to help you do this work. How do we serve as a resource, as a greater resource, to help you be successful? And so to help us set the table around that discussion of community partnerships is going to be Greg Darneter who spoke with us yesterday about the landscape in the U.S. And so now in terms of higher education and education and so forth. And so I would like to have Greg come over here. He's going to talk to us. I think yesterday you said you were going to tell us some stories from the road. And Greg, as we mentioned yesterday as a special assistant to college access for the Department of Education. So Greg, thank you. Okay, I'll start with the microphone this morning. So just to pick up on a couple things that Jeff and Jacob just shared with you. Not only do we have higher ed act being reauthorized, but we also obviously have ESEA, no child left behind, and the whole waiver process. As many of you might know, we also have put out a blueprint around CTE and the redesign of CTE. The President's proposed a billion dollar investment in helping districts build career academies. This would be above and beyond the $1.2 billion that the Department currently invests in current technical education. So, you know, we'll see where that is in his proposed O-13 budget. So we'll see how that plays out over the next weeks, months, and the such in terms of the budget that's for this year. So there's actually quite a bit of opportunity on the horizon. But there's also a major dark cloud. And then going back to one of Jacob's comments around federal aid and what, 75% of or 77% here in the A coming from us, how in the O-14 budget, so not this current fiscal year, but the following year is projected to have a several billion dollar shortfall. So there are conversations going on within the nonprofit community. Gates has funded eight or 10 entities to begin thinking about what that might mean. That could translate into a fairly significant cut in the Pell Grant. Could. As you might know, the President's proposed an $85 increase in, again, his O-13 budget. So not a significant amount of money. Probably more symbolic, if you will, in terms of his priorities of, which he's made very clear. And he's, you know, and he's defended the support of low income students through the Pell program. And it's not only defended that, but also, remember last July 1st, Congress had to act on student loan debt interest rates not doubling on July 1st. And so he was, we were able to make a deal on that a couple weeks before July 1st sort of thing. So my point is that the President is going to be our strongest proponent in this kind of conversation around Pell, which doesn't, as you know, operate basically as an entitlement program. It abides as an entitlement program, even though it's not labeled an entitlement program. So, anyways, lots of opportunity, but also this fairly large dark cloud in terms of how does the shortfall get handled. There are conversations around limiting Pell if students enter higher ed and not prepared to earn credit. So if they're in remedial courses, should federal funds be used to support that? Should the time that they can be in remedial courses be limited? Those sorts of things. Now, some institutions across the country are making their own decisions along those lines, where if students are in remediation for half a semester, I mean for a semester or two semesters, the institution is saying it's not in your, but we're not going to continue to enroll you. Because it's not in your, you're not making adequate progress. And our concern is about you potentially absorbing more debt and the such. So anyways. So, yes, let me tell you some stories from the road. Let me put this in context. There are five major areas that from when we arrived a little less than four years ago, that have been core to the way we've approached our funding strategies. And these will all sound very familiar, and I'll try to refer to them, and most of them will be fairly obvious, as I kind of share some of these stories. So the first one is around leadership and teachers. So supporting high quality teaching and supporting school leadership. Second is around standards. And this is all related to the conversation in terms of what's gotten most people's attention across the country in terms of the United States falling behind other countries in terms of students' academic achievements or post-secondary degree completion rates and that sort of thing. The third one is around data. And this kind of ruthless honesty about data. The fourth one, which was not part of our original core funding areas, is early childhood. And early childhood has emerged over particularly the last year as a centerpiece of our funding. And then the last area is really our civil rights, our social justice investment and kind of banner to say states and districts and communities need to pay attention to the bottom 10%, the bottom 5%, the dropout factories. You need to pay attention to the lowest performing schools in your state, in your district, the lowest performing students in your district, your state. And so this has been part of our school improvement grant, the SIG grants. It's been our major investment there. But it also comes through in our I-3 funding, in our Promise Neighborhood funding and the such. So as I've shared with most of you, I think I've got the best job at the department because I report to Arnie, which means we exchange emails once in a while and we sit down a few times a year. I can get to him any point in time. He can obviously get to me at any point in time. But when I ran the high schools in Chicago, I had 200 staff people and I had a $45 million budget and I show up at the department and they give me an office and it overlooks the Air and Space Museum and I look to the right and there's the capital and I look to the left and there's the Washington Monument. But I have no staff. I have no budget. I have a job. I'm supposed to be the senior advisor. I am the senior advisor to the secretary. How do we get 8.2 million additional college graduates in this country? But you get to sit in the secretary's office, which is great because it gives me access to all the different assistant secretaries who are actually driving the office of elementary and secondary education or the office of vocational delta education or to the under secretary and her staff and so on and so on. So I think it's the greatest job in the world because I also only have to be in D.C. when I really need to, which means I can be out here with you guys and keep coming back to San Antonio as you know I love to do. So here are some stories from the road and I'll try to talk about those five core funding areas. Let me just say that if any of these are just kind of meant to be hopefully some of them will stimulate you. If you want to know more about a particular district or program that I mentioned, just come up to me afterwards. I'm happy to do an email introduction and make that sort of thing happen. One of the things I just I love about our community, our education community is a willingness to learn from each other, right? And we're all very proud of what we do and we like to share it. And so the people that I'm going to talk about have just been so generous and open with their time with me over the last three and a half years. Most of what I'm going to share is actually happened in the last couple months because the day after Labor Day I was in Seattle and then have basically spent the last 10 weeks on the road except for like two three-day students back to do my wash in DC and then come back out. But it's been really inspiring and quite motivating to just to see the energy that's out there in so many different contexts. So let me talk about, start on the pre-case side. We met, I mentioned this yesterday, how particularly in rural communities, how when you don't have a local foundation, you don't have a big corporation, you are, and I'm talking about if you've ever been to North Dakota where you can travel for an hour and maybe not even see another human being, you know, as you drive from one place to the other. But in places that are pretty isolated from what we're used to living in urban settings. So Berea, Kentucky. Berea College, anybody ever been to Berea College? This amazing institution that doesn't charge tuition, serves 1600 students a year. You have to live in the Appalachia area. Berea College in the last two years has gotten more federal money from the Department of Education than probably anybody else, any other entity in the country. They've got the largest gear up money in the country. They have two gear up grants that total almost 50 million dollars. They have upward bound programs through their higher ed institutions. They have a Promise Neighborhood grant. Serving half a dozen counties, rural Eastern Kentucky, coal mining country, not much around. But this institution has these amazing leaders, underscore leaders, who have a vision for their young people. One of the districts there, Hazard, has the school system made a policy in terms of this, how do we build this college going, career going culture with our kids? So they did a very simple thing. They passed a board policy that said, any field trip that start with second graders or older must incorporate a stop at a higher ed institution. If you want permission to go on a field trip, that's fine. But you just have to make sure you stop at a college or a training program. Now, these are not large colleges. They're usually a building or two. But what they're trying to do obviously is translate to these young people what the why they're in school and what it can lead to and begin to build this vision and the such. Shasta County, California, Northern California, anybody ever been there? Kind of a gene has been there reporting. So pretty I've never been there. But they decided as a community a number of years ago that they needed to build this kind of image of the importance of school with their kindergarten kids. And so they said, Okay, we don't have any industries. We don't have any foundations we can turn to. But we do have ourselves. And so they started a career fair for their preschool kids. And what they asked was the community doctor to come with his white coat or her white coat and stuff the scope. They asked the dentist to come, you know, with the appropriate professional garments. They asked the forest rangers, the all these different professions to come kind of to illustrate just through their dress. And to talk with these kids but also to put on demonstrations of wherever they could. Well, this started with a couple hundred people. It's now five or 6000. It's turned into a day long festival with free health screenings and dental screenings and fire demonstrations and all this all focused around their four and five year olds. Just to be again to build this image in these kids heads of what can happen. The creativity really hit me when I went to Northeastern Tennessee. Rural Tennessee, a former superintendent retired, had this vision of how do we really build rigor and college opportunity for our kids when I've got schools in rural Tennessee that range from 40 students, high schools, four zero to 2000. Most of them a couple hundred kids. So she actually ended up writing an I3 grant to us and decided to use technology. And I wish I had thought of this when I was in Chicago because it was very similar to the challenge