 So let's kick off on this very exciting community engagement session. I'd like to start by introducing Mark Martin. He's an assistant professor in computer science and education practice at the New College of the Humanities in London and co-founder of UK Black Tech. He's a thought leader in ed tech sharing his expertise and insights to educators around the world. He advises major global tech brands and continues to advocate for homegrown talent, digital skills and education equity. In 2019, he was awarded an MBE for services to education, technology and diversity in UK technology. And earlier this year, he was recognised as one of the top 50 most influential people in UK IT. So I'd like to hand it over to Mark now. Thank you for having me. Let me just make sure my camera is working. Can you see me? Yes, I can Mark. Awesome. So I'm going to share my screen. So today I want to explore digital community engagement and thank you for the introduction. I've been working in education for the last 18 years now. And one of my first jobs in education was all about encouraging professionals to use online platforms. And over the last decade, I've had the privilege of upskilling myself and working with a range of different big tech organisations showing good practice of how I've kind of built these online communities at various stages in my career. And these kind of badges or awards have shown some of the kind of companies that I've worked with in terms of how do we make an online experience relevant to the target audience that we're trying to serve? How do we impact communities? How do we impact users or give people a voice or a space to be themselves? And one of the things that I always think about in education is the helicopter view because I think if you're in institutions or if you're sometimes been in a place for a long time, it can very be like you're in a fishbowl. But what does the ocean look like? What does the ecosystem look like for our young people or the target audience that we're trying to serve? And here's just a picture of thinking about the micro, meso, exo and macro systems. And when you're building online communities, do you think about the different layers of audiences or stakeholders that the user needs to engage with? And one of the kind of things that's worked for me, especially in education, is around we know that students have churches, libraries, faith groups, afterschool clubs, parents, they've got policies that manage them, they've got ideologies of culture, actually choosing all of that. And when we're thinking about our target audience, do we drill in? Do we drill in and look at the different types of systems that they operate in? So as I was saying, these are some of the qualifications that I've been awarded in the past in terms of managing online systems. And then when we think about the different type of systems, as I was saying before, do we think about the different layers of engagement? And that's really helped me in terms of me really being able to see it from a 50,000 feet view in terms of how we're supposed to impact the target audience. And then I want one step further in terms of a lot of the communities or people that we want to get online. What if they're starting from a non-digital place? What if they're starting from a place of they don't have the equipment or they don't have the insight or they don't have the networks, they don't have communities. And I put this image out probably about six years ago to try and help the education system think about how do we help people from becoming a consumer in tech to a creator? How do we help schools from the basic model of being a school with not being no tech experts or nothing in there? And how do we help them to connect them to the industry? And then I kind of push the boundaries in terms of if I want my students to use an online platform or communities to use online platforms, let me upskill the family. So I've done a family club for about five weeks, which was empowering parents to be able to navigate the online community as relevant as the students. And then I, again, I went into the elderly community too to feel that if I'm training up students to use these digital online platforms, could those students then transfer those skills to a different type of audience within our community. So we created this ecosystem and, you know, probably most of you are coming from different disciplines and different institutions. Do you have an ecosystem around the platforms that you're using? Or is it just that you put content on the platform and, you know, you do a few advertisements in different channels trying to get people in? But actually, is there another layer of engagement? And then at the school it's funny because when I first was running the online platform, it was called Fronter at the time for the only one working in education. It was a very clunky platform and, you know, students, the lack of engagement wasn't there. So again, creating this ecosystem around creating an award system. So we award students and teachers for engaging with the platforms and then with students, I trained them up and then they were able to train the trainer. So they were able to give that advice. But sometimes with online platforms, there's this perception thing where you've probably built something. And this is probably where user experience comes in and really drilling into your target audience. There's sometimes a misperception of like what is it supposed to do? What is the why? What is the purpose? Is it purpose driven? Is it performance driven? Why are we building these online platforms? Who are we trying to engage? Do we know the people that we're trying to engage? We probably have an idea and we have, you know, a tick list of who we want to involve. But sometimes what you find is that there's a mismatch and sometimes that mismatch again can come back to this thing what I was saying before around having these different type of systems. Do we understand, you know, the global context to if you're going to build this kind of online platform? And