 I'm sure Dominic will continue that trend with this topic. So you can see some slides appearing now. So. All right. Hello, everybody. Thank you for having me and also thank you to all the presenters before me for this very interesting insights. Now I see different slides again. I'm not sure that's just me or someone. I think we're probably going to be there with me one second. Dominic, I think we're almost. I can just introduce myself. I'm Dominic. I'm working for the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. And there I'm responsible for the coordination of the Free Education Alliance, which is an alliance of a variety of actors who work together to influence decision making processes, to influence the German educational sector. During the talk, I want to talk about how we work, how we try to manage to set some impulses to change some legislative procedures, and also talk about the challenges that we face and the opportunities that we have by working together in a collaborative process. Now I see my slides also, so I can go ahead. Well, the definition of open education resources, I believe, is very known to everyone here in the chat. So I'm going to skip that. But I also want to emphasize that we understand open education as a whole, as a collection of approaches for the promotion of educational equity. So in addition to open education resources, the content, we also deal with educational practice and technologies. Our approach is that education should be accessible, participatory, and democratic. We as an alliance understand education as a human right. And we believe that the enforcement of this right for everyone is indispensable for a functioning democratic society. Sorry. Yeah, well, we see that among the teachers, there's already a culture of sharing, which is very sensible. And furthermore, right now, we have the problem that it is very difficult to share proprietary materials that are not openly licensed. And we try to improve the framework of that. We are committed to preserve this culture of sharing, which is lived within the institution and bring it to the digital world. So to give you a little bit of a background where we are working in and what's happening in Germany, I want to talk about the last few years. So we were off to a good start. We had guidelines from the Ministry of Education in 2015 and 16, which were meant to promote open education resources and projects about this topic. And also in 2016, the federal states developed a strategy for education in the digital world. And then two years ago in 2018, we had a new election. And the new coalition in Germany promised us in the coalition agreement the development of a comprehensive open education resources strategy. So to 2018, everything seemed like going the right direction. We had the promotion of open education and the projects. But after 2018 and after the promise that was made by the coalition, Germany while the German government went into a different direction, it started to not prolong the promotion of open education resources, but it started to just finance technical infrastructure, try to give schools smart boards and the Wi-Fi connection. But they didn't think about the background behind it. Like it was very short-sighted. And the promotion of the openness and the required practice of sharing and participation was not longer in the art of promotion. So in 2019, they came up with this digital pack, which was kind of quite right because they laid down the foundation for the school systems to finally digitize the educational field. They supported them, as I said, with electronic blackboards, learning software. But they lacked in really promoting and helping the teachers to get to know how to use this infrastructure, how to do open educational practices. Also, because the digital pack was not very specified, a lot of dependencies on certain software arose, and proprietary companies, bigger companies, went into the schools and made them dependable from their products. So as we are right now, we are in this situation where the politicians are very short-sighted. They don't look at the competences that you have to have in the digital field, but they just look at the tools and the infrastructure and just trying to fund this technical side of the digital education. We, as an alliance that is an association of various actors, organizations, and also people from schools and universities, we want to promote a more holistic educational view. And we also try to make suggestions how to promote open practices, open education resources. Our main goal is to reduce social inequality and increase participation. We have around 30 members, single members. On this picture, you see a few of them from the meeting that we have once a year. And also, we have 18 organizations which are officially members of the Alliance. The Alliance was founded in 2014 by Creative Commons, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Wikimedia Germany. All these actors work together in a collective impacts approach, which you can summarize by this proverb. If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. More scientifically, you have different kinds of impacts or different kinds of coordinated action. So collective impact is more than just a coordinated impact. That is aligned with activities. It's collaborative action. Collaboration has to be stressed here. That all runs towards one goal. The structure of the collective impact has five main frames. It's, first of all, the common agenda. You have to have a common goal. You have to have a measurement system. You need to measure success. And you