I felt in many urban settings. So in her mind it was like how do I get physics delivered to the two kids in that high school of 40 students, right? With the highest level possible. So she gathered these principles and superintendents. They built this proposal to us and using the basic question was who's the best physics instructor within our 27 high schools? Who could deliver five or six class periods a day to 25 or 30 kids every class period, three or four, five or six who are actually live in front of the teacher? And the others are basically on flat screen TVs and delivering the lessons. They've recruited three young ladies from China. So they're now teaching Chinese. Underneath all this was to build an AP strategy because they knew that with the fundamental belief that these kids, if they were given the opportunity, could do as well as any other child in Tennessee and the country. But we just needed to figure out the delivery mechanism to these kids subject after subject after subject. In one year their AP offerings went up five-fold just because they figured out a way to collaborate and work together. It's a remarkable, remarkable story in terms of leadership just stepping out there and taking the risk and the such. Southern Maine. Southern Maine Community College. We talked a little bit about advanced manufacturing yesterday in the 60 minutes segment that was on Sunday. So they have this challenge in Maine where the community college president decided to begin to open up some of his shops. So the welding shop and the carpentry shop to students who had dropped out of high school as a drop in place. Without a pressure to get them to enroll in class, it was just a place to kind of hang out. The long-term intent is to get them to enroll. But the first line of the attraction here is just to create a comfortable place for young men and young women just to come. And if they have an interest in learning carpentry or welding, hey, just come on over, spend a couple hours, blah, blah, blah. Well, something like 75% of the drop-ins to these shops end up enrolling. Those who enroll in their advanced manufacturing program are being taken out of that program, halfway one year training program, being taken out of that program, halfway through it, by manufacturers in rural Maine because they're in such desperate need of workers. And then working out with the community college away for those students to finish their certificates and such. So in talking to the president, it was like, this is just the right thing to do. It doesn't cost me a lot of money. But it's a way for me to engage the community in a very meaningful way. CTE, let's go there for a minute. So I'm in Elk Grove, California, just north of Sacramento. And it's National Gear Up Week. And we're celebrating National Gear Up Week at Elk Grove High School. Anybody been to Elk Grove? No Elk Grove at all? Well, the principal gets up and his CTE director gets up and begins explaining some of the projects that the students will be doing this year. The first one was that the kids in the construction trade program are going to design and build a greenhouse and sell it to a family in the community. They've done this before. They've got the architecture and drawing piece of this all together. The kids will actually build it. We'll actually meet with the lawyers in terms of the actual sale of the house to whoever ends up buying it. And I mean just this very powerful example of translating meaning of school into action, if you will. Another group of kids at the same high school that come up with this idea of building a solar powered battery that can be used in medical clinics in Africa. Now where they got that idea? And where they got seated? I don't know. But they've done this. And they were actually at a point of talking about how do we commercialize this product that we've created as the 16 and 17 year old kids. And just the energy and kind of purpose and intent of why we go to school is just you know, you can't you can't quiet these kids in terms of their their inspiration and and the such. One of the on the engineering side project lead the way is something if you aren't familiar with it, I encourage you to look into it's really spreading across the country. It's a curriculum at the high school level. I think it's also down into the middle grades to some extent. But it's all around engineering. It's very project focused. It's very hands on learning. It's supported by professional engineering associations and the such. So something to to look at. Albuquerque. Albuquerque is just built a brand new high school, serving about a 90% Latino population that is I believe it's seven different programs of study. Each of these programs of study has their own building. The county so they have a school of law as one of their programs of study. The county has built a courtroom. It as part of this school of law with a full jury box and seating for you know, observers and a couple of judges gave the school their law books, retired judges gave the school their law. The county intends to hold trials there and for students then to have the opportunity actually have hands on exposure to seeing our legal system in action. The building next door. They are working with Disney to build an entire program of study around animation. And with Disney's help. Probably doesn't get much better than that right. But the vision of this principle in terms of and she had a huge fight with her board in terms of why are we going to spend like 70 or 80 million dollars to build the state of the art high school. And this is on the outskirts way on the outskirts of Albuquerque to serve low income Latino families in her argument. Latino woman is this this sure as hell would not be a question you would ask if those was being built in another part of our city sort of thing. And so she's been fighting for years to make sure that this high school gets built. If you will for for her kids. A couple weeks ago, the college board had their annual conference in Miami. So I went over to Miami Dade schools. This was two days after they had just won the Broad Prize. So they were in a very good mood. But but one of the things that Miami has done is use the the National Academy Foundation to build up their CTE Academy offerings in the district. And I believe tongue in it last night, I think they've got five or six of those 16 programs of study that that they're that they're focused in on. So let me tell you about the most amazing place I've been to Long Beach. Anybody familiar with Long Beach's story? So you can correct me if if so I'm I'm I'm typically the guy that's half full in terms of the glasses have full in terms of how I view these things. But this really got me excited. I was there just a couple weeks ago. And their superintendent's been in place for 11 years. Chris Steinhauser over those 11 years and a few years plus. So his predecessor, this amazing partnerships been built between Long Beach Community College in Long Beach and Cal State Long Beach, which basically guarantees for every Long Beach student admission into Cal State Long Beach. Now, why is this amazing? Cal State Long Beach gets 60 to 70,000 applications for 4000 seats seats each year. Okay, 60 to 70,000 applicants, 4000 seats. They also admit something like 3500 transfers from the community college systems and and the such. Cal State Long Beach made a decision to set aside at least 1000 of those 4000 25% of those seats for Long Beach students. Now think about this, they the Cal State Long Beach probably could admit 4000 kids with 4.0 GPAs, right? But they have decided not to do that, not to not to do that fully. They're saying, we will take these kids from Long Beach ISD and guarantee them admission into our system. So why would they do that? Part of it is on a social justice and civil rights. Part of it is about seeing their future as a community truly truly in the hands of their young people. And we're going to give our young people the best education possible. Now, if I'm the president of Cal State Long Beach, I'm not going to make that bet. Unless I also have confidence in the community college system, and in what's happening in K 12, right? So Cal Long Beach ISD has this long standing superintendent, he just signed another four year contract. He told me I happened to be there when it was principal for a day. So I got to actually hang with the superintendent for four day as we popped into school after school after school. I didn't see one student not engaged as and we were popping into schools totally unannounced. He wouldn't even go to the principal's office to tell the principal he was there. He would just go straight into classrooms sort of thing. We didn't see one student. We saw a couple thousand students who was not fully engaged in learning as we popped in and out of classrooms. So what have they done? I want to use Jeff's example about algebra but at the high school level. So they have offer high school algebra to their eighth graders, something like 70% of their eighth graders take high school algebra and 80% of them are passing it. So they're basically addressing this transition academic rigor piece as early as possible to tell students, to see students the fact that you can be a successful high school student and we're going to show you that as early on as possible. He is a leader that has very clearly outlined to his principles, his expectations in terms of what he expects those principles to put in place programmatically. And so that if you're going to, I notice back over here, the Harlandale has implement avid with fidelity, right? So we like to talk many times about our programs, but we all know as administrators that it really gets down to this issue around fidelity. Right? We can design all the most magnificent tools and feel really good about our design. But if they don't get implemented by those teachers in those classrooms day after day after day with fidelity, you know, we've, what have we really accomplished? And so this becomes as much of a managerial challenge as it is having the right tools in place. I know going back to how we, we put together a electronic portfolio portfolio for our kids in Chicago that started in fifth sixth grade. The issue was, where does that fit into the curriculum from a time standpoint, right? When you took go into the middle grades and talk to teachers administrators about that. And so for administrators who really get it, that's a very short conversation, because they figure out how to do it, right? For others, it's a much longer extended conversation in terms of, now, why am I doing this? And, and do I have to? Yes. And, and what, what if I don't and, you know, all this stuff. But for administrators who really get the importance of it, it's not a conversation at all. You just figure it out. And you figure it out, not by dictating it down. You figure it out because you introduce it to your staff. And you figure it out together, right? And then it just gets done. And, and you figure out that and how to, to monitor it. I had a quarter million kids across 650 schools that I had to try to figure out a system to monitor it in terms of, of the implementation and fidelity of just that one tool. You know, we had avid in 250 schools, had about 40,000 kids in it. How do you monitor the fidelity of implement, implementation a consistent basis, and the such. And of course, data helps with that. And