 Can we hear you? Yes. Hello everyone. Thank you very much for being here today for our public annual meeting of the Society of Science and Technology Museums of Canada. I would also like to welcome the people that are joining us on our live broadcast over the internet. So if you saw the technical difficulties we're having, it's because we're having problems putting our English slides on the internet. So people will be treated all in French over the internet right now. Later on, I would like to invite our Chairman, Mr. Gary Bolesky, to speak to us. Thank you. Bonjour. It me fait grand plaisir de vous souhaiter la bienvenue. If I was one of my grandchildren, I could do the rest of this in French, but that's about as far as the kids from Thunder Bay gets. So with your permission, I'll kind of do this in English. And I would like to just acknowledge that it has been a tumultuous year for our museums. The Agricultural Museum is off to, with this new Learning Center, the Aviation Museum with the Living in Space exhibition, which will lead to the Star Trek extravaganza starting in May. And of course, with the Science and Technology Museum, we were blessed with mold, which turned into asbestos, and with sealings that came crashing down. So you might think, well, that's a disaster. But, you know, every spore sort of apparently has its silver lining, and the disaster led to a quarter of a billion dollars, which actually came together yesterday in its second iteration. And so, as you would expect, these are particularly exciting times. And Alex will be going into that in more detail. I'd just like to conclude my remarks by thanking people. I'd like to thank the minister, Minister Jolie, who has been a spectacularly supportive, and her staff, and our own staff, and of course the quarter of a billion dollar kid himself, Alex Binay, and it's time to hear from him. So, Alex, over to you. Merci. Thanks, Gary. A few million short of a quarter billion, but we're working on it. So, merci beaucoup d'être ici. C'est après-midi. Thank you very much for being here this afternoon. I have a few slides to go through with you. I'm used to walking around with my clicker and moving around and stuff, so I feel kind of contained here in front of the camera, so I'm going to apologize in advance if this is a little wonky. But we'll start off by talking about who we are briefly, because we have quite a few people from McGill here, and since we're an Ottawa-based institution, not that we're competing between Ottawa and Montreal, because the Habs would win that every day anyways. Then, let's just tell you a little bit about who we are. So, we're three national museums. Dr. Polanski mentioned that we are the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum, which is one of the only, not the only working farm in a nation's capital anywhere in the world. It has hundreds of animals. It has historic artifacts on some of Canada's first pioneers and some agricultural culture. We also have the Aviation Museum of Space, which is a top-10 CNN in the world. We're not quite proud to promote this, but it's really one of the best Aviation Museums of Space in the world, which is just outside of the Ottawa city centre. We also have the Science and Technology Museum, which is set to reopen in November 2007, on time and on budget, and to a whole bunch of rave reviews, and the team's pretty excited about all the work that we're doing on the relaunch of that particular institution. We're going to be redesigning, resetting the bar for what's possible. Two years to tear walls down, bring the walls back up and do 90,000 square feet of exhibition. It's not something we're accustomed to in North America, and it's something that the team is on target for achieving, and we're extremely proud of that. So, three national museums. If you were to look at us by the numbers, we reached over 170 countries in the last few years. We do a bunch of historically accurate mobile games. We have over 100 live animals, hundreds of thousands of artifacts, and we are also one of Canada's top science communications shops in the sense that we've reached about 14 million Canadians in the past year, and we're extremely proud of that as well. So that's who we are by the numbers. We're able to speak to and launch an exhibition on Canadian veterinarians caring for war horses in the past year as well. So we also have year-round public and school programming that teach the children about the foods and the products that we produce here in Canada from Canada. We're also able to speak to and launch an exhibition on Canadian veterinarians caring for war horses in the past year as well. That we produce here in Canada from an agricultural perspective. Oh, you can keep clicking through this. Okay. Great. Now, at the Canada Aviation Space Museum, on the opportunity for the last year. So just keep clicking right through. Too much animation in the slides. That's okay. At the Canadian Aviation Museum, we were able to renew most of our expositions or to renew a lot of text on the board. We were able to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the First World War as well. And we were able to do the acquisition and exposition of new planes on the board. So it was a very interesting year. On the next slide, we also launched, from our perspective, Canada's first mobile game, where we were able to take history. So we 3D scanned all the aircraft on the floor down to the rivet and made people fly through structures and artifacts, or sorry, structures and pylons and chute bubbles. So it was good. It was a good first attempt at getting history to merge with digital technology and to see what came of it. So that was our first launch in 1314. And we will talk a little bit later about some of the innovative work that we'll be doing to pursue this kind of historic, history and