There we go. Yeah, now screen share. Okay. Sorry, this is yes. That's not what I wanted. I wanted. Technical difficult. I just had the right window open. I just had it open. Okay. So welcome everyone to today's meeting of the hyper ledger supply chain and trade financing. We are honored today to welcome Gary store and April Harrison of chain yards, trust your supplier platform. They're going to be talking about using trust your supplier to manage partnerships and data. If you look at the agenda on the website, we also have information in their white paper before I handed over to Gary. Well, I want to remind everyone that hyper ledger is committed to creating a safe and welcoming community for all. We have the hyper ledger code of conduct. Available from the meeting agenda page. And then also our antitrust policy, because this is an open meeting when attending. Please be mindful of not sharing any proprietary data or any information that you have. We want to be compliant with the Linux foundations antitrust policy. Okay. I think those are the beginning housekeeping items. There are a couple of SIG items that we'll be going over at the end of the meeting, but we wanted to take it to optimize our time with Gary and April. So let me, I'm going to stop screen sharing now. I'm going to go to Gary and April. Do you have your slide? Yeah. And I'm sharing right now, Alicia. So. Excellent. If you could let me know that I can see it. Okay. You should see kind of a welcome screen. So. Hello, everyone. Again. Thank you, Alicia. My name is Gary store. I'm with. Trust your supplier. Trust your supplier is a. Blockchain based platform running on hyper ledger. And it's a platform that's running on the IBM cloud. And it's role in life is to connect large enterprises with their supplier community. Over that blockchain using, using our SaaS platform and microservices. To bring information about suppliers. To those enterprises and ultimately to whom our, our customers. And so. I want to talk to you a little bit about that today and how we, you know, how we landed on this use case and decided to use a blockchain platform for our solution. And how it is driving benefits to both enterprise organizations and their supplier bases around the world. Okay. So if you have any, I guess we're going to hold questions to the end, Alicia, or are we having them as we go? How do you want to do that? Which works better for you. Either one. I mean, I'm always happy to answer a question if you have it in real time. It seems to me more topical. So I guess, feel free to interrupt if you've got, you got a question or just want to make a comment. Great. So if anyone has questions, please, please speak up for those of you who aren't comfortable speaking, if you put it in the chat, I'll read them aloud for Gary. Got it. Okay. Awesome. So, so if we think about the world today, we've, we've gone through a host of changes in all of our lives, both professional and personal over the course of the last three or four years. And really it's manifested itself into a changing landscape for corporate relationships and business partnerships. And that really manifests itself in supplier visibility. So the pandemic brought that out. Obviously we have geopolitical issues. We have many, you know, we have a poly crisis. And I think that's real. And so without getting too much into, into that level of information detail, there is a heightened awareness and heightened need for supplier information for organizations to do business today. So in the old days being four years ago, enterprise organizations are primarily interested in whether their supplier organizations were going to be financially viable over the long time. And that was it. Now they're concerned about, you know, adverse media and reputational risk and compliance issues around modern slavery and supply chain due diligence. They're concerned about sustainability and resiliency and social awareness, diversity is a whole host of issues that is growing and expanding every day, which makes the challenge makes it challenging to continue to have products that are productive with, with, with an enterprise supplier constituency. So enter trust your supplier, trust your supplier to aims to address some of those challenges by providing a platform in which information risk information, particularly, but any information about a supplier can be housed in a, in a network fashion, in this case on the blockchain and the supply chain is the one that's really focused the suppliers customers in a very efficient and effective way. So really it's about creating trust and we all know that blockchains, you know, kind of principle, predominant principle is trust. And so that's featured obviously in our name and what we feel is very important, right? There needs to be trust between two business partners and we help to embody that trust through the sharing of information. There's value. There's, you know, there's value in information today, data being our greatest resource. I think that's been been kind of well chronicled over the last few years. And so we try to provide data and information that helps drive relationships, drive decision making and drive value back to the organizations that we do business with. And we do that through innovative partnerships and sometimes relationship that we have our customers and our suppliers on our network are relationships that they just haven't had before, right? It's not a simple, you know, a simple transactional relationship. Now the relationships need to be much tighter because as an enterprise you need to understand what your suppliers are doing and as a supplier you need to know what you need to provide to your customer to make them compliant and to make them viable and to make them resilient and sustainable. This is a very important relationship dynamic that is happening today that, you know, again, really is, is relatively new to the landscape. If we think