We had ordered this humongous helicopter, biggest one we'd ever seen on the refuge, I think. Had a 450 gallon bucket.   And so he dumped a 450 gallon load on the fire and it didn't do much. He dumped another load on it and it didn't do much. We brought it the rest of the day. We had crews in there in the swamp along. We had this little old line going into the swamp where he'd dump a bucket and they'd get in there and they'd try to mix the water and stuff around. And the fire got suppressed but I don't think that we or the helicopter had much to do with it. And we've had fistfights. Our refuge manager and our gold folks have stood between people, between a division group super and ops chief and landowners because they felt like they were going to burn their property to a smithereens to stop the monster. And we just don't have to do that anymore. How do you manage for the unexpected in the complex and sometimes fire-prone 438,000 acre Okifanokiswamp ecosystem? What concepts, tools, and skills do you need? What should you be paying attention to and watching out for? This was a key challenge facing more than 100 members of the Wildland Fire community who traveled to Jacksonville, Florida for the second national Managing the Unexpected Workshop on High Reliability Organizing. On the workshop's first day, setting the tone for the entire week, the two people heralded for helping develop the concept of High Reliability Organizations, or HROs, explain the concepts and strategies behind High Reliability Organizing. Dr. Carl Weich and Dr. Kathleen Sutcliff, renowned organizational psychologist and eminent University of Michigan professors, are the authors of the insightful book Managing the Unexpected, assuring high performance in an age of complexity. Several weeks before this special 2005 workshop, all participants were mailed Weich and Sutcliff's Managing the Unexpected Book. Dr. Weich and Dr. Sutcliff emphasize that the same five key processes or hallmarks surface again and again in high reliability organizations. A preoccupation with failure, a reluctance to simplify, a sensitivity to operations, a commitment to resilience, a deference to expertise. Using these five High Reliability Organizing Principles as guide, workshop participants used the Okifunoki Fire Management Program as a field visit HRO case study. Most importantly, workshop participants wanted to see if they could take their Okifunoki Swamp case study insights, they're managing the unexpected learning moments and apply them back at their home units. A major goal of the Okifunoki National Wildlife Refuge is to use prescribed fire and wildland fire use to reestablish the Swampland's historic and vital fire regimes. Managing the unexpected workshop participants learned how this unique and multifaceted Okifunoki Swamp ecosystem represents a complex landscape of wetland and upland habitats. As they prepared for their field visit, the central question before the workshop participants became how do these swamp fire and resource managers manage? Tomorrow we're going to be observing collaboration among groups and different kind of agencies in a complex environment when we observe the evolution of the fire management system program in the Okifunoki ecosystem. Pay close attention when we're hearing things, when we're watching things, when we're asking people questions, when we're hearing them tomorrow. Pay close attention to what are some of the mistakes they don't want to make and ask yourself how have they designed themselves to avoid making those kinds of mistakes? We want to keep our eye on mistakes they don't want to make for which they may not be well prepared and by less well prepared we mean that given the mistake they want to avoid they haven't identified cues that would suggest that their system is moving toward that mistake. That's the preoccupation with failure. What kind of cues, indicators, indexes are they looking at to see whether they're in pretty good shape or it's getting kind of sour and they need to pay some attention to it. Maybe they're using overly simple categories that will keep them from seeing some of these mistakes. Do we see examples of that or not? Maybe they have a weak grasp of operations that set the stage for a mistake. They don't want to make that mistake but they aren't really well set up to avoid it because they don't see the operations that might lead up to there. Are they unprepared to recover from mistakes? As Kathy said, we all make mistakes. Okay? Are they aware of that fact? How are they prepared to recover from them? Do they know their kinds of capabilities and their capacities? Or are they taking it as an article of faith that anything comes along we can handle it? Or a can do culture? Okay, are they or aren't they? You might also want to ask yourself the question and I hope you will because this would help to crystallize things for you back home. Are there parallels between the challenges we hear about tomorrow and some challenges you've got back home? It's an obvious kind of point but they may be tackling some of the same kind of things that you're trying to deal with. How are they doing it? What's worked for them? What hasn't worked for them? Use that as a kind of virtual experience so you don't have to go through yourself some of the agony that they may be going through. Take note of those things. Listen tomorrow for are they learning anything from their past experience? Listen for what their primary expectations are. If I do this, this will happen. If I do this, this will happen. See whether or not they are set up to see when those expectations might not work because the one thing we know is that when you have an expectation you really tend to look for data that confirm it. It is really tough to have an expectation and then say I'm going to look for all the reasons why my expectation is wrong. Yet high reliability organizations are able to do that. Ask yourself the question if I were to take charge of this program, the one we're hearing about tomorrow, what would you personally do more of, less of, and what would you keep the same? And probably most important of all, just keep tabs on what surprises you. I mean, you might want to make that concrete and this would be a tip that I would give you just in terms of monitoring failure and so forth. Write down if you can tonight what you expect you're going to see and learn tomorrow so that you're committed to something on paper. Go, really soak yourself in the experience tomorrow. Come back to your list tomorrow night and say whoa, I thought it was going to be this. It wasn't that at all. I thought there'd be this, yeah, there was that there. And all of these other kinds of things. And be sensitive because as Kathy said, this is a really fleeting notion, but this is a learning moment. For a short while you'll be surprised at the way they say something, at the way they point to something. You may say to yourself, why the hell did he point to that and why is he talking about that and not about this? Pay close attention right at that moment and catch what it is that surprises you because you and I are just too damn skillful at smoothing over something like that and say, oh, I can sort of see how he'd do that. And then you're right past that kind of an event. But if you can catch those small surprises as they go along, they're really golden things to pursue after that. Workshop participants have now had the opportunity to explore and hands on detail from the HRO experts a framework for high reliability organizing. It's time to apply their HRO insights to the Okifunoki Ecosystem Fire Management Program. This all day case study excursion includes a presentation on the Okifunoki National Wildlife Refuges Fire History and Prescribed Fire Program, an up close and personal tour of the Okifunoki Swamp Ecosystem and introduction to the related fire management roles of the Georgia Forestry Commission, the Florida Division of Forestry, the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. One of the first field visit speakers that day was Ron Furnettin. Recently retired, Ron served as the fire management officer for the Okifunoki National Wildlife Refuge for almost 30 years. We also learned that each habitat has its own particular set of problems. For instance, managing fire within the Okifunoki Swamp is different from almost any other habitat that we have in this country, including the cultivated bogs up in Michigan and around the lake states and in the northeast. Well, these lessons are all not new. In fact, history shows that we often learn them over and over again. The problem is that wet and dry periods and the resulting difficult fire years tend to occur in cycles. In this area, these cycles tend to occur every 10 to 30 years. During the period between cycles, entire management staffs can change. Priorities change. Current management plans are replaced and the files that tell our history are in the archives. That's why we're here today to... We have to document the lessons that we have learned in the past in a form that will survive through maybe long periods when fire suppression isn't an emergency and when everything just becomes kind of mundane so we can remain ready to cope with the year when it once again becomes a major priority. These are fires that occurred during the beginning times before the refuge was established between 1855 and 1927. Now back during this period, the fire management managers kind of had this little rule. When the swamp water level was high, they make the best use of the swamp they could and do everything they could to try to run the fire into the swamp so they had one less line to worry about and the fire would go out on that side. When water levels in the swamp were low, if they had a fire on the upland, they'd do everything in their power to keep the fire out of the swamp because they knew that once it got in there we were in for a long period of trouble. Well, in closing, the lessons we learned as one, we can't safely manage fires without adequate fire suppression equipment, personal protection equipment, training and funding.  Three, it's dangerous and foolhardy to put personnel in the swamp. Travel is hazardous and difficult and personnel may easily become trapped. Four, it's dangerous to put equipment in the swamp. It will get stuck. And if you could put, five, if you could put equipment, personnel and anything you wanted to in the swamp, it wouldn't do any good anyhow. The helicopter drops in the swamp. This vegetation layer is so thick that it atomizes the water when it hits it and it doesn't soak the actual burning area. You'd have to dump buckets and buckets in a single spot just to put out a little piece of fire. Seven, retardant drops just make a real good show besides fertilizing the vegetation that's there. Eight, if it were possible to create a fire line in the swamp, the chance of it holding anything is zero because there's too much burning stuff in the air. Nine, as they did in 1932, the most effective management technique is to retreat to the upland and fight fire when it gets there. Ten, managed wildfire used in conjunction with prescribed fire is beneficial in the uplands and in the swamp for both fire suppression and habitat quality. Eleven, the surface fire in the swamp stops spreading only when it reaches an open water area and twelve, the fire isn't out until the water level comes up from underneath. And as a result of all of our planning, we did finish the swamp sedge break around the rest of the swamp and Fred will tell you more about that. We developed a plan for when we would fight fire in the swamp when we wouldn't and we've also developed a series of dip sites throughout the swamp so that we can use helicopters to help us when the fire comes to the upland. The Okefenokee is a land of earth, water, and fire. If you take either of those three elements away from the mix, you changed it forever. What I want to give you briefly is just an overview of what we have to work with in terms of resources that brings us up to why we have adopted the policies, the procedures that we have to manage wildland fire. On our uplands, our