your presentation today as I'm sure this particular audience is COVID brings some really critical questions to mind for all of us but particularly I think that interplay between migrants and how we build a world over the next 12-18 months which is going to be safe for all of us and I think that's something which you know we all have a stake holding in so thank you very much look forward to hearing what to say and look very much forward to hearing what you have to say so thank you very much thank you for your introduction and also I take this opportunity to thank you for all the support that Arish has been giving to IOM and it's a pleasure to see David again and it's it's and even more rewarding because not not only David played the key role in the New York Declaration that is essential for IOM today after the adoption of the global compact but also it is an opportunity for us all to pay tribute to the memory of Peter Sutherland a very good friend a very close friend a friend that helped us all very much to get to the point where we are I would propose to you to divide my introduction in three parts the first one what takes my sleep at night the second one a few good news and the third one about the future of mobility which is something that is concerning me quite a lot the first part about the challenges that IOM is facing due to the COVID-19 crisis I will start by what is self-evident the situation in the camps in the camps of refugees in the camps of migrants in the camps of internally displaced people a little bit all over all over the world the good news is that the COVID-19 crisis has not yet arrived in full shape to the camps but it's just a question of time and camps are a very prone to disease environment as you can imagine social distance is impossible in the camps we have done quite a lot of work in Cox's Bazaar or in other places in trying to prevent and to raise awareness of the camps population but unfortunately we have to register 200 infected cases in mainland Greece UNHCR took notice of the first infection case in the Greek islands we have five active cases in Cox's Bazaar in host population of Bangladesh is where there are more than 120 infected cases and in environments where we have to deal with conflict and instability IOM is quite used to that as you know because we had to deal with the Ebola crisis in West Africa and more recently in North Kivu amid a conflict and the tribal and terrorist activities but in fact in Yemen the situation is for the time being clearly underreported but we are very concerned with the situation in Yemen or in the IDP camps in West Africa and in the Sahel just to give you an idea only in the miles of March IDPs in Burkina Mali and Niger have grown by 33 percent new 370,000 people internally displaced and if you look to Latin America you will see that the COVID-19 crisis the insecurity the loss of jobs to Venezuelan migrants has started a process of return of Venezuelans back to Venezuela and we are talking about the small number for the time being if you consider that in Colombia you have 1.8 million Venezuelans but the 52,000 are now returning back to Venezuela in large crowds walking and without any sanitary conditions so camps and movement of migrants are a source of enormous concern and they are environments very much prone to the spread of the disease. My second concern you may recall that in the negotiation of the global compact on migration one of the most serious issues and the controversial one was to guarantee the access to basic services to migrants in the countries of destination and in the countries of trend and especially there was the very famous discussion for those who joined these who follow these discussions about the firewalls establishing firewalls in access to basic services in order to prevent basic services to be used as migration enforcement mechanism and at the end of the day in the global compact the firewalls were not taken on board and then last year if you recall also in the general assembly of the United Nations there was a debate about the declaration on universal health coverage and the last point to be agreed and one of the most controversial ones was precisely should migrants be entitled to universal health coverage and finally at the end migrants were included well this crisis this COVID-19 crisis is the best demonstration how important universal health coverage is because if we do not guarantee access of migrants irrespective of their legal status to health care to health services to tracking and the testing and treatment it's the entire community that is under threat and if you look to what happened in Singapore it's a very interesting example because the Singaporeans were very effective in containing the pandemic but they left quite a large number of migrants outside the system and then suddenly you had a focus of infection in the migrant community and you had to close down a game and to have a specific dedicated focus on tracking and testing the migrants themselves so access to health universal health access to health is the first key lesson to be taken from this major pandemic then my third issue of concern are the urban slums where large parts of migrants live both in the developed world and in the developing world in very precarious conditions with often depending on informal economy where distancing is not possible where quarantines or lockdowns mean being deprived of basic income if you look to what is happening in Brazil or if you look to what is happening in Mexico you will see how in those slums the disease is spreading quite fast and there are huge numbers of people dying the same can be said for instance of migrants in detention or in collective deportations and expulsion and the UN migration network has just published two important statements one on alternatives to detention for migrants and the other one on asking a halt a stop in collective deportations in order to guarantee that the migrants are not exposed to the pandemic but of course and this is my third concern is about the economic impacts of this COVID-19 pandemic and what we are thinking is that usually migrants work in sectors that are very seriously hit by the lockdowns by the travel restrictions by the economic crisis in construction in tourism even in home care for the elderly and of course those people are losing their jobs creating two very concerning impacts the first one is the situation of the stranded migrants with borders closed with the travel restrictions with lockdowns we have thousands and thousands of migrants that some of them want to return home because they have no further hope of finding a job in the countries of destination and others were on the move and were blocked by the border closures and we have large amounts of them living together in very precarious conditions whether it is in the border of Ethiopia with Djibouti or whether in West and Central Africa in Nigeria in Asia people who are very difficult to reach for health care people who are living in very precarious conditions and of course in an environment that will fuel the spread of the disease but there is a second element which is extremely important if migrants in countries of destination lose their jobs there will be a significant impact in the drop of remittances to countries of origin the World Bank as a forecast as a forecast of a reduction of 20% of a drop of remittances this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the socioeconomic crisis associated with and there are countries that depend on 10% or more of their GDP on remittances for migrants so in countries of origin it's not only just the direct socioeconomic impact of pandemic it will also be the indirect impact due to the significant drop of remittances from migrants coming from outside that's why we are dealing with a health crisis but we are at the same time dealing with its socioeconomic impacts and one thing cannot be seen without the other and there is a need to have an integrated approach that's what IOM is trying to do and that's the entire UN system is trying to achieve both with the humanitarian assistance the ELS assistance but also the socioeconomic recovery assistance now the good news the good news I think is that it's very interesting to see that several countries have had a positive response to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in their own territory for instance in Portugal I'm sorry to give the example of Portugal but it's one of the few I have in Portugal those migrants were waiting for a decision on and asylum seekers were waiting for a decision they were granted automatic authorization to stay in the country on a legal basis for the duration of the pandemic but even more significant in Italy the government has just decided to regularize 600,000 irregular migrants that are badly needed for the agriculture and for the industry precisely to be able to count with that workforce to respond to the impacts of economic impacts of the COVID-19 and also in some cities in the United States like for example Chicago and New York they are providing cash based and housing assistance to migrants in need so there is a certain move in some countries to recognize the need to incorporate migrants in the response of the crisis from the economic social and legal point of view but even more significant than that in a number of countries migrants have been considered essential workers it's a very interesting concept that came out during these debates essential workers and not just the Einstein of this world not just the ideal skill that was welcomed in the countries of destination what are essential workers well they are the ones who drive the public transportations that never stop those are the ones were in the supermarkets those are the ones were in the delivery sector those are the one who were in the health care and in a number of countries these workers have been recognized as being in the frontline of assuring that life could go on in spite of the lockdowns while the natives were comfortably living in their homes protected from the virus those migrants were in the frontline working for the cities to go on being delivering the necessary basic services for the entire for the entire community and I could even mention more target the role of migrants in health care system home care but also in the hospitals in countries like the UK US or Canada 30% of the doctors are migrants or ever migrant origin in Switzerland near half of the doctors are foreign born and if the OECD figures are correct from 2016 in Ireland 42% of doctors were foreign born and 296% of nurses were foreign born and I think that this is a very good example that migrants were on the front line we're confronting the virus to preserve the health of the entire community and even more striking in a number of countries especially in Europe some seasonal car crops depend a lot on migrant workforce and some countries like the UK or Italy they have all even authorized shutter flights to facilitate the entry of temporary workers mainly from eastern Europe or Northern Africa in order to guarantee that the crops were not lost and that the seasonal agricultural works could be done effectively so there are good examples having said that and this is my last point I still am very much concerned about the politicization of the migration debate about the examples of the scapegoating migrants as virus carriers and I'm also concerned with the profitability for populists from the crisis and that will require in a discussion about the what will be the future of mobility we at IOM we are discussing this issue thoroughly internally for the time being we have a dialogue with iCal and with the international maritime organization because those are two international agencies that are very much involved sorry Indian people's mobility but my key concern is we will have to be imaginative and creative recognizing that the future of mobility will depend on the way we reconcile legitimate else security concerns with the principle of movement of people that is and separate from open