cultural engagement with digital natives and youths. Frankly, anybody that plays video games. In the museum of science and tech, as Gary mentioned, we opened in September 2014. Never waste a good crisis, as Winston Churchill would have once said. So we've been busy doing quite a few things for the relaunch, which we'll speak to a little bit later. But prior to the closure, we were able to participate in the Ottawa Maker Faire. We ran a whole bunch of summer camps. We are probably one of the museums in Canada that has the largest amount of outreach programs and does the largest amount of youth engagement as well. So we were able to continue that tradition prior to the closure and had had just launched an exhibition on big data as well prior to mold. And I'm not a chemist, but I've been told that Stecchi Botchers is the most aggressive, fastest growing mold spore type there is out of 104,000 types of mold. And that's what hit us in September 2014, which forced us to close, unfortunately. But luckily, with the help of the government of Canada, we've been able to relaunch, or in the process of relaunching the museum, with an $80.5 million capital injection. So we are well on our way for that. However, after closing, what was interesting is when you no longer have a box to think in, because you literally don't have a box anymore, interesting things can happen. So we were able to actually continue our outreach into the community. We crammed all of our programs into a car and started traveling anywhere that this car could go to. So it's called Museums on the Go. Science will be able to schools, libraries, community events, and it's gone extremely well in the process. We've been able to increase our traveling exhibition programs as well as a result of not having to necessarily have a box to run the Science and Tech Museum in. We've been able to get out across Canada. So Echo is in the ice after the finding of the Franklin Bell, for example, and other things. Has been traveling across the country. It was a Library and Archives Canada, and has been traveling across western Canada for the last year. And I think I might have had the fire. So Minecraft, again, this concept of trying to take science and history to youth. Any of you that have children in the room of a certain age will know that they spent a lot of time on Minecraft, which is actually a good game to be on, frankly. So we were able to do workshops at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum run by the Science and Tech Museum. This workshop in particular was in collaboration with kids from Peru, Alaska, Sudbury. They got to build a space shuttle together throughout a bunch of space artifacts on the floor. So they got to see the real thing. They got to create their space shuttle on Minecraft to launch up into Mars and go mine to Mastroids, I should say, sorry. So in a typical youth fashion, we were able to sort of supervise to make sure there are interactions. It's quite fascinating to see youth interact across the various countries in South America and North America and see how exactly, very similar they can be, actually, in some of their interactions. From a corporation perspective, we were also able to launch an initiative for greening of the enterprise as well. So we've been able to continue the trend of going greener. As some of you may know, yesterday we had an announcement of $156 million collection reserve facility, which will be state-of-the-art and continue the pattern that we have of making our buildings greener and more efficient and sustainable. So we have also been able to continue down that trend from a corporate perspective, even though one of our three museums has been closed. On the next slide is where we talk about really starting to look at how digital culture and heritage institutions such as ours and science museums, because we're a bit of a weird mix of all of those things combined at the Science and Technology Museums Corporation and really sort of launch into the open and open heritage sort of movement. So we were able to launch the app. As I talked about, our national collection database is online fully. One of the first to be able to do that, we were able to be the first national museum on Google Cultural Institute, for example. So it's a question of trying to get our content, which we sit on tremendous amounts of content, whether it's archives or artifacts, out in the public in a way that's accessible. And the easiest and most efficient way of doing that is obviously online. So we've also been able to continue renewing the museum's three websites on the next slide, as well as the corporation's foundations website. So we've also hosted a series on the next slide of Google Hangouts from meeting some of the new lambs at the farm, for example, which was one of the more popular ones, to aviation and space hangouts as well. We were also able to launch a series of videos on YouTube that deals with different scientific subjects that vary from how to create a telescope to once again spend a little time with some animals on the farm. On the next slide, we also had our first initiative to do crowdfunding. So we were able to raise funds to create a project of oral history with some of our World War II aviation veterans, for example. So we dabbed into the crowdfunding space as well, something that we had not done before. So it was a year of firsts, for sure. From an educational partnership perspective with universities, which we'll be speaking to a little bit later on some of the work that we'll be launching together as McGill and the museum, is built on, this isn't something that's come out of the blue, we've been able to actually develop a lot of partnership with community colleges and universities. So some of our veterinary technology students, for example, coming in from Algonquin College, the aircraft