now I'm going to move over to more of the work that I've been doing with UK Black Tech and, you know, reaching a wider world global audience on these online platforms. Do we understand the historical view, cultural view, religious view, human view? Because sometimes what we do is that when we build these platforms, it could be siloed to the people that we feel that would appreciate it or we make some assumptions. And it's really, you know, really detrimental for making assumptions of how we expect people to navigate our online sites and so forth. And then, you know, there is a need to get this right. If we don't get this right, then it can lead to misinformation and to establishment, distrust and popularism in the sense that no one's listening to the concerns. So we understand that, you know, if we don't get these online platforms to a certain point or relevance to our target audience, there could be some potential backlash to it. And, you know, some of the solutions that we've done in the past, I'm going to share some in a minute around co-creation. So we try and find the stakeholders. Who are the stakeholders that don't have a voice on our online platforms or when we're trying to engage? And one of the things that we had done in education, as I said, we kind of connected with parents. We make sure that parents were heavily involved in the process, but also we made sure that the community, whether it was silver surfers, whether it was just the public engaging too. And similar with UK Black Tech in the sense that we had to dive into our community to see what the real need is for Black technologists using this platform. And then we thought about representation, the language and tone. Sometimes the language and tone that we put on these online platforms can be scary for some individuals or it may present more issues if it's not, again, going back to the previous slide, if there's not a historical view, if there's not a wider context. Are we looking at from a global view, a local view, a regional view? How are we looking at the context? And if you're looking at from a global view, have you asked the people who are part of that global market what they feel about the tool too? So there's so much different questions that we had to ask ourselves. And then the last thing around accessibility, which is sometimes an afterthought when we build these online platforms in terms of how we make in this relevant around, especially around neurodiversity and the range of different other complexities that people have when accessing platforms. So one of the things that we decided to do is look at the community needs and look at the identity of our platform. Can people bring their identity to the platform? Will they find acceptance within our community? Is our community engaging and relatable? Is there a sense of belonging? That's what people want on these online platforms. Most online platforms that do well, there's a sense of belonging and people can bring their identity. Whether it's a funny picture or a picture of a cat or whatever it is of their profile, but they come in and we definitely saw that with some of these NFT communities where they had all of these different images and they rallied around these images and they supported each other. They went into this group, they had conferences. There was really like this really sense of belonging because there was some sort of commonality. And then connections is the connection genuine that we're trying to make when we are thinking about bringing people into this kind of online space. So UK Black Tech launched in 2017 and we was presented with some of these challenges in the sense that how do we support underrepresented technologists within the tech sector? How can we create a space where individuals that historically might have felt that they didn't have a platform or their voices weren't heard? How do we give them a profile? And when I looked at the stats this morning, I thought I shared them with you in terms of on our newsletter, we've got over 1,000 followers, Twitter, 9,000 Instagram to meet up, LinkedIn and so forth. And then when we looked at our makeup of our community, 60% of our community are women. So a lot of times when they say, hey, where's all the female technologists, especially Black female technologists, it seems that whatever we're doing, which I'm going to show you, that we are changing the narrative and we are showcasing that actually the talent is here, but sometimes it's about the access, it's about the opportunities, it's about the awareness, do they know that these things exist? And then 60% working in tech for over three years and 35% under 25. And then this is the collective, the advisors on the team, so it's a range of us from all different types of expertise and so forth. And the thing that I think made the difference for UK Black Tech when we launched, we've done a stock photos project and we put it on our website and it's been downloaded hundreds of thousands of time because one of the things that our community said is that we just don't can't find pictures of ourselves to put in our pitch decks or in our presentations and so forth. And this stock photo was built out of our online community because we knew what the problem was and we quickly addressed it by doing a photo shoot in a tech office in London and then being able to share these photos. And we made sure that women were the leaders in the majority of photos so they're still free on our platform and also on Splash, but we made sure we always position women as the leaders, the four leaders and the visionaries because that's the perception that we need to have when we're thinking about the future of technology and how we promote and pop people up. And then we also started to put out articles in terms of there's so much technology in part of our community, let's share their story, let's share their experiences and let's share their intellectualism. And one of the things that we've done with UK Black Tech is that we focused on their intellectualism quite heavily and again for us we felt