societies democratic societies free trade and the free movement of goods and services and this is very challenging because we see some ideas coming up tracking systems apps to track people we see immunity certificates we see e-health declarations a number of things that are coming up they are not yet system ties but definitely they will have a say in the future of mobility you remember that after the 9-11 the changes in the security for traveling the liquids the things you could not carry with you because they were potentially up now the point is no longer the things you carry with you now you are the problem you became the problem because you might be carrying with you the virus and the the main concern I had is that we should not let the establishment of a two-tier or even a three-tier system of countries as far as mobility is concerned some countries are more capable to set up the infrastructures and the necessary mechanisms to have systems capable to assess the health condition of those who are traveling but others won't have that and we might be creating a system where the access to mobility will be limited by economic condition social condition countries of origin creating bubbles of movement that do not interoperate and this is particularly important in countries where there is a high level of commuters across borders working across borders and living in another country which is by the way very typical here in Geneva where I'm today but I'm sure that you know that also in the Irish in the Irish Island not just from the economic point of view but also a very sensitive question from the political point of view so we are at the crossroads we are at the crossroads things can still evolve in a very negative way for the future of mobility but things can also evolve in a more positive way if we are able to put on the table a fair honest reasonable open conversation about how much we need mobility how much mobility can contribute for the development not only of the countries of the nation but also for the countries of origin there you have David sorry for being so long I've tried to stick to the 20 minutes but the the agenda as the French say we have bread on the table thank you so much well thank you very much Antonio and in fact you are admirably concise for what is a very very complex and ever widening agenda thank you so much on the on behalf of the institute you delivered some very powerful messages there all about the exposure of migrants to the virus in in health terms but also to its impact economically and socially and I think you are at the same time noted that some states are trying to rule against the tide of of hostility or perhaps tide is exaggerated but there is undivided hostility in some quarters but there are notable examples like Portugal and a few other countries that we can which can inspire us and I think Ireland also I would like to think is in a reasonably supportive state in terms of of migrant interests and then you talked you talked in a way in troubling terms about the threats which will arise in the future to mobility the kind of automatic mobility open movement between states that we have we have committed to you you talked about the the restrictions which we may have to accept coming out of this it was a wonderful presentation Tony thank you so much and a lot to to reflect on and I'd now like to invite those participating in this event to ask Antonio questions to to make comments to react to some of the points he has raised I should say that this is a discussion which is entirely on the public record so let me see have we any questions coming in already or but otherwise I would invite people to use the function I think it's at the bottom of the screen maybe Antonio just while people are gathering their their thoughts I might I might ask you just to explore a little further one of the things a very interesting angle about IOM that it could itself be involved gradually in in in supporting governments with their testing and screening arrangements because you already if I understand correctly IOM is already doing that de facto with its medical centers around the world with its labs and one could under the heading of future mobility one could imagine that IOM might eventually have a wider remit to to help or at least it would support governments as they try to to improve and accelerate their their testing arrangements would you be able to say anything about that thank you David well you are absolutely right I should have mentioned island also is a very good example because as far as I know there has been a decision to renew for two months automatically the international protection and migration measures and there's a there has already been a second renewal so that's also a very good example in parallel with other countries in the world that I mentioned so I'm happy that you allowed me to have a specific reference to Ireland that I appreciate very much not as impressive as Portugal but nevertheless no no nevertheless no no no all good examples are helpful in this moment well we are and David you know very well IOM IOM is a highly projectized organization so we have a project we get the funding we do the project fortunately donors have been very flexible in accepting to reshift quite a number of projects that whether they are slowed down or even are blocked for the current situation in order to shift those projects towards supporting countries in the fight against the pandemic I could give you a long list of examples but one of the most striking examples is precisely in southern Africa and in east Africa and in west Africa we have been deploying our medical staff to support national health systems who are very weak and were very much unprepared to confront this this pandemic we are building capacity in those countries in terms of the hospital facilities to deal with this virus and we are even training doctors and nurses in this new ground of how to deal with the virus of which there are still many questions that remain unanswered it's perceived as a threat but fortunately IOM had an experience with the Ebola crisis in 2015 in west Africa and more recently in North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo and therefore we are very much engaged in supporting member states in Africa in scaling up their capacity to respond to the pandemic including including the possibility of having our networks doing the testing and giving medical support because something that is not usually very well known is that IOM in the world has 60 clinics 60 60 clinics we have our 18 laboratories and we have two tele radiology centers one in Nairobi and the other one in Manila because we do quite a lot of work of health assessment of migrants before they move and all those movements are blocked now so we are using and putting this capability installed capacity at the service not only of the countries where we have them but also of the entire UN system to accomplish our duty of care not only in relation to the UN staff but also in relation to the implementing partners especially the NGOs that worldwide work with us are on the front line humanitarian workers hate workers and of course they are very much exposed to the threat of the virus looking ahead looking for the future we think that we are well positioned to scale up this capacity and to put it at the service of a mobility system that introduces health screening and health assessments in the worldwide movement of people so we are ready to take up this challenge and even going beyond our mandate because to be honest we have very much focused on migrants but of course we do that quite a lot on internally displaced people for instance which are not exactly international migrants but they are also in need of support from the medical point of view and with refugees we have scaled up our capacities in Cox's Bazaar we have done quite a large upgrade of our capacities in West Africa and in the Sahel and more recently in East Africa especially in Somalia and in Kenya and in Djibouti that's it thank you very much Antonio I must say I think it's very impressive what you are doing in relation to the support from member states particularly in Africa and indeed you're working also with IDPs which in a strict sense is beyond the mandate but the reality is that if IOM doesn't do it nobody will do it and IDPs are very much at the center of the crisis as well just turning to something else and Johnny we're all obviously anxious about what could develop in the camps we've seen the news about cases now or a case I think in in Lesbos and then several cases of Cox's Bazaar you referred then to the those on the Greek mainland as well but one question from Karen Smith asks is there is there more that can be done to manage resettlement and asylum activity in Europe in order to relieve the pressure on the camps is the more that we as a European Union should be doing over the next 12 to 18 months to actually try to lower some of the pressure on the camps which now could could really take off I suppose another way of asking that question would be what scope do you see for the asylum and migration pact which I think is is due to be brought to a conclusion over the next few months well that's a very critical question as you know IOM and UNHCR in agreement have suspended the resettlement operations because of the closure of the borders and the travel restrictions but what we can guarantee both IOM and UNHCR is that we have gone working we have kept our work in the processing of asylum claims and in all the preparatory work so that when the borders are open we will be ready to resume resettlement operations but just to give you an example the lockdowns in March created a backlog of 10 000 refugees who are blocked were already selected to move and they could not move because of the restrictions so we are ready to make that put them on the move and up to now this is the positive side up to now no country that has accepted to take refugees for 2020 has dropped their offer so the offer still stands and therefore it's just a practical question of being allowed to do the movement having said that let's be honest the numbers are very much ahead beyond any capacity no just to put it very clearly the numbers are very low in comparison to the needs that's the way of putting it okay there has been a significant drop of a refugee resettlement for the United States as you know the figures of Europe in a number of cases have gone up but not enough to cover the gap created by the reduction of the US and we are talking for instance in the Rohingya case of almost one million people living in the Cox's Bazaar camps so resettlement can only cope with a limited part of the refugees that are in the camps which means that the vast majority will have to be addressed by direct action in the camps scaling up our medical capacities prevention prevention prevention and trying to install water stations for instance guaranteeing the access to water which is one of the most critical challenges because you can save two people you have to wash your hands several times a day if you have no water how can you wash your hands several times a day we distribute disinfectant but of course it's quite a huge challenge and every day i fear what figures might come from the from the refugees and the migrant camps over thanks and joining you in fact i just if i may come back to the the the the the question of the european the the new pattern migration asylum because i see that Sophie McGinnis of UNHCR's Reps station Ireland has asked what hopes you have for the new asylum and migration pact i think the commission is meant to be publishing it soon well we we are engaged in a dialogue with the european commission about the pact there are different dimensions to the pact that we consider equally relevant of course one of them where i believe IOM and UNHCR together can give an important contribution is precisely to deal with the situation of migrants and refugees in countries of origin and in countries of transit as we are doing in a number of places in the Sahel in West