maintenance students are also operating on some of our historical artifacts and some of our engines. University students are involved in the series of new exhibitions, local university students in Ottawa, and we've got curators that are teaching and lecturing at local universities and colleges. So we are today going to be building on that history and on that track record of success of community and post-secondary engagement in a big way. I won't steal all of Jason's thunder necessarily, but I'll steal a little bit of it. So on that note, however, so that was the past year, we'll talk about the next year in a little bit, but before we do that, I'd like to invite Fern Prue, who's our Chief Operating Officer, to come up and spend a few minutes talking about our fiscal situation. But not before I thank the Governor of Canada for its support in the 13-14 fiscal year, so thank you, 14-15 fiscal year, apologies, and thank you very much for the successful year that we've had and your support in that. All right, thanks, Alex. Next slide, we've got the financials. There we go. It's going to be a little synopsis on what the financial situation was, and again, we're looking at the fiscal year, 14-15, which ended almost a year ago. By the time we get the financial statements done approved, they have to be tabled in Parliament before we can make in public, so that's why it takes a little bit of a delay before we can actually get and start sharing the news that we do have. As you've heard, it's been a very active year for us, reshaping the operational model, financial model around the museum that became closed without walls. Creating a whole new model for us to do some financial planning. So, I'm looking at the bright side of some of the occurrences that happened. The closure of the museum happened in November, which is right after the tourist season, cyclical business, so all the revenue, the peak revenue season came through. We got the revenues coming through before all the expenses kind of normally happened with less revenues to go against. So the attendance for that year was a very solid year. We've shown two-year growth at the Aviation Museum and Air Culture and Food Museum. The programs are really taking the plen de l'ampleur. C'est excellent de voir le développement et l'évolution des musées, mais avec la fermeture du musée de science, technologie, on a pu atteindre 2.2 millions d'admission. Other revenues include farm operations. As we mentioned, we do operate. We have animals at the farm. We actually have a milk quota and we sell our milk to the milk marketing board and actually we generate revenues from our farm operations. So that's part of the other revenues that are, you can see up there. The other part of the other revenues are parking and museum memberships. So that's the other revenues. The commercial operations, like most museums, we have a retail facility rentals, not as eloquent as this building here to rent the facilities, but we do actually host groups for weddings and other events within and we generate some revenues from that. For a total of 4.898 million. We also have supporting revenues through partnerships. Sponsorship, our sponsorship group is really doing well. They're now fully anchored and more we're going with the vision of the museum and our partnership growth. Our sponsorships are accelerating rather nicely with a record high of 1.372 million coming through for us. For an institution of our size, it's something we can be proud of in terms of the number of museums across Canada that we are now in the top tiers of generating museum contributions and sponsorship revenues. We also have a foundation that works with us for scientific contributions and donations which contributed a little over $200,000 last year towards the museum's activity for a total revenue of 7.028 million. On the expense side, as you can see, the expenses can be shifted in different ways. What we have here is based on activities, museum activities, collecting, sharing knowledge. Heritage preservation includes the historical, curatorial, collections management part of the work. That activity, we invested 4.1 million into it last year. The sharing knowledge includes the exhibitions, the websites, the communicating education programs. That investment was $13.6 million. Our support activities include the administration, finance, government, governance, the IT infrastructure for an investment of $6.5 million. The accommodations is basically, as you may have heard, we receive some funding for our leases. We're leasing buildings or property tax utilities. Everything we need to run the facilities of the museum on all our sites, including 19 different buildings across the city, costs $13.4 million. For total cost, $37.8 million. So with operating loss of $30 million before government contributions, with government contributions of $31.6 million, we ended up with a small surplus of $883,000. That surplus goes into an equity account. As a Crown Corporation, we do get to keep our revenues. We're not a core government department. So that allows us to put some money aside to invest in future programs which is coming in very handy in the re-establishing of the Science and Technology Museum. So that in a nutshell is our financial picture. We had a very good year in 14-15. Again, because the cycle of revenues coming through, a completely different model of how we're operating science, with science mobile so there's a different way to be able to put our message on for our visitors with the funding of the government. So that's all for the science revolution. Great. So now I get the pleasure of talking to you about what's coming in 15-16, even though 15-16 is almost over. So let's talk about what we've been doing in the past year. So obviously we talked about relaunching the Science and Technology Museum. That's been again