just having having the right staff to oversee it, and are able to, to interact appropriately with administrators and teachers is, is critical as well. But the Long Beach story is fascinating. It's a district of about 84,000 students. So it's fairly large. Majority Latino. And yet these institutions of higher ed have been able to work with the school superintendent. And his basic attitude is, if it's the right thing to do for students, I'm going to do it. Oh, it's against state policy. I don't care. If it's the right thing to do for students, I'm going to do it. And they've worked this out. In terms of the community college teachers and professors sitting down with his teachers and figuring out the seamless system of instruction. Algebra just one component of it. Now the community college does a couple other interesting things. It doesn't use Accuplacer or Compass. It gives it places students into credit bearing classes based on GPA. Now, there's the University of Chicago about five or six years ago started making this argument that GPA was a much better indicator of student success than actually ACT, SAT, Accuplacer or Compass. The only reason that they use Accuplacer and Compass is basically for diagnostic purposes to get students the skills that they're lacking in certain areas as quickly as possible. In other words, they don't have to take the entire semester remedial course. They just need to work on the skills. So suppose you're doing that in that wasted senior year, right? And so that students are leaving Long Beach ISD knowing that they're going to be placed into credit bearing courses. The other thing the community college does, and I used to have this argument with Chicago Community Colleges all the time, because they were very proud of like the 5,000 courses they offered, right? They had posters and they had brochures up and down the ying-yang about all the things that they offered. And I said, this is not helpful to Chicago Public School students. You guys need to tell them exactly what they're going to be taking, at least for the first semester, right?  And these kids need direction in terms of at least that first semester, if not the first year. So Long Beach Community College literally gives Long Beach students no choice. Here are your courses. Here are your professors. This is what you'll be taking. Now, the data at both Cal State Long Beach and at the Community College is showing that the kids coming out of Long Beach ISD are outperforming at both institutions all the other students that those institutions are admitting. They're outperforming at the Community College the other thousands of kids that are entering. And at Cal State, they're outperforming academically those kids who supposedly have those higher academic skills coming into Cal State Long Beach. It's really an amazing, amazing investment and commitment on a part of community institutions to to basically deliver this message. Again, a district that's largely low income, heavily Latino, basically saying there is a future here. And we are going to do everything, everything to make sure that you're successful, if this is the pathway that that you want to go down. All right, a couple other thoughts and examples. Let me go back to engineering. Detroit, Detroit has a program that starts their engineering sequence with kindergarten students. It's called DAPSA, Detroit Area Freak Legit Engineering Program. One of the unique aspects of this is that in Chicago just started a similar program is that from kindergarten through third grade, this is not a drop off program for your student. The parent must attend the sessions with their child. They must attend.  The whole purpose here is to not only educate the child, but to educate the parent in terms of the disciplines around and supports that they need to give their child and to ingrain those into these mothers and fathers at the earliest point possible. If you go to the University of Michigan School of Engineering, before you open the door to go into the building, there's a plaque on the building from the University acknowledging their partnership with DAPSA that's been in existence for 35 years that says, basically, we honor our relationship with Detroit Area Freak Legit Engineering Program. This program has reduced hundreds of engineers into the automobile industry, and thousands of minority students into medical, teaching, engineering, STEM fields over the last 35 years. But it's done it in a very realistic way to say, if we're really going to do this, we can't start with our juniors in high school. We can't start with our freshmen in high school. We can't start with our 10 year olds. We have to start at the earliest possible point. It's really an amazing example, I think National Science Foundation has been helping to seed this work in Chicago with million dollar grants for each of the last three years. Part of it is that the guy who started the Detroit program is actually from Chicago. He retired from Detroit Public Schools.  There's like five or 6,000 kids in DAPCEP every year. He tells a story about how he hopes that the sign up day, which is usually in February, Detroit can be a little cold. He hopes it's the worst day weather wise, because he uses it as a way to test the determination of families to get their kids into this program. They have to do the registration at where the Pistons play basketball, because so many families show up to get their kids into this program. It doesn't cost anything.  This is an after school and Saturday summer program, just deliver your child on time to participate.  It's really quite amazing. Alright, let's see. What else can I tell you? You want another example of a great partnership between Community College for your institution and a school district is Orlando, Valencia College, and their relationship with Central Florida University, and with the Orlando School District. Another place to check out. A great example of where data is beginning to bubble up in terms of importance is that 15 states have come together that have state GERA projects, and they basically are partnering with ACT, and they have agreed to use the E-PASS system, so the Explore Plan and ACT test for all of their gear up students across these 15 states, so that they can do some comparative data analysis on some of these outcome measures like high school graduation rates and post-secondary enrollment rates and password completion rates and that that sort of thing. That's huge from from our standpoint at the federal level, because we don't have the data, the research to kind of support many of the federal investments that are that are being made. As I mentioned earlier, we put 1.2 billion into Perkins. We put another 1.1 billion a year into gear up and trio of programs. And one of the things that we need better information on is is just what's the added value to these investments. Fastphone. So I've been talking to some of your state people over the last couple of years to say that if you're willing, as some other states have been, to basically push individual verification of your student's fine of fast reform, we would encourage you to consider doing that. They amongst other states are concerned about violating FERPA. However, there are three states that for the last several years, the lawyers in these states have said we don't think this is a FERPA issue. Because we're not revealing any particular piece of information on that student's form. All we're doing is confirming a very simple question. Does Johnny have a completed fast reform? Yes or no? So states like Colorado, Illinois, Maine, just talked to Massachusetts last Friday. I think they're going to come on board fairly quickly. They've said, yeah, we think we don't think this is a FERPA violation. And so they have been pushing out to their districts. Once Memorands of understanding have been signed off on individual verification, just as three of three of the districts in the room are participating in the FASA completion project, our argument has been, why not do this for every district in your state sort of thing? So I think where this is going is that eventually, there will be guidance sent to state officials to say that this is not a FERPA violation. And folks at state levels, the people in Illinois and Colorado, Maine have been more than willing to talk to their colleagues around the country. Usually it's the state agency that oversees the state scholarship in the state and say, here's how we came to our decision and how we became comfortable with progressing to a point of working with our districts. And what it's doing is exactly what's happening today and what you guys have been involved with in your conversations over the last several years, particularly, is building this college going culture, both at the at the district level and within each of the buildings. And how do we really, really build the infrastructure to support all all this work? So the FASA piece, as I've been arguing since I came to the department is really a foot in the door for most districts in terms of being it the importance of a data point. And to hear the 77% figure is is more than important, because my own experience in Chicago is Chicago kids, it's a 90% low income district, those kids are not going on to post secondary education, unless they start with that federal Pell Grant, which opens up the door for in Illinois case for $5,000 from the state, in addition to the 5500 from us.  And yes, we there's kind of a two pronged attack here, right? We have to work with our students in terms of building their academic rigor and abilities and such. We also have to give them the realistic opportunity financially to be able to access higher higher education. So let me see if I have anything else here. Oh, so so about six months ago, I started a monthly call, I was been on it. And I want to invite a representative from each of the districts. If this is of interest, it started out by identifying people within school districts that are driving this work. Many times it's the counselor, but many times it's not. So districts like Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, St. Louis, Chicago, rural districts in North Carolina have been hiring into a position somewhat around college and career, you know, the college and career executive director, college and career director, Denver, basically to work alongside the school counselors, but to drive this whole college and career going work. So I started a call about six months ago for an hour. And basically, it's just a way to exchange information and to kind of meet some of your colleagues across the country. We've had people from Harvard who've been doing research on say summer melt present. We have been just sharing kind of our own frustrations and opportunities and and the such. So the next call is actually this coming Tuesday. And if you're interested in being part of that, just come up to me afterwards or tell Ira, and I'll give you my card and I'll make sure you get the call in number and the such. So there's about usually about a dozen or so people. The call is set according to my schedule. Sorry, but it basically have to be in the office to actually execute the call. But it's usually at 11 o'clock Eastern time. So 10 o'clock your time and and the such. And so if you're interested, just just let me know. But I've been toying with what are some of the other subgroups across the country of folks that that where, you know, some sort of interchange might be helpful. The College Board has been has been initiating conversations, certainly with their with their interests in school counselors. And the report I mentioned yesterday, which again, I would encourage you to pull down. But the the other is that they took about three months ago, a step where they invited people in like Ira to who are not counselors, and basically said, so this is Pat Martin, if you know, Pat at the College Board who leads their school counseling work and said, you know, tell us how counselors get in the way of you doing your work. So there were no other count. There were no counselors in this conversation. It was about 30 people from from the College Access work because the world and we said, we just want we want your honest opinion. Ira, what did you say? Thank you, dear. You didn't mean to put you on the spot there. But but but I thought it was a really it's one of these courageous conversations, right? Because I know my staff, even though I worked with an oversaw school counselors in Chicago, I also had another part of my team that had nothing that weren't school counselors.  