that that stand to raise the bar when we're thinking about the next 50 to 100 years of technology. Yes, there are things to talk about in the DNI space and I think there's quite a few other groups that do that well, but for us we felt that actually let's get the Black, underrepresented technologists talking about some of the challenges in today's world, raising the bar of that perception in the fact is that they're not just contributors, they are innovators, they're changing the landscape, they're changing the narrative. And again, that's one thing that's really grown up community over the last couple years. And then we put our report similar around how technology is improving the, how can technology improve the local high street? And again, the way we wrote this report is we embedded in DNI, so the report didn't involve DNI, but the people that wrote it came from all different types of backgrounds. So our kind of approach to our online community is again that sense of belonging is embedded, it's not just the thing where it stands out, it's kind of a flash pan thing or it's sticking out like a soft thumb. We want to normalize the experience, the online experience for our technologists, so that anyone who comes to our platform actually sees that, yeah, I can be a part of this, I can see myself innovating and talking about the future of tech or in that relevant field. And then with our online community, we give them a space to introduce themselves. So on your platforms, you give a space where people can share who they are. We have a general section, we have career talks, news, cold resource, open sources, and projects. And again, we try and populate this as much as we can. And we use this called, most people use Slack, some people use Avakind of online platforms, but we use this called because that's the trendy thing and probably that has probably improved my street credit amongst the young people who love it for gaming. And then last but not least, just to summarize, I know I've spoken for a little while here, but here are some of the takeaways that we found when we're building these online communities, especially in education and especially for this technologists group. It's around consistency. It's about finding whether you've got a team, it's about how can you be consistent in that process. We've got an event on Monday where we're trying to support charities and organizations looking for technologies, because that's one of the things is that some organizations say, well, Mark, how do you find people that can help us to drive consistent content so it reaches our target audience? That's a challenge, but it's about finding that talent, relevancy. Is the information and content on the platform, can people see themselves in it? Is it relevant to them? Is it hitting some of the things that we've spoken about by giving them a global view of current affairs? Is it engaging accessible user experience and different stakeholders? I can't stress that enough about how do we get different stakeholders who don't look and smell like us to be able to critique us on our platforms? Yes, we've had a lot of feedback in the past that has been challenging for us, but we've had to kind of listen to the pain points and see where we can support them going forward. So I think I'll end there and hopefully that's a foundation for a further discussion. That's marvellous. Thank you very much, Mark. That was a really wonderful overview of some of the practical social issues that we should be thinking about. Everybody, if you could put questions for Mark and for Patrick in the Q&A, and we'll come back to those questions at the end. Mark, if you'd like to switch your camera off for now, we'll bring you back in after Patrick's part of the session. So I'd like to introduce Patrick Towell now. He is the Innovation Director of the Audience Agency, UK's leading organisation for sector intelligence and audience insight for the arts, culture and heritage sector. He writes on innovation, design, enterprise and resilience. Within the UK, he's a financial and business advisor for Arts Council England, who co-led the development of the Digital Maturity Framework underpinning the DCMS Arts Council England National Lottery Heritage Fund, Digital Culture Compass. Internationally, he has had leadership roles in two national government information services, and is a global policy research fellow at the Institute of Technology and Society, the Think Tank for the Global South. I hand over to you, Mark. I'm sorry, to you, Patrick. Apologies. No problem. It's nice to be confused with Mark, and I'm going to try to share my screen, and hopefully that's going to behave. Let's just double check, and I'll go full screen, and hopefully that's visible. Is that working? It is working, Patrick. Brilliant. I'm sat in a moderately hot but not ridiculously hot little office in an old cottage in Cornwall, which is near where I grew up. It's not the house I grew up in, but it's with friends. If the phone rings, excuse me, it's not my house, but I will mute myself, and I'm wearing not the right glasses because I've broken my other ones, so that they're very cheap Amazon ones. I've got brown hair and a goatee and a stripy blue polo neck. There you go. That's me. It's wonderful to get the chance to share a bit about this project, and I have to say I'm standing on the shoulders of giants here. I'm the director of consulting for the whole of the audience agency and our digital inclusion lead, and one of our senior evaluation consultants, so Penny, Liam and Nicky. This is their work, but hopefully I'm contextualizing it for you. So this is unusual funding. This is a kind of DCMS money via the Heritage Fund, the Digital Skills for Heritage program. We had a luminary and helpful steering group, and I would like to thank the National Archives, Film Archives, UK, Historic England Heritage Trust Network, and Larra Ratnaraja Art UK, British Library, and Archives and Records Association. This was intersectional, as I'll go on to say, and interdisciplinary this project. There is