long-range goal around here is to restore the long-leaf pine wiregrass community back to a pre-settlement condition before Walmart. Parking lots, roads, trails, clear cuts, anything that manipulates the environment that prevents fire from flowing freely through the ecosystem at will once it gets started naturally. We have a very scattered management base, 16 forest management compartments around the outside edge, and numerous wilderness islands that have that same component of long-leaf pine wiregrass slash pine-pine mixture of about 17,000 acres. So, at 30-some thousand acres, we have to work with its upland component out of the 396,000 total acres, so you see most of it is swamp. We do management out there. We prescribe burn for the reason that Ron was talking about that these wilderness islands are upland, Fuel Model 7, okay, Southern Ruff. The fuels around them in the swamp burn more irregularly with greater intensity, and if the islands are not prepared to receive that fire, this habitat, which is endangered species habitat, could be destroyed very easily. So, we manipulate that by burning regularly so that then when the natural fire moves out of the swamp and crosses these islands, it does it at a much lower intensity, and we do not lose the habitat that's so fragile to the endangered species red-cockaded woodpecker. We have developed a fire use guidebook that will guide managers when they come here through the whole process of all the fire use documentation that you need to do. That has been looked over and approved while our fire management plan is now in review and will go through the NEPA process shortly with our comprehensive conservation plan. So, hopefully by the middle of the summer we will be able to use fire use in name. Everything we do here is fire use. We've been doing it a long time. Fire use has just kind of caught up with what we do. We didn't do it intentionally. We did it because that was the only way to do it, and we adopted that process. Sometimes fire puts us in a pinch, as we all know. The urban interface is encroaching in on us on all sides, and it requires us to be better managers and better prepared for when that fire moves out. And you notice I said when, it's not if. It will move out of the refuge onto private property. We know it will. That's why the Goal Organization was built. We knew within ourselves that there was no way to stop it. The best thing to do is be prepared when it comes out. We, the federal government, does not draw our boundaries anymore at the boundary line. We reach out to those areas around us that influence what we do and what we say. This is all state land. This is state land. So we have a couple million acres of land that has the core group of public lands that are surrounded by private lands, all working toward keeping their lands from burning and allowing our lands to have the best practices on them possible. Start small with an organization. Be content to just have one or two people involved. Don't set too high of goals for the group. Don't put Uncle Sam in charge.  Let the landowners let other folks run the process. You provide what you can, but let them run the process for you. And you be an equal member with the group. Set obtainable goals. Remember that the route taken is not as important as your destination. We want to start thinking about not building a fire management plan for the Fish and Wildlife Service or for the Forest Service, but we are for the state lands, but we want to build one that encompasses the whole area that looks at the things we've learned, the things that we've learned that we don't want to do anymore, and ways that landowners can grow their timber in harmony with that type of process. Many times the rows go perpendicular to the side of the refuge and when there's a fire, tractor plows go. You don't want to ride them because you're bouncing like this with those trees and you're knocking down trees. And so we want to turn things sideways and look at things a little bit differently. And our big goal when we first started working with these things was to provide a way to cut down on the confusion during initial attack. We all know it's a Chinese fire drill most of the time. No matter how well you prepare, as soon as the troops leave the barn, the radios don't work, you break down, nobody knows who's in real control because there's two or three. And so our goal was to try to provide things to this group that could do that and also provide information in a real quick manner to the crews on the ground. Fire use, we've trained five of our employees, two fishing wife service regional employees in fire use, four state and we sponsored state people, paid for them to go to fire use training and two forest service folks have gone so that we as a group begin to learn the new techniques and the new procedures so that when we're out there managing a fire use event, the tractor operators aren't cussing us wondering why we're out there because we're moving people into their organization that can tell the story of why we're out there and why we're doing it because their key people have the training and know what we're doing and we integrate them into our process so that they don't just have responsibilities on the outside, we bring them into the umbrella and they help us manage the whole thing together with that knowledge. We have 200 miles of road around the refuge that's designed to provide access and there are no mountaintop vistas, there are no real stream beds that you can follow to know that you're in this valley or whatever.  It's a multi-functional sign, it provides target practice as well as... But you know, the landowners are embarrassed and they've started charging the hunting clubs to replace those signs. We don't have to do it anymore. It's their signs on their road and they want to make sure they're responsible and so they're replacing those by making hunting clubs pay for them. I thought that was pretty neat. And then we're sometimes a very long way from a paved road where the fire crews would come in and so the state of Georgia came up with the idea to let's put signs into the perimeter road and back out again and those are our hub roads all the way around the refuge so that you're on the road, our shift plan, shift plan, boy I said it there, Incident Action Plan will, boy, we'll say that you go in on Joe Cone Road, we'll have that flagged and you'll turn there on that red road and there'll be arrows all the way to the perimeter road and from the perimeter road they all come back. And so it's a really neat safety item to get folks in and out in the most appropriate, because there's 100,000 roads that you can get lost on around this place. There's been so much consternation with Incident Management teams wanting to do standard practices on this fire because that's the way it's always done and we've had fistfights. Our refuge manager and our goal folks have stood between people, between a division group super and ops chief and landowners because they felt like they were going to burn their property to a smithereens to stop the monster and we just don't have to do that anymore. And so we want to look at trying to help get our folks to maybe go back to short teams and train those folks in short teams into fire use so that they can come with a short team and manage it and not bring 60 people with them and nobody in the field. If you can imagine something going terribly wrong in the future, I mean, the worst case of tragedy, what would it be? Well, for us, we've got a state park sitting out in the middle of the swamp, which is wooey type related. That's always of concern to us to have a fire go there before we know it exists. A lightning strike in the middle of the night and it runs across the state park on us. That'd be pretty tough for us to handle. There's not a thing you can do about that. Other than we're burning the state park and if we had burning conditions today, we'd be out burning around their cabins and all that kind of stuff like most of us do for urban interface. But really for us, I think with the technology that our folks have got in terms of plowing out fires, we're going to catch one fairly quickly as it comes out of the refuge.  And one of the things that our information folks should tell you today at the Boardwalk is that we have a tremendous information dissemination process. We call governors, we call senators, we call congressmen, mayors, school superintendents. I mean, the list is huge. Faxes, updates. We have people calling us as I've been watching the weather and you said that if we got a wind shift last week I might not need to have schools. Should I cancel school tomorrow? Yes, you need to cancel school. They'll shut their school system down based on what we've already told them. It's pretty neat, but it's the smoke that gives us our worst concerns. As the workshop participants continued on through the field study visits various stops that day, speakers from all the cooperating agencies, the Georgia Forestry Commission, the Florida Division of Forestry continued to voice a common united theme. The Goal Organization serves as a vital bridge that bonds the private landowners with the state and federal land managers in caring for these unique Okefenokee Swamp Area lands. Private landowners also shared their insights about the Goal Organization. A private landowner has always been in the Goal Leadership Role. Back in Jacksonville the next morning it was time to discuss high reliability and lessons learned from the all day Okefenokee case study field visit. So the whole purpose of Kathy and I kicking things off this morning is really to get attention back on your home organization so that you can take some of the ideas that we talked about on Tuesday used yesterday as a kind of platform to say and to think about just what sorts of things you might want to change or you might want to strengthen or you might want to do differently when you get back home. First point I want to emphasize is that these principles of high reliability I want you to be thinking of those as a language that can help you label and understand and think about and redo some of the kinds of things that you already are working on. So think about it as a language as a set of terms as a set of ideas that you can use to hold on to certain actions and activities that you have. Fred Wetzel yesterday gave us a perfect example of just what I mean by that. Fred said you know we were doing fire use without having a name for it. Then we got the name of fire use then we could think about it more explicitly we could do something about it and that's exactly the way in which I think you want to be working with some of these high reliability ideas. And so now what you do is work on being conscious of those kinds of high reliability principles fire use principles the way Fred Wetzel talked about them and now what you're doing is working on them so that you're good at them but you're also paying pretty close attention to them.  