My job is being, you know, one third administrator, and one third kind of strategist and such. But the other third was being this professional counselor, where you know, where people come in, and they you close the door, and then they just start telling you stuff like, and you never know where it's going as a supervisor. But so I thought it was a really, really important step to begin to honestly engage, you know, what we what we have as a common goal, but where jealousies. And when when we started this work in Chicago, for the first two years, it was hell, because the school counselors thought I was out there to take their jobs. And it didn't help that the community college had two years before that fired all of their counselors at a board meeting. And those people want to work the next day and didn't have a job, you know, and the Chicago school counselors thought, Oh, my goodness, the same thing is going to happen to us. This is really just a ploy to ploy to get rid of us sort of thing. So we had, we had to work through that, right? And it wasn't a set of necessarily easy conversations at times to get to a point where we could collaboratively really, really work together. So I'm thrilled that it's happening at a national level, we'll see where it goes. Because we are all in this together. And what again, what I love about what's happening here in San Antonio is the critical importance of these intermediaries, like the educational partnership in Jean's role from the mayor's office and the the P 16 council and such this work doesn't this work will not progress. Unless we have communities have those types of intermediaries, who can build the trust across all the different constituencies and have and keep the vision alive in terms of what what can what can be accomplished. It just is not happening anywhere that I that I know of in the country without that sort of vision and support mechanism that can, you know, call gatherings like this together. This just didn't happen, because you got an invitation to come today, right? There was a lot. Somebody was doing a lot of legwork to make these couple days of success and and to keep this keep this process going because it's a process and it's not necessarily a linear process. There's lots of curves and and back tracking at times and the such. And we just have and you need leadership with the vision. And certainly in your case, having something like Mayor Castro. In my case, it was arning. It was not the mayor. We brought the mayor along, but it took us about four years. Because Mayor Daley thought the only job Chicago public school students could barely get would be in the service industry in the hotels in Chicago. And we had to convince him that no, there is so much potential here with your students, Mayor. And we just had to demonstrate it. One of it one was through data, but also is through the accomplishments of students and the accomplishments at the school level. Sometimes programmatically, sometimes just by individual student accomplishment. And so I'll leave it at that. But again, if you're interested in this call, let me know if you're interested in any of the examples I used, all the people that I mentioned are more than interested in connecting with their colleagues across the country. And I've got lots of other examples too that happy to explore with you.  So so we have time for questions. We have five or six minutes. Okay, reactions. Observations. How do they do that? We can do that. Yes, we can. Yes, we have to. There's a great group in Salt Lake City, Latinos in action, started by it's run now by one of their principles. It's all about building leadership at all the way down into the middle grades, heavy focus on high school students. It's heavily connected to their Abbott strategy in Salt Lake City. I want to Salt Lake City not I've never been there before. They have something like 110 languages in their school district.  Sorry, but it was anything but I mean, it was unbelievable, the diversity in Salt Lake City, and this huge growing Latino population. And here's this group, they're actually have a foothold somewhere here in Texas. Yeah, sanctuary city or yeah, yeah, so that's what Salt Lake City is too. But yeah. So anyways, Somalians and Ethiopians and yeah, it's it's amazing. Really, really exciting. I'll have to look it up for you, but I can get it for you. Everyone stunned. Okay, or you want to break. Alright, I'm around. Thank you all. Appreciate it.


I'll introduce the next panel shortly. Just flying on from the previous two panel conversations, things like recognising that a lot of good things have been done in the past, but just that last presentation started to highlight things around power and resource disparity and the imbalances that has on advancing Indigenous language and so forth, but also to recognise that the predominant conversation has been about Indigenous languages and there's ongoing conversations as you proceed that will take in other language groups, multi-cultural language groups which includes Indian, Italian, Greek, Chinese, all different groups that are all part of this country. Going back to your question about language, we're still in this country live and a fragile state of mind. We're still trying to assert certain things historically what was the plan here was to dilute the culture, the language and the story and that stuff we still have to grapple with. The other thing I'll say in terms of language is the wording which comes in around settler. For the first hundred years it wasn't about settlement, it was about invasion. So we need to own that and get beyond our own fragility and own this because you'll be a part of a history moving forward in the next hundred years. That's what we've got to recognise collectively. The only other thing I want to say coming from the conversation, language is in song, ceremony, story, art. There's a whole lot of dimensions of language and also to acknowledge that there'll be reverse racism and psychological trauma that comes back. When I listen to Nick he's obviously spent a long time and invested a lot of time and effort into this space but he could very well be confronted by Aboriginal people who will judge him because of his skin colour and that's important. So we've got to work together on this together, come together and stand united because it's an important transition into the next hundred years. That said I'll introduce the panel members for the next conversation which is about oral histories and the co-design process and we have Alistair, Alistair Thompson from Monash, Jackie Oldman, National Film Sound Archive, Vanessa Russ, Indigenous Data Network, University of Melbourne and Sophia Sembon, Queensland Art Gallery. Thanks. I'm Al Thompson. I'm from Wurundjeri Country. I'm from Wurundjeri Country. I'm past present and emerging when we use that as a step. I've been doing oral history since I was only with my grandmother in 1979 and I fell in love with oral history and asked a few of them to tell us some of their stories and then ensuring that their stories are rich to historical outcome. A historian of Monash University and the President of Australia and previously the President of the International Oral History Association and delighted to be here and delighted to be invited partly because oral history collections in Australia are facing a desperately urgent problem. All of you will know that people have been collecting and recording people's voices, languages and life stories in Australia for many, many years whether it was it linguists and anthropologists for example this recording with Fanny Cochran Smith in the late 1890s Palawa Woman in Tasmania. Then folklorists and folk music collectors in the mid-20th century. The wonderful Hazard of Berg collecting interviews with elite Australians, particularly the cultural and political elite in the 1950s and 60s and 70s. But then from about the 1960s an extraordinary flowering of oral history work in community, professional and academic context partly because of the coincidence of the invention of the portable cassette tape recorder which made it possible. But partly also, up closer sorry, I sort of forgot that I can't use this. But partly also because of the development of social history and the so-called people's history and a recognition that our archives traditionally have held the records of people who have been powerful enough to create those records and get them preserved and therefore it's an impoverished archive. And so oral history was really well how do we transform the archive and ensure that the stories of people who haven't recorded them or they've been recorded by other people about them.  