Thank you. Oh, I'm on, good.  It's kind of intimidating standing up here with this full hall and I don't know, nobody ever mentioned it, but it's actually a little bit scary. It is. But I guess it's my own fault cause last year I spoke over in hall G about Soviet encryption in World War II and I got a lot of very positive feedback and people were like more historical topics please. So I guess the CCC thought that would be a good idea and promoted me to hall two to speak about history once again. Unfortunately, we only have 30 minutes tonight so I would love to go into much more detail about technical stuff, but I'd have to shorten it a little bit. I'll try to talk about my topic for 20 minutes so we have 10 minutes for Q&A afterwards. If that's not enough we can go somewhere and have a talk. So now let's see if this, yes it works. What I would like to talk about. First of all, I would like to introduce to you a kind of living drone used extensively in World War I and World War II pigeons as you can see, used as messengers and also as spies to take aerial photographs of enemy territory. Secondly, I'd like to very quickly elaborate on animals used to deliver and drop bombs on enemies in World War II such as bats, cats and dogs. And finally go into the present situation and talk about things that are being worked on right now such as cyborg drones actually surgically altered animals and ask a few questions about what these animals might be doing. Couple words about pigeons, so-called homing pigeons are a variety of domestic pigeons that are bred especially to fly very fast over very long distances. These pigeons, what they do basically they fly home. They have an innate homing ability. They've always fly back to their home nests also known as their pigeon loft. One more term, a person who breeds and keeps these pigeons is a pigeon fancier because he fancies pigeons. So pigeons have been used as messengers since ancient times. Let's not go into that. Let's go back 100 years to World War I starting in 1914 where communication was a bit different from today. Radio communication and also wired communication was still very crude and unreliable. Imagine you're going into enemy territory with your troops. You're going into battle and you need means of communication with your back supply. You'll have to actually carry big rolls of wire and string wire around to communicate and obviously that can be cut once you get into a really tough battle situation that's not going to work. But something that did work was pigeons. Pigeons were used by all countries in World War I, kept behind the front lines in these mobile lofts and then carried into battle in these kinds of wicker baskets. And what you did, once you're in the trench, you need to get a message to your back supply.  And these pigeons were so reliable that about 95% of all messages got through. And they were so important that in 1914, the French Army alone kept 72 of these mobile pigeon lofts behind the front. The United States Army alone used about 600 pigeons in France in 1917 and 18. And even more so in World War II, the United Kingdom used about 250,000 pigeons. And it was so important that you had these kinds of posters, don't shoot the carrier pigeon because it would be a broken link in vital communications. And the United Kingdom actually had fines for killing, wounding, or molesting homing pigeons. Six months in prison or 100 pounds, which was a lot of money back then. Very quickly, one pigeon, which was actually awarded the French Croix de Guerre after the war was Cherami, which is French for dear friend. She was actually female, but it was only discovered after she died that she had been female. She delivered crucial messages despite being shot by German troops. She saved 200 American lives of American troops trapped behind German lines surrounded by German troops who could not communicate in any other way. And who were actually caught under a friendly fire in October 1918. So all they could do was send a little message, I don't know if you can read it. We are along the road parallel 276.4. Our artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven's sake, stop it. And they send off Cherami with this message. Cherami took one hour to her home loft, delivered the message, and the American troops could stop shooting their own people behind enemy lines and find a way to evacuate them. So as you can see, sometimes these pigeons were shot down, they were wounded, and they were actually captured as prisoners of war. Here you have captured German war pigeons in a victory parade in New York City in 1919. When the Second World War came around, pigeons were still used for messaging, although communications had improved. But armies started thinking about other ways of using animals in their war effort, especially in the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. People began to think about how can we retaliate, how can we find a way to bomb Japanese cities just like they bombed Pearl Harbor, we need to do something. And a civilian who was actually a dentist had a brilliant idea. He proposed to the president, which was obviously normal at that time, that he had found a way to fire bomb Japanese cities. And the answer is, bat bombs. This was actually researched, not in that exact way, but the United States started a military project thinking about ways to use bats. The idea was find lots of bats, put them into hibernation by cooling them