The Environmental Portrait. That's today's topic on Deconstructing Photography. Welcome to another Deconstructing Photography. Today we're talking about the Environmental Portrait. Now this is the third in a series of photojournalism topics in Deconstructing Photography. Today we're going to be talking about how it's used, when it's used, and my approach to this type of photograph while working as a staff photographer for newspapers for 25 years. If you've seen any of these journalism videos, you may have noticed a reoccurring theme. There rarely is a lot of time to make these photographs. You've got to be pretty efficient with your time. You've got to make the best photo you can with the amount of time you have, and that might be five minutes. You just never know. As a photojournalist, ideally we'd love to spend a week, days, or even hours documenting, documenting a story. But the reality is it just doesn't work that way. That's just the nature of the business. Sometimes you have to use a portrait out of necessity. There just isn't time to document a story. But there are also stories that you would do as a feature on a person that may not need anything but a portrait. You're just putting a face to the voice in the story. We should talk a little bit about lighting, because that is very important when it comes to portrait photography. Now, I try to keep it simple. That's this type of photography. You've got to be pretty nimble. You've got to be pretty quick. You've got to be able to adapt to what's around you, what's available, what light do you have available. I'd carry a single stroke, and often I'd use it on camera, and I'd rotate the head and I'd bounce it off a wall, off a ceiling. There'd be times where I'd use a sync cord and get to flash off the camera, and then do the same thing, bounce it, or I might put it out here and shoot it at an angle, try to be as creative with it as possible. Every once in a while I might have a second strobe with me to maybe light up the background or something if I had time to plan it out. But I always had at least one strobe, and almost all the outdoor type portraits generally had some kind of fill light for filling the shadows in the face. And sometimes I would have a card on the back of the flash as a fill card, and it might bounce the light off the ceiling and throw a little bit forward to fill in the eyes. Those are the things that I would do on a regular basis, and you can do a lot with one flash and other light that's available. The key here is just keeping it simple and using the available light you have. I think my favorite type of lens for the environmental portrait was a wide-angle lens, something around 24 millimeter. It lets you nice and close, but yet have enough angle of view to take in enough information to add context to the photograph. But you got to be careful. If you use two wide-angle lens and you don't position the person correctly, it really distorts their features. I was never a big fan of anything really any wider than, say, 24. What a typical assignment would look like was I'd go through Porter to interview a subject at their home, business, or location that might be germane to the story. And when we'd get there and make contact, the reporter would often ask me if I'd rather do the photo first or should we do the interview first? And if I could, I would always opt for the interview first. Now that might not leave me a lot of time at the end for a photograph, but what it did allow me was to get an idea what story's about. It might give me some ideas of what I might want to photograph, how I might want to photograph this person. It gave me a chance to look at the environment around and see if there's a location I might want to photograph this person. And it also allowed me to take photographs of this person while they're being interviewed. Now this isn't really, I don't know if really you could call this a portrait, but it really served the same purpose as a portrait. It was just putting a face to the voice in the story. Sometimes it was the best image, because some people just really get stiff when you put the camera up. They stiffen up as like deer in headlights. So as an insurance policy, I always took pictures of them being interviewed. And if we were interviewing them in a field or a farmer's field or something that gave context to the photograph, whether they're looking straight at the camera, whether they're just talking or showing you something. And I was fortunate enough to work with really good reporters that realized that it was best for us to work as a team. And the reporters realized that they didn't need to stand real close to the subject. They'd stand just out of frame. So they wouldn't mess up the shot. They understood the importance of the image for their story. And there might be times that that photograph, while they were talking, being interviewed was the one we'd use. It was just the most natural. It was a good insurance policy just in case the more formal portrait didn't work out. The environmental portrait can be used for all kinds of different stories, from business, sports, human interest, even hard hitting news. They can evoke a wide range of emotions. It can be a very useful tool for storytelling. Maybe a story about homeless. And I noticed this older fella, which looked like he was living out of his truck, I'd seen him in the same location quite a few days as I went to work. And so one day I decided I'm going to stop and talk to this fella. And so I stood there and talked to him for probably an hour. I didn't take my camera out. I didn't just start taking his picture. I wanted to know his story. So after a while, I asked him if he mind if I took his photograph and he was pleased to be photographed. And I think he ended up making a pretty intimate portrait. I think the picture really told the story of how he was living.   If I were to try to make this image less edgy or sterilize it, it would have done this service to this woman's plight. She really was crying out for help. She needed help. And it was my wish and my hope that if someone that could help her saw this photograph, then she would get the help she needed. Let's lighten this up a little bit. How about this series of photos from these high school theater students? How's this saying go? Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil? I basically just let them do what they wanted to do and just got out of the way and made the pictures.  It's often funny how a person might look like their pet. This couple had just finished a restoration project on this historic building. And while I was being given a tour to show the project how it turned out, I'd notice this staircase and I thought there's a photograph right there. So I used it to frame the couple. It was a great way to show really one of the best details of the project and a portrait of the couple at the same time. These firefighters were getting ready for a competition that involved climbing stairs. So we thought it'd be a good idea to use their training tower as the location for the portrait. It worked out pretty good. Sports portraits are always in demand like this young javelin thrower. I caught up with this young lady just before practice. Didn't really have a lot of time and people were milling around behind her. There was a really busy background. So what I ended up doing was getting real low, shooting at a real low angle, shooting up with the sky and using that as the background. So we're doing this business story on this woman's bead shop. And when we were interviewing her, my head just about exploded. There were just beads everywhere. It was quite impressive. Unfortunately, she was standing in a really good location. So once the interview was over, she asked me where should we do this photograph. And I said right here should do just fine. And I thought it was actually pretty effective. This is a good example of really tying in the environment to the portrait. Well, I hope you enjoyed this series. This will probably be the last photojournalism topic in this deconstructing photography series. There might be something more in the future, but for now we're going to move on to some other topics. There are other general photography topics that I'd like to look at. So we're going to end today's video right here. Until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.


Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the first issue briefing of Saturday, day four of a World Economic Forum annual meeting. We're going to take a trip back in history almost with this when we're looking at the internet. Twenty years ago, at this very meeting, a document, the Declaration of Internet Independence, was released by a gentleman called John Perry Barlow. It set the stage for the development of what turned out to be a crucial and blessed global commons, an engine of growth and job creation the world over. Is that engine under threat today? We do release an internet fragmentation report this very morning here which actually sets to build a landscape for the threats that are posed to this global commons and tries to, I hope, map out some of the pathways forward. Here to talk about it, I have a very, very esteemed panel indeed. We're going to introduce them and then I'm going to hand over to them to make some remarks and then we'll have, in accordance to our usual format here, plenty of time for questions. To my immediate left, I have Dr William Drake from the University of Zurich and one of the lead authors of this report. Very honoured to be joined by President Thomas Hendrick Ilves of Estonia and next to the President, Jonathan Zitrain, a long-term friend and partner of the Working Forum and a member of our partner, forgive me, of our global challenge and future of the internet. Mr President, I'd love you to start, if I may, to give us an overview of your perspective on the state and health of the internet today, and whether it's in good shape and good health or how it can be best returned to full potential as an engine for optimising growth and jobs. I'll start off by not being an author of this. I'm probably not the right person to turn to, but since you served with John Perry Barlow, the second lyricist after Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead, which probably means nothing to this audience any more. But in any case, I found that in his Declaration of Independence there was one word that was not mentioned. I mean this kind of anarchic vision of what the internet meant and the word privacy doesn't exist there. I mean I just find that unnotable, which shows not so much that he was doing anything wrong, but how that did not foresee all of the issues and today perhaps even an overblown form. Privacy is what concerns the citizen more than anything else. Now fragmentation of the internet can take so many forms and I actually would hope that the esteemed author, Dr Drake would talk about that rather than me, but our own connection to the issue of fragmentation aside from the 2007 cyber attack on us, which was I guess the first politically motivated cyber attack, which did lead to fragmentation in the simple sense that we were denied access. I mean access to fundamental services, public and private, and basically what did we have to do in order to solve that? One of the things we did to this massive DDoS attack on us was to cut ourselves off temporarily from the web. So the web worked internally in the country but we couldn't because these massive DDoS attacks on various institutions. We did not have that time, the resilience or the preparedness or the readiness to deal with it. So we in fact fragmented voluntarily.  Now what has been the primary focus of my country in policy terms where we have been extremely active is in the issue of internet freedom. We were one of the founders of the Freedom Online Coalition. Freedom House rated us as number one in internet freedom for years and then the Icelandics had developed even better or more liberal legal frameworks. So now we're pushed back to number two. I should point out the United States is number three on this or maybe four. In any case what we see in terms of fragmentation are illiberal regimes pushing for an international intergovernmental as opposed to multi-stakeholder model in order to they call security but it's actually informational security. By offering security or wanting to have security which we understand as keeping your emails from being hacked to Scottish systems being hacked and so forth that's our idea but there are those mainly illiberal or authoritarian countries with authoritarian regimes that want to actually fragment the internet in terms of content. Be it bloggers who are then arrested for what they say to keeping out or filtering information from outside the country that might be deleterious or detrimental to the regime in the eyes of the regime. Block things, block access to sites and as I said ending up in the most extreme case of repression of people who actually express opinions within country and online. That has been a fundamental concern of ours for the last three or four years especially when we saw that in the ITU there was a strong push to take internet governance over from the multi-stakeholder ICANN model in the name of security but that would have left out the civil society, the third sector, fourth sector, second sector. It just kept internet governance in the hands of governments under the ages of the UN which we thought was a very bad idea. William, you're an author of this report so is Vint Cerf famously coined the phrase the internet has escaped the lab. So where is it running? Is it running amok and how do we reign it in? Tell us a bit more about the landscape. Okay, thank you very much. I don't think that the internet is running amok. The internet is becoming the essential fabric of modern societies. It is interwoven into our politics, our economics, our culture. It has become essential to everything and indeed the theme of this meeting at Davos is the fourth industrial revolution. The internet is a driving force in catalyzing any shift towards a fourth industrial revolution where you have all these different realms of technological development in materials and energy and other fields all coming together with the internet at its core. So the internet is central and it's not about the collapse. It's not in danger of falling apart. We're not predicting any cataclysm. However, there are problems and you pointed out to me earlier I hadn't realized that it was here in this room that 20 years ago John Perry Barlow, the grateful dead lyricist, made his declaration of cyberspace in which he said you know cyberspace would be this free, open, innovative thing that would not be subject to the heavy hand of the state and people would be able to draw on the internet and do all kinds of creative things with it etc. And the problem that we're having now is that while that is still true to a very significant extent, we're also seeing troubling signs emerging. We're seeing chipping away at the global public internet as an open space that allows people to have that kind of creativity, that kind of freedom because of fragmentation. And fragmentation takes many different forms and many thought leaders in the global community have been raising alarm bells lately about fragmentation. And so the purpose of this project was to try to get us on the same page and say well what are we talking about because it becomes very clear once you start to talk to people that they have very different ideas about what fragmentation might mean. Technical people think of the fragmentation in terms of the basic functioning of the infrastructure and whether you get the same results every time you put in a certain kind of input and so on, whether the net performs in the same way every time reliably. But beyond that there's the level of content and transactions, cyberspaces where people live, where people create content and use the internet to do economic activities, engage in transactions or form social networks with other people who like cute cats. And there they are experiencing fragmentation too. All kinds of new blockages, all kinds of new policies or mechanisms are being put in place that are limiting people's ability to use the internet in a very free and open way. So what we try and do in this report is take a holistic view and say there's technical fragmentation but there's also fragmentation that