You're doing continual kind of updating you're doing the sorts of things that we're talking about that go along with mindfulness and high reliability yet at the same time you're not having to use up scarce attention to monitor them. One thing I want to be sure to re-ster and emphasize is that when we're talking about reliability and this came up in a number of discussions since Monday when we're talking about reliability we're talking about reliability through flexible action through having options reliability through resilience it's easy to get caught in the trap of saying to yourself look by reliability I need to be able to do the same thing automatically over and over that's to miss the point. The point is you want to do the same kind of scanning of a situation you want to keep looking at things and processing them in a mindful fashion but you want to keep as much flexibility in your actions as you possibly can deal with the unexpected events that come up. That's why there's all of this emphasis on small signs of failure early clues that things are going sour all of those are about trying to address a situation when it's pretty tough to see what might be going sour but it's really easy to cure it when you do see it. In fact, you've got a lot of pre-cocted physicians that's a kind of dilemma that they're in all of the time you want to get a disease at its earliest stages because then you got the best chance of curing it but the signs of it are subtle, they're small they're easily confused with other things and by the time you've got a nice full-blown sickness on your hand it's a monster to try to get a whole oven cure an earlier warning of things and that's what a lot of this mindfulness activity is about. This is a good chance to make points or to comment about just the issues of context if you think about the swamp itself as a pretty bounded kind of it is a bounded activity if you think about everybody rallying around doing a perimeter road if you think about fires moving in this direction are not trouble fires moving the other way can be trouble you've got a nice clean boundary around this problem in the way some of the rest of you don't those things may contribute to helping them build the level of collaboration that they have and you might want to keep your eye on your own situations about what are equivalent kinds of things that you could capitalize on that would give you a common focus or a common starting point or some place that you have a common set of interest that you can start to get people linked on remember one of the things that was mentioned yesterday is you don't have to have a big deal to get some dialogue started if you can just get some dialogue started over any old thing and get some agreements then in the data are good on this that you're building your way out and get agreements on a larger set of issues and don't settle for the easy thing which you hear all the time we hear it all the time executive programs or wherever Kathy hears it all the time when she's with doctors she goes in she talks some about high reliability organizations and the doctors just put the arm out and they say look we're different we're not like that we have our own kind of problems everybody's unique unique unique unique it's as if some people have staff in line but you guys don't have staff line relationships other people have division of responsibility and division of labor but you don't have them of course you've got them there are some kind of commonalities that we've across all of these sorts of situations and those are the kind of things that you have some leverage over and those are reasons why you can learn from some of these apparently organizations because they run into some of the same kind of organizing issues that you do so fine you're different we understand that we learn that over and over when we just walk around with you and listen to the kind of problems you have but we hear some of those problems in other settings at the same time so keep your eye on context but understand others have been down some of the same kinds of the others get entrapped the same way you do we're here in this room to learn about managing future unexpected events that could come and snap us in the rear and what I was left with and I just toss it out rhetorically to the whole crowd here is how do you pierce that veneer that crust to get down and start talking about those things because I don't want to talk about them in Region 4 I don't want to tell the Chief of the Forest Service oh yeah you know we've had three near misses last year with our program how do you have an audit a brutal audit that somebody described and yet it's respectful you know one of the first things that comes to mind on that is that going back to Carl's outline here of going from something that is unconscious and incompetent to unconscious and competent is what essentially what you're talking about is those middle processes or you're saying essentially and it would be interesting to try this just to be honest and to say we're at this conscious incompetent stage but we know it and this is the process by which this region or this organization is going to be moving towards the conscious competency these are the actions that we're going to be taking we are committed to this this is how we're going to measure it this is how we're going to report it so it does make you vulnerable but it also opens you up to obtain that leadership commitment to helping you move forward with that change process let me comment just quickly on one of Dave's point Dave's questions yesterday for my money I learned a huge from the first Ron Frenett presentation because what he was doing was saying wow we did this we had this wonderful brainered helicopter and it was out there with 450 gallons and damn it didn't do a thing when he could have been in a real box and said god we put that much money into the thing it's got to do something good so then you justify it and you talk it up and so forth and so there was a way in which the person who's got a hold of the history of things is saying gee when we saw a fire burn through a previously burned area we saw that it burned differently we heard a tremendous number of different examples of a learning organization just in that first episode so maybe one way that you can do it is just to back up your history again and you say boy in the 80s we were really in trouble and we've sort of understood more about how things burn in region 4 or we kind of see how to deploy people a little bit differently but take some of the heat off of right here and now and look back at some kinds of progressions that you've made and I thought Ron's presentation yesterday was really terrific in just laying out some of those kinds of things and also there was a real tone of just saying well we fouled up a good minute and then we moved on a little bit from that and that's the piece that you want to be able to talk about and maybe if you can talk openly about your distant history you can move it up a little closer to the present a little closer to the present and then you can start to look with more candor at some of the kinds of present kinds of difficulties. A thread that I noticed running through the conversations yesterday was the deference to expertise and the reliance upon expertise and I think that in that community is also reflected in the various comments that we've heard in terms of the longevity of the people in the area there's a lot of stock I think placed in the expertise of the local folks and I think this is one of the aspects that has developed the trust over the years as it we're dealing with the same we're dealing with people that we know that they know what they're doing we trust them to do that and they are the recognized experts in the area I think a lot of the controversy through the 80s when command teams were brought in was the failure to recognize and rely upon local expertise and this is some of what created some of the hard feelings during some of the fires the friendly fire was not all that friendly largely for that reason the local folks were not were not brought into the fold and I think you made an awfully good point about the inclusiveness of the current planning process and the respect and the reliance upon the landowners for their expertise and their knowledge of the land and their knowledge of the road systems and the bearing capacity of the soils and what equipment you can put where and where you can build a line and where you can't you also have to understand the viewpoint of the landowners we look at a forest we see an ecosystem we see trees we look at a forest they see hundred dollar bills and you don't like to see those going up in smoke so there's a tendency to fight for every acre if you're a landowner we're in our case there's sometimes a tendency to back off a little bit and fire it out one issue is this issue of plans yesterday we heard an awful lot about planning and putting together the plans etc and I think that I mentioned to you on Monday organizations that are very highly reliable spend a lot of time on plans they try to plan for every kind of contingency they develop protocols they do scenario planning they develop policies because they want to preempt things going wrong but by definition plans can't manage the unexpected plans don't plan for unexpected events and so there are two kinds of issues that I want to that I want to make with that first of all the issue is that you know plans can't handle what they don't expect and it really does influence mindfulness in this kind of way plans embody certain expectations about how the world is going to unfold and we have a tendency to look for information that confirms what we think is going to happen many organizational situations and many of the situations that you all face when you're in the field on an incident etc those situations are ambiguous and we have a tendency with our minds to fill in the gaps and to see what we want to see so plans can sometimes lead us to miss little small signals that things are developing are not going the way that we thought they were so that's one point about plans is that it's not to suggest that you don't do it plans of course are very important but one thing is that they can make us more mind less the other point is and actually I guess I've got three points the second point is that ordinary organizations oftentimes do not go back to their plans their existing protocols their standard operating procedures and incorporate new learnings high reliability organizations spend a lot of time revamping plans and protocols and standard operating procedures maybe that's normal for you all too in your units but a lot of organizations don't do that they have plans that have been around for years and they don't seem to update them third point we're not so much concerned with plans we're more concerned with the planning process we've been talking about process and this idea that this is a process of practices and procedures policies or principles that have to be continually enacted over and over some organizations do mindful planning other organizations do mindless planning mindless planning would be just having a checklist and going down and saying yeah we got that without doing a very rich discussion or a planning process that takes into account a lot of different kinds of views a lot of different stakeholders yesterday we heard Fred Wetzel talking about and we heard the people at the last part of the day as well talking about the planning process involving many different stakeholders in that process trying to figure out what could possibly go wrong there was a richness to that process that really gave them a sense of these are the kinds of things that could come up there were lots of there was a lot of input into that plan if you've got an inflexible a hierarchical kind of planning process it may lead to more mindlessness not mindfulness you have meetings all over the place everybody's been talking about gee I don't have any time to do anything I've got all these meetings okay what questions are frequently asked in those meetings what questions never get asked why not ask a different kind of question why not shift around the order which you go through some of the topics in a meeting so that some of those things are brought to the top ask yourself in your own unit what things that come up in a meeting get followed up what things are forgotten why not change that in some way what's referred to in the public statements by your group what are the themes that show up in the speeches can you work on those where do you spend your time haul out your calendar during the break look at it see where you're spending see if you can't adjust what it is that you're spending more time on and less time on is a signal to others of what strikes you as important what's important enough to call a meeting you're going to start calling meetings around a new issue now that's something that you can have some control over what kind of things get on the agenda what's on the first their first thing on the agenda what's last on the agenda there was the comment at the end that only three things came up and I hear it over and over again with incident management teams no one got killed we only had one