no simple answer, as I think we've heard from Mark, to making participation in arts, culture, and heritage work with digital, so we used many people's brains here. But why did we do a project of this kind around democratizing archives using digital technology? Well, it's part of our mission. So we're there to support the arts, culture, and heritage sectors. Our mission, if you look at our piece, about enabling them to increase their reach and their impact and their own resilience as organizations and their relevance. But also, we have another part of our mission, which is to represent or give voice to audiences, or one might even just say people, the public, citizens, and indeed all the other people who aren't citizens, who live in the UK and call it home. And so this is one of the models that we have internally about a kind of range of, in a sense, perhaps the more on the left hand side, the more traditional idea of a venue or a destination that's kind of managed by professional experts, kind of people. And then as we go over to the right, we're more into a range of being co-designed, co-delivered, co-created with communities and users and audiences and visitors and customers, whatever we're calling them. And indeed, there may be a different combination of those things every day. To be honest, on this model, we disagree about it internally. I think that there's another thing on the right hand side, which is where then it entirely starts with the community and in a way you kind of work left towards towards having some arts and culture and heritage, but that's perhaps a more anarchic view. So what this project was, was us managing a network of action research projects. So we used all of our networks of all of the other things funded in the same tranche and all of our people that we work with. We running the audience find a service for Arts Council, England Arts Council, Wales and Greater Scotland. We do have relationships with every regularly funded arts culture and heritage organisation in the UK. And then we reached out to more people and more people and more people. And so you'll see that in the end, we ended up with a surprisingly large for 10 places, 76 applications, which was just amazing. And I think the thing that you'll see is that these were not the usual suspects. I'll just see why. So the kind of idea was to engage genuinely new people who perhaps wouldn't ever think of engaging with an archive. An archive wouldn't be a thing, then might not be the more culturally engaged in the sense of formal culture. And so it was great to have an LGBT organisation. And obviously, there's many different stories from different points of view to be told for that community. And then the Jewish Museum in London was looking at kind of geo referencing. And I think there is definitely kind of stories of place and journeys over time in that project. We had the colonial history and decolonialisation, if I'm saying that word correctly, issues are definitely within this project. Although, of course, that wasn't only about that, but certainly as a kind of who's voice, who's archive, who controls the narrative. Then we had, and Mark mentioned, well, women and indeed, not men, from diverse backgrounds, building an extending archive. And so, in fact, we had significant extensions to existing archives and some genuinely new archives built throughout this project. It was really exciting. There's some kind of really important history. I remember doing a project on all the regional film archives of England, kind of when they were about to be annihilated by the simultaneous abolition of the Screen Agencies and the UK Film Council. And it's interesting because the kind of National Archive, the National Film Archive of the BFI, it tends to be quite a lot about film, but the regional stuff tends to be quite a lot about people in place. And it's a different sense. The film is a recording medium. Of course, there's some technique things and still a moving image that is interesting in itself. But in a way, it's about the people in places that you're capturing. So, we had still image, we had moving image, we had quite a mixture of organisations, so some that were cultural, some that were local authorities, some that were community-led organisations, some that were media companies. It's a real mixture. For those of you who haven't seen about Cinema Nation, based in Merseyside, they're a really interesting group. And so, this was, again, looking at technologies to create and interact with the archive material. I think it's interesting for those of us who wrestle with collections management system and digital asset management systems, sometimes it feels like the interaction and participation bit is an afterthought to some of those products. This was something that was addressing a certain group of young people and looking at gaming and understanding, conceiving gaming as culture, which I increasingly think that we need to do, because it is part of many people's culture. Another thing that was looking at women's experience from a feminist point of view, and that's a gallop. But I think we can see, of course, I won't say, of course, but we did have some London-based things, but this is quite a good geographical spread. It was an England-only project. I don't know why we didn't have more from the Southwest, but in fact, we do do quite a lot of other projects that are quite specific to the Southwest, so across the portfolio of all the different things that we do, we are more balanced than that. And I promised Karen that I would share some of the findings, so apologies. This is a gallop, and we will share the presentations, obviously, and also links to resources coming out of this. So in summary, although it was 10 research projects, because they were often consortia and collaborations, partnerships, there was quite a wide range of organisations there, and quite a large number, given the kind of modest scale of what was being done and that limited timescale of participants. One of the reflections was that it takes time to build trust in