comes from government action and there's also fragmentation that can come from quite frankly private sector action. And we try to map the landscape of different forms of fragmentation going through the process. We came up with 28, it was not a preordained number, it just happened to be what we came to. And then from those 28 examples of fragmentation that are listed under each of these three categories, technical, governmental and commercial, we come at the end to a top 10 list of the ones that we think are especially worth paying attention to, which I could go into more detail about later. But cases where we see real problems emerging with ensuring an open free integrated end to end internet available to all to use. And then after that we try to make some suggestions for the web about areas they might want to consider further. But that's it. It's a landscape exercise. It's a foundation setting so that future work that might go on in the web or in the larger global community has a common baseline in thinking about fragmentation and not one that's very narrowly exclusive to the technical dimension. So that's the purpose of the report. It's quite long, it's quite meaty, but the executive summary and the conclusion I think make the management of the key points quite tractable. Jonathan, we've been hearing about the chipping way of public spaces and the president here talks about real first hand experiences of fragmentation. It's a new normal. We possibly abused that term here at the forum, but it seems to be a new normal situation. How is internet adapting to this? Well, thank you Oliver for including me today and when you bring up normal, the normal then of the book end of 20 years ago in Barlow's declaration where he said, Governments of the industrialized world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. As you say, somewhat anarchic. You've remembered this for the 20 years. Congratulations to you. I can tell the guy is an lyricist, but there's been so much that has changed between then and now and at the time Barlow was writing and leading up to it, not many people and certainly not many institutions had a strong sense of just how crucial and central and ubiquitous the internet would be. And as a result, it could develop in a corner without anticipating all of the problems, including privacy for which if you wanted to try to plan around them ab initio, it would be really difficult. It's one of the reasons I think that the internet did succeed. But now 20 years later, we really do have issues that have to be dealt with. And this report, which I think Bill may be underselling a little bit. This is a really powerful report. It talks about primarily at a technical level, but it matters so much for the political for the social layers about one of Barlow's core ideas, which is a user centricity or a human centric view of technology. That's really emphasizing the ability of a person using this network to exchange bits freely with any other point on the network, permissionless innovation, location independent. These are the sorts of things that so many would agree are important to preserve even as we know, we can't just wish it to be the case. And that's why so many things in this report are agreeable, but not continually ordained. And that's why, while Bill is right, this report is not prescriptive, it is in its way a call to action to defend some of the basics of an open and unowned internet, an institution that may have founders and creators, but no CEO, no one entity controlling it. And that's why I think it's such an important report. I also look, there's just a brief mention in the report about interoperability for the internet of things. Interoperability is a huge theme. I mean, it's a foundation stone of the internet. I put it next to user centricity. But for the internet of things which has not truly fully happened yet, I think it sets a marker to show how for these devices that we are welcoming into our bedrooms, our kitchens, we're locking them around our wrists. I mean, we're very intimate with these things. To have a vision that by acquiring one, you need not be establishing a long-term relationship with a single vendor that now the rest of your devices had better have to be from that vendor. These are the sorts of things the report is pointing us towards and why I think it's such an important roadmap and why I'm so pleased the Berkman Center, which I'm a part of at Harvard University, and my colleague Professor Urs Gasser, it really contributed to the report and I'm just so pleased to see how it turned out. Mr President. I just want to point out how real the implications are. One at the economic level, the upcoming big battle in the European Union is going to be on having a digital single market, which we do not have today because virtually all electronic services are geolocated. I cannot buy an iTunes record for someone who lives five kilometers away from me if it's across the border. Creating a digital single market is probably one of the biggest hindrances to European competition with the United States and with China and India because we have 28 different markets digitally. When it comes to physical goods, it's easier to buy or ship a bottle of wine from the Algarve in southern Portugal and sell it in Lapland than it is to buy an iTunes record for someone across the border. It has even gotten worse, in a sense, through a court case, which in throwing out the Safe Harbor Agreement, we're back to where we were before the Safe Harbor Agreement, which means that all data transfers across borders within Europe are the responsibility of the National Data Protection Agencies, which we have had no bad cases yet. We are back to before the Safe Harbor Agreement, which means nations within Europe, which is already a political entity, are responsible for what goes across borders. This has implications for all kinds of things which I want to get into. Fragmenting, we are fragmenting in ways that we don't even realize. You do realize you've ever tried to buy an iTunes record for someone in another country. So this kind of fragmentation is one problem. There's another one which I just mentioned. I have not done the empirical experiment, but it has been claimed to me that there is something called, I would call algorithmic or search engine algorithmic fragmentation. If your search history is one of environmental activism and you put in fracking, you will get a lot of anti-fracking articles. If your search history is one kind of industrial energy-based, sort of not anti or not environmentalist, you will get a different set of articles on fracking. I am told I have not tried this, but nonetheless if you have an algorithm that basically chooses things based on your previous history. So it means that you end up creating or decreasing sort of discussion and the world that you're in, as in with say Facebook, you only are talking to your friends. They all share the same ideas and I'm worried, okay that's fine if you're just talking to people who also support candidate A or candidate B. But if I want to get information on something, I want to be intellectually independent. It makes interpersonal cognitive fragmentation happen. There's no interoperability between the people. Starting the virtual world and moving to the real world. Let's just dwell on that though, because I can't help thinking some of these fragmentary pressures also create business opportunities. Therefore, for example, better search, more targeted search. People may want that. Is that not against the spirit of the internet to curb business enterprise opportunity? For my part, I think surely competition is good and the idea of competition even for different models. Some people want to give their music away, others absolutely want to sell it. The fact of the interoperable single internet, the way it developed, allowed for that mosaic to come about. Perhaps the kind of fragmentation that isn't as healthy is when you're locked into one system or another and as soon as you go down that path, it may mean that you're having to pick a single