slight injury and there was one other small thing that was the result of an after action review and it kind of led me to wonder well how rich are these after action review experiences sounds like they are very rich but there's this tendency I think to use as a metric for success did we kill anybody did everybody get home healthy and if we did that then we were totally successful and it kind of goes to this HRO idea of that we don't want to get into of saying we've got this lit we've got this done we don't need to keep looking at ourselves and thinking about how can we get better and better the AR process is accepted by leadership and they actually have introduced it into the IRPG and said that if not explicitly by having it there that they want us to use this process to identify our weaknesses and build on our strengths so there is a process in place already and it should give us then as a culture the opportunity to admit vulnerability to admit that we've got some things that we're working on so if we use that process they've already okayed that and given us permission to continually improve and say we're not perfect we didn't really talk about the first principle and that's preoccupation with failure and I see that even in this room we kind of fell into the trap of only focusing on everything they're doing right and I know people don't want to be critical because they're doing so much right but if we don't do that and I've only learned this from going through this workshop before and being involved in a very large escape and so I have learned for myself to be more preoccupied with failure and until you go through a big failure that you didn't see coming that you should have anticipated it's hard to look at things that way and I get accused of being a pessimist and I've been through it just kind of along what Dave said part of the AAR process is doing that near misses sometimes we used to laugh them off, whoa that was fun boy that was a blast instead of saying why did we almost lose it what saved our bacon what are we going to do next time after the morning HRO observations and dialogue workshop participants divided into their small facilitated discussion groups to answer six high reliability organizing questions the first two questions focused on the workshop's high reliability organizing theme remembering what we have learned from the case study experience what aspect of high reliability organizing already exist in our home organization and how might we do more of these HRO related practices or build upon them a summary of the insightful discussion findings that evolved from these questions have been published in the wildlandfire lessons learn centers written report that documents the entire workshop adopting the high reliability organizing principles into the wildlandfire organization is no easy task we are to successfully meet the wildlandfire management and hazardous fuel challenges that face us we must continue to improve our skills in managing the unexpected here at the second managing the unexpected national workshop to better explore the terrain of high reliability organizing participants journeyed out into the oki finoki swamp and now because of this facilitated voyage into the unexpected as these people return to their day to day wildlandfire organization operations they have a new enhanced awareness yes they are more mindful of the alligators that await them within their own work environment


So this webinar will be on distance communication. We're doing this in a series of webinars to support DFC2 partners and others who are interested to get to discuss in these times that we have to change our way of working to use tools and to use good practices and to share our knowledge. So we're also we're not only broadcasting our ideas to you but we also want to know what kind of solutions you have and what kind of challenges you face and then we can see where we can help each other. So I'm supported by Wim Duven, the coordinator of the DFC2 program. There's Nadine Sander who's also regularly in touch with the partners together with Kimberly Vakari and from the from the e-learning team Raquel Dos Santos and Jep Koster and I'm Hans van der Kost. I'm the coordinator of the e-learning projects with our partners from DFC2 and yeah I'm very happy to have this webinar for you to share some good practice. But as said I'm also eager to learn about your ideas and challenges and solutions. So first I want to set some rules here that's very important and many of you are probably new to Yitzi. I'm going to explain what Yitzi is later but please mute your microphones during this webinar and until where we go into the plenary discussion there you can raise hand and unmute yourself. So please also don't use your camera during the presentations. It disturbs but also in the plenary if you feel like showing your face feel free to then start your camera and please use the chat box to ask the questions. Now you see that the European Union is now also moving their their communication their their meetings to online and they're of course discussing the issues that we have with the budgets and all the member states and yeah we also have things that we need to discuss and still keep the discussion going on. So in Yitzi you see here on the right you see the different buttons that you can use during this meeting. So when we have the plenary discussion you can use the raise hand button to draw my attention and you can then unmute yourself if I mentioned your name and then you can ask your question or contribute to the discussion. There's this button you hopefully found it already for the public chat. You can introduce yourself there if your your name your organization in your country but also post your questions there they will be answered and some of them will also be used in the plenary discussion. Then a very important button is the mute and unmute microphone button. So only unmute when you get the word in the discussion otherwise please keep it muted and the same for your camera switch on your camera only in the plenary discussion. So just a few rules they also apply as good practice to share those rules with your participants of your online meetings. So DFC2 and distance communication as part of your DFC2 projects you of course have many things planned for the year and many workshops also in this time and yeah unfortunately you're faced by the challenge that many of those workshops or all of them actually cannot go on in the normal way that you want to do it especially if it's transboundary and outside of your institute and you have to travel we face all kind of difficulties. Now we don't want that things stop completely and we therefore organize these webinars also to yeah to assist you in moving these face-to-face webinars face-to-face meetings to webinars where you can still meet with all people across the world in a digital environment but that's of course not the same as face-to-face and it will also not replace all the things that you can do face-to-face but if we follow certain good practices then we can make it equivalent and even efficient. So therefore it's important that in this webinar we share our good practices and challenges so we can make the most out of this period where we really have to rely on digital communication online communication. So there are many tools around but before we are choosing a tool and I know people have their favorites for many reasons I always like that we start from the features that you need and I made a bit of a word cloud here on the left and it depends of course on you as a user what you find most important but what I find important that you can do this exercise by yourself to determine your features of the tool that you require but of course we all want an audio connection we want to see each other from time to time so video is important we want to share a screen like I'm doing now we want to discuss things in a public chat but you can also discuss things maybe in a private chat if you want to discuss with team members separate from the whole group. What we also want is to raise hands when we have questions you might want that share a whiteboard where you can do brainstorming and maybe collaboratively work on a document watch a video simultaneously that's also possible with some tools use it on mobile devices when people don't have access too much to computers then a tablet or a mobile phone app is very useful you also want to record these webinars that's what I'm doing now too and you can even live stream it if you want in some tools you also want it to be platform independent because some people use an iPhone others use an android some use it on the windows computer and then yeah it should work on all these devices and in different browsers you want also that there's attention for privacy and security you don't want people bombing your meetings and breaking in that's a serious danger with some tools and your privacy needs to be protected you also don't want that your meetings that are quite serious business that other people hear what you say and can use it at their wish especially big companies that get away with your stuff so that's a bit of the exercise you need to do is check your requirements and yeah what's an important thing there I forgot a few is I think it dropped out here it's the the user friendliness is a very important one and yeah that that's really the look and feel of it is also an important thing so now I'm going to mention a few of these tools everybody knows Skype and in the beginning it was quite an efficient tool but it got a bit overloaded with things and the maintenance had been not so good but it's still a free tool that you can use and you can do most of these things and the most important things there's google hangouts if you want to rely on big tech of course it sounds for free but you also pay with your privacy in some way so but it's very useful there are smooth tools and they work nicely from the browser and there's this tool yet see meat it's completely open source 100% open source it's quite safe to use there's encryption there's all kinds of nice things that you can use also from this word cloud it's available for us there's a zoom the free version you can just register download it and share the link with others and they can use it but it has some serious privacy and security issues that you need to be really aware about and I've posted some some links on reviews of zoom where they point out these these vulnerabilities that you get so it's both on security and on privacy that zoom is lagging behind compared to other tools and yeah you really need to weigh the user friendliness of a tool like zoom with what you pay for that in terms of giving up security and privacy it's a it's a conscious choice you need to make but also since you are dealing with a lot of other people you're also making that choice for them so be aware of that then there's skype for business or teams those are paid products are going on to the paid products that are mostly used by the corporate sector and in big organizations because these are expensive tools but they work quite well of course in your organization you need to have trainings on that to get used to these tools and keep that your IT department needs to keep them up to date you have to zoom pro or enterprise edition where you pay for more features but you don't get more security or privacy necessarily so you always have to check that it's not that the free version is more vulnerable than the paid versions so always keep an eye on what you pay for and there's go-to meeting also an expensive product but also very smooth to use so basically the conclusion is to check your requirements against what these tools offer and of course it also depends on your budget now i want to talk a little bit about trends because zoom is very trendy it's also for private use many of my friends they organize zoom parties because nowadays with birthdays we cannot visit each other and what we see is that skype was always more popular this comes from google trends so in the last year skype that's the orange line has always been more popular but