So a massive flowering of oral history projects all over Australia from the 1960s and 1970s. And our problem is that you can see here many of those collections are still whether they're old CDs, cassettes, reel-to-reel. They may not have been digitised, they're sitting in academic studies in local history society, dusty cupboards, under people's beds and even the stuff that has been digitised and those are some digital records of a project I'm involved in. They're going to be saved because the National Library did the project on Holden with us, but there's a lot of digital recordings that are not going to survive either because they're not future-proofed unless they're linked to a significant, unless they're ingested and preserved by one of the state or national institutions that has the resources to ensure that they'll be future-proofed. So we've got a real problem because there's just multitudes of collections out there for historians of historical worth but for linguists of linguistic worth that are going to die, that are going to disappear. And our whole archival aim of oral history to enrich the archive, we might actually, that aim is basically potentially dying unless we do something about it. So we've got some challenges. One of our challenges is about locating those collections. You can see, sorry, one of them is locating collections. You can see on the right there about 25 years ago, the National Library of Australia did a survey of existing oral history collections all over the country and produced this book. That was 25 years ago. It's not been done since when I asked the National Library a couple of years ago. They sort of said, ah, maybe not. You could Google it. You could find it on Trove. Actually, you can't. You can't find a lot of this stuff. So actually just finding stuff. So for example, Yarra Council in Melbourne did a survey a couple of years ago and discovered dozens of collections just in Inner Melbourne that were basically dying because they weren't being looked after properly. A student colleague of mine last week contacted Andrew Jacobits who made this extraordinary website on making multicultural Australia in the late 20th century and there are snippets of interviews on that and she contacted him and he's retired. Where are the interviews? Well, actually, they're in his study at home. He's retired. They're going to die. They're interviews with extraordinary multicultural activists in the 1970s and 80s of Australia. We've got issues, even if we find and locate these collections, we've got issues about documenting them. Any of you will know that an audio or a video recording without documentation is almost useless because it's so hard to know what's there. It's so hard to make use of it. So creating decent documentation to enable access is really crucial and that involves significance assessments, whether it's for its linguistic or its historical significance. Permissions is critical. Our historians started thinking about ethics and permissions long before universities had ethics committees and have a principle of shared authority that's evolved in the oral history world around the world for many years but basically, and a lot of our collections, our old collections, do have good permissions where people have had informed consent and have thought about where they want the material to go and want it to be preserved. And indeed, that's a significant thing. Mostly people are telling us their stories because they want those stories to be on the record. But if those permissions aren't clear and if the copyright's not clear, then there are significant issues there. Digitisation is obviously necessary. Ironically, the most robust form record for many of our interviews is the written transcript because paper will survive in the way that a whole load of other things won't. We need to digitise, but we also need to future-proof because most academics, most local history collections, most community projects don't have the resources to do that. And so the really key issue is about preservation and future-proofing. And as I suggested, I think only the large national and state institutions have the statutory responsibility, the resources, the skills to future-proof these collections forever. If they stay in a local history society or in an academic study, they'll be around in 50 years' time. And lastly, it is possible. Quality data is probably less relevant here. It's a bit more like the research data commons here. Quality data in the UK is a thing that's been going for about 25 years, collecting academic recordings. But more important, Save Our Stories, a British library got about 20 million pounds from the Heritage Lottery Fund in the UK a few years ago to create eight hubs all over the UK to locate, document, digitise and preserve recordings, voice recordings from all over the country. They're halfway through that project and it has been transformative. And we really need something like that in Australia. Thank you. Is that working? There we are. My name is Jackie. I've come to you today from where I live and work on the lands of the Ngunnawal people in what is Canberra, a very cold country, and it's beautiful to be here. I pay my respects to Elders Past and Present and to all Torres Strait and Aboriginal... sorry, Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people. I was hoping I could go last to say what they said, but five minutes goes fast, so I'll talk fast. I'm head of collection at the National Film and Sound Archive. We are the National Audio-Visual Repository, the archive. We obviously work very closely with our other National Collecting Institution partners on what is sort of loosely termed the Distributed National Collection. We all hold different parts of our national memory, but as lots of people have highlighted, there are gaps, there's a lot to be done. We're really excited about the concept of the Data Commons. We are excited about what we can learn, but also what we have to contribute. But I just wanted to flag some of the work we're doing, some of the challenges we have and the many gaps that we have. So in terms of our history itself, the NFSA, and I pay respect to Sophia, who was a previous curator at the NFSA and knows this collection very well, we have a dedicated oral history program not on the scale of institutions like the National Library. Around 5,000 oral histories that are labelled and have been created as such. Very limited focus on First Nations people, and I can quite confidently say I think none of those oral histories are in language, and I'm looking at Sophia just to say I think that's right. That is a gap for us. We know that we need to focus on that. We have just launched a new collection policy, and in that we have said that we want to focus on First Nations collection material and partnerships. So firstly, better understanding what we have, making sure it's described properly and that we are managing it appropriately with the individuals, communities or organisations who actually hold the cultural interest in that material. There's a lot of work for us to do. On the Oral History Front, one of the things we're embarking on this year is a pilot project on Western New South Wales Community Radio, so a First Nations Community Radio project, and we really want to start to take our oral history program in the direction of First Nations creators and audiovisual industry stakeholders. So I think there's a long way for us to go there, but we're starting that journey. But as a lot of people I know have already said, in relation to First Nations languages, for us it's not necessarily the oral history collection, which is where the information is. We have material in our collection that is recorded in language. Much of it has been recorded over the last century for various reasons. We have collections such as the Strello Collection from Strello Research Centre, which is around recorded language and vision from our under men. We've just been working with the Strello Research Centre and our under men on digitising and managing that material and developing an access centre in Alice Springs for community. I won't have time to talk about that, but if anyone would like to know more about the partnership that was developed to make sure we were handling that material appropriately and working with the traditional custodians, I'd be happy to talk about that. We also have, for example, the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association Collection. Some of that is in the language. We're working on digitising that at the moment, but we know that there's a project there. We need to work a lot more on understanding, describing and discovering that material. I'll just quickly go through, I know, time-wise. I'm probably getting close to the end. Some of the challenges, and these aren't unique to us. I know many other archives, libraries, museums and galleries face them. The question of what is defined as oral history will be one that we will need to resolve. That ties into the question about data and how we describe, how we bring our collections together and how we discover that material. I also wanted to note the question about access. Particularly in the AV world, there is an assumption that what we have should be shared and uniformly available. We know that that is absolutely not the case in relation to First Nations material in particular. We have the copyright framework but also the ICIP and cultural rights framework that we work within. It's really important to us that we partner and make sure that accessibility is not always assumed and it has to be managed appropriately. I've mentioned metadata and finally I think the data portal is a wonderful idea. I think discoverability for us is one of the key challenges. While our catalogue is available online, that's only at title level and I think we have a lot of work to do on actually properly describing our collection, making sure that the language used is appropriate and enables discovery and I think that's where this discussion is really important for us. Thank you. Vanessa Russ, I'm a Noreenian Gidja girl from the Kimberley region. I live on the wonderful Wajikbuja and I'm really grateful to be here. I love coming to Queensland because it just reminds me of my family. I'm here not necessarily talking about oral histories although I feel like I can speak to all of them. I actually work with Professor Marcia Langton and Kristin Smith and a whole range of wonderful people on an ARDC project linked to the Eldaka project and we're looking at Indigenous capabilities. Our aim is to try and set up and basically we're dealing with green fields. Everything that you have all spoken about today are all to me green fields because when we look at Indigenous data we don't know what we don't know and I recommend we all remain students of the game not experts in the field and I include this in in terms of Indigenous people as well. It's really easy to say we need an Aboriginal person to do this thing but we set them up to fail if they don't know what that thing is and we help them more when they get access to things that they're not prepared to. So just kind of one of our challenges I'll quickly explain our project and you can ask me his questions later. So our project was really okay so what do we do with Indigenous data what is Indigenous data and how do we actually make it functional so that researchers like Client and others can actually research them and not necessarily be Indigenous to research them because there are some people like Nick who've been working in this field forever actually sucking the life out of them and bringing that over to and you know I mean I'm in a very loving way but I think that I think we need to be a lot more open to it so our project was really okay what is the whole ecosystem of data where do we start from and so we started with governance we've got three parts to this one what is Indigenous governance and this is taking the sovereignty narrative and actually applying it in a functional way so it is not stopping anyone access caution and I think I would love to speak to censorship because I think we see censorship in every single approach there is censorship to Indigenous people getting access and there is censorship to non-Indigenous people who are working on behalf of communities getting access and so on so I think so governance is one of the key parts of our sort of three streams and they all come together at the end you know we're looking at building a catalogue of where all the Indigenous data sits so that as a researcher I can go well I'm really interested in these things who has that and not to kind of say well you mobile have data and we want it now well actually no I don't want to take the responsibility of having the repository work that you guys have to do no no but can we get it up into some sort of federated system where I can look at it and then see if that fits within the research that parameters of my project you know and