winner or loser. When the internet is, quote, a winner beating out other networks as it did, the fact that it's not extracting itself a tax for every bit that moves. There's no one CEO who gets to move it. It makes it a public good. So if you have a ubiquitous public good that's shareable, then you can have the diversity that is so healthy that you talk about. That's something to anchor and I think again the report points to that. Let's just develop some thinking on the other areas of the report. You had 28 frameatary risks. We had no time to go into all of them. Give me your highlights. First of all, I'd like to highlight that we do in fact address the question of algorithms, but we did not go deep into that because it's a point on which many people are disagreeing. So we simply put it on the table as being one. But there is this whole question of filter bubbling and how people only expose themselves to certain amounts of information and algorithms feed into that. But more generally, we were just talking, John was just talking about the freedom of the customer in using these different technologies to be able to access everything. One of the types of fragmentation that we do talk about in the report as a commercial sort of fragmentation is the creation of so-called walled gardens, platforms where you buy into something and essentially become locked in via an app to an entire ecosystem where it is then difficult to take your information portably and move to another environment and where you can't necessarily access the whole internet, etc. This is growing very rapidly as a business strategy and just perfectly logical and defensible reasons for companies to want to do that. But at the same time, from the standpoint of competitors and some customers, there is a debate as to whether this is not fragmentary. There are other kinds of things one could look at. Geoblocking of content based on being told in your location, this information is not available to you. This is something that governments sometimes require, but it's something that companies often require because of their own commercial relationships. And again, you can make the argument, there's perfectly defensible reasons for companies to do this. They have licensing arrangements with local content distributors and so on, but for the customer there are issues. And indeed the European Commission is looking into this question now because they think some forms of geoblocking may be anti competitive. But there's other forms. Those are both examples of commercial. If you look at some of the governmental forms of fragmentation we talk about, for example the establishment of strategies based on this notion of cyber sovereignty or having a national internet segment that is somehow sealed off from or separate from the larger global transnational fabric of the internet, subject to strong territorial control from the top down by the state. This is a somewhat problematic strategy arguably and it can lead to fragmentation. We talk about prohibitions on the transborder movement of certain types of information that may be of great importance to global companies, but also to SMEs, the small, medium sized enterprises who lose out and don't have the ability to defend themselves effectively when such barriers are put in place. We talk about requirements for local data processing, local processing and local retention which many countries now are exploring to try to keep local data within their territorial jurisdiction. The growth of digital protectionism efforts to try to bolster the development of local digital industries through establishing protectionist barriers to foreign entry to markets. Filtering and blocking based on content. Many governments have concerns about the substantive content of certain forms of information. Don't want their citizens to have access to it and establish blockages. Blocking of GTLDs, the generic top level domains. We adopted in ICANN, the body that manages global names and numbers. Dot triple X top level domain like dot com dot org et cetera. There's now a dot triple X and many governments simply said we're blocking this. Now you can understand they may have arguments but ICANN has now adopted a new GTLD program that's rolling out hundreds of potentially thousands of new top level domains. And if governments begin to block entire domain names based on their particular preferences, this could introduce a level of fragmentation into the internet and there's reasons to be concerned. There's been long running debates about the possibility of establishing entirely separate internet systems, new root servers that would run an entirely distinct set of connections from the global public internet. There have been discussions about what to do with the transition from the current kinds of IP numbers we use now. The numbers that are built into all the objects you have in your laps, IPv4 numbers, which are now running out effectively to IPv6, which offers trillions of numbers. But the problem is the transition going from one to the other is different and they don't inter work. So we can end up with two different internets, technically, that don't inter work effectively. So these are just examples of some of the many types of forms of fragmentation that are looked at at the port and where we say governments, civil society, technical community, business. We all have to look at these things together. We all have to be vigilant of these problems and we all have to try to work together where we can to develop more effective solutions. I'd add one more to a risk simply because I've seen it, which is that there's an inequality that comes out of commercial applications in that one concrete example. iTunes, in which I keep bringing up, and iTunes was available to Western Europe about seven years before it was available to Eastern Europe. In some cases simply because they didn't quite trust Eastern Europe for reasons beyond me.   I mean, Germany's big, but you guys, you're not going to buy anything because it's not worth the effort. So that in fact, I mean, I think we're going to have to deal to fight or to avoid fragmentation. We're going to actually have to deal with other issues that are not even technical but have to do with intellectual property agreements, VAT agreements across borders that in fact currently are sort of pressures to for greater fragmentation when in fact, and it has nothing to do with the internet. It has to do with intellectual property law and it has to do with VAT agreements. And this is a complex thing because if you take the European Union again, there are 28 countries. The number of VAT agreements is 28 factorial that you have to decide. That's a lot of property agreements. If you know what 28 factorial is, it's a lot. We're running too fast running out of time, but I do want to see if there are any questions from the floor in which case we'll go to one of mine. Now, we're here at this meeting looking at the fourth industrial revolution. Bill, your report is very much a landscape here and now. Are there any fast-moving, fast-approaching, long-range threats which could complicate further this landscape you're putting before us that we need to be thinking of? How is the fourth industrial revolution going to contribute to the progress of mapping fragmentation of the internet? Well, I mean, again, we are mapping the current state of play and we do note that some of the trends we're talking about are just that, the trends. There are emergent possibilities that many people are worried about and it depends on the choices that actors make. So, for example, going back to Jonathan had mentioned the Internet of Things and standardization. We do talk about this and we say there's an emerging concern that as more companies get in there and try to follow different standards processes based on different organizations, they may adopt their own technology as the way to tie together Internet of Things applications and so on. And then others will have other ones and you could have limited interoperability across these. This would be reducing the