relationships. There's a tendency to think that digital is instant and everything's very quick and whatever, but the headline is about participation and democratisation, and that's got a different rhythm and timescale to it. So I think on reflection, perhaps we would add perhaps three to six months on to the timescale, but one of the outcomes that we wanted to have was that people, both in the organisations and in the communities, felt that they'd developed new skills, that these were kind of transferrable, and looking at the detail of the evaluation reports, this is everything from really sophisticated 3D capture and also 3D information modelling, all the way through to people saying that's the first time they've ever clicked on the mouseable laptop. And so I just think that the breadth of skills here is really fascinating. And of course, some of those skills are about archiving, are about online publishing, are about kind of, as it says at the bottom here, kind of digital service recipes, this idea of a kind of model of a particular framing of the way that you can build a digital service. And so there was an impact on, although the headline was digital, actually this impacted on a general approach to community engagement, you know, people are people and you might use digital or non-digital means to engage with them. And in fact, I think as we, our general conclusion is that there's a kind of blended approach that you always need. And I think probably all the people listening know this, but it's worth having it reinforced that creative activities in a sense of kind of animation of those things, but not necessarily by experts, either archive experts or subject matter experts, but just by people. And the digital tools can actually help people undertake creative activities themselves. And there's an interplay here. So there's archiving and all of those kind of information skills index in cataloging, record keeping, and also importantly kind of the consent side of things. And so both the community archives and the participants learned stuff around archiving and the kind of formal nature of that. And one of the themes, again, it may seem obvious to us, but is where is this idea of preservation. And of course, no one has the silver bullet for digital preservation. You know, I've been to lots of events by, you know, British Library and Microsoft and all the way down to smaller organizations. And, you know, none of us have the perfect answer. We're all scratching our heads, especially with kind of born digital content, but that doesn't mean we mustn't try and solve that problem. And there's a subject matter kind of outcomes of people, for all that they may, you know, I'm LGBT, I think I know about LGBT activism. But in fact, every time I read stuff, it's kind of like, oh, there's a set of people or a set of key turning points in the history of UK rights that I didn't know about. It was the 50th Pride this year. And so I learned some more looking at archives, actually, strangely. And maybe that's not so strange. But there's an interplay here. So many, many times, the community archives and the community-led organizations actually had something to teach the formal archives. There was definitely an interchange that, you know, the community ones could learn more about preservation and some of the archiving techniques. But the way of allowing people to co-lead and co-create is something that the formal archives took on. So this idea of this peer learning group, the 10 projects, it was just amazing. And, you know, both in the project leads and the participants are very much more diverse set of people than we would see in a lot of heritage projects. And I'm almost to the end, you may be relieved to know, this systematic way of collecting information, the importance of preservation, and then the more tricky things around the ethics of everything to do with this, whose voice, whose story. And if you're doing oral history work or you're including content from individuals, making sure that where that's come from and that that contribution is acknowledged and that, in a sense, the digital world is often about allowing a diversity of viewpoints to be represented. So doing that in a way that's fair but safe. I think just reflecting for us, the projects responded and engaged. They really appreciated the support and fairly informal way that we have. And mentioning and training this kind of cohort of projects helping each other. There was quite a lot of communications and requests to information. Sometimes comes with that kind of funding but us trying to find a way to simplify it. As I mentioned before, we probably needed to give them maybe three to six months more to have more impact and build relationships. The question for us is, what's next? Because it's very clear that this was something quite special, quite exciting. There's the whole digital divide. Not everyone has equal access to digital technologies or equal confidence, recognising that a blended approach is what's required. And I think that's probably enough for now. That's great, Patrick. Thank you very much and thank you, Mark. If you could put your camera back on again, Mark, and we can have a Q&A session. I find both your talks absolutely fascinating. Mark, when you were talking about that idea of upskilling a whole ecosystem around it, you know, families, the elderly, youngsters and students and how they can help each other, and Patrick, when you were talking about all the diverse communities and archives and projects that were coming together in your work, it really shows those different communities that are out there. And there was a question chat that reflects on this. But I wanted to really talk to you very broadly about how do we attract those voices? How do we give them their voice? You talked about Mark's representation, language and tone and some of the things that we put together. But at that time, how do we actually really reach out and engage with different audiences and really engage them for the long term? Yeah, so what we try and do is that we