies having a strong social movement to Keep the demands in place and not to basically conform when a center left or a progressive Government arrives to to power so and and and a leftist or center-left government Has to be conscious of that as well and to try to keep pouring ideas resources and developing new leadership in in social movements and civil society, so I think that is the real sort of strong answer to to that Hi So thank you so much for your talk. It's more than education for democracy. I would say emancipatory education So I am from Brazil, but I work at the opening University But they're very close to the University of Amazon in Brazil So I would like to know if Your ideas open policy if you are working together with other countries Including Brazil. Yes, just because I think that it working on this idea of Social innovation together with the people who are there Might be stronger Yeah, thank you for in the case of the regional Amazon University Ikeam that we did have collaboration with University in Manaus in Brazil Especially trying to partner around the the biodiversity and biopiracy issues But in general there is not enough Both social and government the coordination efforts in terms of knowledge policy I think that in Latin America it's still viewed as too far away from the immediate priorities of giving food to everybody or You know economic policy or trying to survive But if if there's not a Group of people at least trying to work on this it would be too hard one of my campaign proposals last year was to work in the context of Latin American regional framework To have Latin American Erasmus, right? So that we could have you know a hundred thousand Latin Americans do exchanges among universities in the region So that you could build a strong social base for these transformations that that we need and for You know fraternity purposes as well So yeah, I mean there's a lot that can be done with very little but I just I Seem that when I talk about these things it seems like I'm talking about Too far from the immediate priorities of other politicians. You know what I mean So hopefully that that can that can change with time once we realize that we are in the 21st century Hi, Nicole Sad here from the Wikimedia Foundation. Thank you so much for your talk I feel like this is the first time in a long time that I've been inspired by a politician So thank you for that So my question for you is so I come from the Wikimedia movement and our mission Are one of the pillars of our mission is on knowledge equity and so when you are showing About the University and the Amazon where they're doing all of this research I could think that Wikimediants would immediately want them to like start creating Wikipedia articles about You know the things that are being published and so Thinking about you know protection of indigenous knowledge and and all of the things you were sharing about like Biopiracy and and that's like what are the ethical guidelines you would suggest for Wikimediants and OER Developers as we think about knowledge equity and ensuring representation and closing knowledge gaps while also safeguarding indigenous knowledge and indigenous communities Yeah, I mean I I perhaps won't get into to all the details of ethical behavior in terms of OER For indigenous knowledge But I guess the main principle is to work together with the indigenous communities, right? So it takes a plane to go there and to try to say how much of this do you want to open up and how much Could be used even for promotional purposes, but that when you know the real deal comes Then then it can it can actually represent an alternative economic alternative for indigenous communities in terms of the ancestral wisdom I Think That that is the real Challenge is to work together and that's the idea of of the regional Amazon University because it's placed there we had a challenge in the first year of the University because Only about four students the first year were from the actual Amazon All the others were from other parts of Ecuador that went to the Amazon so you could think of that as internal colonialism and And we said Why we need to change this so we had to come up with explicit affirmative action policies So that students from the Amazon would want to study there and not only from the Amazon But actually from the communities themselves want to go there and we we eventually changed that so I think That's the kind of thing that has to be done. You know to try to have the local communities govern themselves and Whatever we can do to support them with you know Knowledge and so on to get there. Yeah, but there are I think a lot of discussions around this and you can probably find ethical standards At the UN level for this as well Okay, so please join me in thanking Andreas for our fantastic talk. Thanks so much