potentiality of the Internet of Things and its contribution to the fourth industrial revolution. If you read the book that Professor Schwab has where he talks about the development of these kind of like digitally enhanced value chains and global corporate operations that are reliant on these kinds of technologies. He talks about this with standards blocks where you have lack of interoperability across because particular companies and forums have decided to lock in on their technology. That would be a real problem and that would be a problem that we would be stumbling over quite soon, I think, in terms of our transition. It would be a track versus beta max writ large. I think it may be a generational problem. So, again, the point is to raise the concern and say we should have a global multi-stakeholder dialogue around these things. We should not allow these pressures towards fragmentation to just kind of accumulate in a distributed way in different parts of the Internet ecosystem with nobody really kind of paying attention to it and raising the alarm and saying, hey, are we going in the right direction here? We need to have at least, as the first cut, a joint awareness of what is happening so that we can then identify problems and see do we want to try to figure out some solution to these? I think data transfer regulation on part of sovereign nations will collide with IoT because we have a wide array of national legislation on transferring data across borders. On the other hand, IoT becomes interesting if and only if the data can move between borders. I mean, again, metaphorically, the pictures of a Mercedes auto, I mean sort of a self-driving or autonomous car that gets to the French-German border from which everybody comes, and it stops because it depends on receiving input over the Internet. You know, through Wi-Fi, but that data may not be transferred, and then it just stops. But I mean, that's a metaphor, but nonetheless that is a potential picture of where we will be unless we figure out cross-border data transfer. And just to say, the metaphor you're using of moving between borders is in itself a problem, right? Because the Internet ignores borders. The Internet is transnational. It's viewing it as one integrated logical space, and once you start to impose that territorial separation into it through some mechanism, then you are really changing the way routing and everything else is working and taking away from the vitality of the net. No, no, not at all. When you look at the original design and ongoing design of the Internet, it's interesting not just to see what was put in, but what was quite by design left out. So identity and reputation down to a person was quite self-consciously left out of participation in the Internet. As far as the Internet is concerned, as Bill mentioned, there's the Internet protocol address, and that's it. It doesn't map to a person all the time. It goes to different people. And as time has gone on, you can see all sorts of reasons why people would want to be able to preserve identity, convey it across borders, have a reputation developed so they can be trusted and can trust others. And thinking about, is it better having that be somewhat distributed if not outright fragmented so that there are lots of different stores of reputation and perhaps you're not well regarded at Uber, but you have a really good view elsewhere on the Internet. It makes a nice diverse portfolio for someone or should it be something in which, no actually, how well behaved I am as far as a company like Uber or Airbnb is concerned might then be helpful to me in acquiring a loan when I haven't otherwise established a financial reputation the way that a normal bank would presume. So these are the kinds of questions I think looking forward that really are grounded in some of the technical questions of the report that are not probably solely in the province of the engineers to try to solve. That's a group decision really to make. I'm very worried about time because we're going over, but before we do finish there's been a fascinating discussion. I'd like each of you to give me one key single intervention that you would like to see happen that could have the greatest impact in addressing Internet fragmentation. I have a very parochial view when it comes to the European Union. I want to eliminate borders and also avoid protectionism between the EU and other countries. I see that as an increasing risk and could ultimately lead to the European Union falling way behind the rest of the world because protectionism always is a bad idea but when the change is non-linear that is exponential then falling behind a little bit for a short time can have a very long lasting effect in the face of Moore's law. Jonathan. I would say that the many freedoms and opportunities we enjoy thanks to this network are grounded ultimately in a certain freedom to possess a device that can run any code the user wants to see it run. To have that be the presumption. That's something that over time for many reasons including simple consumer choice and development of the market has eroded that when you make a choice of device you are picking your team and as you accumulate your apps and the data within those apps you get into these concentric walled gardens that Bill was talking about and to be able to pick your code provides such an important safety valve against capture by any one party and ultimately would be one of the important atoms the building blocks to avoid the sorts of situations that President Ilvis was talking about of the car that stops at the border as we go. I would just say finally though it is complicated now in a way that it wasn't before to ask that somebody can run any code that he or she wants on a vehicle versus just a device that moves bits around. Those have physical kinetic consequences and I just want to recognize this is much more complicated than it was when it was quote only bits. Bill. When John Perry Barlow made his statement 20 years ago there was a notion that the internet was maintaining its freedom because the governments had not been centrally involved and that that should continue but it was inevitable that governments were going to get involved. It was inevitable that governments were going to want to see the internet being embedded within frameworks of public authority so that in cases where they have responsibilities to protect their citizens to promote certain values and so on that they were not just standing on the side doing nothing and the citizens would say what are you doing to protect us right. So of course they're going to come in but the question is come in on what terms and via and use what tools and the risk that I'm seeing now is that many governments are perhaps overextending the types of interventions they're making seeking to impose more territorial control in a vertical way onto a transnational space than is really necessary to achieve the objectives that they have in mind. And so that the conversation we need to have is what kinds of measures can governments take that to preserve the values and objectives that they legitimately want to pursue but which intervene in and shape and disrupt and block the freedom of citizens and businesses least. How can we have an optimization a proper calibration of what that intervention should look like. That conversation is a difficult one but I think it's one that we need to have more and more because we're seeing more and more reactions to the internet that are going too far in one direction and so having a multi stakeholder global inclusive dialogue on issues like that I think would be very helpful. RF is based on being shipped away with a new normal fragmentary pressure so I think we need to be dealt with politically motivated sometimes commercially motivated. There is an increasing risk and one that hopefully multi stakeholder collaboration can help address. Hopefully the landscaping document you've got here is a good starting point. Thank you very much gentlemen much appreciated. Thank you for joining us in the room this session is now over.