down, clip a tiny little incendiary bomb to their chest, release them over Japanese cities, they are going to wake up, and then as bats do, they will try to find a hiding place and hopefully hide in the attics of Japanese houses, which at that time were mainly constructed of wood and paper. And this actually worked. It worked really well because one day on a military base in New Mexico where this project was being researched, a couple of bats with live bombs attached to themselves were accidentally released and they found a hiding place under a fuel tank and the military base burned down. Eventually this project was, although successful, superseded by the atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities as you know in 1945. Another idea which very shortly I'd like to mention was the Soviet Union training dogs to carry bombs under German tanks during World War II. They were trained with food put under tanks to run there and eventually they had these kinds of bombs strapped to their bodies and they were supposed to run under German tanks and explode. This did not work well because in actual battle situations the dogs were confused and scared of the noise and the moving tanks. Some of them ran back to their trainers and their timers went off and they exploded. Some of them attacked Soviet tanks because they knew how these tanks were supposed to smell because Soviet tanks ran on diesel, German tanks ran on gasoline and they were used to diesel tanks so not very good. Nonetheless, this project was followed until 1996 in Russia for whatever reason. One more idea during World War II was cats. If you can use dogs, why not use cats? And the single idea behind this project was cats don't like water, do they? So how about we put a cat with a bomb next to, we just drop it in the ocean next to the enemy's ships and the cat because it doesn't like water is going to jump onto the ship and then explode. So what do you think? Good idea? No. Those poor cats drowned. Moving to the present, let's take a step to the present. The thing about all these projects in the past hundred years is that for the longest time the use of animals as these kinds of drones delivering messages, dropping bombs, starting fires was always limited to a creature's natural behavior and what you could train an animal to do. You can, in a very limited way, you can train pigeons, you can train dogs, cats not so much. But there was also, there was always this limitation. For example, these pigeons, they only fly home. You cannot send them anywhere. But as of 2014, scientists are actually working on finding a way to remedy that. Working on these kinds of insects, you see here, attaching tiny electrodes to the insects from a very early moment in their lives and are monitoring the electrical signals these insects use during flight. And the idea behind that is that eventually scientists are hoping to reverse engineer this and use these same electrical signals to steer these insects in a certain direction. So they could be used, for example, as researchers say, for search and rescue missions. Yes, sure. The thing is, the questions that all these projects involving animals pose, if you want to use insects for search and rescue missions, what else can you use them for? What other animals can you use in the same way? There are, of course, ethical questions of animal protection, who's responsible, who's morally responsible for surgically altering these animals and using them, possibly, for malevolent purposes. And the situation, as of now, is that already seven years ago, Charles Higgins of the University of Arizona, who works with insects, predicted that around 2017 until 2022 hybrid computers using, on the one hand, computers, on the other hand, live tissue would actually be operational. And we're talking, obviously, about, for example, a computerized hand, but also about these kinds of insects and other animals being controlled beyond their own means. Somebody, yesterday, somebody sent me a very interesting link, a video about a guy who turned his dead cat into a helicopter. It's hilarious. I can't show it because of time reasons, because we only have five minutes. I'm almost done. I'll include the link with the slides. I'll upload it. So this guy had his dead cat stuffed and prepared and turned it into a helicopter. It flies. And this video poses the question, what is the difference between shoes made of cow and helicopters made of cats? Many of us eat animals. And so where's the limit? Where's the difference between eating cows and using insects, dogs, pigeons, bats for other purposes, military purposes, for example. As of 2014, the CIA, they just tweeted a couple days ago that their pigeon missions are still classified. Why? What are they doing still with these pigeons? The question is, who is working on what right now? In an interview about drones last year in 2013, Norm Chomsky asked the question, if you look at the public reports, you can imagine what the secret reports are. So the question is, all these things that can be researched that I could present here, how much of what is really being researched, is that? Thank you very much. We have a few minutes for Q&A. If you have any questions, please do line up at the hall microphones. We have six of them on the ground level. Are there any questions from the internet? No. Any questions from the audience? No. Come on, guys. No. No questions? No. Okay. We do have a question at microphone