about challenges, I talked a little bit about this. So let's spend a lot of time, but really if you think about enterprise organizations today, they're entering a new world. They're being tasked with accountabilities around delivering ESG objectives for 2030 or 2035 or 2040. They're being tasked with corporate responsibility goals, diversity goals. This is not something that your typical procurement organization historically has dealt with. And so they're being challenged in ways they didn't expect to be challenged and probably not consistent with their core competency as part of their, you know, kind of career. And so now they're facing new challenges and we're helping through our technology base. We're helping them address those challenges. It's very fracturally spread today. The responsibility for risk in most enterprises doesn't exist with one entity. It could be spread depending on the nature of the organization. And that makes it a very tricky situation to manage. And so what our platform does is really tries to bring those organizations together so they see one common version of the truth as it relates to the enterprises relationships with their suppliers, right? So what customers already want is they want that data integrated, right? They want their supplier management integrated. We deal with customers all the time that have a back office filled with applications. One customer we're dealing with right now has 88 ERP systems, 88. You can't imagine managing that. They're using our platform to try to bring together the data sets from those 88 platforms into one common supplier base. And that one single version of the truth for all of their suppliers. And then the issue exists on the supplier side as well. Suppliers are inundated every day daily with new requests from their customers. Provide me an ESG. What's your carbon emission look like? What's your diversity status? What's your financial health look like? Are you tax registered? What's your insurance levels? All of these questions are bombarding suppliers today. And that's an administrative burden that drives costs to them. And of course those costs are going to be passed on in their goods and services back to the enterprise, which drives it to the consumer base. And it's an economic jungle that we're trying to alleviate some of the pain through the value we provide to reduce administrative burden and make it a more seamless relationship between all of those parties. Thank you, Gary. Yeah. Let me ask a quick question back on the previous chart. Of course. And customers want integration of their risk data and supplier management tools. Are there any standards at all on this or is really that part of the problem here? And you guys can kind of become the de facto standard. Well, we'd love to become the de facto standards. I think if I used to say there weren't those standards, but I was dead wrong, there's too many standards. Right. So somebody told me once a great thing about standards is there's so many to choose from. And so what you've, you know, what you see is there's standards in the United States or standards in Germany or standards in the UK. The EU has data standards across the EU. You know, there's, there's burgeoning requirements in Australia that in South Africa, it's all, it's global, but it's not, there's not one standard globally. And there's multiple, multiple points of concern that do need to be managed and standardized. So it is a little bit of the Wild West right now, because it is so new. And I think, you know, the government's and industries are struggling with, okay, how do we really standardize this in a meaningful way? That's going to be, be effective. I think some of this is politically charged. I won't get into any of that, but suffice to say there's probably more standards today than, than ultimately we need. Okay. Gotcha. So you're basically, you're going to figure out ways to mediate all those different standards in some way, shape or form. In some ways, you know, are we going to boil the ocean and be able to solve all the world's problems? No, obviously, but what we need to do at minimum is to provide a standard way that organizations look at their supplier information, the golden record, if you will, of what is, what is the supplier's golden record look like? What information do you need to make a value judgment around the supplier and your ability to do business with that, right? Because it's a concern. You don't want to bring on a supplier that's going to have you in tomorrow's news. There was just a, I think a $2 billion fine levied by Ireland against Meta Facebook because of a violation of data rights and personal PII, personal information. And so these kinds of things are real, right? So no organization wants to be in that situation. And so compliance and trust when we're doing this, when your suppliers is really significant. Good. Thank you. Sure. Gary, Jeff has a question as well. For the discussion, does supply only does suppliers of physical goods or will this apply to a non physical good supplier such as insurance? Yeah, sure. Any supplier, anyone that supplies goods or services. So we have yoga instructors on our platform and we have semiconductor providers on our platform and everything in between. So if you are selling a good or service to an enterprise, our platform will help you and help them administer that partnership. Okay. So really what I've been talking about really the whole time is disruption, right? We've seen disruption in a whole host of places and that's driven the need for, for a platform like ours, right? So, you know, I talked about a lot of this. You know, so I probably haven't mentioned even cyber risk, right? So, you know, these are the kinds of things that you can, you can see on the slide here that organizations are trying to deal with today. You know, the one graphic up here is what they call the doomsday glacier, which, you know, is in an Arctic seas and potentially fall into the ocean and cause supply chain disruptions because of changing ocean levels, right? So there's things like that that are out there that we aren't even prepared for, right? So you try to get ahead of that with data and information and our platform tries to bring that to bear. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the evolution here. Suffice to say that we're not where we need to be. The future state is having a supplier digital identity based in blockchain with trusted supplier credentials that is portable and consumable, you know, by any kind of back office platform we're not there yet. We're probably somewhere between the web portal that's been around probably for 20 years now and supplier networks like ourselves. But we still have some distance to go. We're not doing things on handshakes anymore. At least most of us aren't. And, you know, we're still seeing a little bit of email and spreadsheeting, unfortunately, but, you know, our journey is to create a true identity so that you as a supplier or maybe you as an individual can own in a way that you have an identity that you can then share with others at your discretion and then organizations and people can make immediate decisions about your credentials and how and when and if they want to do business with you. So how do we build this identity? Well, it's multifaceted.  What ecosystems do you work with? Whether it be internal ecosystems like your ERP or PDP systems or external ecosystems that you might be involved in from the industry or a government perspective, regulatory perspective. What cloud solutions do you use? Do you use S4HANA? Do you use AWS? What's your mobile strategy, et cetera, et cetera, right? So our aim, again, is to build an identity that's based on our platform that can be consumed by any of these platforms or any of these solutions. And that information will be, you know, again, easily consumable and resolvable so that organizations really can understand who's adhering to the rules and standards and really bring that efficiency by providing information that's current and accurate and immediate. Today none of those things are really true in the industry. It takes days, weeks, and months to get the right information. It takes a lot of human intervention to evaluate that information. And unfortunately, there's just really no way to determine effectively if that information is accurate. So that's part of our aim, is to address those challenges. Right? This is a quick snapshot of what we have available today. So a lot of this technology is already built. We have full identity attributes built into our platform. That's a supplier currently owns and self-manages, right? So that's sovereign. We have third-party content from the likes of the Dun and Brad streets and Moody's of the world that provide some of that information. And we're bringing on other authoritative third parties all the time that help us do that. We send out questionnaires that help further clarify information that may not be fully, you know, kind of fully articulated in their identity. So we help fill in the gaps with questionnaires that suppliers can respond to when it's immediately updated or on a blockchain platform. And then that really lends to the credibility and authenticity of the data. Some of the things on the roadmap is to make that highly portable through and globally resolvable. And so that's our things that are on the roadmap and will have a dead identifier that's consumable, both of the microservices and network and networks by end of the year. So really, again, it's about answering questions about trust, right? So organizations want to know who they're doing business with or the people I'm doing business with responsible. Are they going to damage my reputation? Are they acting in a sustainable manner? And can they help me address some of my business challenges, reducing my cycle time, reducing my overall risk profile? Vaw, hey, are you at risk as an enterprise doing business with a supplier or a group of suppliers? Quite honestly, right now, most organizations simply cannot answer that question. I'm wondering if any of your current clients have shared with you any increased efficiencies, maybe a reduction in the amount of time it takes to screen a potential new supplier or potential partner or any other benefits that they're already seeing? Absolutely. So I don't know if I've had to slide it here or not, but we did a, we have a use case where we reduced cycle time by 82%. And cycle time meaning time it takes from the first contact with a brand new supplier to the time that they are successfully onboarded and you could, you know, you could take an action such as issuing a purchase order, right? That's great. The other meaningful metrics that we measure are the ability to continuously monitor a supplier's activity. So a supplier is, you know, has adverse media or their financial health changes or their, you know, maybe their carbon emissions change. We monitor that and we notify organizations when those changes occur and is obviously organizations can take the appropriate action. And that is actually a difficult thing to measure because most organizations just couldn't do that before we introduced our platform. Now there's our platform and other platforms that do do this, but if you asked a couple of years ago how organizations will monitor new suppliers, you'd probably get a lot of blank stares. Almost like Lexus Nexus, but without having to go in and do the search. Right, exactly. And organizations were doing it one time on the way in. Okay, I'm onboarding my supplier. They're taking everything out. They look great. Boom. Let's put them on our business and we're going to do business with them. And then, you know, years would go by and nobody would update any of the information. So, you know, we didn't, the enterprise didn't know what that supplier was all about. And then if something