Welcome everybody to this project briefing on the OA switchboard from tall roads to highways how the OA switchboard is building the infrastructure for an OA driven scholarly communications landscape. The OA switchboard is a neutral information exchange hub streamlining the communication between funders institutions and publishers regarding OA publications. It's a tool. It's a simple tool as I will show you in this project briefing, but we believe it can enable a breakthrough in the transformation of the market such that open access is supported as the predominant model of publication. My name is Yvonne Camphons. I'm the executive director of the newly founded foundation that will run the OA switchboard moving forward as of January. And in 2020 I was the project manager when the OA switchboard was still project overseen by OSPA the association of open access publishers. And I will be presenting today together with Liz Ball from just Sarah Rui from plus and Morris York from the Big Ten Academic Alliance. Where are we with enabling open access? Well, obviously open access output is growing year on year and you can view statistics on the OSPA website OSPA does a survey every year and it clearly shows the growing trends in OA output. And increasingly funders and institutions are paying for OA centrally business models are becoming more complex diverse some with or without individual publication fees some through agreements with publishers and some through sponsorship models like diamond. Funders and institutions are also expanding their requirements about how various research outputs should be published and the result is a situation. If we talk about journals where there may be multiple authors involved in a specific publication, each with multiple institutional affiliations and funder arrangements and we call that multi lateral publication level arrangements. Now what is the challenge around these multi level multi lateral open access publication level arrangements for all three stakeholders funders institutions and publishers alike. It's very complex it's administrative heavy but it's simply complex to implement these agreements. I already mentioned multiple authors institutional affiliations funder arrangements, but don't underestimate also the myriad of systems and processes with all these players and stakeholders involved. It gets very complicated and messy everybody has their own way of working and think about all the operational relationships and communication going on. It's a challenge. And in preparing for this talk, I had a chat with this ball Sarah Rui and Morris York about what problems they see that need to be resolved in the transition to open access and we're going to listen to a recording of that. So as we seek to progress with the transition to open access across the whole publishing landscape, what we are faced with is a significant challenge around transparency. So really there's a lack of transparency around the types of data collected and stored around publications. And as we really look to for a cost effective and sustainable solution. Sorry sustainable transition to open access is critical that we have the data we need to be able to assess that and ensure that agreements are in place to support sustainability. And in line with that as well at the cost of away can be prohibitive so really more transparency around costs and that's not just article processing charges but also the total cost of ownership with regards to open access. And in general there's a need for a neutral partner to address this problem that doesn't represent any of the interests of particular stakeholders and range of stakeholders involved. Absolutely. So one of the key challenges that we're looking at is essentially how to move from 15 separate institutions that collaborate towards working together as a collective alliance towards particularly solving public challenges with publishing with open access. Picking up this gesture of how do we create intentional strategies to enable the move towards open access broadly across all of our institutions for all of our faculty authors and to really change the equation for how funding flows. One of those big ones is understanding first of all how funding flows and what money goes where and also how we can start to shift that balance. Looking at the amount of money that's in the system who pays how that pay flows and then put in place once we understand that strategies for actually shifting that intentionally towards what we'd like to see. So we have those two problems one is understanding the broad landscape and what it is that we're doing what it is individually all the institutions have very intentional strategies and have been moving those. So it's a question of how do we look across and look at our collective strategies and bring intention into that and how we can start to construct the workflows and the functional methods of collaboration that help enable those. A plus we have a number of challenges we're trying to solve for here with respect to infrastructure particularly because we have not historically engaged with libraries and therefore don't have what seems like the very obvious infrastructure to support that kind of part. One is simply reporting just for example has a very robust set of requirements to partner with them in terms of article metadata for every publication that they're they're funding. Many institutions whether they're just in the US or elsewhere around the world have have very basic requirements like do you have counter data whether or not that's particularly relevant you know do you have it. So plus really needs a mechanism to deploy this kind of these kinds of reports that doesn't require us to build an entire infrastructure portal. The way many of our other larger competitors have so that libraries don't have to go to many different spaces to get the same piece of information ideally there's kind of a one stop place for them to do that. Additionally the sort of management of fees and infrastructure around tracking fees approving fees determining this institution is part of a deal with no fees but it only covers five journals and what about the other two the kind of nuance there that can really cripple an accounting system. The idea that a shared resource could support that is very appealing. Well thanks list Sarah and Morris that gives a great overview of the challenges at stake here from different stakeholder groups so now how is the always switchboard helping with practical solution with a working solution and in various areas so this lack of transparency absolutely came up and data can help to improve transparency but there's also a challenge because it's very often a sensitive topic. So we need to collaborate to define who can see what and who can have access to what but there's no doubt to achieve a transition to LA we need better and more and clearer data. Both publication and financial information and that will come from multiple systems and so in order to respect privacy and security there we have to do something and we are addressing that in the switchboard through contracts and technical solutions. Bringing down cost it's possible efficiency and cost effectiveness are definitely possible first of all if we collaborate to agree standards that will bring down transaction cost. If we collaborate secondly to achieve streamlined communication that will bring down cost and last but not least if we work together and use state of the art technology to develop a collaborative shared infrastructure. Like other industries, banking, airlines, telecom have done for decades. But these are some of these are heated topics and it was already mentioned then it would help to have a neutral intermediary that everybody trusts to deal with these topics. Now what solution was developed already way before the project in 2020 started. This topic was being discussed by various stakeholders and quite early on they thought an independent neutral intermediary who only deals with the exchange of information streamlines the communication is contributing to the solution. So bringing standards agreeing the standards, having a shared infrastructure and providing back office services to communicate and exchange things between the three stakeholder groups is the solution and that is what the always switchboard does. As I mentioned 2020 was a project and we always had the ambition that everything worked out with an MVP and proving the concept can work technically we want to move and we have to move to a structural setup. It cannot continue as a project under OSPA so this year we spend also quite a bit of time discussing with the different stakeholders what are our principles moving forward if we're designing that structure. What should be covered first of all neutrality and independence are preserved through the structure and the governance and the funding model that we choose. Also very important all three stakeholder groups should be around the table the funders the publishers the institution should have equal say in what's happening with the always switchboard. We should be able to fund ourselves through a self sustaining not for profit obviously business model, but we obviously need some money to run the operation and keep on developing. Our promise our ambition is to support all a business models policies and types of scholarly output so whether it's diamond whether it's a PC based whether it's a book whether it's a proceedings paper or journal our ambition and promises to support all. Also in terms of developing the services and doing that through an open source solution we work with all stakeholders to determine the functionality to agree the standards and and so on. And sixth is that we serve three masters we should never forget