since the corona crisis there's an enormous boom in the use of zoom and the funny thing is there's also a difference in the region so we see that in in united states and some countries in in south america australia zoom is more popular and we see indonesia also your second place and well in eurasia we mostly still use skype if we compare the two tools i didn't compare all the tools but this gives a bit of an indication of the popularity but never confuse popularity with features so your starting point is not popularity your starting point is which features do you want the word cloud of the previous slide now when you have chosen a tool there are a few more tools that you might want to use next to your online meeting tool for online collaboration and a great suggestion there is to use in parallel to your online meeting a google document it's a web-based tool where you can share documents spreadsheets and presentations and work on it live with each other so when everybody's logged in through the browser to a google doc you can simultaneously edit the document and this increases very much the efficiency of the of the meeting because the output is created while you're doing the meeting i've even seen some meetings in our projects where we co-designed the notes of the meeting so everybody adds to the to the notes of the meeting and immediately after the meeting it's or during the meeting it's already shared with everybody so very useful to do that also to collaboratively work on presentations it's very useful another nice tool that i came across is mural in many of your sessions in the project your workshop you have these posted sessions pressure cooker sessions world cafes and all these nice things that social scientists use in their meetings and yeah i can imagine that some people miss those posted sessions but this is a nice digital way of still using it and you can have a look at it it's called mural and it's for digital brainstorming online visual collaboration that might be very useful if you still want to continue with your with your workshops in a similar way as you planned and these tools are all for free then yeah before you start even your online meeting you need to do some planning and preparation so here are some good advice first of all you need to share the agenda and the background information before your teleconference it's very important because you want to be efficient and when people are prepared for the meeting it works most efficiently so make sure that all these documents and the agenda are shared preferably then in a google doc so people can even open it during the meeting and you can collaboratively work on it and I can even see the last changes that you made it's very important to define the roles who's the host who's the moderator and who takes notes now the host is normally the person who hosts the system that's not necessarily the moderator and like in this session the host yes it's somewhere outside of our control the moderator that's me but I do it together with Nadine who's collecting those questions and brings them up in the plenary and it's always good to have somebody who's not presenting to take care of all the other things behind the scenes so it doesn't disturb the presenter and we need a person who takes notes this is not a meeting it's a webinar so we record everything but it's essential that you decide who takes the notes it's also very important to to make sure that everybody makes it to the meeting and you don't get any confusion therefore the preferred way is to send electronic invitations and this is cross-platform so you can use google calendar to send out these invitations to all other systems and it will work similar from outlook and yeah it will adapt to their time zones in their systems automatically so that's a preferred way to avoid confusion but also to have automatic reminders set to the people and make sure that the participation rate is as high as possible another advice about when to plan your meeting of course you have to deal with time zones but you also have to deal especially in corona times when people are together with their families at home staying at home that you avoid the times that they are with their family so avoid lunch and dinner seminars because that disturbs the the family dynamics and also for people who are not having their families around it is also important that you give them a break because you know like me i'm the whole time behind the computer doing my work even in the evenings but at lunch i'm not waiting for a lunch seminar i just want to have my scent which is not behind the screen so take care of the rhythm of others and i know that you cannot always avoid lunch and dinner seminars but keep be conscious about it because you will lose participation you will lose attention during those meetings and many people choose for other priorities during those timings another good advice is stick always to the same tool because people need to get used to new tools so if every time you use a different tool then every time you spend a lot of time with explaining people where things are how it works and which browser gives the best performance so test these things with your little team how which one works best for you and in your case and with all your requirements from the word cloud that i showed and then stick to that one and don't swap all the time because also you get confusion with the links that you send out because people will use the wrong one and are expecting the wrong things now as i mentioned security safety is very important now we are aware with these corona times that we need to keep the viruses out and don't affect each other or get affected so that consciousness is there for a virus but in the online world there's a lot of bad things going on and you certainly don't want to have your online meetings or webinars affected by that by people who break in in your session and show things that you don't want the world to see so some advice there is to use a unique link for the meeting don't use the same link every time add password protection if your tool allows it can be a requirement for you because then the link will be longer with a lot of numbers and characters and it's hard to to guess for a hacker so don't make the link public big mistake is to put it out on websites and on social media it's not always to avoid and it's also a bit of a trade-off you want people to access especially your webinar but on the other hand you want to avoid serious problems with security so yeah one solution is to use a waiting room or lobby function of your tool which means that everybody has to wait until you allow them as the the moderator you allow them to come into your digital meeting and another way of doing it is to to have people registered and you keep track of the participants and yeah that's also important if you want to do monitoring and evaluation of your participants not to keep it completely open so some things to consider when you you plan this but something you also should take really seriously then there are a few things you need to do before the online meeting you need to make sure that you have a good internet connection and generally cabled internet is preferred over wi-fi and you can have some backup options so if the internet is breaking you might want to switch to to your phone tethering function and use your 4g bundle so make sure that you have a good backup option that your bundle has enough megabytes or gigabytes that you want to use and have this backup i myself i use dlan it was mentioned yesterday in the plenary of ihe that is that you get your internet through a cable but then from your power network in your room these are very nice and not so expensive things that you can use at home especially if you have a big house i don't have a big house but the cable version is much faster than the wi-fi so this goes over my power line to my router and works perfect then if you use a camera then please make sure that your room looks professional that you look professional that the light source is good that you test it before the meeting you see when i switch on later my camera after sharing these slides you will see that i have my a little bit of branding sticks to my door and a little anecdote is that on my preview it looked mirrored so i printed a mirrored version and then when i practiced this with nadine she said it's mirrored and so it also differs with how you see it in your preview and something in a person sees on the other side so it's also good to practice it with somebody on the other side so my guideline is always like with lectures always be there at least 15 minutes before the participants to test stuff and make sure it works so i could still hang up the the non mirrored one so the audience can see it in the right format and yeah if you have pets or kids around keep them out go to a room where you're not disturbed or if there's people outside doing works that disturb yeah take care of all these things it's much more professional and then for sound yeah very important that you do a sound check before the meeting and that that's very very important often the sound fills and invest in a good microphone or a headset it's so much better than many cheap laptop microphones that are also very directional the ihe default laptops especially the older versions they have this problem so if you're with two people at the microphone you often can hear only the one just in front of the microphone so that's a good investment to to have a good headset or a good microphone then some other advice just before the online meeting is if you plan to share your screen like me then it's very important that you close all the software and documents that you will not use because you can make a little mistake and people can see your emails coming in and there's a lot of privacy information there so if you want to share this word document that you see in the picture then of course make sure that you don't share also your emails in the background and if you want to show things make sure that those documents and software are already started so what i did before this yeti meeting i already put my powerpoint in presentation mode and from yeti i shared that screen and you couldn't see me browsing to the documents in the in the windows file explorer and taking time to open a powerpoint etc that all looks very unprofessional saying that browser tabs keep them open if you want to show things i already did that also for this meeting i will demonstrate a few of those things really good things to do to make it smooth and professional so you have in different tools some choices to share your desktop the full screen desktop versus sharing a specific window versus uploading it to to the platform there are trade-offs there so sharing your full desktop i advise that if you want to share software tools which have many windows because if you share a specific window and you get a pop-up pop-up from your model or your GIS software then your participants can't see it therefore it's important that you use that function to share the full desktop if you don't have it like with a powerpoint you only share the window of your powerpoint and not other things that's much more professional so they don't see Skype messages or WhatsApp or FaceTime coming in they only see that window that you use and then the third option is to upload your presentation but there we face problems for example during the msc defenses that Skype for business is not really consistent in that that for some people the presenter could go to the next slide etc and for other people it just stays on the first slide and yeah it's sometimes unpredictable or not intuitive how this works but why is that option there then well i can advise you to use that option if your bandwidth is very low because then sharing screens takes up more bandwidth than uploading your file once preferably before the meeting and have everybody more locally on their screens or through their own internet provider instead of having a direct connection with you when you have a low bandwidth so all these things you have to think about then you