three. Yes, hello. Well, I was thinking, what does the Geneva Convention say about the use of animals in war? Or is it saying something about it? Question is, what does the Geneva Convention say about this? Have to say, I have no idea. Or is there any other war rules that would? I have not come across anything. Is anybody here into an expert on these kinds of, are there any laws on using animals in these? Even the United States, the United States did never sign the Geneva Convention. They say they are following that anyway. Yeah, that's another thing. I have to say, I have come across these questions. What are, well, what are the moral implications of doing this to these animals? Who is responsible? I have not come across anything in writing that would actually regulate these kind of thing. You were saying something. Okay. Yes. Yes, the gentleman just said, there is a draft to the Geneva Convention about the protection of wildlife in war situations, but it's not in the officially signed version as of yet. Thank you. Another question from microphone number five, please. Yeah, you mentioned pigeons that were used in World War I, and then there's the Olympic discipline pigeon shooting. Is there any relationship between this? So does this Olympic discipline or this kind of sports, yeah, was invented in World War I because the enemies had to shut the pigeons? They shoot pigeons? Yeah, I think so. When they were used as spies, they should shoot them. So is this where the sports discipline come from? I'm shocked. They shoot pigeons in the Olympics. I mean, really live pigeons, not just these. No, no, no, no. It's forbidden to shoot live pigeons for sports, but they use solid pigeons, so they shoot something in the air and it's called pigeon. I thought these were clay pigeons. Yeah, yeah, it is, but it's. Oh, okay. So to be clear, they're not shooting live pigeons in the Olympics. Thank you. Oh God. That's good. I think clay pigeon shooting is actually older than World War I, but I would have to look it up. Clay pigeons. Yeah. No. I mean, sure, in World War I, you shot down your enemy's pigeons whenever you saw them, because everybody was using them, so the troops knew that the enemy was probably using pigeons. So if they saw pigeons rising up from the enemy's trenches, they try to shoot them. They also sometimes had falcons to hunt these pigeons and bring them down. Okay, we have another clay pigeon at six. Please shoot. How much of this cyborg moth work is being done in the public domain? And how much of this neural interface work can be used to assist those with, say, neurodegenerative diseases? Well, that's actually the point behind all this part of it. This is research that is publicly done. I believe it's the University of North Carolina that's working on it as well as the University of Arizona. Professor Charles Higgins is doing this research. And of course, one part is, as it is said, to use these insects in search and rescue missions where humans cannot go in to gather information about catastrophes, earthquakes, and stuff like that. But it's obviously technically very similar to the research being done to, for example, disabled people to regain control of their muscles. It's a very similar process in working together in that area. Microphone number two, please. Yeah, I'm wondering about the detail with homing pigeons. The way I understood it is that they always return to their home. But now I saw that you can actually transport their home somewhere else. Yes. And they just accept this. You have to train them. Well, these are special pigeons. They are bred. They have certain genetic material. And you can train them to get used to these mobile lofts. But you can only move these for a couple of times. So you can use one of these pigeons for a couple of weeks at the front, and then you have to, they get confused after a couple. If you move the loft around three, four times, they get confused about that. So you can use one of those pigeons for a couple of weeks, and then you have to retire them. We have a question from the internet via our signal intro. Thank you. Actually, I've got two questions. First one is how long would it take to train or retrain a pigeon into a life drone? And the second question is, is the time of life drones over? The drones are advancing very fast. First of all, training these pigeons starts about at the age of four weeks. When they are four weeks old, they are taken away from their nest, and they are trained to accept a new loft, which takes about another four weeks. So when they're eight weeks old, they are fully trained, and you can, in these war situations, you can take them to the front and use them for another couple of weeks. That's why you needed so many of these. You had 250,000 in World War II because they had to be trained for a couple of weeks, and after a couple of weeks, they were obsolete. The second part is the era of life drones over. I'd say yes and no. The era of these pigeons or bats is obviously over. I mean, the United Kingdom stopped its pigeon army in 1957. The Swiss army kept it till 1996. But as of today, nobody uses these pigeons anymore for armies. But if we look at what's being done right now in 2014 working with these insects, it's obviously a different kind of life drone that's being developed. And I think that's going on really strongly. And the question is, is this all what's being done, these insects for search and rescue missions? I mean, if