on time on budget. We've got fabrication and design firms all over North America, really from U.S. to Canada. One of them is here in Montreal. Partners are in place. The construction is going well. We have a roof now. Officially started on a roof. So we have roof and beams and posts, I guess for now and foundation. So it's coming along. It's going to be a busy year. We've also been able to launch our second game, which is called Ace Academy Black Flight. So after we launched the first one and realized that maybe we could do something with history and digital, we took a page out of our friends at HBO, a band of brothers, or the Pacific for any of you that watched those shows and actually reenacted the lives of five Canadian pilots that flew in a squadron called Black Flight during World War I. So we actually took their war diaries and turned it into a video game that is now over 175 countries and 65,000 for over two months since it's been launched. So people are actually consuming and using Canadian culture, Canadian knowledge, Canadian history online in a way that, frankly, they may not even be realizing that they are. We've also been able to take our science and some of our artifacts in 3D format, so 3D printing and 3D scanning in a big way across most comic-cons across Canada. Why? Because, you know, science fiction and science are actually related. You can, if you're a Star Trek fan, you know, a lot of the technology in Star Trek has found its way into our daily lives already. A few of them haven't, like teleporters and others, but I've been told that that's being worked on actively, so hoping that that happens in my lifetime. We've also been able to host food for thought lectures with a series of professors and scientists from the University of Ottawa as well. So it's been a very active year. It's been a year where we've put a lot of pieces on the puzzle board to be more than a museum, science center, but actually really morph into a knowledge institution and be able to talk future science and pass history in trying to merge the two together, because they cannot be separated and should not be separated when you're talking to youths across the country. So it's been an extremely exciting year. We started doing live streaming for most of our activities, so when we have meetings with our team, we have live streams across the country, across the world. So that was something new for us and for us too. We created a new event called Bacon Palooza which is kind of stepping outside of our comfort zone. If you're the Agriculture and Food Museum, you're used to it being a very young audience. This was for bacon, bands and beer. It was a huge success and it's something that we'll be looking to repeat as well to advertise and broadcast to the world. There are museums and there are things you could do even as young adults or as anybody liking bacon frankly in this case. Those are some of the highlights. On the next slide, some of the things that will be coming up in 2016, 2017 at the Agriculture and Food Museum, we will be launching an international food series so every month will be a series of different food cultures so we'll be looking at probably my favorite first hopefully which is French food. We will be looking at Maple Month, Cheese Month, Continuing Down Bacon Palooza but we'll also be looking at continuing the traveling exhibition of a taste of science that's launched across the country that speaks to some of the food preservation and some of the food science behind some of the food you eat. At the Aviation and Space Museum, Gary alluded to it and we will be the world premiere and the global launch of a new Star Trek exhibition in partnership with CBS called Starfleet Academy. So you will be able to go through Starfleet Academy and emerge a doctor, an engineer, a weapon specialist and then do the Kobayashi Maru for those of you that follow Star Trek and you will fail the test unless you are Captain Kirk which also happens to be coming for our event in our global launch. So we're looking forward to that and celebrating the 50th anniversary of Star Trek. For Canada Science and Tech Museum we will be launching a new traveling a national traveling program called Game Changers. It will be talking about science and mathematics in the field of art that helps us create video games. Most of our children play video games without realizing that they are involved in creating a game. So this launches tonight actually in Ottawa with speakers from Algonquin and Carleton University and Algonquin College on the concepts of addiction to video games and we're going to be talking about everything from science and math and the psychology behind video games and with a 3500 square foot traveling exhibition that will cross across the country which is already booked for a year and a half so it's a huge success for us. 2016-17 we'll continue with the relaunch of the Science and Tech Museum six major galleries, Children's Museum located inside the museum which is all based on the concept of failing and failing being acceptable and experimenting. The Science and Tech Museum will tell the story of how Science and Tech basically created Canada as a nation from railroad to telegraph to medical sensations and we'll be looking as well to launch our new future video game called Spaceborne which is about the human colonization of our solar system so really diving into the mining concepts for example of mining an asteroid and mining the planet Mars what's required in colonizing Mars working with institutions such as the perimeter institute and others in this video game on actually bringing science to gaming and youth. We'll be launching in mid-May our climate change exhibition but more on the sustainable technologies to help fight climate change in partnership with National Geographic in Ottawa at Lansdowne Park we'll