that so we we will provide value and our ambition is to also do that equally provide value to institutions funders and publishers alike. Even though the way in which the values delivered is maybe not the same, but there should be an equal balance in what we do for the three stakeholder groups. So sustainability is now ensured moving forward through a new not for profit foundation without shareholders and it is a this neutral intermediary that meets all the six requirements that or the principles that I was talking through enabling shared infrastructure bringing transparency and efficiency and cost effectiveness to the open access ecosystem. But what is it what is the what is the tool that I was talking about the always which board is a central information exchange hub connecting parties and systems and streamlining and standardizing the communication and neutral exchange of. Oh a related publication level information that's important it's always situational and it's always interaction at a point in time so there is no database there's no big database of policies or contracts or what have you there is a situation at hand about which a funder and a publisher want to communicate and the switchboard enables them to do that. We enable a financial settlement to be done, but I can't stress enough the always which board does not get involved in invoicing or collecting money. It's only information about the settlement so whether that's an APC or an arrangement under a read and publish deal or a diamond model. It's the information about the financial settlement and not the settlement itself. Now in essence even one level deeper very very practically this is it the always which board is a hub. It's that's the technology in the middle. And the messages are predefined. We spent most of our time talking about the standards and the schemas and what goes in the messages and basically the always switchboard enables stakeholder one to send the message or ask a question. To stakeholder two and enable stakeholder two to respond through the switchboard. The technology validates the message that if the message is complete if it meets the schema and the standards and it will route the message from stakeholder one to stakeholder two and we're using the roar identifier to do so. Stakeholder one in theory in essence can be a funder publisher or an institution and stakeholder two as well. However, for the MVP the minimum viable products and we had limited time and limited money in 2020 so we had to define what is the minimum we want to do to prove the concept. And that is why we have in the MVP defined two messages and both of them initiate from the publisher. But you can imagine now that the infrastructure is in place. It's a much smaller task to define additional messages. The work will go into defining the standards and agreeing with the stakeholders what the exact question is and what the message should be. A little bit of detail now to show you what it really is the two questions are an eligibility inquiry and this one usually goes out before publication of an article by the way the MVP is also journals only. And the second type of message is a publication or payment settlement notification message and more about that in next slides. And then there's various scenarios between a publisher and an institution or funder there is nothing like an agreement in place nothing so it's just a standalone article and then the question will simply be, will you institution funder cover the article level publication charges for this intended publication with all these affiliations fund ref grant refs all the information we have will you cover it. And in that message is information like the license type the APC charge maybe additional charges and then what have you. Then the second scenario is a prior agreement and that is split into some prior agreements require article level information others don't and if they don't the question is pretty simple. It's do you agree this publication can be charged against our existing deal. And the answer is equally simple. The question, will you pick up the charges is simply yes no or partial the funder or the institution can respond through the standardized message that they will pick up the full APC but not the full color charges and so on. Quite a nice feature, which is being tested by our pilot users and also our launching customers is to then at this point already inform the publisher about your invoicing conditions and that can be as simple as a purchase order number but quite crucial for an efficient handling of the invoice later on. Same kind of type of answers yes no if there's financial information also whether it's the fee is acceptable and the same thing adding conditions or remarks. So this all happens before publication, and then once the article is published gone through peer review and it's really being published the publication notification the P1 message is to confirm that the articles now really published with all definitive authors in the right order all version of record information including a DOI and also information about how the settlement of the finances is so for instance some publishers are planning to include the URL link to their invoicing system, where in that P1 message there's simply a link where the recipient can go to pay for the publication charges. Again if there's a prior agreement that's not always necessary and the message can simply be this is the publication with all the relevant details and we will, according to whatever we agreed in our contract charge it against our deal. And again we don't need to know in the switchboard we don't keep any information about what that type or financial arrangement or payments arrangement is between the publisher and the institution. So there's no response necessary it's optional because this is a notification if all as well. Institution funder and the publisher have already talked about this publication have already given the green light that they're picking up the charges so this is just a notification that could be sufficient but optionally, there can be an answer. There's a value that the OA switchboard will bring and I have many more slides about that I won't talk about it today but you can imagine specifically for funders or for institutions or publishers there's a whole set of underlying benefits and value to these generic statements but in transparency, the clearer data is what this is all about and saving efficiency time and manual work but also cost effectiveness and an opportunity for better service to to the researcher, but also potentially for a publisher to the institutions and the funders. And what we've learned in talking to so many people this year is that there are direct benefits, especially for those who are directly involved in settling financials and maybe APCs, but there's also indirect benefits for people who may be doing things on your own like institutions managing block grants on behalf of funders, and there's also the community benefits. I mean the whole system to be able to learn, adjust and progress as as listen Sarah and more is already alluded to. If you have data if you have information you can progress and you can define policies and approaches and strategies for the future. And then I don't want to forget I want to stress, even though the OA switchboard does not have an interface for the author researcher remember we are behind the scenes this is back office. There is a value that all three stakeholders will embrace and it is trying to get the author researcher out of the equation when it comes to financial administration or settlement. There are many stories about authors having to get involved in exchanging information between their institution and the publisher about again a purchase order number, and I don't think anybody wants that we'd rather automate that and allow the researchers to focus on research. Now, the OA switchboard is a simple solution. But what makes it sometimes complex in talks like this is that it has so much potential, and it can support multiple use cases. So what I want to illustrate here and this is just the publication workflow obviously from from grant through publication. The OA switchboard can be called upon, or it can be integrated at various points in time in the workflow and in the in the systems. And this is super flexible. Again, it's a simple tool that can be integrated ideally automated and not manual there there is a user interface for funders institutions and publishers so for the occasional situation or if the volume is low. But ideally, this is integrated and it can be done at any point in time. It's all API based. I forgot to mention that. Now, partnering with the OA switchboard has the potential to solve our challenges. And again, I talked with Sarah, Liz and Morris about that. And let's see what they have to say about that how the OA switchboard can help them solve their challenges. So, in addition to increasing transparency and reducing barrier to entry for puree and smaller publishers. I really see huge promise from the OA switchboard and enabling institutions to manage and report on their publications and costs more effectively. So, no potential use cases could be the automatic feed of essential data around publications directly onto their local systems, linking invoices to publication data, you're using that burden. Really enabling them to monitor funds more effectively anticipate where funds need to be allocated to publications at key points in that publication lifecycle. And even assess if a particular way publication meets funder requirements. I think the potential use cases are vast and really it offers a very simple solution for us to build upon in the whole open research. So, I think what has becomes one of