in that there's things like looking at you know traditional knowledge labels and so on we're also looking at the complexities of data and how right up to geospatial types of data can you map country and then on top of that add collections and then on top of that add oral histories and can an Indigenous person then go on and click on a thing or can we actually start to provide places, hubs for people to find access if they can't afford access so really looking at the whole range of things which is always really hard to talk about in schools so our first project which we did in June on the 9th and 10th was to look at this this idea of what is governance governance is one of the biggest challenges because if you look at state and federal data they won't give you access unless you very special and so what if we had access to some of that data right now in terms of those Indigenous kids in WA who are being incarcerated I mean we call it detention but it's just incarceration and then what happens to them when they come out I mean you know we want to talk about evil kids, the systems creating evil kids so how does data improve our mob without actually adding more limitations to the access of data so it's how do we do it in a way that's really ethical, respectful gives time for pause as lovely Sandra said this morning and allows us to actually get outcomes that are community based or research based that then improve the lives of mob would be really great but it's very ambitious of course thank you okay good afternoon my name is Sophia Nampo-Jimpas-Sambrono and I'm a descendant of the Gingli people of the northern central desert of the northern territory I also pay my respects to the first peoples and ongoing custodians of this land that we're meeting on everywhere we walk in this continent is Aboriginal land and it's our responsibility to respect the lands that we live in. So apologies for my pun I'm a huge fan and I hope there's like a dad joke section and any data comments or system coming up so I guess I'm going to interject with a bit of a perspective on the glam sector and just that not all collections are created equally or accessed equally so I'll just switch forward to something more interesting so for over 15 years I've worked across glam institutions currently at Kugoma which I forgot to put on the first slide which is the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art previously I've worked at the NGA the State Library of Queensland National Film and Sound Archive National Museum and a little bit at the Old Parliament house before it was Moad and in all of these I've worked with the City with Indigenous collections except for OPH and only two of these institutions were actually in the business of creating oral histories or dealing specifically with oral histories but I've found within each of these places that other sorts of content is equally valuable significant to community especially with language as much as oral history so I'll just kind of talk about that sort of thing. This slide here is of some exhibition content we made for the International Year of Indigenous Languages at State Library of Queensland for the Coral Dargon exhibition which is Coral Dargon is the I guess dedicated space at the State Library of Queensland for Indigenous stories and sharing and culture. So as part of that we created audio-visual content and it's talking about current projects in language, speaking language and creating new sets of data about data sometimes as well but also about what's happening in community and a lot of this doesn't go into collections and that's the same as I guess in a gallery world that I'm in at the moment that will create audio-visual content that is about education, it's about interpretation for online audiences sometimes in gallery audiences so these aren't collections or the data sets that we think of if we're trying to design interoperable database systems so if we're trying to connect these resources like how maybe that's something to include how do we include these resources because it's something that people spend a lot of time on and the people involved in the projects invest their intellectual and cultural property in this as well I don't have a slide for a bit recently at Quagoma there's a sculpture outside the front entrance of Quagoma that Judy Watson created so she made that in response to archival collections and museum collections and then we've created a digital experience that that we created more content and audio-visual content to contextualize and create I guess a new experience around that so organizations in the glam sector are doing this all the time whether or not it's within their actual collections this is a talk series that we used to do at the State Library of Queensland I hope that's still happening there's a beautiful fireplace outside of Quirrell-Dargon where we hold a talk series to talk about I guess projects that are happening at the library and exhibitions that are on at the library oops I've run out of time really quickly but that is to say again that these aren't necessarily included in collections but often are the most interesting part of some of the projects that we're doing we're talking about collections we're talking about experiences like contemporary experiences talking about lifetime of experiences in particular these ladies in the top right they're Sherbag marching girls it was the last I guess the ladies that were healthy enough and present to be there and they actually did a march to the space it was like a reunion conversation outside but then we also worked with the collection area to record some long form interviews as well so there in the collection but the kind of I guess the spirit of the group isn't captured in that either I'll try and wrap up quickly and we can keep talking in the panel part the next project I'll just quickly touch on also at State Library of Queensland it's about the other side accessing collections for First Nations creatives who are in the business of taking that data they've experienced in this case it was language focused and then creating new exciting things to experience so but yeah that process brought up lots of frustration and lots of like with discoverability with needing to I guess prep some of the First Nations creatives before we dive into these collections and how their family and culture is going to be talked about and I guess the need to have like not just Indigenous staff but appropriately briefed staff or people that understand and are able to bridge those gaps and prepare groups to be in the presence of these collections okay I'll stop now but we can keep talking thank you Sophie you didn't have to rush to finish because we've still got a little bit of time are there any questions to the panel from the floor microphone to the thanks so much panellists that's fantastic and Sophia thank you for agreeing to be part of the day I think listening to you that you are probably one of the most experienced people in the room in terms of bringing data to life through those coordinated activities taking a longitudinal real-life approach to objects in collections and bringing people whose lives and communities or histories that the collections encapsulates together that's just an amazing example that you provided you spoke briefly then at the end about the complexities of bringing people in that in that example First Nations creatives into an institution of the glam sector into close contact with the collections and you obviously it's difficult to speak when we're speaking in the present and with real-life examples but you did indicate there were some challenges there do you feel able to perhaps give an example or two so that example well that picture series that we had was I guess creatives who had never been in the business of looking at materials and archives and I guess that some of that came down to the I guess the responses were about the language and how they've been spoken about or the family's been spoken about in those archives I guess derogatory language mostly but also yeah I guess the feeling of walking into an archive is very different and very confronting if you're an original Torres Strait Islander person but also a creative like it's a very imposing situation and it's nice to walk in there with people who are supporting you I have worked in this kind of space before at Film and Sound Archive where we were trying really hard to figure out I guess older collections which hadn't been looked at by anyone with the authority from communities for a very long time so we brought ten senior men from I think it was eight different Arnhemline communities to Canberra of all places to have a look at those recordings that we had take a step forward in I guess resolving some issues about those and that was I guess my first time ever doing that but I guess the most difficult because it involved so many moving parts and I guess I hope that that has made a difference to the NFSA collection but there is a lot to be said about having Indigenous staff in these institutions and support for them and also networks of people and what Sandra said before about I wrote it down because I thought it was very apt that First Nations mob within these institutions form their own communities across these glam institutions and I guess across academia as well and what you said before about when you call someone up you want to know that they're on the other end and they're going to let someone in and have that friendly face when you do bring someone into a collection and the respectful response and that's important is that someone can be referred by you to me and I just nah, I've done more about it so I've damaged your credibility for sending that person in the first place the other thing Sophie mentioned conversation around how do we make this whole process culturally safe and dignified because as you talked about cultural safety and the institutional elements attached to that that's an important conversation to continue to have as well are there other questions that you would like to ask Nick you hogging that microphone all day before I get everything sucked out of me I'm just thinking that typically you know when somebody approaches any kind of holding institution you get a catalogue and it's like this is the truth and that's what's given to you and we've been thinking a bit about dialogic archives so that where the people receiving the information can feed back into it and if it's made clear to them and so we have a lot of recordings in our collection for instance which come from you know the Pacific but we have no metadata we've got what's written on the outside of the tape and that's all so if somebody comes in and says well this is actually my grandparents and this is what they're saying they can go back into the catalogue so we need to encourage people to think of these things as not being fixed and static but being there for them to enrich and like you say it's an intimidating environment to come into but somehow we need to get that through one of the challenges that we have in terms of our AIDC project is how do you actually get the reuse of data happening so and data can be anything right so how do you actually get the reuse but how do you get all the stuff that's been done already to come together as well so we've got all this old you know some communities have had so much research done on them they have no