try and do it from, sometimes we just do practical roundtables. Before we even design something, let's get a roundtable, some outliers, some people that we won't think about actually when we are building these online tools. Because sometimes this is the afterthought. We get the techies in, we got the vision, we've got the budget, we've got the funding, and then we think about all the other stuff that we want to include too. So what we try and do from the offset is, who are the voices that we need to be thinking about? Could we just set up a practical roundtable or whether it's a survey or reach out to them, go out into their spaces? Sometimes we want them to come to us, but why don't we just go out and reach to them and see what they want and what their ambitions are and so forth. And that's kind of some of the successes that we've had in the past. I think we were one step removed here, so we were not ourselves doing the engagement. I think that the diversity of the people running the projects and their organisations reflecting the communities that they engaged with was the key factor. And this has, I think, potentially quite big implications for the heritage workforce and indeed the wider arts culture workforce. It's not representative of UK society. It's trying to be, but it isn't. And the only way that you can have things differently framed is through a diversity of people in control as well as participating. Great. And I have one very general question for both of you, but we'll be slightly putting both of you on the spot, so be prepared. So what do you think is the biggest thing that you've learned in your respect to projects? Were there any surprising revelations or discoveries in these journeys? Sometimes you've got to listen to people's grumbles, right? So we felt that by building this online platform, originally people were just going to come on it and just wine and dine and do all the things that are expected. And what we found is that the community just wanted one element of it. And we were like, no, but we spent all the time building 90% of this really shiny toy and so forth. And then we had to take a step back and focus on that 10% what our community wanted. And what they wanted was just more of a space to network and to know each other because what they found is that their networks are so small in terms of who they can collaborate with, who they can partner with. And then on our platform now we've got Innovation Hub, we've set up a speakers bureau and so forth. So we had to listen to all of these kind of elements that our community wanted amongst our e-goals and sometimes our pride. Sometimes it's the ego, the pride, the working groups that kill the creativity when it comes to really thinking about, you know, how do we really serve these communities and so forth? Goodness, simple but hard questions. I think that a mixture, a diversity of the diversity, I mean, you know, our geography diversity wasn't so hot, I have to say, across England. But in terms of different communities and communities who you're not seeing regularly in relation to collections and archives, I think that it was really remarkable. And I think what's fascinating is how very different communities with different lived experience can nevertheless learn the kind of one step remove things from a particular community or particular subject matter about how to engage people with archives, how digital tools has a role in that, how you are mindful of people's digital challenges and barriers, how you want people to be able to express themselves creatively and their identity through what they're contributing and recognise that contribution. That's great. And I've got one round here which is about sustainability and supporting communities in the long term. There are a couple of questions that asked similar, slightly different things. So in terms of the community archives projects that were funded as one-time grants, you know, is it where's the sustainability element and that will they be going on? Is that going to be, are those projects going to be carried on through community involvement or did they understand this was an ephemeral project, funded projects that happened as we often found with archival funding. But then also in terms of more generally supporting communities to carry on and to continue to engage in projects. So Patrick, if I could turn to you first and then Mark. Yes. So that's, there was a bound to what we were able to do. We ourselves bid for money for the whole programme, then quite a lot of that money we dispersed and it was emphatically money to do action research. However, I would say that it was very little bit to the question also in the Q&A about skills. It was about that action research was towards building capacity in those organisations or consortia of organisations and communities to enable this stuff to continue. Some of the projects that I do very, very deliberately look at enterprise, entrepreneurship, financial resilience, business models, all of those kinds of things. Couldn't do that in this. There was so much to do just in terms of digital technologies and new models of participation. We couldn't overload the project. So I agree that we did not have at some kind of explicit what's the ongoing sustainability of this as a strand. We didn't. That's one of the questions that we ask ourselves and perhaps that fund or another funders of what, how we can generally fund these kinds of projects and generally make these kinds of archives and the organisations around them more sustainable. But I think it's definitely the case that the organisations taking part have more capacity to do what they want to do. So that isn't going to magically turn into money. But I think that certainly it will embolden them to bid for more money. Yeah. What we found in the past is that especially when we want to keep these online projects sustainable, there's a funding issue. There's also an issue around how people fill out grants. So say, for example, your smaller community that doesn't is not used to filling out grant forms. How