be traveling across the country and right now we have a lot of interest from even other countries which is great so this is in partnership with Sustainable Development Technologies Canada we're actively signing and pursuing agreements for 12 documentaries around the world as well being co-produced on a variety of scientific topic from the history of medicine to the future food source for the world talking to institutions such as the Discovery Channel the Smithsonian Channel so we're really again this shift from museum science center to a knowledge institution and using multiple mediums to be able to communicate the message and we'll also be continuing to grow our national footprint of traveling exhibition so we've got quite a few things on the road on our plates right now small team of 225 employees that are hitting homeruns every time we turn the corner which is absolutely fantastic and as of yesterday well we now know that we will be able to get off the ground a state-of-the-art collection facility that will house our collection the National Galleries collection as well as the Canada Conservation Institute under one roof that will be opening in 2018 Fern 2019 apologies live streaming I've been corrected on record 2019 Fern just had a heart attack or he's okay okay so without further ado let's talk about a big part of why we're here today at Miguel thank you very much for hosting us historically the museum had stopped a lot of its research and now we're getting back into it and research for us is in just our folks getting the privilege of working with our collection but it's actually opening up our collection to the rest of the country and Miguel was one of our first stops so I'm here today to talk a little bit about and again we'll turn it over to Jason shortly the Miguel Fellowship in the history of science medicine and technology collaborations and partnerships that will be striking between your institution and the museum so we collect and preserve Canada's scientific and cultural heritage and we disseminate it and Miguel provides a broad range of outstanding learning and research program to prepare students as citizens and leaders who will make a difference so why not combine the two together so today I'm here to announce that we will be collaborating with Miguel to establish the Miguel Fellowship in the history of science medicine and technology for the next few years to come and hopefully build this partnership together so we're really excited about this because the Fellows that we'll be announcing today will contribute to the body of research of our museums yes that's certainly the selfish side of that equation but it'll also help to the Fellows research that's going to be published by Miguel and the museum and our museum is going to receive Miguel objects and archives that are worthy of preservation in the national collection as well so we're going to be strengthening our ties quite extensively over the next few years together I know some of our curators that are here today are excited because Miguel is ranked among some of Canada's top four research universities so something to be extremely proud of we may take a bit of heat over this back when we get back home in Ottawa but that's great that's fine it's a national collection and Montreal is a big part of our history and so is Miguel so I'm pleased to announce that the first two Fellows are Cynthia Tang who's a PhD student in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine and her field of study is the history of medicine and Hassan Moud is a PhD student in the Institute of Islamic Studies and his field of study is the history of science in Islamic society and the history of astronomy so we look forward to working with Cynthia and Hassan who will be supervised both by Brian DeWalt who's our director of the curatorial division and by David Panoloni who is our curator in physical science and medicine so at this point I'd like to turn the floor over to Jason if you'd like to come and join me and I'll turn the mic over to you so thank you very much again for hosting us today and we look forward to working a lot more closely with Miguel in the years to come thanks very much I'd like to start with a sincere thank you framed in an apology so let me explain I've been in the field of higher education teaching in university or college level for 13 years and for 12 and a half of those years I really did not run anything I was not responsible for running any institutional anything institutionally really to a great extent and those 12 and a half years were glorious they were really wonderful I could entirely focus on my own academic career and teaching and that was really great that very sheltered institutional and moral space allowed me to be perhaps allowed me to be lazy with or sort of just complacent with how institutional structures take form it allowed me even in certain times that I feel very embarrassed about to complain about the slow pace of institutional changes about the slow pace how difficult it was to complete bureaucratic tasks to form partnerships to finish money transfers to devise contracts to figure out how partnerships would actually work over the last six months I've had the opportunity to actually run something or to be in charge of something which is to be the graduate program director here at Miguel in the department of history and classical studies which I'm very proud and it's been a very it's very difficult it's very rewarding and it's given me an entirely new perspective on how difficult it is to make institutional initiatives happen how difficult it is to bring institutions even when they're very complimentary together so I apologize in general to the world for having had that experience of 12 and a half years and for not realizing how difficult it is to run things and with that in mind I would like