the CIA says its pigeon missions are still classified, you have to ask yourself, what might they be working on? And I'm very skeptical. I think there might be a lot going on that's not in the public domain. Microphone number four, please. I don't know if it was already answered correctly. I just wanted a clarification for how long do you have to, well, have a pigeon at a loft so it accepts it as its home? About four weeks. No, I mean, when the company moves somewhere and do you have to stay there for some time so that the pigeons will, this is where we live now. Yeah. This is, that's the four weeks. A thing is, as far as I understand, science does not, still not fully know how these pigeons find home. It is considered to be a mixture of possibly using the electromagnetic field of the earth, also using smell and using some sort of map, visual keys. But as far as I understand, it takes about four weeks to get a pigeon used to its new home so that it will go back there and not to where it was born. OK, thanks. Microphone number three, please. Yes, again, a question on pigeons. How could you distinguish between friendly and the pigeons of the enemy? That just because of the direction where they fly from?  No, in your presentation it was forbidden to shoot a pigeon. So how could the people know it? Yes, that's fine for shooting pigeons that apply to the United Kingdom. So inside of England, people were fined if they killed or molested homing pigeons because these were needed for the war effort. Obviously, at the front, well, it might have happened that friendly fire caught some pigeons, I guess. Microphone number six, please. I was wondering if you have found out anything about dolphins. Yes, I read something about dolphins and bombs, dolphins being trained to find. So I understand, I don't know if that's what you mean. It was just too much material. There's a lot going on. There's obviously a lot of animals being used or that were used. I don't know if you could say something about that or... No, I've just heard it from a reddit somewhere. And so I thought you'd have something. Yeah, I came across it, but I chose to focus on birds and just do the little excursion on dogs and those cats. But yes, dolphins also. Dolphins are considered very intelligent animals and can also be trained to do certain tasks. We're running out of time. One last quick question here from microphone two, please. Thank you. Did you find any evidence of actual use, abuse of animals as biological warfare carriers or something like that? Biological warfare carriers, yes. Like the traditional diseased animals with the catapults. It was after World War II, the British actually did research in that area to use pigeons to drop bacteria or what have you. But since other technical means were being developed at that time, we're talking about the 1950s where technical developments were becoming better and better and these pigeon programs were eventually stopped in the 1950s. But yes, people thought about using pigeons also to spread whatever diseases, biological warfare. Thank you for your talk, Anja. Please give a warm round of applause.


I will just do a short introduction, and then it's all yours. Okay, good afternoon. I hope you had a really, really amazing time at the Moodaloot Global so far. My name is Katharina Podotska, and I will be the moderator for this upcoming session. So I want to welcome you to our next session, Ask Martin Anything session with Martin de Guillemus and Thomas Korner. Please feel free to come up with a lot of great and especially crazy questions for the two of them. So no further introduction needed. It pass on the mic to Martin and Thomas. Well, thank you very much, Kasia. I need to introduce Amy, who is joining me as a member of the MUA committee, since this session is held on behalf of the Moodalusers Association.  We have collected several questions, and I'm sure they're coming some more in this session. I feared that 40 minutes are not enough, so let's jump right into it. I had a very interesting question. The COVID crisis is all around, and it has been a very hard time for us all. What do you think? Moodalus performance?  Well, is something good or bad? Is it black or white? It's a mix of lots of things. It's a complicated situation. So what we've been seeing is a lot more people getting into e-learning. Very fast and with very little preparation. So they're going, oh, hey, marketplace, what have you got for us? And they're going to everything. So everything that's out there has been getting a lot more attention. So yes, there's been a lot more Moodalus stuff going on. In a couple of months, our registered sites went from 100,000 to 150,000, and then they kind of leveled off. Now they're rising very slowly again. But also a lot of people went to Microsoft Teams, went to Google Classroom, went to Zoom, went to WeChat, went to all kinds of little things all over the place. And then it's quite interesting. At first they're like, oh, using Zoom all day is really hard. And you hear those sort of stories from teachers trying to be in a classroom on Zoom all day. And then now I'm sort of picking up more, well, how do I manage my assignments? And how do I keep track of all my students? And like, how do I know they're doing anything? And then, oh, you know, maybe you need to learn a learning management system. So it feels like now there are a lot of people going, well, OK, those quick solutions weren't