happened in the marketplace or with that supplier, most, most of the time they were dumbfounded because they weren't taking, you know, the time to monitor. And then they had the tools to monitor that supplier's activities. So all these things are, you know, what would have been, you know, very much an innovative, nice to have a couple of years ago are imperative today. It's exciting. Thank you. So, you know, when we think about who we sell to today and who uses our services, it's. We have the management agencies and these organizations that are recruiting management officers, C.P.s, Risk and compliance officers. These are relatively new roles in enterprise organizations. Some organizations don't have this role yet. And I mentioned risk, fractured risk management, fractured and extended across organizations. That's still true today. It was some, But if they do exist, they end up being our customers. If it's a manufacturing supply or organization, typically they have a supply chain or CSCO, VP that we would sell to or we would market to. And then, of course, all of the suppliers, any supplier or anything, or potential opportunity part of our network and establish that digital identity I've talked about. We source information from three different places. One is directly from the supplier, and I've discussed. The second one is from these third party authenticators that done at Bradstreet's, the Moody's of the world. And then directly from the buyer themselves. Buyer's enterprises have over the years accumulated records of data on their suppliers, probably too many records. So part of our role here is to take that information, cleanse it, and it becomes a baseline piece of information. Again, it's loaded to our blockchain platform or SaaS application, gives organizations a line of sight to that, and then we can very quickly marry that information with supplier provided information and third party information to give organizations a more holistic view of that supplier. We can do that via dashboarding. We have advanced analytics, customized scoring, workflow capability, and that continuous monitoring I talked about. So it really helps enterprises understand their suppliers at a very granular level and dig into where the trouble spots might exist. And then you guys probably know more about this than I do. But we are the only supplier network that we're aware of that utilizes any kind of blockchain platform. So obviously the benefits are many. And this is one of our core selling points that we use as a differentiator in the marketplace to really talk about how blockchain today provides a platform that is immutable, that does build consensus, et cetera. But it is also future proof in your organization because we know that there's going to be token economies and there's going to be network of networks and the nature of blockchain is going to proliferate as we move forward in time and as technology continues to move forward and the blending of blockchain with IoT and AI and generative AI and all of these things are going to require this kind of backbone. And we tell our customers all the time, look, you make an investment in TYS. You're not going to be reinvesting two, three years down the line is something that's now based on blockchain because you're already getting it out of the box. We think it's very important for organizations to be ready for that because it's coming. Is it coming next year or five years? Depends on the industry and where you're located, what kind of business you're in, but it is coming and organizations need to be prepared. And we also integrate through more conventional ways. Obviously all of these organizations have ERPs and P2P solutions and lots of third party providers and other outboard platforms in the back office. So through conventional microservice APIs, we connect to all of them very seamlessly to mix implementation of our platform very straightforward. Just some of our customers, I'm sure you recognize most of these logos. We really are agnostic to industry, we can work worldwide and find that global organizations, multinational organizations with broad basis suppliers, typically are kind of find the most valuable where our solution. And that's really all I have. So guys, any questions, comments, criticisms? So happy to answer any questions you might have. Great, you're the first platform that I've heard from that's partnering with organizations like Dunn and Bride Street and Moody's. And so that's a really interesting one. You mentioned being industry agnostic, working with yoga teachers, working with things. I'm wondering, are there any hospitals or medical organizations that are working with you to keep like doctor data so that people can be aware of any challenges, what's the latest education experiences of their surgeons or other medical providers as well? We would love to venture into that space. It's a complicated one. We've started to dip our toe in that water. It's obviously highly regulated. From what I've learned, and I'm no expert, but healthcare organizations probably wouldn't be described as on the very tip of innovation. So we've struggled quite honestly to break the barrier of that particular industry, but we are mindful of it. And we think it's in the future, but right now we haven't really had an opportunity. We are working with a couple of pharma organizations. And so those organizations do clinical trials and things. So there's some similarity there, but we're not at the point now when we're carrying any kind of patient data. Obviously there's HIPAA concerns and things of that nature that creaks in complexity, but as somebody that's starting to advance in years and I spend more time on my own health record than I probably would like, I can appreciate the value of this kind of solution for healthcare as we go forward. For the pharma trial, I can see a potential use where a lot of companies that are trialing something in a foreign