idea what happened to that research and so I mean I know that you know in the Kimberley is now trying to set up sort of this hub where all health data health research is captured so they can see what's come before but then also the new research should go in there too and I think that that's the same thing this is that green fields, well you've probably seen it for a long time but I feel like we're in that even with museums I know at the Burnt Museum when we were going through and doing all that work to rehouse and digitise my biggest worry was we were using in new so Axial and what's the relationship with them but also then we were looking at things like how many names do you put on a thing I mean some communities have so many names so we built it into the system so that you can put in whatever spelling and it'll pull up that same thing anyway because the Burnts weren't great I mean they were writing things down as they saw they weren't linguistics you know experts so so yeah so there's that whole trouble around the same thing identifying things and taking the time to put it into your data making your data clean and then actually making sure that everything else then can sort of be magnetised to it I think right the magic stuff but that goes into that governance stuff right if we don't get how we capture data clean and nice and ready to go it won't sit in a system and it won't be able to be findable and all those sorts of things but there's also gaps in the care and fair principles as well that we're not thinking about and I think this reuse reuse of data and continuation longevity is just not thought about at the moment Jackie you also I'm sorry Vanessa I'll come to you shortly Jackie but Vanessa you mentioned the issues around governance and the importance of that as well when we talk about ethics we've got to precede all these terms governance ethics with culture cultural what does it mean governance to me would be about our law, our culture our custom governance in the western world is about performance and accountability and quality assurance and all that sort of stuff that goes in there as well so how do communities yet a sense of knowing that the governance that's applied is responding to their need I suppose to think about it is there's two points to this this is just data itself right we lose knowledge by not purely not caring for it in any kind of way so there's stuff that old people have done and contributed to in the past that I think is probably sitting around in most collections and I would include iatis in that I mean I think you know iatis is it's either really underfunded or like they're just overwhelmed with material so something like that I think you're right in terms of cultural material for sure that it needs to be looked at from that cultural space but we're kind of looking at all of it so in terms of the type of governance I'm talking about it's literally what do you do with the data that you've got on somebody else this is that idea that we could if we get it right for Aboriginal mob we might actually get it right for all Australians and so that includes your health data what is your you know what if you could I mean I think some of the work we want to do is with exprisement here looking at how they use data they create a lot of data how can they do better with that data to help the mob that come into clinic you know so there's that side of it so it is very big but yes when it comes to the cultural material there would have to be an element of that it goes back knowledge of language knowledge of culture who is the owner of that material really who is the community those things I don't think we're there yet I think we have some idea but we really don't know and that's probably through stolen generations but it could also be through loss of old people right passing away to young and stuff so it could be because of past policy deliberately designed to dilute a culture language in a story yeah and I think that that censorship thing you know when I was at school I was told I would get the cane if I spoke language so I have it in memory but I don't have it as a verbal so I think that that is really true old but also that like you know that old idea of I'm really cautious right around the don't become the person that you don't like so you know how do we as Indigenous mob come into this without becoming the oppressor because we've been oppressed how do we stay open enough to not lose our minds but open and kind enough to go well actually what's better for culture and knowledge right now what's better for that particular community right now what are we going to do that's going to make it better for everybody right now so yeah that's the challenge we have is we you know it's easy to go down that path where you want to just kill the snake right like but how do we get there without and bring everybody with us is a really big challenge I think and especially as culture shifts and changes I was saying to someone earlier I think we still don't even we haven't even grasped that our Aboriginal culture has changed from like 20 years ago in as human beings change right and in the next 20 years young kids are looking at the world in a totally different space to how we're looking at the world so how do we keep that old conservative knowledge going is kind of be a challenge for all of us so the sooner we get this data stuff right in terms of culture I think the answer lies in some famous words I heard were students in the field not experts in the game sorry students in the game not experts in the field to carry that theme and come back to your comments Jackie we had talked about you know shared accessible proper descriptions authority what is defined and who defines and that's in a cultural context very simply answered is right people right country but then there's sociological gaps which you've touched on just then where I'll point to that old grey head fellow with a hat on he taught me how to make spear and he still to this day doesn't believe well at this big but sitting beside him is my nephew but my nephew has had that more access to language and archives and material than what I had and what this old fellow had but he carries cultural knowledge above and beyond so there's all these different dynamics that have got to be considered in the process of capturing data that is authentic and it's done in the right way in a simplified respectful way so we need to act with honour cultural honour and integrity and we need to act and behave with cultural dignity and humility in all of your engagement processes in around this and every engagement process is all about established build nurture sustain and value the relationships in this one space yep right don't just get to the end and go well we did that consulting and never come back you should have a relationship with the people you work with for the rest of your life until they die watch whoever dies first I mean it's not a race sorry don't start bringing you know what I mean don't tell me I remember somebody else saying about not a race um Michael just for your little bit of homework I'll come to you shortly Sophia where to from here I hope shared governance is implanted firmly in your head and your heart um before I go to Sophia just to give you a wrap too sir you gave a framework of which we could go forward too in terms of that UK example locate digitise preserve there's basic framework that we've got to develop to make this happen but part of this is today is coming together at least sharing what you have in a commitment to work together collaboratively Sophia you had a point that I it's great to when you create a new data to make sure that it's done the right way but I guess new recordings and things that you're creating a new having worked a lot with historical collections there's needs to be more work done revisiting those collections we have fantastic computer generated captions now which will help maybe make oral histories and audio visual works more discoverable but they don't work very well with indigenous languages or non-English languages or hybridised languages like Creole or Pigeon or anything like that it's like you want to make these things discoverable for people to know that they're there and how do you do that within a system that's only capturing search words in a written form there's a lot of work to be done and I guess one of the takeaways from the last 15 years is that once something's in a collection there was rarely anybody revisiting to tidy up data to make things pretty to make it easier for everyone else even having experienced multiple collection system changes you think well this is the point where we make it better for everybody but really as data sets are being migrated under new categories that make it more complicated to get to like there's a lot of things My response to actually fund identification work and we all all institutions fail to do that we just get more more more more but we don't have the right people sitting in the right space going right this chunk of information I'm going to go share with that mob because it's got their reference to them and then when we bring it back into the system we know for sure that that mob has a relationship to that material we don't fund it we don't even think about it we go digitisation it's important to save it there's a thousand photographs but we're never going to find out who those people are we're supposed to remember who they are Vanessa I want to put this to you if you want to go and get your motor car service who are you going to go to to ensure you get the best quality service I'm talking about quality assurance company I bought it from not probably you'll go to someone that's got the accreditation certification to do it if you wanted to build a house who would you go to registered builder who's got all the certifications you're not going to go to a builder who tinkers with your motor car on the weekends to fix your car are you because the quality assurance is questionable I'm going to go to the caranara and talk about indigenous language data in your part of the world who have I got to go and talk to there's a really great language centre and they've been doing work with mob and they've been teaching school kids and they teach everybody language and stuff yeah and they've been collecting it for a really long time and they're still but they are running off a shoestring and relying on the goodwill of people to keep them going yeah and to recognise that you probably got a better knowledge of that place and you'll understand the factions and the clan situations so you're the expert in that space but that's where this whole process of language is if you don't know I need to ask you and that's how I come in and when I talk to you you'll give me that picture that's the sort of stuff we've got to embrace or it's now I'm going to put a question to this young lady here in the maroon top I'll come to you shortly you've been sitting there quietly have these people been making sense nobody's safe here have these people been making sense this morning from your point of view yeah definitely it's super interesting so I'm an applied linguist so I don't do the things you were talking about before I look at how language is in action I'm really interested in this question around how do we have a data place that actually can provide for all of these types of languages so we talked about