enough. What else is there? And we're still seeing a lot of uptake. One problem though is that with a lot of the quick and easy solutions, they're very cheap or free. And so now everyone's accustomed to thinking, well, I need to have everything for free. And that's a difficult situation to be in when we already give away Moodle code for free and always have. But services aren't free and people aren't free. And you can't just go to a dot com and get it for free all the time because it costs money somewhere. So yeah, it's been a very interesting time. I hope out of this we get a lot more, at least, appreciation for the kind of work that our community has been doing for 20 years. And just having a look into the future, do you see any substantial change because of this crisis for the Moodle roadmap? Well, you know, it's always been on the high on what people talk about is make it easy for new people. Moodle to a new person should be easier. It should be simpler. We all agree. I don't think anyone disagrees with that. But where I think only some of us are thinking is but we don't want to throw away all the complexity. We want to keep all those little things because that's 20 years of work of like useful stuff. So how do we keep the complexity but make it simple for a new user? That's the challenge. And that's the challenge of Moodle 4.0 is essentially that. And that's even sharper now. Now we have a lot of new people. Those new people want simple. If we want to be, if we want to stand up against a Google classroom or a Microsoft Teams, we have to be as simple as those for a new person. Very good. So Martin, I'll just put the next question out. When Moodle started in the early 2000s, what users expected was a website and Moodle did that very well. Giving the teacher the tools to build a website for their course was essential for teachers and Moodle was ahead of the game with that. It was doing web 2.0 before 2.0 was a thing. But now we're in 2020 and what users expect on the internet is shaped by social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, things of that nature. I think it's fair to say that Moodle hasn't necessarily kept up with those changing expectations. Do you think it should? Should that be a goal for Moodle? What do you think a VLE for 2020 should look like or should be like? Well, look at how we use our devices. We're sitting here on these little things and at least 50% of the time we're in a chat. And that chat might be like a Telegram or Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or WeChat or those sorts of ones, or it could be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, which are very chat-like these days, more and more so. And that is what people are used to. That's what they want. And look, internally, I'm the one pushing the most for revamping our messaging platforms. I don't get a lot of that from the Moodle community. I don't hear the MUA going messaging, messaging, messaging like it never comes up. They want, you know, we want MUA, we want, you know, fix this grade book thing or this participants page or it's management C type of things. But the actual core experience is not something that I hear a lot about. And even amongst developers, like, they're like, we're not going to build a whole messaging chat system. And I agree with them. Like, I'm not happy with the messaging we have in Moodle now, which was me pushing that on the roadmap to say, let's focus on messaging internally, to some degree, because it was pretty bad before. Now it's better, but it's still not where it should be. What I really think we need to do is find the best open source messaging platform we can that includes video and audio and make sure that is integrated tightly with Moodle.  Like Matrix messaging is pretty, is pretty very good. It's very federated. It's open. Good standard. The apps are not quite as slick as they could be, but they'll get there. And yeah, and there's things built on top of that. People are building on top of that standard. Michael saying rocket chat in here. Yeah, played with that quite a bit. It's, it's okay. But I think we have to get out of the idea of our institution is a silo. And we only want to build a chat for our institution and start thinking about how our messaging work more globally, just to be more flexible. So we could have, you know, maybe six Moodle sites, which are all part of some association and we want them all to talk to each other. And it should be that you should be able to open it up and let that happen.  So we need something that's a big standard. And we shouldn't build that again. We should just find the right thing and connect to it. I'm personally always talking about that and trying to push it onto the roadmap. But there's a lot of influence on the roadmap. Just jump in here. We got a question from a Mua member preparing this event asking, are there any efforts on the way now or coming in the near future to work on the most core functionality. So not talking about adding features, but working UX core and things like that. And was this the reason to really make this full stop before 4.0? Yeah. Absolutely. Yep. So there's about 50% of the effort. I think for the next 18 months will be the low hanging fruit as we call them the little obvious things. So like an example on this very website where we are that messaging thing that comes out. Martin. Oh, hello. I'm still here. Yeah. Yeah. Here again. So I give you the simplest example on