country, being better able to document the results of those trials, making it easier for them to apply for FDA approval as well. Yeah, I think that use case is right on. That's something that will certainly be on top of this. We start to mature the platform around that industry and that use cases. How do we create an environment where it makes it easier for organizations like that to share that information and then make it really speed up the process of approvals and bringing those benefits to the public in those countries. And Gary, this is a town question for you around governance of the data. And if you're putting it directly on blockchain or if it's a hash of data right there, that would be kind of interesting discussion and who is to decide what data goes where and who gets access to it. Is that all you guys or are you doing that in conjunction with anybody who joins trust your supplier? Well, it's always a partnership. We're constrained by data rights. I'll give you a quick example. So PII is not stored on the blockchain, right? Because PII might be where it needs to be. It needs to be information that can be deleted at the discretion of the individual, right? So we can't store it on the blockchain for obvious reasons, it's immutable. So we keep that off-chain. Most of the information is hashed, but non-PII information by and large resides on the block and most organizations that we do business with, I think for those that understand blockchain, not all of them do, I think they feel like that's the right moment, right? So as regulations change worldwide, and what we can and can't put it in an immutable platform might change and evolve, we'll just continue to roll with that. But right now, our approach is, any information that makes sense to go on blockchain and then any, obviously there's other things that are going to be off-block. I'm not the architect, so I'm probably running out of my level of expertise here, but that's our fundamental approach. Okay, good. And does trust your supplier own the data then once it's in there or is the customer still just owned it? No, the owner is the provider, right? So the supply, and in most cases, the supplier provides the information, they own it, sovereign to them, they decide whom they can share the information with. So how the system works fundamentally is an enterprise would send an invitation to a supplier that says, hey, look, we wanted to do business with you, we're already doing business with you, and we'd like to do so on the trust your supplier platform. You agree to share your information and then the supplier gets to say yes or no. Now, obviously, if they want to keep the business they're probably going to say yes because they want to get paid, but that is a choice the supplier has. Other information comes from third parties, like let's say Moody's, they obviously own that data, or if the enterprise provides the information out of their vendor master or ERP, obviously they own that. We own no content, whatever the platform to speak of. Good, so you're facilitating there. There was something in one of the charts, customer score, I think when I first heard about you guys way back in probably 2020, something like that. The idea was I'm trying to serve some personal protection stuff right from China. I want to know whether this supplier is any good over there. Is a customer score kind of your consumer reports view of something or is it the enterprise that signs up looking for it? It's their kind of way that they get to build and you just provide the building stuff. Yeah, it's the latter. The enterprise builds their own score. We've toyed with the concept of a TYS score. We're not, to be honest with you, we're not certain that we want to venture into that part of the business just yet, but an enterprise that comes on board, they can come up with their kind of customized scoring algorithm that says financial health means a three and ESG means a five and it totals it all up and so they can come up with their own mechanism to establish a scoring standards for their suppliers. Good, thank you. Sure. I'll stop there. Gary, this is Jeff, I've been wondering any experience with NFTs at all? We've been working with many art galleries to identify them in the supplier. Anything in your space yet around NFTs in the art world? No, I haven't run into that yet. We're obviously aware of it and we thought about it, but we really haven't run into a customer that has that use case today. Yeah. I'm sure it's coming for it, but at this juncture now we haven't run into it. In so under that world, I don't know how much you got in your architecture and your planners and looked at, but would you then, does your site have a capability to issue tokens or coins in that space then that you get, if you go in? It has the capability. We've architected for a token economy, but deploying that solution to the enterprise is fairly challenging. Number one, enterprises don't understand it. So there's a communication and education that needs to happen. And then many of these organizations are competitors that are our customers. And so there has to be a consortium built and that consortium needs to really understand how they're going to share in that token economy. And it's a complex use case. When we started this back in 2018, we thought, okay, we're just gonna create this, and everybody's gonna kind of cryptographically buy in and that didn't happen. So I think that although the underpinnings are there, the cultural aspects of this are limiting at the moment. Yeah, okay. Here's a quick question going back to data share. You mentioned how the provider owns the data and suppliers will decide who they wanna share the data with. Is there any level of granularity with which they can choose which data to share? So say there's products they no longer, they're no longer marketing. Can they remove that from what's being shared and just pick and choose what is