to offer a sincere thank you not a perfunctory or a kind of official thank you both to personnel at the museums and at Miguel so in no particular order thanks to Alex Benet, Christina Lucas Monique Horace, Sandra Corvay and David Sudden at the museums and at Miguel, Matali Das, Franca Sianzi Greek Vankerbergen Counting Giuseppe, David Wright Nicholas Dew, Layla Parsons Kate Devereux and others who have supported this effort over the last several months a sincere thank you as well to the doctoral students some of them with us today who have been helping us over the last several months so I'm just going to say one two things the first is a word about why we at Miguel and in history department and as allied institutions are going to be good at this and can help and then secondly and more broadly why it is that history and science should be better friends so first about Miguel in the department of history and classical studies at Miguel we haven't been teaching history in the history of Canada at Miguel one of the oldest and largest institutions of department's history in Canada and we have particular strengths history of science and history of medicine at any given time depending on how you count we have 10 or so faculty members and postdocs working on and studying history of Canada and this is not even to mention Miguel's institute for the study of Canada which is an interdisciplinary institution group at which many of our faculty members regularly participate this is in addition to our many PhD students who work in history of Canada and an even greater number of master's students work in history of Canada put this together and this is a very large department with extreme strengths traditional strengths and growing strengths in history of Canada writ large and especially in the history of science both because of our department in an allied institutions and programs in the history of medicine whether through the social studies of medicine or the institute for health and social policy our current chair David Wright is in fact joined and appointed in the department of history and classical studies in the faculty of arts and the institute for health and social policy in the faculty of medicine so I guess what I'm saying is we're good at this we have deep institutional knowledge and the history of teaching history of science and medicine and we have a lot to offer the museums I think and museums will be very helpful to us our fellows now and hopefully in the future will use the materials at the museums and they will use them well practically they will use them creatively and they will use those materials to broaden the exposure both of the institution of museums and of McGill last let me just say a more general word about what history has to offer science and vice versa why history and science ought to be better friends or actually are already better friends they think that they are before I say this I want to say that it is important for me to note or to argue that knowledge of any kind does not need to defend itself really at all the pursuit of knowledge is inherently valuable the pursuit of facts the pursuit of truth the pursuit of data and everything in between needs no justification and it should transcend any form of market derivation or market share any institution or any society or any nation that purports to be or that wants to be that aspires to be you can choose your adjective enlightened, democratic, progressive or just needs to assert that that being said some disciplines and some pursuits are especially relevant to and helpful for each other and I actually think that history and science have more natural partnerships than they perhaps think that they do and the first hand history and science actually share an intellectual method both of these disciplines are accretive that is they build on prior research in a more self conscious way than many other disciplines do to use an archeological metaphor they build upon certain sites and they rest upon the shoulders of immediate researchers previous to them in history we call this historiography but whoever you want to describe it it's the same process in science and in history more broadly history and science are both about linking up particulars and making distinctions they're about finding the most relevant bits of information and then subjecting them to rigorous criticism scrutiny, hypotheses, arguments experimentation at a more concrete level the study of the world through time and the study of the world historically has always or should always inform scientific discovery while hopefully also giving it a deeper form of humanistic purpose let me just take one example from one that I know well in my own field of early American history for millennia for generations and many generations one of the greatest terrors of people of the world of parents of children was smallpox and in the western world the modern study of how to treat smallpox the modern study of how to prevent smallpox dates from the early 18th century in a series of complex transfers of knowledge from the Ottoman Empire itself probably from China to Europe most especially to England to London the kind of anecdotal story is that an English gentleman in 1720 travels to the Ottoman Empire admired the clear skin of women she saw there and learned about the process known as variolation which is a kind of precursor to vaccination it's actually a much broader story about how scientific knowledge medical knowledge was imbued with and combined with historical knowledge of the east as it was known and how over various periods of time through a number of different institutions and intellectuals the knowledge of how to combat smallpox and the historical possibility of eradicating smallpox came to hold an important place in western history in English history and in American history