do you do that and then connect to the wider ecosystem? And then when we think about some of the problems, so one of the things that we've been working on recently is around clean air. And there's so much that you can talk about clean air from, you know, the historical point, you could talk about the innovation point and so forth. And we felt that we just want to work with companies that want to support us in that momentum. So we've worked with Dyson Foundation, we've worked with the GLA and we've worked with a few other organisations. But when it comes to that sustainability piece, what we've tried to do is actually align ourselves with other companies or tech companies that believe in the same vision too. But funding is an issue. And my concern is that sometimes when that funding runs out, what is the life of that project or the stuff that you've been building with this online community? How do you preserve it if you haven't got the staff in or the resources? And going to that idea of just a follow-up on the project, this was specifically for Patrick. But of the 76 applications where 10 projects came out of it, of the ones that didn't get through, were there pathways suggested for those that didn't make that cut about how they could be supported or, you know, other ways that they could, you know, work with their communities or build their collections around their communities? Excuse me. I'm pretty certain that we'll have suggested other funding sources. So the Heritage Fund itself has other smaller grants programmes and Arts Council England has project grants and also has kind of place-based grants. So it depends how ambitious people are being and how kind of uniterally around a small archive it is or how it might be part of a wider, say, potentially regeneration of an area, something that's based within a building that has footfall from the community or whatever. So there are those options and then as we're publishing the findings from the reports, from the projects and case studies of all of them, then we will be back in contact with all of the applicants and kind of go, know that you didn't make it this time, but hope that you have, in some cases it may be that they were inspired to in a sense do what they were planning to do anyway, but on a kind of shoestring basis. I want to kind of pick up on what Mark was saying, you know, I think in some cases with some subject matter and with some locations there may be companies, there may be local businesses who see it as part of their kind of community engagements, CSR work to support this. So I think it's important for people to not just look to public sources. And I want to go on to the question of skills and Patrick, the question that we had was directed to you, but I think it's really to both of you in terms of for the work that you're doing, you know, either this project or the work that you're doing Mark and Black Tech and your other projects, how do you identify the skills to focus on, you know, in terms of when you're working with your, you know, the elderly community or upskilling families or does it come from the communities themselves to a certain extent? Is it a dialogue that you have with the Black Tech work? Is it you're bringing certain things that you think are core, but then there are other things coming into the conversation? And just your thoughts on that? It's interesting, as a technologist, we don't teach digital skills or technology so that everyone's going to become a programmer or cold hour or whatever. We actually teach it so you can understand the world around you even better than you had before. It's just like literacy or numeracy. And the way we pitch it, that means it's accessible for most people that want to enhance old skill sets and want to work with us to get to a certain place of opportunities or awareness of the opportunities that's in the sector. And then, you know, the whole thing of also a lot of organizations struggle to find talent too. How do we tackle that in terms of, you know, if we lack the skills internally? How, which, you know, how do we engage with other organizations? So again, we work with universities in terms of giving students work experience and so forth. So in terms of the skill economy, we try and look at both end of the pendulum in terms of what does the community need? And then also what does we need as an organization? And is there any ever kind of partners that we can tap into to enhance those skill sets? But I'll probably leave on to Patrick. Probably might have a few more ideas around that. Right. Well, I love what you said about literacy, Mark. So I'm trying to find the link and I will show it later. The one by one project, which is a Culture 24 University Blaster project, it's got a great kind of digital skills diagram and it's a triangle and I don't have it, so I'll describe it. So as you're looking at me, bottom left is competences. So, you know, can you program? Can you use that digital tool? Can you use TweetDec? Can you put something into the collections management system? Whatever. And there's a tendency to focus on that in the cultural sector. There's a tendency to focus on that in education. And the trouble is, is that it changes very quickly. So the requirement for it, Karen, you were asking about kind of where the requirements came from or indeed the question was about that. And the trouble with those is that those aren't stable requirements because the tools change continually all the time. So the next level up is you've got kind of digital capability, which is can you achieve a thing? It's functional. It's like that functional training you might do at the gym. Can you stand up and sit down? Can you lift something? And so the digital equivalent of that is can you promote an event using digital media? And can you successfully do that? Can you successfully get a set of people who haven't seen an archive before to engage with it? That's a kind of can you do something that's an outcome that's not digital but with digital technology? But the third thing is what Mark was saying, which