relevant for that potential customer? Because we don't have product specific content on the platform today that's been a concern. So it's really because it's thermographic. The thermographics are the base information. Who you are, where you're located, which kind of high level financial picture, et cetera. Those things are, it's binary, yes or no. Okay. Then the questionnaire aspect of this, conflict minerals, modern slavery, SCVDA, corporate ethics, company operations, any question errors you might send, that the organization has the discretion as to whether they'd like to respond or not. If they choose to respond, then obviously the enterprise would have line of sight that information. And that's how we handle that particular issue. Okay. If they choose to share that data with one enterprise, is it then in their file so that any future enterprise they share data with automatically gets it? It doesn't automatically get it. They have to choose to share it. They have to choose, okay. Very good. So if they're, let's say they're doing business with IBM and then they're also doing business with Lenovo, they may share a certain questionnaire responses with IBM that they choose not to share with Lenovo. Got it, helpful. Thank you. Gary, maybe this might be a good summary question wrap up here. What would be the three things that blockchain brings to the table, specifically fabric, if you'd like to go that way, right? Brings to the table, because you mentioned earlier about, hey, we're the only one using blockchain. So what would be the three things that come to the table with TYS? Yeah, that's a good question. So I think number one is what I mentioned before, is it creates the platform for you in the future, right? Today, it's really more of a SaaS solution to be quite honest, but there's several competitors we have in the marketplace, but none of them are blockchain.  So we do have the token economy. We do have some of the things we talked about when we venture into healthcare, and maybe this becomes a little bit broader and not just from an enterprise, but also deals with perhaps individual relationships in their healthcare records or their educational records, whatever it might be. There's use cases like that. So I think that's number one is that, it's just this thing is pinned on a blockchain. I think number two is it opens, obviously it gives you a highly secure platform in which to actually store the information. And many of our customers are very gun-shy about putting information on the cloud still in this day and age. And I think that having any information on a blockchain gives them an additional level of comfort that information is not going to be able to be hacked or compromised in any way. And then I think the other thing around blockchain is it just allows organizations to start to have a solution that helps them understand that the blockchain use case better. Like what does it do for them? Like where does it play for the enterprise? It's kind of been well-chronical than in the kind of cryptocurrency markets, right? But enterprises are still really in infancy as a lot of organizations are dabbling in it, probably less than effective way, using it for what use cases that phone doesn't need to be used for. But this gives them a real-world blockchain solution in their portfolio of tools that they can start to understand how it works and why it adds value. Because they're gonna have other, they're gonna have a logistics platform at some point that's blockchain-based and they're probably gonna have a product lineage platform that's blockchain-based, et cetera, et cetera. IBM already has one of those, right? So in the rest of the IS platform. So long story short is I think that that just gives them gives them an opportunity to have blockchain as part of their back-off the solution. Good, thanks. Thanks. I guess we're, does anyone else have any other questions while we have our speakers for today? Jeff, Andrea, Sean. No. No? All good. Kelvin, Mufa Dili. April. Well, I'm glad you're with Gary. I have all the answers, not the questions. Yes. Yes, absolutely. I will be sending you more emails later. I hope April doesn't give me any questions. He wouldn't be able to answer them. Okay. I have a question. We're gonna get the slides for the slides. Yes. Okay. Yes. April's going to share them later. Yes, this is Alicia. So you have those now and you're welcome. And I know Gary and I have to run to another meeting but this was great. Thank you for having us and for inviting us to discuss. We're very proud of our solution and feel like it's a very good product for enterprises in the supply chain area. It sounds like you're really at the forefront of building something like this, the fact that you're partnering with Moody's and Dunn and Bradstreet to get that data and to make it all available in one place when enterprises are evaluating your suppliers. The fact that you're reducing cycle times by 82%, that's huge. Yeah. Yeah. We think so. And we're starting to see, this is a long journey. It's taken us much longer to get here than we thought but I guess that's how business goes sometimes. But I think we're starting to see this really take bold and driving value to organizations. So we hope that we hope that this share, some of that journey with you and you have better appreciation for what we're trying to do and what's out there. So appreciate everybody's time today. Thank you very much. Good job. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'll let the two of you go. Good luck with your meetings. Unfortunately, we have a conflict. So we're gonna leave, but again, thanks to everybody and we'll talk soon. Thank you so much. Bye. And if everyone else can stay on, we've got a couple of SIG housekeeping things to look at. Alicia, maybe we should stop the recording now. Sure, let me do that.