to take one example it appears that the ability to variolate that is to prevent smallpox or to reduce the symptoms of smallpox was actually crucial to George Washington's Revolutionary Army in 1776 1777 George Washington in fact ordered the entire continental army of the nascent United States to be variolated and to be therefore defended against smallpox which probably allowed the continental army to survive and thus the revolutionary movement to survive south of the border this gets huge cheers here I guess we'll just have to say that it was an important moment in history and that it was a good thing in general that smallpox this great scourge of humanity was eventually eradicated it was eradicated as I'm saying here both because of medical research and medical knowledge and the transfer of that knowledge via the medium of historical study of other places and times study of people unlike ourselves I don't want to exaggerate the extent of our partnership here but we will do our all smart part I think to make history and science the partners that they should be and I look forward to our partnership with museums over the next several years thank you Hello Gary, Alex, Fernando Professor Opel, a big big big thank you for your presentation a big thank you to McGill University who has opened the floor for questions I see a lot of young crowd here I'm sure you have some questions they're all looking at each other for people around the internet so they're saying like who's going to dare ask one question we like to pepper our CEO all right well there's a question over here perfect I got one person excellent and what is your name my name is Nicholas Duke I was just wondering if you could say more about the fellowship program just maybe a nice time to tell us more about the program how many fellowships there are per year, how many years do you think it will run I did already go ahead yes I know for the moment I had kind of planned this out as two possible models of fellowship a short term fellowship and a long term fellowship the idea being that the fellows would be in house or would spend most of their time during their fellowship in Ottawa doing the research at the library to do at least one public presentation during their fellowship and participate in the public life of the museum when they're there hopefully this will also result in a longer term fellowship originally planned that the short term fellowships would be three month periods a long term fellowship so we'll start with our two fellows and see what that takes us but it's basically designed as that way as either a three month or a nine month stint we could sort of think about how that might change later on but that's how it starts I don't know if you want to add for us this is the beginning it's not just a one time thing we're going to be looking to grow it we are going to be looking to bring on scientists as well so I think your commentary on the combining forces of history and science are very very appropriate so we will be looking to bring in biochemists and astronomers and astrophysicists so how these things start combining together sort of the future science combined with the history is what we are, is what we do nobody else does that in the country so as a forum for that dialogue so this will be the beginning we'll throw in the scientists as we go through and then we'll continue to grow the fellowships program over the next few years and see where this takes us one of your exhibits which as a parent I was really interested in and that is the or I guess it's maybe a series of workshops the idea of failure in experiments is that the idea? yeah so we're going to have a youth a children's museum in the new institution and well a lot of scientific discoveries I'm speaking to a bunch of historians you know sometimes it happened by mistake it only happened through a series of failures I can speak as a parent in part of that answer as well my daughter is about to be 16 and my son 12 and I just don't think we promote failure enough we took a Steve Jobs for example to talk about how many times he's failed in launching or any entrepreneur I'll tell you so science and technology for us is a series of failures that leads to that one sort of breakthrough and not encouraging failure and trying to hide from it would be bad the children's museum is to provide them a space to fail try things here's a challenge try to fix it probably not going to happen may happen but then have that right in the heart of the museum where all these exhibitions are about the successes that have come from failure we hope is an environment where youth will be able to come and physically and digitally and intellectually engage in what it means for them to be actually be able to be permitted to fail because if we think at school for example you have to have the best grade absolutely possible and it's a society driven by lack of failure but at the same time failure is usually what gives us the success so it's this weird thing going on I really commend that I think that is an amazing idea it wasn't mine I can't take credit for it and I'll be you know hoping to bring my kid to it maybe absolutely you'll get an invite thank you any more questions or volunteers I there we have another one this is fantastic this is a nice crowd as a parent I was actually quite curious about the video games how does that work depends on what side of the equation you said I'm not playing them I'm watching other people play them are you using them for outreach to people who would not normally be in a museum and how is that functioning it sounds like a really interesting idea for a museum to be working on video games for me personally if you're in Ottawa there's a lot of talk about our location not being downtown Ottawa and for me a museum in today's world is about being global because no matter