sound we talked about video we've talked about words written down being digitalised but how do we, is there a way is there a machine big enough to actually put all of that to be able to see it in action because I don't think we can understand language with just a dictionary definition that's my personal perspective of language so yeah that's the sort of things I've been thinking about while I'm listening to everyone talking thank you, it's really awesome this panel I think sort of gave a foundation and a framework moving forward there but it comes back to that UK example Alastair who had located it digitised it, preserved it but understand the cultural governance dynamics and around it, do you want to respond to that and you've also got to connect it I mean, in my sense it's the state and national libraries and the big museums, IATSIS the War Memorial and National Film and Sound Archive they're the only institutions that really got the resources and robustness to be able to do that linking connecting work into which all the little collections out there that don't have those resources need to basically somehow connect into to give them credit the big national collections have been working really hard over the last two decades digitising and making their own material more accessible and occasionally they ingest other materials and that's great but there's a limit to how much they can do but finding a way to actually enable all those little collections sitting out there to be preserved, to be documented and digitised and to be then accessible and findable subject to whatever rights and conditions there are that's really crucial and that strikes that's a real national coordination thing and the British Library in the UK did that but they had a lot of money to do that but the National and State Library Associations for example which brings together the state libraries and the other big collections and national, it's that sort of macro-institutional basis that's going to enable what you're asking, I think but it's expensive, it's going to take either a big mob of philanthropic money or something like heritage money which is basing people gambling and then a little bit of that going into good things which I'm not sure is a good model or state funding research funding I'll just go into that and we'll I think that's important because it's complex I mean we are big and well resourced and I think we have to be doing this there is work already underway and digitisation has forced us to come together and work on getting our systems more integrated we need to get our data sort of matching up and the libraries are a great example of how they've worked together with a well-formed framework for describing collections and discovering them the other question then is resolving things like storage just and particularly with audio visual storage needs a huge but it's that technical joining up but they're not in cementable problems, I think we just have to have the will to do it, it's going to take us time but that's yeah we're starting that's actually what we're going to do we are going to look at what is a federated system we don't think that we need to take people's data off them we just want to figure out how can we like tap in so if I'm going oh well I want to look at a group of photos from the South Australian Library and from your archive can I actually do that at the same time and how would that work so we're looking at big data lakes that compress we're looking at all of that we don't think that that's the way to go we think that whoever has the data is responsible but it's actually getting that data put together so that it can talk to other data and that's some of the challenge but yes this is the ARDC project that we've taken on so yeah and the idea is to work with what is already in existence so IAXIS is already involved in this we're also working with ANU so we've got these really big kind of aims it's really complicated and lots of things that we just actually don't know but the technology seems to be ready for it so we're kind of just getting the right build set so that it all starts to do kind of bigger versions of it so yeah we'll be coming to people and asking how we can make your data talk to this system and basically it will have to be some sort of formatted approach then this goes back into can we apply different levels of controls around your data so that you can have to be an authenticated person but you can then shut them off from access in the data because you've found out that they're not using it well so we're going to give the sort of controls to the owners or carers of the data but also to community as well so there's lots of different fingers in the pies but we're working on it we the federal governments we the federal government and our state and territory counterparts in collaboration with the glam sector would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of these lands in which we live pay our respects to our elders past present and future you've all heard that and here's a question I'll put back how are we the government authentically doing what we say for you the glam sector and why are you having to rely on philanthropic dollars why is this not a national focus to talk authentically about the world's oldest culture that's the problem Clint you've got a question thank you everyone for everything you're saying it's all really resonating it's all valuable stuff and that last point you made is exactly what I wanted to try and articulate and I think it's a world view thing it's like in this nation state of Australia this very new nation state bolted on to this you know such rich and ancient ways of being and doing people love building buildings it's like most arts funding in Australia goes towards building buildings even iatsis yes iatsis is underfunded government just said we want to spend over 300 million on building a building more people know you can have a building and I worry now now we're in the digital realm we're talking about building something else building some infrastructure and again we don't want to get sucked into that thing of we're building something else and we're not investing in people we're not investing in relationships because that is a story and a world view that's much older in this place and that's what's kept it going for so long that's all I wanted to share and thank you again a part of our project is also how do we get Indigenous mob trained up to run these things to make them happen right now we can't really find Indigenous data scientists who are just starting out and want an opportunity to do a thing to learn a thing to find and I don't know if that's because right now mob are just like go be a doctor go get into hospital somewhere you could be a lawyer or if it's just data science is so new in itself I don't know so yeah 100% and that's why we think it's a really ambitious thing that we're asking for that's why we don't want to take people's data off them we think it should remain where it is we just want to figure out how you as a researcher can get access to all the things you need to actually come up with your findings and then maybe build with the community new stuff and then how does that get maintained for perpetuity I mean it's a big big interesting and it probably will include some of the big giants of tech maybe but who knows but the thing is that I think right now we all know we've got this stuff somewhere we just don't know how to get it out and get it back in you know like it's like that singing culture back to life you know the one thing I found with the Burnt Museum I loved old men coming into the Burnt Museum they always knew somebody who knew somebody who could sing and they'd just start singing a song that's his song I'm just singing it for him and so I think that's the same with the starter we have to just start singing it back to life and so I think the aim is to try and solve our problems and make our community stronger through this practice and we just keep that there and keep building Vanessa what's the word can I just add something on it's a really good question and it's a I mean I agree with you about buildings you look at how much money has just been put into the Australian War Memorial to build this massive building and how many other cultural institutions haven't got that money etc but building structures of preservation is about people because you can't do the location you can't do the documentation you can't work on the permissions and the access you can't do the digitalization etc etc without training people both in institutions and in communities so you know creating a really effective structure for preservation at a national and community level is first and foremost about people it's about will and it's about money but it's also a lot of people doing a lot of really good work a lot of them are doing it now but it's about connecting them one of the things I think we're grappling with is there's an assumption that when a project is funded so we had some money recently for digitalization the people will come that will be able to find the staff and that's a real challenge at the moment that we need to be more proactive yeah yeah and really targeted proactive work to you know bring people in and train them up and make it a safe workplace and I think we've really fallen down there and we've started to talk to IACIS and some of the other collect institutions but it's a long it's going to be a long time patience is a virtue a little bit more to that Vanessa I want you to think of a word that rhymes with language but I'm going to hand to Sandra on the question of where are the indigenous data scientists it made a series of thoughts pop up in my mind in the 80s we were all going to be teachers and social workers and then doctors and lawyers and perhaps next phase is the technologists and data scientists but in order to get there we need people who are chairing or heading up professional associations like Julian you're on some oral history association every leadership don't mention of professional associations should get their action plans happening how are you going to and how is everyone else who's got some governance authority going to ensure indigenous participation excellence and achievement through your particular domains so there is a question in there too so Julian how does the oral history association do business in a way that broadens the base for indigenous participation for example Julian first sorry Alastair you're the one calling everyone the wrong name so I'm just following suit we're all wondering who your Julian is now that's okay I mean the oral history Australia is really a federation of state oral history and territory associations and they're comprised of lots and lots of different people and doing different local projects so but the coordinating the coordinating things we do are develop ethical guidelines we just run a whole lot of recent indigenous oral history training events with indigenous oral historians teaching us about their protocols, procedures etc etc yeah but absolutely all of the different sort of peak organizations can contribute to this so Sandra you and Julian can have that conversation that big lunch now the word I wanted to find Vanessa with language was sandwich and it's big lunch and we're going into big lunch but thank you Sophia Vanessa, Jackie and Alastair Julian for your presentation