Classroom seating setups. Classroom seating arrangements are just as paramount as any other an aspect of teaching and lesson management. An effective classroom seating arrangement or lack thereof can easily be the difference between an optimally performing class and a mediocre class. As a teacher, one needs to create a synergy between the chosen classroom setup, and the teacher's style of teaching, the students' personalities, the classroom furniture and the classroom space itself. A host of factors influence the most effective classroom seating arrangements, and some of which shall be discussed in this summary. It is also important to note, is that some of these influential factors are so dynamic, may even change with every new day or new lesson, such that a teacher needs to remain flexible when it comes to accommodating new seating configurations. The configurations in which you organize the students' positions, and that of yourself largely depends on, but not limited to, some of them factors listed below. Space available. Classroom size and shape. The size and shape of a classroom, often times than not, will determine the variety of seating arrangements that can work within the space available. Certain seating configurations are not practical, and may not work certain classroom shapes. For example, horseshoe or circular seating arrangements, are unsuitable for classes being conducted from a room with a rectangular, long and narrow, floor sections. Classroom furniture. The kind of classroom furniture greatly influences the kind of seating arrangements to be chosen. Chairs and desks that come as separate singular units allow for more and different seating configurations to be used. Possible attention diversions. A teacher has to consider possible attention diversions — distractions — when choosing a preferred seating arrangement. Finding ways of reducing possible distractions may enhance students' attentiveness and increase classroom productivity. Where possible, the classroom seating arrangement should be such that things, like windows overlooking busy car parks, or a busy road should be kept out of the direct line of the site of your students. Student age and size. The age and the number of students in the class impact the seating arrangement. In deciding on sitting arrangements, a teacher should be mindful of the general behavioral patterns that are age-specific. For instance, it is not the same experience when one teaches adults compared to teaching teenagers and children. Children and teenagers tend to have more disruptive behaviors, so your classroom seating arrangement should depend on the students that you have in your classes. Student personality. A teacher may want to mix students of different personalities in order to boost classroom productivity. During group work activities, a teacher may choose to pair talkative students with quieter ones, so as to encourage quieter students to participate more actively in class activities. Lastly and most importantly, the teacher's style of teaching and focus determines the seating configuration. Below listed are the three teaching styles explained, and how they affect classroom seating configurations. Teacher-focused class. If the teacher's style of teaching is more of a lecture or presentation kind of approach, the teacher may want to use a seating configuration where all students are able to see and hear the teacher, while she stands in front of everyone. The teacher becomes the center of attention in this case. Learner-focused class. If the teacher's style is one that encourages student-to-student interaction or group work, the teacher may want to find a seating arrangement that encourages students to interact with one another and less with the teacher. A combination of both. In many instances, teachers believe that a style of teaching that strikes a balance between both styles, teacher-focused and learner-focused classes, is the most effective. In this case, a teacher should look for seating configurations that are flexible and functional. Types of sitting configurations. Traditional rows or columns. This is the most commonly used classroom seating arrangement, and is mainly based on teacher-focused style of teaching, and is suitable for all classroom sizes and shapes. This configuration has the advantages of minimizing disruptions among students, encourages individual work, it is the most effective for lectures or presentations, and also easy for the teacher to supervise the class. This setup despite its upsides, it may not work optimally for large classes. Large classes may often see uneven levels of interaction, as students in the front row will participate more, while those in the back may lose focus. Circles or horseshoe setups. This configuration is best suited for student-to-student interaction and teacher-to-student interaction. This format is the one that strikes a fair balance between the teacher-focused and the student-focused style of teaching. Lessons that require discussions and presentations are the ones that mainly function well with this configuration. However, it is difficult to control individual student behavior and enforce discipline with this layout. Separate tables or group pods. Seating arrangements where students are clustered into small groups promote student-to-student interaction. Students develop skills such as communication, problem solving and collaboration in this arrangement. Group seating arrangements offer safe and comfortable working spaces for students to explore tasks among themselves. However, this arrangement encourages noise-making and distractions among students, as well as presenting a challenge for the teacher when it comes to enforcing student discipline. Do you want to teach English abroad? You are on the right way. Take a TEFL course today. Having shown that seating arrangements in the classroom can greatly influence learning outcomes, it is therefore important that a teacher chooses the classroom arrangement that supports his or her teaching style and objectives.