what you do now it's globally interconnected and while the physical experiment and the physical experience is important and we're not denying that being able to reach a child in a world if you look at our second video game iteration Black Flight a lot of our downloads are coming from China a lot in Canada as well but a lot in China so Canada has a role to play we have a role to play to get our culture out there in that world and if we don't do that then the risk is that our children my children are growing up on a google and facebook culture that may or may not contain canadian content getting content out in that world and we're not going to pass it we've just we have for example two weeks ago we are the first public institution in Canada to remove our firewalls systematically so as we create draft documents draft ideas it will be out there in the world for commentary for collaboration so we are a public knowledge institution taxpayers dollars at work the knowledge that we generate that we sit on that we create getting it all out there as soon as possible letting researchers journalists, exhibition designers deal with our content as it is created because if we have 10 people contributing to this process we're adding value gamification is the same context so if my youth is going to play a video game that's why I love Minecraft it's actually helping them it's teaching them so we want to educate them but we want the history lesson to come out so Black Flight is an example of how we can take five canadian pilots that would otherwise do it independently because they're not an easy company and they're not on HBO probably not as known because it's Canada and we're south of the border of a massive media giant this is a way for us to sort of equal the playing field a little bit so 175 countries in two plus months getting the story of five canadian pilots that is historically accurate at 100% the rivets are 100% accurate on the 3D model for us it's just a way of getting canadian content out in that spectrum and getting known as a great nation that has contributed to world history in World War I we were very significant players in that space and Black Flight that unit was a significant player as well so now we got the story out and since we know a lot of youth play video games then we might as well talk to them in their world in their language as well and that's one example so that's sort of the theory or the thinking behind it we're going to launch probably another three or four more in the next few years the aviation of ace academy should be a partnership with a few European countries that's the target anyways see what happens but that's certainly the intent and the theory behind it is merging historical accuracy or assistant curator Aaron Gregory at the aviation space museum spent a lot of time researching this game to make sure it's 100% accurate so you're actually fighting the real battles that were fought in World War I so for us it's a fantastic merger of past, present, future really exciting wasn't my idea either I'm on a roll actually this was Fern's idea Fern's baby in part so a few years ago so well done Fern and finally somebody from the younger crowd that side of the crowd is sort of finally I'm interested in the traveling exhibits if you could talk a little more about those are they going to be exhibits from the museum are you helping to showcase exhibits from around Canada and help those travel yeah mostly they're self produced in our case but if you look at Star Trek for example since we're the global launch we've been helping to produce that we've been helping to find locations it'll be going to Calgary for example after us so there's some collaboration that happens across Canada on traveling exhibitions some of the ones we're launching are a mixture of both but again like we have the privilege in science and speaking I mean it's a running joke but cows to Canada and everything in between at the museum so it's pretty wide subject area so we have about I would say in the next few years we'll have a close to a dozen of these shows on the road crisscrossing across the country at any point in time but again our challenge is balancing our shows that we want to produce in partnership with others but also looking at digital looking at documentaries now that you know Canada is a very economic place to produce science and technology documentaries as it turns out and we have not leveraged that as an institution we're about to start that so for us it's a mixture of both so it's a mixture of our traveling exhibitions a mixture of digital because you can't it's just not one experience anymore and if we pride ourselves in engaging youth we have to do that because that's typically where they live first much to my chagrin sometimes and for us that's sort of the strategy so a lot of our taste of science for example is crisscrossing across the Saskatchewan, Manitoba right now I believe or it's in London, Ontario and it's scheduled to go out west Gamechanger is a launch in Sudbury with the Science North Science Centre for example so it really becomes a blended mixture typically Canadian in that sense I guess actually very collaborative, collegial alright well we've actually did very well thank you very much to everyone thank you for being here today thank you to Miguel for hosting us this actually adorns our public annual meeting thank you very much everybody as you know there's actually some drinks cash bar at the back as well some food and for those actually we're talking about the sort of exhibits that we do in terms of you have a little pamphlet here information you also have some nice little USB drive if you'd like with the Technoscience.ca where you can actually find us on the internet and of course we encourage you to follow us on social media we do tons of very very cool stuff thank you