Africa in the East Africa or for instance in northern Africa including in Libya this part of the pact is extremely important because for for two years now we have together with the european union we and with the african union a joint approach to the situation in Libya and we think that this tripartite approach can be extended and replicated in other parts of the african continent and having these tripartite work european union united nations mainly IOM and UNHCR and the african union brings added value to the cooperation to deal with the situation of asylum seekers and migrants the second dimension is an internal dimension to the european union which in the internal dimension there are also two strings that should be taken into consideration one is the internal solidarity of Europe and that has been a crucial issue without re-establishing mutual trust and a thought of a greed system of sharing solidarity among the european member states it will be very difficult to have a pact on asylum and migration that is worth the name and the second string is the connection between the situation in the Mediterranean and especially the issue of the disembarkation disembarkation of those who are trying to cross the Mediterranean the figures show that there has been a slight decrease in crossing the Mediterranean in the western Mediterranean in relation to Spain there has been a slight increase in arrivals in central Mediterranean especially to Malta and to Italy and the figures on the eastern Mediterranean mainly in relation to the Greek islands are as far as at the end of April at the same level of last year by the same period of the of the year the figures are very far from 2015 of course we are talking about seven thousand people arriving in Greece we are talking about more or less the same figure of arrivals in them in Italy and we are talking about five thousand people arriving in Spain the problem is that those are very dangerous trips especially in central Mediterranean and we have always said that Libya is not a safe port of disembarkation and the COVID-19 crisis brought also more confusion on the possibility of disembarkation and save and rescue in central Mediterranean so there is a need when it comes to the European Union to clarify the rules and the principles for guaranteeing safe disembarkation of those who are rescued in the Mediterranean. Over. Thank you very much Antonio. Donald Cronin of Irish Aid asks about the global compact on migration and the extent to which that can be relevant to a coordinated response to the crisis do you see it as something useful and relevant or is it possibly masking further or does it contain the seeds for further conflict? Well as you can imagine migration as a whole and the refugees as a whole are not exactly on top of the agenda of the countries because the response to the COVID-19 crisis was mainly closing borders and turning inwards but I'm sure that the issues will come up to the top of the agenda after when the pandemic slows down and hopefully it will come back to the top of the agenda in the best positive way possible but there is a danger that it might come back in a negative way we don't know yet. As far as the global compact is concerned I think that there are a number of principles of the global compact that are very talkative about this crisis I've just given you an example access to health care for instance let's be honest one of the problems we have everywhere when it comes to migrants access to health care is that the migrants need to understand the advantages they also get to have access to health care it's not just a question of the countries being a little bit reluctant in accepting access from of migrants irrespective of their legal status to the health care it's also all the way around migrants being suspicious of getting in touch with the health care system of being tested of being identified because they are afraid that there will be consequences for their status if they attend so there is a problem of mutual trust that needs to be created when it comes to universal health care which is clearly stated in the global compact in terms of access to services there are two key points this year for the global compact one is the regional review the regional review of the global compact because it was adopted in December 2018 in Marrakesh and now we will take stock of all the different regions in the world have used the global compact in their migration policies and that will happen in the last quarter of this year in in person or virtually one never knows the second key element this year for the global compact will be the first by annual report of the secretary general the secretary general is supposed to report back to the general assembly in December on the assessment of the UN system in terms of the implementation of the global compact and that will give i visibility to the global compact last but not least how is the global compact an instrument to deal with the current the current crisis i think that what has happened clearly is that the the values and the principles of the global compact have been implemented by the countries in a very asymmetric way well i'm not counting those countries who did not subscribe to the global compact those 12 did not implement the global compact of course but those who have subscribed to the global compact have implemented it in a very asymmetric way but there is one very important point is that this the UN system has taken ownership of the global compact the UN migration network the multi-partner trust fund that was created by the global compact is already in action there is a first set of projects to be funded by the multi-partner trust fund the UN migration network has made a number of statements on returns on deportations on alternatives to the tension on protection to the children all in line with the principles of the global compact bringing together the entire UN system and at national level and regional level UN country teams have created replications of the global compact of the UN migration network on the basis of the global compact so there are systems of coordination of all agencies in the field around migration in well something like almost 100 and something countries in the world so from that point of view the global compact has been a leverage to coerence and consistency in working together in the United Nations. Over. Thanks Jun Liu. Another question Valerie Hughes asks about what about IOM's work in Syria could you say something about that? Well we our operations in Syria are basically cross-border operations we implement them departing from Gaziantep in Turkey and we provide shelter blankets non-food items food items to the Syrians that are displaced both in the northeast and in the northwest the situation in northwest is very difficult because there are almost one million people stranded there and in the middle of the conflict between the Turkish control zones and the government of the Damascus control zones the good news is that there has been a sort of informal or implicit ceasefire so the situation has become less traumatic due to a slowdown of the conflict but but the humanitarian situation is still extremely vulnerable extremely precarious and those people are there stranded blocks have no no hope no future and we depend quite a lot on the cross-border operations and since there is the resolution of the Security Council that allowed the UN system mainly IOM, WHO and WFP and UNICEF to operate in the northeast and in the northwest through the cross-border operation this resolution comes to an end in July and of course the support to those people will depend on the extension of the UN Security Council resolution otherwise we might be confronted with a very dramatic humanitarian crisis in those areas of Syria in the rest of Syria of course there are four and four to five million this internally displaced people who also depend quite heavily on the support of the international community and therefore there are actions to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic in those very fragile environments and those actions are mainly led by WHO in close coordination with UNICEF and WFP over thank you very much Antonio. Susan Murphy of Trinity College Dublin brings up the the issue of sort of isolationist attitudes that we see in the part of certain countries and the US will be one example with border closures and reduction of funding to international organizations you'll be aware of that I mean is there what is your attitude towards that and can you say something about the role of smaller states or less powerful states in trying to counter those tendencies what what can we do to try to preserve the values of multinationalism? Well I think that the the first line of response to the COVID-19 has been a closure of borders looking inwards a sort of strictly national approach but everybody realizes that if no one is safe we will not all be safe and that is a very powerful argument and that are good signs in that respect for instance the international scientists researchers medical doctors are cooperating in trying to find a vaccine as it has never happened in the past and that is very encouraging but there is a second issue closely linked to this one we need to have a multilateral international approach to access to vaccine it's not just a question of cooperating in discovering the vaccine it's also a question of making sure that everybody is entitled to the vaccine and this is not something new you can recall the debate in the late 90s about access to retrovirals in the UAA in the AIDS HIV disease we are going back to that point again how can we guarantee that the country is irrespective of their economic wealth it can provide their citizens with access to vaccine at an affordable price and we are talking about if we come to the vaccine and everybody hopes that there will be a vaccine that the vaccine will bring immunization at least for a certain period of time we are confronted with a paramount operation of vaccination worldwide which has never been seen in our history so this can only be done on the basis of international cooperation this cannot be done on a pure national basis otherwise we will create a healthy world and an an healthy world divided by the economic power that is totally unacceptable so I think that there are strong arguments for multilateralism and I think that small countries who have no even agenda should be at the forefront of making the case and the advocacy for equal treatment to all mankind we are all entitled to have access to the vaccine in the name of human dignity and those countries who are small in size can be very big if they use authoritative moral arguments. Thank you very much Antonio and in a way that that's replies to a question which Una Buckley of our Department of Justice has asked, I think you know Una and she raises the question about what Ireland what a country like Ireland can do to support better treatment for migrants and refugees. I can I come to a question from Daniel Korolev who picks up on the issue about recognition of migrant workers and he asks whether there is a risk I mean does that mean that if we go down that road which is a very important road is there a risk that somebody has to be seen to be useful to the host country before he gets support does it in some way I mean in some way dilute the basic need to protect lives and support human rights? Well it's a question that needs to be seen put into perspective are we talking about refugees or are we talking about migrants because those are different realities I mean people who are asylum seekers and refugees they are entitled to international protection okay that is not a question of usefulness for the country of destination it's a legal obligation coming from international law and what is at center stage is the threat to the life of the asylum seeker and refugee and the obligation for those countries we have subscribed to the international humanitarian law to give protection. When it comes to migrants we are not talking about the same