need to realize if you're going in the right direction or not. To reach the success, you reinforce your activities, you coordinate your activities through continuous communication. And usually, in the collective impact approach, there is one backbone organization, someone who coordinates and promotes this communication and the activities. For the free educational Alliance, we have a common agenda. That's our mission. We see ourselves as a forum and platform for actors. Everyone can come and share ideas about how the education sector could be improved. And we're trying to put that together in position papers, statement strategies, and bring them to the political decision makers. Our vision or our goal is threefold. We want to reduce social education inequality and strengthen social participation through open practices. We dream of a world where educational materials are accessible, usable, and changeable without legal and technical hurdles. And also, we see the need that software and infrastructure should be freely and openly accessible for everyone in the educational sector. Talking about how do we see if we are going in this direction? We come together once a year, talk about our goals for the next year, and try to measure our success. With this framework, we see if our arguments from position paper strategies make it into political strategies, positions of decision makers, or now also of educational institutions. So we are following an impact-driven approach. How we try to get the arguments into the political strategies. We have an ongoing open dialogue with decision makers. We advocate for our positions. We also have host an event once a year where we put together people from the education sector and people from the politics from the parliament to really engage with each other and debate about the future of the education sector. We collaboratively created the position paper. It's the origin is in German, but I have the link here for the English translation. And we are at summits and try to promote our ideas. This is the picture of the last form of medication. If you know some German politicians, you can find some in these pictures. And then also, there are a lot of really engaged people from the open education community. Our alliance has monthly calls. We have half-yearly meetings. We communicate continuously. And also, we work in working groups together. Well, yeah. And there's a backbone that's supported by Wikimedia. That's me, the coordinator, who tries to keep it all together. And we have a comprehensive, well, everything else that we do, all the activities is volunteer work. And we act with the consensus procedure. So everyone always has to engage and really stands behind what we're doing. Some learnings. Well, it's always important that all the activities and the goals that you try to achieve are really clearly stated. Communication is crucial internally, especially to get everyone involved, but also externally to really have success when you try to set some impulses. And if you work with a really big group of volunteers, it's important to have patience because everyone is just doing their best. But I think it's worth it to really come together and work together on political positioning because together you're louder. And if someone goes ahead, a lot of people, it's easier for a lot of people to follow. So my call to action to everyone is that you should get together, show your diversity, show the diversity in the educational fields in your country or in your region. Be welcoming to different approaches, different ideas. And when you talk to politicians, you have to stay persistent. It sometimes takes two or four years to get something in the political field. But sometimes it's just you don't know that something is going to change in the next day. So yeah, that's my call to action. And I don't think we have time for questions, but here's my contact data so you can reach me whenever and we can talk about maybe founding another coalition in your country. Thank you for that, Donnie. We do have time. I appreciate we're in too much. But I will give you the opportunity to ask questions. I did ask. Right, so we do have a question from Kathy. So she asks you, do you feel like the pandemic offers support for your work? Or does the crisis perspective hinder and distract from it? Because of the pandemic, the ministry really had to consider what to do in this situation right now. And the ministry made it possible to have more fundings for projects that also can promote open education. So right now, the alliance is working on an infrastructure on a hub that would make open education resources more accessible for everyone to support teachers and educators with their online teaching for the next few weeks. So there is, well, actually, there is a really big opportunity that just came up to really transform the education feed in Germany just because of the pandemic. It's good to hear that something positive is coming out of all of us. I think there's appreciation into the work and interest in the work that you're doing. So we have time for one more question. If anyone else has something for Dominic, again, if you want to raise your hand, we can get a microphone to you. If not, I appreciate all our presenters and the time that they've taken to share their work today so we can show our appreciation to Dominic and also Martin, Maggie, and Chris. We will let you go away and grab your breakfast, lunch, dinner, evening meal, wherever it's happening in your time zone. And I hope you get a chance to relax for a bit before our last sessions of the conference resume. Thank you.