have the online meeting like this webinar you have to set the rules also there are many trade-offs if you have low bandwidth like in many of our conditions in the global south then you really need to limit the amount of video connections and sharing of screens try to minimize this as much as possible instead you point people to the documents you've sent in advance or look together in your in the browser to a google document or a google presentation because that doesn't take the bandwidth of the full connection end to end on the other end of the spectrum where you have really good internet and you want to achieve maximum attention of the participants it's important that everybody switches on their video during the discussion so you can see that they're not drifting off and they will also not do that because they know people are watching them and the same with the microphones you keep them unmuted because then they cannot interact with family members or colleagues with things that are coming in and disturb your whole meeting however you also want to avoid noise and echoes and in that case you want to mute all the microphones except the one of the speaker that's especially advised during webinars but also during meetings i can recommend only unmute the microphone of the speaker also in the discussion so for a smooth operation their raise hand functions are are useful so only people who speak have their microphone open because it's the right of the strongest in these tools so the people who have the most noise even if it's background noise they will take over the the sound of all the participants and they cannot hear the discussion anymore so be aware of these different trade-offs and then good advice for meetings and for webinars is use the chat function for the questions because the presenter gets distracted if there's every time questions coming in and we know that people have lots of questions during webinars but it's also nice then in the end to summarize it that's a big difference with face-to-face where you would go immediately maybe into the discussion but you can't do that in online tools because it disturbs the flow and you cannot have immediate response because it suppresses the the voice of other people and that's not that's not good practice to to do so use the chat then at the online meeting you also would like to start a bit informally so while people are warming warming up figuring out how the things work testing their sound you hear a lot of noises and crisps and everything then you can use that time to have a bit of a nice informal chat so how are you surviving these corona times working at home is it okay as your family etc etc use that time to also touch base with each other also still a social thing that you miss with face when you have a face-to-face meeting you always have a social thing to do but here it's important to break the ice in the beginning and there are always late commerce so use this time to get in touch with each other then introduce the agenda and the roles and also the rules and then the person who who has that role keeps keeps an eye on the questions from the participants to raise hands and yeah things go wrong you need to have a person who also informs you about it can be remotely what i often do during my webinars is to have a separate telegram chat or what's up chat open where the person who helps me informs me when things go wrong so i can still solve it while i'm not touching or interfering with the with the broadcast and time management is very important we don't want to spend a lot of long time online monotonously talking so it's very important that you work on those expectations in the agenda and don't spend more time than needed and if you if it takes more time then just postpone the meeting or plan another meeting where you continue the discussion and like in a face-to-face meeting also always ask if recording is okay in this case i'm recording and you were informed about that and this will be used in in our communications and it will be posted so other people can who couldn't attempt and if you want to see things back and use this recording and a few words about webinars they are very similar good practices as online meetings but in addition you want to have a webpage with all the info where people can go to and very also store the recordings you publish it there you give some guidelines on how to use it you have the agenda there you want moderator and presenters in really different roles it's preferable to use specific webinar software you can do it in other software like i mentioned but for really good moderation and for safety reasons it's recommended to use webinar software that's also important that you take care of MNE because webinars also have often a function for marketing so you also want to monitor how many people where they're from etc and keep in touch with them for follow-up things and also for your reporting in your projects so this friday i'm organizing a weekly webinar that i do every friday since the corona crisis with Kurt Menke as the co-author of my book and if you want to see how such a webinar goes then you can go to the link that's in the lower right of the screen and you can register we do that now for safety reasons but it's free to join and this friday we're going to talk about catchment delineation and GIS it's probably for many of you an interesting topic then yeah when you record your meetings and your webinars or even your courses for the internet i do that also a lot then you could also need tools for that there are paid tools at ihe we use cartasia i use personally screencast automatic it just depends on what you like and what's available but if you don't have a budget there are also very good open source tools around there's open shots you see the screen shot here on the right there's a kid in live or liveness or lives on the knowledge platform which i'm going to show you in a bit we've posted a link where you can see a review of these different tools also there you have to take care of the features you might not want all the possible functionality in the world because you can get lost maybe a simple tool is much better but that's up to your requirements now here at ihe we are also very much using big blue button in Moodle and although we use that in education it's also a very useful tool to use for webinars or for online meetings and yeah it's open source like you see that we're using now so and it has a lot of good functionality therefore i would like to show you now a video that in six minutes guides you through the functionality of big blue button and gives you maybe some inspiration on how you can use that yourself so i'm going to stop the sharing now of the the powerpoint and i'm going to start the video it's a nice thing about yet see you can start video we're going to show you how to use big blue button as a moderator and presenter capabilities first thing is you'll see you'll be invited to join the audio just as the viewers i can join listen only but i'm going to join with the microphone when i do big blue button puts me into an echo test just let me check my audio test test sounds good now i join when i join i see the presentation area here again the public chat is visible by default and the users list when you join as a moderator you have a square icon which says this is all the moderators the students the viewers join with circles when i'm talking you can see that i'm highlighting i can mute myself here by just pressing the mute button when the student unmutes themselves you'll hear them but you can also click and you can mute them as well you may also see students joined listen only when the students joined listen only they can't talk but they can hear you as well students can also set their status which means their initials will be replaced by an icon here you can see happy face and i'm going to clear all the icons as well as the instructor you can start and stop the recording anytime so here i'm going to do start recording and the message appears and i can also click it again to pause the recording and i can start and pause the recording as many times as i want during the session other moderator capabilities i can mute all the users i can mute everyone except myself and i can also lock the viewers down as well so this means that i can prevent them from sharing webcams sharing microphone public chat private chat as much as you want this one here is if you want to prevent them from seeing everyone else's webcams it means that they will only see your webcam but you'll see all the student's webcams to apply it just close i think you'll see an icon here next to their name that says they're locked if you want to unlock the capabilities go back to lock viewers i could just turn off the locks and then they'll be able to do everything again you also have the ability to put students into breakout rooms to do this you choose create breakout rooms it shows you a list of students i can drag and drop a student between each room i can choose a number of breakout rooms the duration and i can also allow students to choose which breakout room they want to join let's set it to five minutes and i click create you'll see the breakout rooms tab appear to left and now you can see students the count of students as they go into breakout rooms you have the ability to join the audio in a breakout room and you can also fully join the breakout room if you do that it'll just give you the invitation to join and it'll bring you into the breakout room just like the students you can join the audio you can see the students in the room and when you're done we just close and you're back to the main room at some point you may wish to end the breakout rooms before the end time you just click and i'll rejoin the audio and we're back in the main room students are all back ready to pick up where you left off let's turn to the presentation area here by default the whiteboard tools are selected so i can use the pen tool to draw i have a series of tools here as well which i can use so let me go to a blank slide if i want to draw can do a little bit of drawing and as the instructor i can also give the students the ability to draw as well by turning on multi-user whiteboard when i do that you can see their icons move and they can draw on their own layer they can't overwrite anything and you as a presenter have the ability to turn on and off multi-user whiteboard anytime you want if i turn it off all the ability to draw will be frozen if i turn it off students can no longer draw and if i clear it clears all the whiteboard marks as a presenter you have some controls here on the left hand side i can start a poll upload a presentation or share a youtube video let's start with upload a presentation i can bring this up i can browse my files and here i've got something ready to go this slide has a question on it it could be a slide deck of 20 40 100 slides very efficient to share a presentation because it only downloads once to the user's computer i'm like trying to show your desktop which we'll show in a moment here the slides have a b c and d let's say i want to do a poll and when i ask the students what is the result because it's actually formatted just fairly simply big blue button actually realizes that you have a poll for abcd you also have the polling option here and i can choose abcd so if i do it the students are all presented with a poll i can see there's one response and i can publish the results when i'm done polling i just close the poll and then i can clear the polling marks as well because they're just whiteboard if i want to share a youtube video i click here choose share youtube video i have a you are all ready to go just click it i do share a video presentation area will become the video and it will start playing and all the students will see the same video you as the instructor can scrub ahead of the video they'll all scrub to head to the same point start playing and if you pause they pause as well it was a really easy way to share a video with your students if i want to stop sharing the video choose stop sharing and then choose stop sharing the video