situation we are talking about people who want to have a better life are in search for it they move because they want to find a better life for them and for their families and of course the personal happiness of those people are extremely important and relevant and at the basis of the motivation of the movement but they can only be happy and fully realize there's human beings if they find a job and if they can be integrated in the country of destination and so there is a trade-off there a trade-off between the benefits for the migrant themselves that improve their life that can be fully integrated and be happy and at the same time their contribution to the country of destination to the host country to the country that have received them and as i've tried to demonstrate to you the rhetorics of the ones who just want to accept the Einstein's of the world the genius of the world the highly skilled i've just given you a few examples where critical people are not particularly highly skilled and nevertheless they have been essential to guarantee that life would go on in spite of the lockdowns in our own cities in the developed in the developed world thank you Antonio um Sirica Pollock who's with the irish times has a couple of questions but i just uh put one of them to you she she coming back to the issue of the number of cases we've seen in Cox's Bazaar and Lesbos and so on the figures which you mentioned which we've seen the strict speaking seem a bit low but but many people presume that in reality they're much higher can you estimate in any way uh what you think the actual level might be in in refugee camp sessions and is there any chance of more comprehensive testing being carried out in camps well maybe you could say that the the figures are low everywhere yeah i mean this is such a tricky virus that uh with with people with non-symptoms nobody can give you a figure an accurate scientific figure bulletproof figure not even in the developed world uh there are different reasons that might explain why the figures are so low in some parts of the world for instance and the reporting being one of them definitely lack of capacity of the health system to identify people who might be infected in other cases there might be explanations linking temperature and humidity it's a a a non-none question about how the virus behaves in different environments weather environments another one is also the age the question of the age what we have seen in the developed world is that all the people are more prone to get infected than younger people and when you look to those camps the majority of the the population in the camps are relatively young people which might for their DNA and metabolism be more resistant to the virus or at least get infected without symptoms or with mild symptoms of course the capacity of for testing is a very relevant element in this exercise and let's be very very clear uh we have some access to tests but there is a jungle out there in the fight for testing okay it's not very easy to get to get the testing we are supporting quite a number of countries and we work very closely with the Center for Prevention of Diseases in Africa to help African countries to get access to testing but testing has become a very mobile market where if you do not buy in the minute five minutes later you won't get any more chance to buy it and if you do not pay upfront you do you are not delivered so uh there is also that explanation the difficulty of accessing to tests and making sure that the picture we have is more accurate so in a nutshell I can accept that most likely the figures are low due to under reporting or lack of testing but there might be also other explanations that at the current moment I cannot discard and I don't know what's going to be the evolution that that I cannot anticipate. And joining you we've time for one more question and uh and that is from Ethna McDermott who's a member of the Institute and Ethna asks about the gender dimension to the various set of migration challenges that you're facing as an organization both in relation to COVID-19 and more generally what what can you tell us about the gender perspective? As in many other crises women and girls are particularly targeted by the socioeconomic impact of the of the crisis mainly in countries of origin. Maybe this is not absolutely the case in countries of destination where if we look to the 2008 crisis young men young male were more targeted by the financial crisis than women and girls in the countries of destination but definitely from the perspective of large crowds or living in overcrowded livelihoods women are particularly valuable and we have already quite a number of reports that show a rise in violence against women gender-based violence and in vulnerabilities of girls one of the most disturbing thing is that with the closure of the schools some people have made assumptions I hope they will not prove to be right that 30 percent of the girls that stopped attending school because of the closure of schools will not go back to school when the schools reopen so I think that we need to be very much attentive to this kind of micro management of the social economic impacts of the crisis and if I had to pick one upfront I would say we need to make sure that all the girls that were attending school before the crisis will be able to go back to school when the schools reopen otherwise there will be an enormous human loss for them thank you David thank you Antonio that's a very powerful note on which to end this discussion thank you so much for having given so generously of your time I found it fascinating it was a real tour of the force across a very very challenging agenda and I have to say from all the comments and questions and many which unfortunately we couldn't reach everybody was hugely impressed by your presentation today and they all wanted to convey that to you so we're very very grateful in the interview thank you so much a lot to to take away and all I can do is thank you once again wish you all the best with IOMs ongoing work in relation to this crisis and and more generally so Antonio thank you very very much for your time and I thank all of those who took part today may I just make one final point before maybe letting Antonio have a couple of words the next meeting of the institute on development measures will be on the 3rd of June when the president of the ICRC Peter Maurer will speak to us Antonio would you like to to finish off David it's just just to thank you so much for the invitation the institute thank the support of Irish Aid of course we are all now used to this kind of remote contact but I hope next time I can be in person in Dublin because there is not yet a solution of sending me a beer by virtual me we work on this thank you thank you


But what we have seen over the years, and when you really look at the numbers that we've heard, not only from Malcolm of the 1.3 million people, if the numbers are right today, and the eighth leading cause of death in the world, which is leading to road safety, to grow, as Jean Todd said, to maybe the fifth leading cause of death if we don't do anything about it, it's clear that we need to have a multi-sectoral partnership to make a difference here.


So, today, I'm Steve Jacobs from RIT. Open at RIT is nominally the second academic kind of sort of open source programs office kind of knob. We'll talk a little bit about that in a minute. And we were funded by the Sloan Foundation, a big part of that funding was to help all of our faculty, whether they were in the sciences, the humanities or the arts, get support for building community around their open work. So I started off as an interactive media professor, then I moved to doing games in interactive media. So we created some of the first game design and development programs in the country. And in 2009, I spun up an honors seminar to make educational games for the Sloan Laptop per Child, which is where my entree into the open source world came from. And due to student demand, really, it grew significantly. We finished the first course as a seminar, offered it again as a formal course, had students from both of those courses saying, can we have another course? So built a projects course. And students say RIT is a cooperative education university for those who don't know what that means. That means that students must have X number of paid full-time internships before they get their diplomas.  So they are required to do this stuff. They said, well, can we get a co-op to work on our project for a semester? And I had to find ways to bend the rules to make that happen. Once I did that, they started going to the new iterations of class one and class two to recruit people to work on their projects as part of their class project. So as a professor, you go, oh, gold. We have an ecosystem. And then the next thing after they wanted co-ops was, can you set up a minor? So we set up a minor. Through that minor, we also set up, once we did co-ops for their projects, we did co-ops for other people's projects. So they've worked with UNICEF Innovation doing both software engineering and community development with UNICEF Innovation. They worked with Penn International, which is part of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, to do a video chat program for the one laptop per child that would be biased to video, not audio, so that if you had network traffic, it would kill the audio first and the video second. They won a couple of awards for that. We worked with the Enable group, which was one of now several foundation efforts that are around building cheap 3D printed prosthetics for kids. So we set up a jobs program in one of our local charter high schools to have our students build a curriculum and create a summer course job program around doing that work, which they then absorbed into their curriculum. Overall, it became a year-round effort. Then we were hired by UNICEF Ventures to do community development for them, for with some of their venture teams. My assistant director, Mike Nolan, who is also sitting behind some of you and runs the student teams that help build the fellowship programs as part of that. And Mike's an alum of all of that work we discussed previously. He started as a student in some of the early open source courses. So now we have Open at RIT, which is a university open programs office. It's the second one in the US that was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. And it's split 50% in kind of trying to build the traditional Ospo-like efforts with our IT services department doing things like best practices, recommendations for contribution or for opening a project, trying to talk about policy, trying to engage them with some kind of compliance ecosystem, stuff like that. And then we also focus on open work, which is something that I started to use as a term. Because the National Academies for Science, Engineering, and Medicine, for example, put out a document that they said they wanted to see more open scholarship in universities. And then they had to say parentheses, which some people call open science or open research, and then the next sentence say, and of course, by the way, we also mean humanities, the arts, and the professions. So I then started to say, well, we're an open programs office, no source. Because at a university, we have lots of things that people do that are open. And we don't want people seeing us listed or hearing about us and say, I don't do code, they're not gonna wanna talk to me, I can't learn anything from them. So we took the word source out and we started talking about open work versus open science or open research or open scholarship because of those very kind of guardrails that get put up when you use that terminology, which is why Mason had to do all that explaining about what they really wanted to do. So you don't see the word source, but of course we support open source software, hardware, a whole laundry list of things. So Carson Wade in the back who's with Red Hat suggested that we build a formal definition of what open work