is the literacy, which is what can you do and not do right now? What's feasible? What should you do and shouldn't you do ethically or from a compliance point of view? Where might there be risks? Where might there be opportunities? What are some of the implications for inclusion? Exclusion? What are some of the implications for a kind of inappropriate speech being people being feeling unsafe and in a more positive framing? What are perhaps some of the new forms of narrative that might come out of that? That's not about using tools nor functionally achieving a task. It's a level above. It's a kind of leadership change making. It's part of the EXO bit in Mark's model. It's the wondering how this stuff changes the weather. And you can see that unfortunately both us as citizens and our political class have been caught out because we have not thought about the impact of social media and these digital platforms enough and the impact on our society, democracy, the quality of debate that we haven't thought about it. We've been caught out. We're on the back foot. So it's that literacy and critical thinking are the most important skills of all. I do agree with you on that. And I wanted to talk about stakeholders and the hidden groups and Mark you mentioned about who are the stakeholders who don't have a voice. And so this is two questions wrapped up in one. I like doing that just so you can have a follow on from it. So in the question and answer it said who are the hardest groups or demographics to connect with or put it another way? Does a smart use of resources mean that sometimes you just have to wait for people to be ready to engage? And I'd like you to reflect on that but also possibly to reflect on what was said earlier about around the idea that we can be siloed particular or assumed groups when we create things and how can we change behaviours to be more inclusive? Yeah, this is very interesting in the sense that how do we reach the what we found in the past is that you can't please everybody on these online platforms and people will always have challenges or will challenge you on certain things. But I think for us we're in this age of misinformation, popularism and so forth. It's very important for us that whatever we're doing we're transparent. We're clearing our messaging and that it's open source to a certain extent where people can come in and challenge any ideas that we have. Now in the past what we found that seems to work is that when we do have that open forum, the space to give as I said before, we make sure that every event that we do we have great representation from females and people from ethnic minorities. We make sure that and also we position them as the thought leaders, divisionaries and so forth, people that can tell us about the next 10 to 20 years of the profession or the sector. And that's really important because if we don't have those stakeholders what's the next 20 or 50 years going to look like when we look at all of our collections or archives and so forth. Are we just going to eradicate those people who never had a voice to challenge us and so forth. So those are the kind of things that keep us up at night in terms of are we listening, are we actively listening and that's one important thing in the sense of this space that we operate in. Who is most difficult to engage with? Because I work at a research agency I think I don't want to say without evidence and I think my comment to it is that we don't have really good evidence. We have the biggest cultural engagement dataset in the UK because we have all the audience finder data which isn't just ticketing it, it's also surveys and arguably is one of the biggest datasets of its kind in the world. But even I don't feel that we have a segmentation of different behaviours around culture but I think it's very dangerous territory to then split that via certain ethnic groups or linguistic groups or whatever because I think quite often you find that the intensity of data that you would need to have isn't there and I think that's why you have to kind of have a tailored co-designed approach project by project. So yeah I don't think there's a global answer to that because partly about that diagram I had at the beginning there's a kind of interplay between who people are and what they engage with in their leisure and entertainment and spare time generally what they regard as being culture and then what arts culture and heritage sector and professionals and institutions bring to them and so that's the kind of relevance to discussion which not to be too kind of theoretical or academic you know it's there are some theories of authorship of like whether who's in control it's Mark talked about governance you know that there's there's definitely some things here about power who decides who prioritizes and I don't know but I suspect that we might have some surprises in some funding announcements that come up because I think we may have may see quite a big shift of who's funded and why whether we agree with that or not but certainly in the larger funders there was a high degree of transparency about the requirements and the basis on which these decisions are made interesting I won't say which location but you know some of the local authority funding I think there isn't that same degree of transparency and there's always a fear that perhaps there is some politics with a small p or perhaps even a big p some lobbying and other kind of local factors that go into those decisions transparency is is the answer to a lot of that and clear clear requirements it's interesting because they used to say they are and you know let's look at the data was the gold but actually it's transparency the new gold now right how clear people are with their intentions and then also you know is it is it purpose driven is it profit driven you know and and who are we really trying to serve at the end of the day is there are investors or the people that like grant the KPIs or is it actually the community so yeah these are really interesting questions that you present Patrick