our central problems that we need to look at and really bring intention and action to is this relationship between open content and open infrastructure. The move towards open knowledge towards expanding open content and open scholarship is incredibly important in so many strategic ways for our institutions. And we need to bring alongside this question of the open infrastructure. So, if we succeeded in opening up knowledge and content, for example, but we haven't opened the infrastructure that we really move the needle on OA and what we want to see. If we've only opened up infrastructure, but we haven't had a corresponding movement in the content itself, have we moved the needle. So, what the problem we're examining closely is how to move both of those alongside of each other so that there is community ownership and investment in the infrastructure itself, as well as in the authorship and creation of the content. And OA switchboard is really one of those emerging and incredibly important pieces of open infrastructure and how we build that out. And for the Big Ten Academic Alliance, we're looking at that landscape and where can we make the investments. How can we bring the proper balance between both of these so that we can provide a real benefit to researchers, to authors who are creating the content and incredibly important part of our output. We are research institutions. We are published institutions. And on the other hand, libraries, as libraries, we're also purchasing that content and subscribing to it. So, how can we find the infrastructure that marries those together? So, a specific use case, for example, would be that the flow of money for subscriptions and access to content is different from what authors use in order to publish and to pay ABCs, for example, in charges for publishing. And those two aren't necessarily aware of each other, but how we can start to connect them and build an awareness of how much is in each place, how we have access to them, how we have funders. And conversation between authors, as well as institutions, and start to gain some knowledge of how these work together and build some real pathways for communication between those. And that's a use case that the OASwitch board steps squarely into and provides some promise for here's some pathways that could provide real solutions for how to open up that dynamic and building on this idea of transparency, provide transparency and visibility into how that flow works. And then as well as access and intention with how we can shape those and design them in a way that works best, not only works best for us and authors and researchers, but also enables an intentional transformation of the open knowledge and scholarly communications ecosystem that we would like to see. I think away infrastructure. Liz and Morris have really outlined the essential components that it brings to making this transition to away whatever that means possible, something that Morris touched on that I want to underscore is the the importance of the equity that it brings to the to the system. Many of the challenges I think we're seeing around this very aggressive pushed away particularly with respect to mandates like plan s is there are certain organizations, either because of their size their mission their location are really going to struggle to make that transition in a way that's sustainable and and away infrastructure like always switchboard is going to be a really important component to allowing those players to make this transition in a way that is not crippling in terms of the infrastructure required to do it so that's one reason I'm really excited to see the roles which were may play in leveling the playing field such that any publisher that wants to play in the space has the means to do it in a way that is open transparent interoperable and aligned with the mission of the organizations that are involved for plus specifically just given the nature of the stakeholders the kinds of organizations involved the mission of the organization partnering on something like this seemed like a no brainer obviously from a business perspective it'll be very valuable to us, but from a mission alignment perspective. It's critical to support these kinds of efforts as well so we're excited to be working with a way switchboard and the communities and stakeholders that will be involved. Incredibly encouraging for the way forward and this is the way forward we are determined to deliver and our ambition is for the ecosystems work better for everyone so that we can learn adjust and progress and as this is a not for profit intermediary it works best if everybody participates that means in this intermediary there is more connections to be made between funders and publishers and institutions, but it also means that our costs can be spread over more parties and since we're not for profit that simply means that the fees can get lower. So there's many reasons why we are aiming for wide adoptions and continue to invite everybody to the table to to join us in shaping this building it and and also using it. We have to be realistic. We regard 21 and 22 still as a launch phase because we need time. We've we've seen it takes time to achieve this adoption, get people to sign up and and of course now as of January really starting to use it, but also we've seen it takes time for technical integration and implementation. If you want to benefit from the automation and the scalability, you want to build the API is with your systems and of course that takes a bit of time and we only build an MVP. We still have a wish list and a backlog and we want to further develop and improve the always which board. Given all of that we are delighted that the following organizations have already confirmed our supports by signing up as early adopters launching customers and founding partners. I want to thank all of these funders launching sponsor institutions consortia and publishers. And as we speak we are making connections and matches where there is use cases where there's specific situations where there's an opportunity or there is a problem something that isn't going to well at the moment or is inefficient and where the expectation and the the hope is the intention is that the always which word can make make life better. So that is what we're we're doing. I want to extend the invitation to everybody who's who's in this in this meeting. I'm always happy to do one on one meetings I've done so many last year and it's been so much fun, but also so encouraging and it's also been so helpful in being able to deliver the MVP within time and budget. So I want to thank everybody who's contributed to that and who will hopefully moving forward also work with us in further building the always which board. If you want to stay informed I invite you to also sign up to our mailing list for for regular updates, but please do not hesitate to to reach out to me and I hope to talk to you about the always which board. Thank you.


Hi, Paul Stacey here. I'm at UNESCO Headquarters. In their days as part of an Intergovernmental Meeting of Experts looking to finalize the UNESCO Open Education Resources draft recommendation. The whole idea is to bring forward to its General Assembly in November an OER draft recommendation for adoption by all countries around the world and there's a meeting of this group here over these last two days. It's May 27th and 28th here in Paris to basically look at how to define an OER recommendation that could be adopted by countries all around the world. There's really four main sections to the draft OER recommendation. I feel privileged of course to to have some input into what it says. The four main sections are first a section dealing with the definition and scope of what we mean by open education resources and the scope of the draft draft recommendation itself. There's a second section that deals with the aims and objectives of the draft recommendation and then a third section that looks at the action plan associated with what the recommendation says and then a final section that deals with monitoring. Maybe worth highlighting just some of what the action plan items are because I think that's really where the heart of the draft OER recommendation is and so there's a number of actual areas of action. Let me just read them out to you. Building capacity of stakeholders to create access, use, adapt and redistribute open education resources, the development of supportive policy for open education resources, encouraging inclusive and equitable quality open education resources and then nurturing the creation of sustainable models for open education resource development and use which is something I've been able to actively contribute to and then finally facilitating international cooperation around open education resources. So those are the main areas of action. The process is quite a rigorous one in terms of defining the draft OER recommendation. There's lots of representative countries here and each section of the draft recommendation is put forward for discussion and for suggestions for changes. If there are any, then it's asked whether they accept the changes and there's a kind of process of consensus that's used to build out the final version of this draft recommendation and then those of us who are observers can also of course contribute suggestions and changes and improvements to what the draft recommendation should say. It's quite a quite an awesome experience of course to be involved in a process like this and I'm really hopeful that the draft recommendation um I'm sure it will be finalized today and when it goes forward for adoption at the General Assembly in November that it's adopted by all countries around the world. Check it out UNESCO draft OER recommendation