is. And part of the reason we did that is because there's this whole list of things that happen at a university. Open access journals, open data, open design, open educational resource, open hardware, open innovation, open intellectual property, open research, open scholarship, it's open work. That way nobody has to worry about what discipline they're in and nobody has to worry about what they do, we wanna help all of those things. So, and part of the reason for that list and part of that reason for the engagement of the National Academies of Science Engineering in medicine, which is a bellwether organization that tries to influence academia as a whole. Once upon a time, there was free software, then there was open source software, then there was open science, kind of, right? Because as my university president asked me when we sat down to talk about this, he says, science has always been open, we're always supposed to reproduce our stuff and blah, blah, blah, and I say, yeah, but, right? This is about real process influenced by the internet. Every, the whole reason that everyone around the world is looking at my slides at real time is Tim Berners-Lee created this HTTPS thing specifically to accelerate the progress of science, especially pre-publication peer reviewed science. That he was working for Europe's Adam Smasher community and they wanted to be able to publish their results in a pre-print format, right? So in the academic world, you don't become real in theory until you have gotten your work peer reviewed and those results disseminated via a journal like Journal Nature that you hear about on NPR all the time or at a conference that's a formal scientific Congress from a formal scientific entity that's providing for dissemination of peer reviewed results of work. So the term open science and the people who practice it have these elements of their process that can include all of or just one or two of those things that we see there. Registering a research plan, right? So that's somebody saying, here, publicly announcing, before I start looking into this stuff, I want more eyes on this. Do I have, have I missed anything I should be looking at around my topic X, whether it's psychiatry or Adam smashing? Am I putting unconscious bias into how I'm studying this? Am I looking at people from other silos, other academic areas or other backgrounds? Look at what I'm doing and tell me is there something I'm missing there? And of course, the double-edged sword is what we're all used to when people talk about things in the open. It's like, but what if someone steals my idea, right? So you've got to get people down with that, right? The online distribution of pre-prints so that you have a much broader distribution network for saying, this hasn't been replicated yet, but there's some really interesting stuff here. Maybe you should look at it. Maybe you should try replicating it so it can get peer reviewed. Publishing and open access journals, science is open historically, but getting those peer reviewed journals published is a huge blockade. It's a huge bottleneck. It can take years, if not months, to get that stuff out there. It's a very flawed system, just like any human system is. The people who push against open science, open scholarship, open research say, oh, well, that can be gamed. And yet, you look at NIH and NSF and all of these other scientific organizations complaining about a reproducibility crisis. Because it's so easy to write papers with bogus data that looks good and put them out there and have other people cite what they're doing, because they haven't tried to reproduce your stuff. That there's lots of bad intentionally or unintentionally science happening. This is why you see the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes for Health rebooting their open science, open data plans to try to be, once upon a time, they were like, oh, it's on a folder on the internet. And maybe somebody will find it and maybe you'll somebody try to reproduce it and just kind of put a link to your data. And now they're being much more specific and much more detailed about what those practices have to be and what safeguards you have to put in, which is upsetting folks. The publishing and open access journals is peer review without the major scientific publishers locking everything down, charging huge fees, blocking access to the information because the libraries have to pay skyrocket subscription costs to be able to have faculty and scientists and researchers access these articles and then sharing data openly. And then while there is some community manager work in very large scientific projects, there's not much and the open science community doesn't understand community in the sense that the open source community does and we all know that the open source community, there's the intentions to deliver and then there's the actual delivery of community. And there's a big gap there often and if we're not getting it right and we've been talking about it for 30 years, how can the scientists do better? Right? So when we were applying to the Sloan Foundation for funding, they looked at those co-op programs we had set up where we were hiring interns to work for NGOs to help them build open community around their work. And I said, what looks interesting in the work that we do? And Josh Greenberg said, well, why don't you do for your faculty what you're doing for UNICEF? Why don't you help them get their work out there? Why don't you teach them about building community? Why don't you help jump-start what they do? And one of the things both Sloan and I were interested in was going to grants against the kind of common practice of mini-grants for research within a university structure. Generally, faculty can apply for a mini-grant that often has a title like a President's Innovation Award or a Provost Research or something like this, right? You submit your mini-grant proposal and you get between five and ten K to hire one or two students to do something. Most often it's to write code for you or to upgrade your website, right? Very delimited in what you can get from one student and very tough in this kind of like blockstep of do it in one year or one semester, sorry. As a result, academic open-source often has a bad reputation. Often it's done by PhD students and once they've got their sheepskin and are on to their day job, they're done. Often they're not well trained in documenting work or leaving it for someone else to pick it up. There is a vast graveyard of our modules that have been developed by PhD students that fall off the face of the earth once they graduate, so it's not great. So the fellowship model that we have is rather than providing people a mini-grant award, right? And we see this kind of the same kind of stuff here, right? I mean, and this is not a knock in any way, shape or form against the open-source contributors fund model that was kind of led by Dwayne indeed. And it's been replicated in other places and has been adopted or at least trialed by Johns Hopkins as part of their efforts. Which is again a kind of, it's an automated system to transparently have a community vote to award one person x grand to get a thing done, whether it's to go to a conference or hire a grad student for x number of months or whatever. It's probably works better in open source organizations because they're better leveraged than actually the individual faculty members to really take advantage of that. They have a long term store of work done, work needs to be done. There's a paper trail. So it happens in both places. But it probably doesn't succeed as well in academia. So we offer a service of multiple students to accomplish a set of tasks or task for a faculty member. And that's not locked in by it must be for one semester. In most cases, we get it done in less than one semester depending on what the work is. Sometimes it spills over into more than one semester, but it's about accomplishing the goal. Most of the requests we've gotten have been faculty members who want to move from consumers to contributors. Often that happens under a semester. Hey, I've got this body of work and these guys really call for contributions and I'd love to get my work into their repositories and their collections of information or help them with their process, but they don't know how to do that. So we work with them, we do some of that work for them and then we train them on how to keep doing that after we leave. A lot of it is with either researchers or faculty members who have stuff that they want to open and build a community around or they have work that's been opened for a very long time and their community pipeline and all their materials, etc. They need a reboot or they need to be scaled up. Depending on what that need is, that's less or sometimes slops into another semester and it means things like doing community member analysis. Who's really using your stuff? Who's really a maintainer? Who really uses your stuff that wants to contribute? What kind of blockers are there from somebody moving from one to the other? How complicated is it? So we'll kind of do a community architecture analysis with them. We'll interview some of their maintainers. We'll interview some of their users, try to build a better pipeline. If they need it, try to set up governance. If they need it, if it's their first website or website that needs rebooting, we'll do UI or UX work. That type of stuff is what they get in a fellowship from us. So they don't get cash, they get services to accomplish a goal. The projects that we supported RIT are myriad. So we worked with Vitas Pathways, which is genetic data and bioscience around making better vineyards. DS for All is a data science curriculum that actually began as a partnership between IBM and Duke. And since you don't have to originate the work to participate in our program, they saw what we were doing with our faculty and said, hey, can you help our faculty? I said, I can't work for your faculty, but I can introduce my faculty and data science to your project. And if they wanna contribute to that, that's how we can serve the greater good by working with them to work with you, and that's what we're doing now. I have a software engineering professor who has the Vulnerability History Project, which is a museum of mistakes. And this is something that he's worked on for years that is open source in that generally his students work on it. And the IP is licensed openly, and some of them will contribute to it after they leave, he has a couple of people in DARPA and other places that like it. But he needs to do the big push to really build a larger community. So we're again doing that kind of, who are your users, what are your pathways with your pipeline to try to help him grow that base. We worked with a English professor who did a book on Victorian autobiography. And people in that field said, we wanna see all your data. Yes, some of that's in the book, but the book's a subset, like where's all the juicy stuff? So how can we take that database that he has that he wrote the book from, get it out there to the researchers? And they gave it my favorite name, which is the Victorian Autobiographical Information Network, or Vane, which is a fabulous acronym for information about autobiographies. Made me very happy, as soon as I saw the name of the project, I looked at Mike and I said, we gotta do this one. So that was fun. A research project that I helped kick off before the open programs office opened is something called World Around You, which is work with the folks who run the master's degree in deaf education at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which is a college of RIT, if you're familiar with Gallaudet University, which is like the four-year Abraham Lincoln created college for liberal arts primarily for deaf students. NTID is the Johnson administration created two-year tech school. And then students who get their two-year degrees from NTID can pass into a number of RIT four-year degrees, you know, with no blockers, no bridge courses, anything they just