it goes back to the presentation area you also have the ability to share the screen so i'm here i'm using chrome which makes it really easy i click once to share the screen gives me some options here and i can choose an application window chrome tab or i can just go back leave it a default and choose here my entire screen and then i click share in a moment the screen sharing will start up and you'll see this kind of screen on screen effect just because i'm sharing my screen while i'm viewing it most of times you'll just go to an application and you can start showing how the application works and this is what users will see when you go back you can just stop the screen sharing anytime you want and this becomes part of the recording as well finally as moderator you actually have the ability to make someone presenter so you can make someone else presenter and if i do that terrick move the mouse around i can see the mouse moving you have the ability to remove any user and you can also promote them to moderator as well finally when you're done you have the ability to choose logout or if you want you can end the meeting which would kick everybody out and start the recording and that's it that's an overview of how to use big blue button as a moderator with the capabilities presenter so i hope that's useful i'm gonna stop the youtube video yep we move so let's go back to the last slides of the presentation just a moment i need to start it first in the right way yep and there we go so the demo of big blue button very complete in terms of features that that you would like to have very complete and i think it uses similar open source libraries as you see because it has some functionality that jitzy also has what we also like to point out is that there's an extension of the deadline for designing and planning online courses it's an online course that we offer to to you and you can register until this sunday very useful if you plan to make online courses and yeah i can really advise you to to follow this one now i want to show before we go to the discussion i want to show you our knowledge platform i'm going to share a tab for browser now it's in chrome so i can share a chrome tab there it comes so you see now the chrome tab with our knowledge platform so the the link you just go to our open course where i think nadine can put the link also in the chat and then you will find this page easily the uc2 e-learning knowledge platform for partners and we try to put there useful things for you to learn about distance communication so the tools have been discussed here online collaboration tools some good practice stuff here that i discussed and some some links distance teaching gives links to useful webinars and other resources and good practices very useful to to check out but also we would like to hear those things from you so if you have something to share you think is useful for the dpc2 partners please let us know there's this tab webinar that you probably already found where you can find announcements of our webinars links to it but also the recordings of previous ones in this series questions and answers we are really curious to hear about your ideas solutions and challenges so mail them to us and we'll post them here so that's what i wanted to show to you go back to to jitzi and i'm going back to the presentation because it's almost time for the discussion so it's time for the discussion and i'm going to give the word to to nadine to come up with some highlights from the from the chat box the questions nadine can you unmute yourself yes i did thanks huns can you hear me yes i will stop sharing so you can also see me okay i don't have my camera because my lighting is not good so i prefer to no problem stay dark i hope that everybody was could follow the webinar well and just to repeat for the ones that missed it at the beginning if you have a question please open the chat it's you can open it on the left on the bottom third icon and there you can also introduce yourself i will keep an eye on the chat and we'll mention the questions here so we can answer them for you there was a question by lauren she was curious she said many of our partners may not have strong internet or use data networks to connect to the internet do any of these platforms that you mentioned earlier i think it was under the when you were talking about the tools jitzi zoom skype for business require more or less bandwidth that's a very good question of course um really some requirements you need to take care of what we know is that that all of these tools probably take care of your bandwidth so they will let you know so in jitzi for example if you go to your video screen or one of the others then in the upper left it will show you the performance the internet connection if it's a green it means it's good if it's yellow it means it's less and red it means it's no good and it will also adjust the video quality to to your performance of your internet other tools don't do that very explicitly but they do it so but it really depends on the tool how well it does and it's really something yeah i can i can check if i can figure it out for video platforms we found that youtube is very good on that because it will just check your your bandwidth and uses the the resolution that is appropriate for your bandwidth but definitely jitzi takes care of that okay and then um there was a more of a comment by laura she said oh whoops i just shared the link to this meeting via twitter so would you say that this okay once the webinar is open or would you still discourage people from doing that i would discourage it because people can simply with this link enter this meeting room and if you guys want you can start sharing screen and you can imagine what kind of screens you can share during this meeting that we are not interested in so the if your tool allows waiting room or lobby then then it's not so dangerous because then the moderator is always available to let you in or not yeah so would you then say that uh jitzi is a good platform for webinars i think uh if so jitzi the version that we are using here is hosted somewhere else at jitzi itself itself but uh you can also because it's open source implemented on your own servers in your institute or hosted somewhere else where you can customize the thing so i think for webinars it is really important to have a tool where you have this waiting room or lobby so you control the people who come in although yeah we love to to have everything open for the whole world especially me with open source and open data and these things but they're just idiots around to break in and i speak for my own experience it happened to me so therefore i'm super careful these days so really really be careful and for webinars let people register it also gives you some nice data on where they're from and you can create a community you can follow up of course within the gdpr rules but but avoid strange people who want to simply disturb your flow so generally no don't put it out on social media only put the registration link there yeah and there's a question from Wim Duven i think you already answered it now but i will just repeat it maybe you have something to add is jitzi open access and safe to use this completely open source hundred percent it has on the knowledge platform i've posted a link about the safety of jitzi it's it's generally okay except that it has that is missing that feature of having a lobby or waiting room but the communication is encrypted there's links you can make yourself and they have some advice on creating these links so this one is called dpc2 webinar distance communication with some underscores chances are really low that people have exactly the same link but if you call it a test then probably many people around have that link so there's a bit of a discussion about it but jitzi is seen as a generally a safe tool also the corporate ones Skype for business and go-to meeting the Cisco tools are really safe and zoom generally not so but it's very popular that's the trade-off okay thanks there are no more questions in the chat we can also take questions verbally there's more questions coming in it's good can you read it Nandini oh yeah how to start with jitzi do we have to download the software from their website no it's very easy you just go to to google and you say you type jitzi and then when you get to the site of jitzi i can even show that in a tab by the way that's better i will show it until the point of starting one otherwise it doesn't work of course so i'm going to share a tab here okay so i googled jitzi and there find jitzi.org always check the url before you click on that that it comes really from the organization it's also one of the safety advice and then there's this jitzi meet that's what we're doing now so you click on it and there is a choice either install it on your own server see the code so the whole source code is public really in the spirit the good spirit of open source and here you can just say start a call when you click that button here you type the name of the meeting and when you press go it starts right away and you can share that link with others and you can go back to it so you can close the meeting and you can go back to it or anybody who has the link can go to it and the nice thing about the concept of jitzi is if i can explain it a little bit is as soon as the first person has entered the link the room exists and it evaporates if the last one has left and you can start it again so when another person starts it again the room exists again and yeah when the last one leaves it's closed again so this link that we used for this one is you can experiment with it and try it yourself after this meeting because it will still exist when you enter this virtual room i'm going to stop sharing it now but it's as simple as that that's the the free version you simply started from your chrome browser it has a plugin for chrome in the same way as you started this one okay thanks i see another from solomon which one do you prefer from your experience for online lecture big blue button or jitzi i think big blue button is the best but a big blue button is not something that you just simply start from your browser you really need to have it implemented in a good way preferably integrated in your e-learning environment such as Moodle and then also your students are registered in Moodle and a big blue button can then use that database and these breakout rooms are really great to to use and yeah if you can configure it well you have the right servers you have it supports them then i think that's really the preferred solution and i would rather see doing these webinars in a big blue button also to you guys we're going to see if we can do that yeah because we we tried but then we realized it was not open yeah we need to register people yeah and maybe we can do that in the future for my own webinars that i do with zoom which i want to get rid of in the future we register now that people are for security reasons and you can easily set that up with meal change with a free account so that's what i use now somebody help me with that to explain how it works with a nice video guy in canada and i follow his instructions and i could do that okay thanks next time i provide some of these papers that i stuck on the door Lauren would like to speak i get your message okay uh lauren you can unmute yourself go ahead i don't dare show my video but i can unmute my microphone great go ahead uh thank you hans and and thank you nadine and the rest of the team uh this is a really helpful webinar so i appreciate the effort that you've done to put this together um i just have a quick clarification question on big blue button does that mean right now it's only a we can only use it for people who are registered within the ihc network and if we were to host a series of webinars with people outside of ihc we should use jitsi for the time being yes or you need to have your own infrastructure to host a big blue button so it's open source it can also be used standalone but then you really need to install it somewhere on a server or you pay for the