 Hi Paul Stacey here. I'm in this beautiful garden in Costa Rica and you can see amazing flowers like these, these angel trumpets. There's also bougainvillea and all kinds of other beautiful flowers. It's such a treat to be here. I'm here for two major group convenings that we just hosted. One of them is actually with my staff, the open education consortia. It's a completely virtual organization. We have no office, no physical office, and the team are distributed all over the world. I'm based in Vancouver, Canada. Some of my staff are in the United States, but others are in South Africa, Slovenia, someone here in Costa Rica, someone in Mexico, and so on. And so we very rarely see each other in person, but I try to have us get together once or twice a year, and we just had a meeting here in Costa Rica. And the purpose of that meeting is always, when we finally get together face to face, it's like, let's talk about some strategic things that we don't frequently have a chance to speak about. And in that regard, I thought I'd give you a heads up that we will be rolling out a membership expansion strategy. Most of our current members, that over 240 members we have, are from primarily higher education. And we recognize that as open education is growing, it's expanding to include the primary and secondary sector of education as well. And it also is expanding to include technology providers who are developing tools and technology to support open education. And so we were discussing our plans to roll out a new membership strategy to include and provide opportunities for those kinds of players to join our organization, as well as possibly to include the cultural sector and the government sector as well. So look for that. We also had, of course, some interesting discussion around the current upcoming Open Education Week, which starts on March 4th, about a week from now. We can last for a week where we host organizations who are advocating for and highlighting and promoting open education around the world to showcase their activities in a virtual way through the Open Education Week website. So I invite you to participate in that and hope even if you don't actually attend a session live that you take advantage of the resources that get uploaded there and the recordings that are made. And we also had a second convening. I'll stop the strategy part around staff meeting there, but we also had a second meeting which followed our staff meeting, which involved bringing together open education leaders from across the Latin America region, South America and Central America. We brought together representatives from over 10 different countries in the Latin America region, open education leaders to talk about the potential for us to create an Open Education Consortia Latin America Regional Node. The idea here is that the Open Education Consortia has long been the main organization that supports and advocates for open education globally around the world. But as open education becomes more developed and more mainstream, it's clear that the way it's being developed and deployed in different parts of the world is different. And so we're looking at a strategy to support the regional and unique ways in which open education is happening in different parts of the world and have been working with a group here in Latin America around forming such a collaboration and highlighting the open education work that's happening here in Latin America and supporting them as they consider how to partner and work together. There were sort of four main areas of collaboration that emerged out of this gathering. One of them is around what I'll just call teacher training. So as open education grows, there's a need to skill up faculty and teachers on how to use open education, how to create open education, and how to teach in the unique ways that are aligned with open education. And that's a common need across all of the open education leaders here in Latin America and in fact around the world. So we're really keen to support the partnerships and developments that are taking place in that track. Another track had to do with policy and strategy to supplement and support open education. It's often developed from the ground up. There's really a need for policy and strategy at the kind of senior levels and from government and so all of the players here in the Latin America region are looking for ways to collaborate and partner and work with us around a creating strategy and policy that can support the development of open education in their country. Two more tracks that I'll just highlight briefly. One had to do with infrastructure. This is a really interesting track especially here in the Latin America region where there's not only high density, highly populated urban areas, but also rural areas which don't often have internet connection. And so there are some of the players here in our working group are servicing rural areas using offline technologies that bundle together open education into a platform and a tool that can be used without internet connection that supports the delivery of open education in rural environments. Really fascinating work and one around which there's an interest in collaboration and there's also repositories and open education resources themselves that people want to share. So that's a really interesting track and the last track really has to do with essentially creating reports that describe what's happening here in Latin America to highlight and showcase the very interesting and innovative work that's taking place here. So you can think of kind of state of the open reports coming out of Latin America. It's really a fantastic event on both sides both with staff and with the working group from across Latin America. Very high energy and a last area that we explore that's also equally fascinating is around diversity, equity and inclusion. This is work that we're digging into right now as we explore how to operate as an organization that supports those kinds of principles as it looks to develop open education around the world. So hi from Costa Rica. I look forward to working with everyone who's been involved with this work here as well as the rest of you from around the world. Bye for now.