transition in. A bunch of kids who will come straight to RIT for the four-year program can get support services from NTID. Their education degree, one of the problems that deaf educators face is that deaf kids' parents and their teachers rarely sign and or are rarely native in the sign language they teach in. If you know anything about people who have children or you have nieces, you have whatever, right? What you hear all the time is, read to your kids, read to your kids, language development, read to your kids. Before they can even speak, read to your kids. Nobody reads to deaf kids in sign language, right? And so there's a huge literacy lag. Then they get to school, the sign language that they get taught in most often because there's 300 years of history of deaf educators voting down the use of sign language, only bringing it back into the classroom in the 60s. The US was the leader of that. And often you will find that school systems like the Philippines or in India, where if there are hundreds or thousands of languages that have spoken dialects, right? There is a boatload of native sign languages as well, right? The Philippines is a vast sea of separated islands. So are there individual languages that pop up? Up until they passed a law that every child needs to be taught in their native language, the deaf kids were all getting taught in American sign language because we led the charge, and that's what all the materials are in. And it's hardly that they're the only country where ASL is the primary instructional language. So this thing is an open collection of deaf storybooks created by deaf people, where you can pick often multiple different signed languages and textural languages, and you can juxtapose them and watch them and get tutorial games, right? So we're trying to build an open community. They already have open content. They need an open tech community. So we're working with them to get that done. Test Smells is another software engineering project that's automated bug detection and ideally automated bug repair for a lot of common software problems. So we're working with them to build them a community. So you can see a really wide range of stuff. Again, why it's not just an open source, right? We're doing websites on the history of redlining in the Western New York region with the liberal arts community. There's just lots and lots of really cool projects. Surprisingly, the National Science Foundation has caught up. I did not find this solicitation first. In fact, my vice president of research found the solicitation first. And he wrote to me and said, did you write this for them? Because this is the first time that the NSF has funded governance and community growth for open source work. There's a two phase program. There's a smaller phase program, the 300,000 for one year. The first opportunity to submit to that has already passed, but this will be a multi-year thing, to just figure out what you need to do to build a community. Phase two, 1.5 million for up to two years to not only figure out what you need to do but to execute. And very little, if any, software development can be funded as part of this. It's all about community development. The only software development you can fund is if you need to fix your pipeline or your tooling or you don't have any community back end and you need to build one to help you recruit. Otherwise, it's all this other stuff. Karsten, is that a question? Yeah, I can take it now. So Karsten's statement slash question is he's concerned over the fact that in open source software at least, community and technology are intertwined. And he's concerned about how restrictive is that don't code thing. The answer is I don't think they knowed. It's the first time they're doing this but what they're trying to say is no, this is not so you can build release 2.0, right? If you're gonna ask for technology development as part of your budget, you have to defend why you need it to support your governance, your outreach, et cetera, et cetera. So if you can make the case for it, you're good. But it's not about putting new features into your existing product. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's a big step. There are lots of us who have one leg in the academic community and one leg in the open source community go like, thank you, oh, it's taken so long, right? So has our fellowship been successful? What comes next? Okay, success is hard to judge because what we're really doing is we're giving them the tools and the setup and the knowledge to grow communities of their own. We're introducing them to the concept of community management but they're not contracting us for community management, right? That's not the initial engagement. So we get them started, give them that roadmap and that startup but then they have to do the work obviously. As you all know, community growth takes time too. So it's hard to judge but two of our early indicators is that faculty came to us and say, hey, we wanted to make contributions to this thing and they did it. So success number one. Success point number two is that three projects that have gone through the fellowship program have come to us to ask for help in writing their proposals for this pose program for the phase twos ago in October. And what comes next is after we've burned through the two years of funded support, the goal is the process is already in place to work with the office of sponsored research, the foundation's office to start communicating to folks that anything you apply for now from anybody, private philanthropies, state, federal, some level of public availability or open community or open access to your work, it's got to be there and it can't just be it's in this folder at this link anymore. It's not good enough. So that we're available to help people work on the language for those proposals and if they don't want or don't know how to or want to get trained in so they can do community work themselves, they can write us in to their budgets. Faculty often have to put in or anybody who applies for grant has to put in what's your sustainability plan. How does this continue after we've given you the money? Well, building a really strong open source community is one way to do that and they can work with us where we already have a track record in helping people do that to get that work done. People who write proposals whether they're scientific proposals or public service proposals often have to say a percentage of our fee or this piece of our grant money goes into an external assessment of the program when we're done or as we're doing it. So this is a similar type of thing, write us in at the front end to help you get your dissemination done right. So we'll see if we're successful or not but that would be how we would move this forward past the initial grant funding. And part of this is about, part of what Open at RIT is doing to support the fellows and support our faculty in general is that right now both industry and academia are facing similar challenges in terms of demonstrating value, efficacy, impact, translation and their open work. If you are Google or Amazon or Facebook you are probably giving people 20% time to work on stuff or you're hiring. This piece of software is crucial to our stack and we hire three people full-time to work on that piece of open software to make sure it stays alive and maybe we get a little influence into how it goes, right, that happens. And they know that but they're having trouble figuring out ROI, KPI, demonstrable spreadsheet here. And it's even harder when it's not software engineering work you can generate automatically metrics on but when it's, well, you know, Bob's been the community manager. Well, what the heck does that mean and what did Bob being the community manager for the thing that keeps our software working for the world? How do we really, you know, prove that that was a good thing? It's not transparent. It's not something we can automate. There's no metrics on it. Sally does the docs and somebody else does this and somebody else does that. Where's the ROI and the KPI that we can tie to that effort? How does that work? On the academic side, right, we have the issue of it's not a peer-reviewed journal article. Professor So-and-so runs the community for the Adam Smashers that do this critical research work and journal nature doesn't care about his community work. They're not gonna publish a peer-reviewed article on it. So how do we promote him? How do we evaluate him? How do we give him tenure? If he doesn't have the stuff we're used to looking, we're used to looking for. Our colleagues in Europe, some of them have told me that in some of the European countries, the classic peer-reviewed journal, peer-reviewed conference is so hard-baked and because in many countries outside of the US, the university system is driven by government policy and government systems, they won't do open work because it's a detriment to them. It takes away time from writing their articles. So why would they do this when it's not gonna get them promoted or it's not gonna get them a raise or what have you, right? So we're seeing a lot of things happening kind of sort of at the same time in industry where we have people like Amanda Kasari at Google saying, we have these credit taxonomies to try to surface that less visible or invisible effort to the enterprise as we're trying to do that same thing in academia. There are other kind of common pain points, if not problems or if not blockers and they're talking about these things but in different ways and they don't know in most cases that each other exists or they're having the same problems. So our good friends at the Alphabet Sloan Foundation gave us a little seed money and we are running something called the Summit on Open Work in Academia, September 7th through 9th at RIT. And you can find the link to that there. I have paperwork for those, little pieces of paper for those of you who are in the physical space and you can see we have a pretty big list of speakers from both the open source world, the academic world, from some of the associations that work in either industry or academia around open work like Open UK or Invest in Open Architecture or the Open Funders Research Group. We're trying to get all of these folks together for one day, the first day and just have panel after panel. So people from each side of the aisle, as you will, can talk about those common problems and pain points and understand where the overlaps are. The second day after a couple of opening presentations, most of the day is breakout rooms to have people get down, start talking through these things together, have a moderator there to take notes and we're gonna do two of those across Thursday. We'll have a break in the middle where Brian Alexander who runs the Future Trends Forum which is a group of futurists who focus mainly on academia and have done some stuff on Open before. He's gonna stream his weekly webcast from the summit so we get our attendees and our presenters to talk to his audience of folks that usually come to that. And Friday morning we'll do report outs and figure out what happens next? How do we continue this work? And with that, that's what we've been doing at Open at RIT. That's how our fellowship programs work. We've got, I don't know, six or 10 minutes for Q and A and ask away. Comments are all so good, didn't have to be a question, sir. So how do we hire your students? Do you have a jobs program? The answer is absolutely yes. As I said, RIT is a co-op university. So there's an office of co-op and placement, I think. Let's see what we get up. So cooperative education at RIT. So this website will talk to you about how you post a need for jobs or a search for interns. That program office services students who are in school looking for their co-op jobs. It services students who are graduating who are looking for their first full-time job. And it gets a lot of traffic from our alums who are when they're ready to look for their next career will not only look at Monster or Indeed, but they'll look at our board because we will post those positions for full-time early career versus recent grad-type positions as well. And they are more than happy to work with you. So very good team. Other comments, questions, thoughts? Do we have anything from the chat room, folks in the back? Nope, we have a very quiet chat room. Carson. Okay, so I'm gonna condense Carson's question down to what does a community for open science look like or what does it do or what does a community manager do? Much of it is the same as an open source, right? Being the hub, being the point, dealing with goals and milestones as scientific research has. That's some of those goals and milestones and roadmaps are about getting this work disseminated, getting other people to use it. How do we make sure that people are able to use our data? How can we get more people replicating our work or trying to replicate our work? So you will find if you type in open science community manager, there will be handful of articles, handful of posts, not a lot. A lot of the frenzy around NIH's new data management requirements, right?  