service i guess at the big blue button itself as far as i know but i might be incorrect you cannot start it from a browser like jitsi they don't have that functionality okay thank you very much any more questions from the audience somebody wants to mute a mute the microphone take the word use use the raise hand function or show the camera so we're also really curious to hear from our partners how they are dealing with the situation and distance communication and e-learning for us it's always from our side how we see the things and they can be quite different than in a condition of our partners in the global south so i really hope that we get some feedback from you i was also curious uh maybe the details are not so important but when you said that uh here it's important not to plan a meeting in lunchtime yeah so maybe there are other details for other cultures that are more important to take into account when you are planning a meeting good point i think you need prayer times such a thing you don't want to disturb but you as soon as you go transboundary things become a bit difficult because the timings are also different but certainly you have to take care of the the social context of the people their personal conditions but also the timing of things events in their their countries uh vim dufe asked in a specific question for quang how he is dealing with distance communication in vietnam students and in projects so it would be very nice to hear maybe you want to try to unmute yourself and uh and say something or write it in the chat also feel free to send us an email if you have no time now and then we can also share the experience of our partners on the platform that we have that might also trigger a discussion he likes to speak i see be raised hand so when somebody raises a hand i can see a message popping up maybe you also saw that so uh yeah you can unmute yourself and and tell us oh okay yeah i am just afraid thank you very much thanks vim for asking question thank you very much hans yeah school from vietnam yeah yeah so yeah we also do something online this is a meeting quite often here but this time we don't have yet a student because school still closed but maybe next week start we will do some online teaching for students some of my colleagues on solving it they most likely they are doing with zoom i do a lot of meeting with my colleagues by zoom and skype normally small group five to six eight people so it's worked very well here so i think in vietnam the internet is quite okay so we we we work with this five so my colleagues also teaching with the big class i think 30 50 p is student and i think i saw them also doing well on the well what did they say on facebook yeah so but i i think now today i learned a bit especially when you're mentioning about the security of zoom again and also you introduce some new system zc or ppp i think we we may try that in the coming days yeah that's fine for me thank you very much thank you very much for sharing that it's really good to hear that you are using things to to be online in touch with your students and your colleagues and also good to hear what kind of tools you use and also good to hear that there are some useful things in the in the presentation that you can share with the others i was just wondering that because the schools are closed wouldn't that be the opportunity to continue online or are they are they closed that you're also not allowed to teach in that period even online yes so the school closing uh i think uh one half months actually after our lunar new year holiday and we start so it's almost two months now already so since then no school but uh but the online school start i think about one month ago yeah uh yeah closed yeah that's understandable of course it's not the limitation of not not being able to to switch to online it's really the holidays yeah so you start the schooling and online teaching of most of uh most of levels from secondary school to university nice that's good and how do the students appreciate it yeah i think um uh actually i i haven't really teaches so i i don't know but uh i found that uh it was not really the difficult for students but maybe more difficult for teachers lectures because they just teaching and not really see students and and they may be a little bit impressed so my friends share on that yeah yeah we all have to adapt these students generally are are quick with new technology about maybe some lectures need a bit more time to get used to it but uh what we see is that this also gives a nice opportunity now in the in this corona crisis that yeah even the most conservative lecturers have to do it because there's not much other choice yeah twice to learn new things lifelong learning also for lecture yes yeah i think it's a great some really a bit challenge but maybe we need to adapt it a bit yeah also for the future of your curriculum you can think of doing parts online and give more access to other people uh in in such a way who cannot physically come to your classroom yes you rise so even for me also i'm during the day i'm trying to learn some distant course just online lectures yeah well that's great that you do that yourself because for me that's also an eye-opener if i look at online courses from others or from commercial organizations in melons who offer that how they do it you can learn a lot of good and bad things yeah yeah i saw several courses like from vahenegan university to delft they're offering so also video lectures there i think it's really helpful yeah yeah okay thanks that was great to hear the experiences from from vietnam thanks very cool thank you han thank you very much i think because of the time we have to round off nadine any final words from your side things that came in no well i just saw last post by uh laura she said that there was a guardian article shared by ihe's it support on the secured insecurity of zoom so i think it's also nice that we shared that one on the on the platform there was a school in netherlands stopping with zoom uh because some bad things happened in the virtual classroom and yeah it's all about being conscious about it do the most to prevent it and take those guidelines very seriously yeah okay we're gonna close this webinar thank you very much for attending we will share the recordings as soon as possible uh and uh yeah i hope to see you in another webinar don't forget to look at our knowledge sharing platform and get in touch with dpc2 to share your solutions your challenges your questions with us hope to see you next time bye


Hello, I'm BDS Davens, a senior handler with the InternetStorm Center. Recently, I analyzed a reader-submitted malicious document that was encrypted and I used one of my new tools, a convenient tool, to help you with recovering the password of the encrypted password if you don't have it, so that you can analyze that encrypted document. So I'm going to show you this here in this video. So the tool is called msoffcrypto.dashcrack, msoffcrypto is the module, the Python module that I use that supports crypto for Microsoft Office, and it has several options. So with AuditDump, let's first look at our encrypted malicious document, and then you get a stream encrypted package. This actually contains the encrypted document, and encryption info contains information about type of encryption that was used. So if you see this, you know you are dealing with an encrypted document, and so you cannot immediately see the macros in here. You first have to decrypt it, and then you can look for the macros. I also have a plugin, PluginOfficeCrypto, that gives you a bit more information about the encryption that is being used, and here it is version 3.2, which is a standard encryption, and the latest ones that are being used is for example 4.4 agile encryption. So I'm going to use my tool msoffcrypto.dashcrack on cryptid here, and here after a second or two, it has found the password. So that's because this malicious document, it's a real malicious document, is encrypted with a simple password 1, 2, 3, 4, and msoffcrypto has a built-in list that I took from a Ripper, a built-in list of popular passwords, and 1, 2, 3, 4 is one of them. So now we know that is the password, and then we can run our tool again and say that it needs to decrypt the document and write it to disk. So not only find the password, but also decrypt it. And I could for example say doc.vir, output it to disk with option O, but as you may be know I like to pipe output into new tools, into other tools, so I'm going to say output to dash and that instructs msoffcrypto to output the document to standard out, and then I can pipe this into Oledump, like this, and now I can see the macros. So it's in A3, and here you have the macro with the URL. So that analysis was quick, the macro is not obfuscated, and we can just use that convenience tool msoffcryptocrack to quickly recover the password if we don't know it. So like I said, it works with a built-in list. You can also provide your own list, your own password list with option P. And here I have the rocku list, and as you can see it is gzip compressed, so you can pass it a list, a text file of passwords, but you can also have it gzip compressed and then the tool will decompress it for you. Let's run this. Now this will at first take some time. It is reading the password list and compressing it in memory. OK, so it already tested the first 100 passwords, and you can see it will take quite some time. This is more than 10 days that it will need to try all those passwords, so it illustrates here that this is indeed a convenience tool. It helps you if it is a popular password, but if it is a rather obscure password and you want to use rocku list, then it will take a long time, and then you are far better off using jonderripper or hashcat. So let me interrupt this. OK. So what will often happen with this kind of malicious encrypted document is that you will receive them via mail. Well actually, a user in your organization will receive it via email, the document attached to it, and the password will be mentioned in the email. And yeah, it can be the case that you will receive the attachment, the document, but that you don't receive the mail so that you don't know the password here. Then you can use my tool. If you have the email, then you can try to look for the password and provide it to my tool, or else there is also an option that you give just all the text, all the strings that are inside the email, and then my tool will extract all the possible passwords and use that. So I run odidump on hiring, and this is the email, and here you can see all the streams. So what I'm going to do is select all the streams and then use option s uppercase s. This will extract all the strings, and I will write this to strings.txt. Let me grab for password in string.txt, and you will see inside the mail there is a message that says the password is 1234. What you can do with MS of CryptoCrack is say option e to extract possible passwords from a string text here, and then do crypt it, and then it decrypts it for you because it found that password. Let me do that again because you might notice that this is quicker than using the built-in list. See it's a bit quicker if I use the built-in list like this, it takes just a bit longer. And that's because I have written an algorithm in MS of CryptoCrack so that it looks for the keyword password or words between double quotes or single quotes, and if it finds that then it extracts also of course those words, but it puts them at the beginning of the list. So here 1234 is at the beginning of the list, it's one of the words in the list and that's why cracking it goes quickly. And then finally, if you have recovered the password and it took you for example 10 seconds and you don't want to run each time the tool for 10 seconds, then sorry you can provide the password with option c, c for cracked password 1234 like this, and then it has decrypted the document for you so I can dump this to standard out and pipe this again into all the dump and here you have your streams with the macros.


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