You've gotta have that model locked for your initial proposal at this point, right? What are the data types? What are their sizes? All that stuff, right? And sort of the uproar around NIH putting this out is that there's a role out there in the scientific world that's a data manager that does this data planning, that does sit on top of this data pool. So community manager might have that kind of role. A lot of the scientific community's kind of concerned about this new level of detail that you have to have at the get go and be able to implement at the get go is they don't have people trained to do it. There aren't enough people trained to do it. What's gonna happen? Well, the last hired, the recent grad or graduate student next, if there's not funding or a mechanism within a university of probably these services, it's getting dumped on the newbie faculty who already has to do everything or we're back to grad students and then do we run into the graveyard of our projects all over again, right? Are they really qualified to do the work? So that's one of the big concerns. I did am, there's a website called The Conversation and if you search for my name in The Conversation, Steven with the Ph. Jacobs, so far I've written one, count them one article for them but it's about what the NIH policy is, links to it, what they're required to do and why it makes people nervous. You can get more detail on that and I have one minute left so if it's quick Carson. Right, so Carson has had a big light bulb go on about people who like open community work in open source but don't wanna be part of the larger corporate infrastructure. Here's a whole new place that he's never thought of where he could point people to look for jobs like that. Fairly restated, okay and with that I think I'm done. So feel free to search on open at RIT and summit if you wanna learn more about the summit. My email I think is linked certainly on our website which is in the slides and maybe even in the slides don't hesitate to get in touch. S-J-A-M-A-I-L-dot-R-I-T-dot-E-D-U. Not too hard to remember. Thank you for your time.


So, the Associated Press admits fault in firing of journalists targeted by conservatives. So you know how we often hear about the sensorious left who's always cancelling people? Well, in this instance, conservatives got an AP journalist fired. They're the ones doing the cancelling. And you know, if you've been following this story for a while, you know that this isn't the first time. It's happened all the time. I mean, it was Mike Cernovich who got Sam Cedar fired temporarily from MSNBC. They do this all the time, but yet they still maintain that it's the left who's overly sensorious, who's cancelling people. So let's read the story. This is an update. I hope that they have some background information here. But the Associated Press admitted to making mistakes over its firing of reporter Emily Wilder, who was targeted by conservatives for her college activism. The news outlet held a town hall on Wednesday, according to the Washington Post, which obtained an audio recording of the meeting. Brian Caraviano, managing editor of the AP, remarked that the mistakes were mistakes of process and not of outcome. That doesn't really seem like they're admitting culpability here. So they admit fault. But yet they're saying, oh, well, we agree that the firing was just, but it's just that the process itself, that's where we made the mistakes. That seems a bit odd to me. Caraviano said Wilder was given special training for social media after the company deemed past tweets borderline inappropriate. Still he said, we do need to be honest with ourselves and we need to admit that we've made some mistakes in the past week. Oh, well, I mean, how introspective of him to say this. The town hall came one week after Wilder was fired from the AP amid conservative backlash to her activism for Palestinian causes. On May 17, the Stanford College Republicans posted tweets detailing her activism while she was a student at Stanford University two years ago. She was fired on May 19. The AP originally declined to comment on the firing, but the news service later said Wilder was let go for tweets she made while on the job, not for her college activism. However, Wilder later issued a statement on Twitter saying, the AP never told her which tweets violated policies. She further suggested that the AP caved to pressure from the right to fire her, and that seems to be the case. More than 100 AP staffers signed an open letter on Monday demanding to know why she was fired. The staffers also voiced concerns that the news outlet service would not support them if they were targeted with a smear attack. As journalists who cover contentious subjects, we are often the target of people unhappy with scrutiny, the reporters wrote. What happens when they orchestrate a smear campaign targeting another one of us? Interest groups are celebrating their victory and turning their sights on more AP journalists. And this is exactly correct. During the town hall, executives addressed the concerns of the staffers, and according to the post, Deputy Managing Editor Amanda Barrett said, we want to acknowledge that we made missteps in handling this crisis. Please know the AP will protect you.  So this doesn't necessarily seem like they've done that much soul searching. They're saying, yeah, I mean it's still justified that she was fired, but we were right to fire her. I mean, this is just one person who they fired, but if I'm an AP reporter, I'm going to think, oh, well, the minute I write an article that's controversial that conservatives don't like, all they have to do is find some old tweet and then I'm going to be fired and the AP is not going to protect me. So Ken Klupenstein of the Intercept writes, the Associated Press sent a memo to the news agency's editorial staff this weekend about its controversial decision to fire a young staff reporter, Emily Wilder, following a conservative campaign to have her removed over her college activism regarding Israel Palestine. The memo obtained by the Intercept assured staffers that we hear you and you will have a voice, then goes on to stand by the decision. I mean, this is obviously inherently contradictory. We did not make it lightly. The memo notes signed by 10 senior executives, one signature is conspicuously absent AP's executive director, Sally Busby. On Monday, Busby insisted to NPR that she had no involvement in the decision saying that she had already handed over day to day operations after accepting a new job at the Washington Post. Busby's first day as the Post's executive editor will be June 1st. Two AP staffers who spoke to the Intercept on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal said that Busby's distancing from the issue reflects how controversial the firing is, both within the news agency and beyond. Wilder, a 22-year-old who graduated from Stanford University last year, joined AP as a news associate earlier this month. Last week, she became the target of Stanford College Republicans who deemed her an anti-Israel agitator. In a Twitter thread pointing to her membership in student organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as a Facebook post mocking Sheldon Adelson, the late Republican billionaire and ardent defender of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. So this is the controversy here. She was in pro-Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace in college, and she made fun of a billionaire oligarch. That's the controversy. That's why they fired her. That's embarrassing. The tweets were later amplified by right-wing news outlets, and even Republican Senator Tom Cotton, the campaign targeting Wilder, came after she tweeted criticism of news coverage of Israel's occupation of Palestine. And she's right to criticize them for that. Now, Tom Cotton, he was just on Fox News, like a month or so ago, talking about how terrible cancel culture is, and here he is amplifying this cancel culture of someone who he doesn't like, who dared to have an opinion. They're just so blatantly hypocritical. And AP's office in Gaza was bombed. And even the most minimal amount of advocacy for Palestinian human rights, AP, shoots it down. Yeah, artillery is absolutely correct. Cancel culture for me, but not for thee. That's exactly it.  An AP editor assured Wilder that she would not be fired for her old posts on social media. Wilder has said then she was fired on Thursday for violating the news agency's social media policy, citing a company policy of not commenting on personal matters. So really what she was fired for was criticizing the news coverage of Israel's occupation of Palestine. You know what we call that? We call that objectivity because the news coverage was objectively terrible. I will say as someone who's followed this issue now for more than 10 years, I think that this latest round of coverage was probably better. Like we saw more objective takes. John Oliver did a great segment. Allieville, she of MSNBC has been phenomenal on this issue. But I mean, she literally just tweeted that the coverage is biased, and they fired her for that. In fact, I'm not even going to buy that. They're using this as a justification. And you know, they know that firing her for being in a club, Jewish voice for peace, and students for justice in Palestine, that's not really a good look. So they made an excuse up, and they fired her because of this. That's most likely what happened. So this afternoon, the union representing Washington Post reporters tweeted solidarity with the staff of the AP and Emily Wilder. We hope management provides swift answers on her termination and clarifies the newsroom social media practices. This is the first tweet the Washington Post guild has issued since welcoming Busby's hiring on May 11th. So I think that the details of the story speak for itself. This is a pretty clear cut case, in my opinion, of the right after denouncing cancel culture for months, successfully canceling someone else. They did it to Sam Cedar, and now they did it to Emily Wilder because she was critical of the coverage of Israel-Palestine. It's just they should be embarrassed, but they're not. So I mean, needless to say, I think that the AP's credibility should definitely take a hit after this. This is inexcusable.  Is that really the expectation? I don't understand what they want from them. You're going to have people who work for you with political opinions, and most of the time, the folks who get hired at these mainstream news outlets, they have the wrong opinion that I disagree with. But they're not robots. What I care about is objectivity in their journalism. So don't be neutral. Don't both sides it when you're covering stories, but be objective and present us with the actual facts and data. That's what we need. But I mean, she pointed out, not in an article, but on her free time, that Israel's occupation has been covered in a biased way, and she got fired for that. It's gross.


The St. Lucia Tourism Authority, through its caribocation brand and in partnership with the Guyana Tourism Authority, led a sales mission in Guyana from February 1 to the 6 in preparation for the introduction of new direct service between the two countries on British Airways beginning March 27, 2023. The mission tapped into the vastly expanding Guyanese market to promote St. Lucia's tourism to attract more visitors. Led by Lorraine Charles St. Jules, CEO of the St. Lucia Tourism Authority, the delegation included the marketing manager for the Caribbean region, events and sports, Christopher Gustave, and CEO and business development manager of the St. Lucia Hospitality and Tourism Association, Norania Z and Juliet Sutherland respectively. St. Lucia's sales strategy included a lunch and learn session for 47 travel advisors, media engagements, and a business mixer with the Guyana Tourism Authority, Caracom Leaders, the Guyana Chamber of Commerce and Related Partners on February 3. The recently concluded Guyana mission has been dubbed a success and it forms part of the St. Lucia Tourism Authority's strategy to increase visitor arrivals to the destination. And the St. Lucia Tourism Authority recognizes this as an opportune time for both St. Lucia and Guyana to capitalize on the service with British Airways that will be introduced come March 27. And so this flight will come from London-Gatwick via St. Lucia to the Chedi-Jegan International Airport and from the Chedi-Jegan International Airport to St. Lucia and then off to London. So this is an opportunity for us to collaborate and really form greater alliances in service in both St. Lucia and Guyana. St. Lucia has welcomed many Guyanese over the years and vice versa. So this is really an opportunity for us to integrate our cultures and really advance. The wider Guyanese population is now more informed about St. Lucia following the St. Lucia Showcase at Gifland Mall in Guyana on February 4. The interactive showcase welcomed thousands of enthusiastic patrons who learned of St. Lucia's adventure, culinary and romance offerings, wellness options and much more. Being fans of these artists too, Sting and Shaggy, I'll help these up Shaggy. Ripa, a whole lot of guests that we would have met before even here in Guyana, for example, Shensia, Kesta Band, Bujimantan, Buji Garlin, Fan Lyons. Listen, a whole lot of artists will be there at the Jazz and Arts Festival May 5th to the 14th 2023 in St. Lucia. So it is the place to be to experience amazing music, beautiful music, generating music as we experience the life of St. Lucia. Visitors were delighted to interact with and purchase on-the-spot packages with hotel partners. Stolen time by rendezvous, body holiday, Bay Gardens Resorts and Harmony Marina Suites and engage with knowledgeable Guyanese-based travel agents who joined the showcase. Of the thousands who visited the Carib Cations and Lucia Showcase, one lucky patron will walk away with an all-expense-paid five-night trip for two to the Bay Gardens Beach Resort. The draw is scheduled for February 10, 2023 at 11am and the winner will be announced live on Carib Cations and Lucia's social media channels. The St. Lucia Tourism Authority aims to target the Guyanese diaspora, expanding expat population and the business community for leisure and business travel through an integrated advertising campaign. The delegation is confident that the recently concluded mission will help to sensitize the Guyanese market further and increase the number of visitors from Guyana to St. Lucia with British Airways serving as another option to the destination alongside Caribbean Airlines and Inter-Caribbean.


My name is George Page. I am the owner of Seabreeze Farm located on Vashon Island in Puget Sound of Washington State.  We also operate a small restaurant and butcher shop in the town of Vashon. We make cheese on a daily basis here at the farm. We're milking the cows, bringing the milk directly into the dairy processing area. We need to track a lot of information about that milk. FileMaker came into the picture as I started to struggle with using other paper based and other electronic systems such as spreadsheets and simple word documents. I realized that they weren't adequate for the task. It was then that I discovered FileMaker and realized that this was the tool that I needed to accomplish that. We're tracking its freshness, its source, the day it was milked, the day we'll be making the cheese. So all of that complex information about our cheese making and aging process goes directly into the iPad on FileMaker Go. In addition to tracking the cheese making operation, there are many other complex tasks that we track with FileMaker Go on the iPad. For example, tracking all of our winery operations. We use it as a point of sale application at our butcher shop and restaurant. We use it to track information about employees, about customers, tracking our breeding and vaccination records for the cows. If you breed a cow, you need to know when you bred that cow and when she's going to calf. If you don't, the consequences of getting it wrong, of having the wrong information can be really drastic. With FileMaker Go on the iPad, my staff can be right there with the cow, pull up her record, see when she was bred, when she is due, when she can have her nutritional needs adjusted according to her schedule. There are starter solutions with FileMaker that make it fairly straightforward to just take your existing data and immediately start working with it, which of course is hugely powerful and it's the temptation that seduced me. It just was so easy to begin using it instantly. Even something as challenging and complex as creating a custom touchscreen point of sale system, I was able to create myself in FileMaker without being a software engineer. All of those FileMaker Go iPads and the FileMaker Pro desktop applications access FileMaker server here at the farm. The application that I've created is hosted here and provides real-time accessibility to all the data from those various systems. This tool has allowed us to be three to four times more productive than we could have been without it. It's amazing. It's an incredible productivity tool. We could not function without it.


Appalachian Wireless now has new forward-pay pricing where you can pay up front and get the data and features you desire. Five gigabytes of data, just $39.99, unlimited, just $79.99, better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. One person is dead following a shooting in Floyd County. Floyd County Coroner Greg Nelson tells EKB News, 37-year-old Michael Adney was shot Friday morning in what Kentucky State police troopers say was a possible attempted break-in. It happened on Kentucky Route 466 in the Weeksbury area of Floyd County around 8 o'clock. At this time, it's still under investigation by the Kentucky State Police and the Floyd County Coroner's Office. He'll be sent to Frankfurt for an autopsy. Nelson's Adney was shot multiple times. Carol Thornsberry is from Wheelwright, but works and hangs out at the Weeksbury Trading Post. The store is across the street from where the shooting took place. She says it makes her worried knowing someone was shot so close to where she spends most of her time. It was a very scary feeling and the atmosphere around is not getting more. There's a lot of bad things that's been going on lately. We've been seeing changes in people. We've been seeing people come in the store that's changed a lot. You can just see it. Thornsberry says it will take her a while to get over the incident. I'm tore all the pieces. I'm shaking. And I will shake the rest of the day. I fear for people. I fear for the children this summer playing out in the yards. I really can't explain how I feel. It's a scary situation. Police at this time have not released the identity of the shooter or details surrounding the incident. In Weeksbury, Shelby Porter, EKB News.