the messaging thing that pops out when you click on the little talk thing on this, this website, it comes out. The first time you see that you have no idea how to close it. Like you're looking for an X or something to push the draw back in and it's just not there and you have to hit the talk icon again, which makes no sense. It doesn't work like anything else on the planet. And like that's a simple thing to fix. That's a low hanging fruit. I think there are hundreds of those little things that would just make people's lives easier. And it's not a lot of work to design it or just doing it. The other 50% are the big things and they're like, what is the whole workflow of teaching in 2022? Like for me when I look at the student experience, it's terrible. Both my kids are teenagers who use Moodle. So I just ask them and I watch them. They have, you know, six teachers all giving them stuff. Those teachers don't know about each other's stuff.  And even if there was, a particular student at a university will have different sets of six or 10 subjects all overlapping. So the teachers can't do it. So what the student needs is some way to manage all of their time. It's a time management problem. And this thing coming from teacher A, it might be a 10 minute task. And this thing coming from teacher B might be a three weeks worth of work giant assignment. How does the student take that and put it sensibly into their life? They need some sort of a task management that involves their calendar, which involves their work and their family life. And also then it's a plan. So if it's a three week assignment and it's due in, you know, six weeks, you have to spend about half of your time working on this assignment. So make sure you schedule that in every week. And we have nothing like that in Moodle. And yet there are tools out there, study managers. And my daughter is very good. She's very conscientious, the best student you've ever seen. She goes out and researched all these study managers and she said, this one's the best one. And I was studying the interface of it and it's no rocket science. Just things we could do and it would make millions of students' lives easier. So, yeah, I think there's a lot to do there. But we are going very wide with the net on the UX. We have workshops coming up. We're running now and they're running for weeks and weeks and weeks. We want everyone to really think about the big core problems. And let's get them all on the table and work them out. We have a slight problem, you see, because when we go out and ask people things, if you talk to expert Moodleers, they focus on the low hanging fruit because they know Moodle very, very well. And this annoys me and they want to fix that little thing. And if you talk to people who don't know Moodle, they ask for all kinds of crazy stuff because they don't know what Moodle is or what rough area we're talking about. So they'll say, oh, we want to voice assistant. I want to talk to my phone and say, help me with my assignment or something. You hired a new marketing lead, a new UX lead, which is kind of, well, predestinated to do that, right? Yes. It's been very hard to find a good UX lead. We've hired a couple and they didn't work out. But Candice really is a great person. She's really, she's an organizer. I think she might have some German background, like I do. That's probably part of it. But we, she's really organizing the process, the UX process we're going to go through and bring us all along on the journey. And at the end of the process, we hopefully have a very good plan for the 4.0 roadmap. Yeah. Sorry, I can talk forever. You know me. So, you know, you've talked about some of your vision of where Moodle is going to go and what the roadmap is. Could you kind of give a brief overview of what's being done by Moodle for open education and support for sustainable development, and how as individual MUA members, can we contribute to that effort? Yeah. Well, good one. So the, look, number one is MoodleNet. MoodleNet is the open education resources part. So my vision for it is like up here, the team was working on like step one of the 10 steps. We didn't even get to the step one this month that I really wanted to see. So I'm a little disappointed with the speed of MoodleNet development. And we can talk more about that after. But the concept, eventually, the vision, if you like, is something like Wikipedia, but focused on collections of resources. And ideally in the future, if you do a Google search for any topic, it says, oh, here's the Wikipedia page on it. And here's a MoodleNet page on it. And the MoodleNet page takes you straight in there.  So not just a description of the topic like in Wikipedia, but here is a website. Here is some videos. Here are the whole Moodle course, et cetera. And that will be really useful for students as well as teachers. So a student studying that topic will go, oh, wow, I'm going to look at and read and so on, that have been collected by teachers and curated. But then teachers as well will have a lovely place to start when they're creating courses for that topic. I love them. Sorry. Nothing like that exists, like it needs to exist.  And everyone talks like that at OER.  But I feel like the Moodle community has a shot because we're big enough. And with the connection with an LMS, it's actually directly usable. It's not like, oh, somebody spent half a million dollars building the OER combiner platform sitting over there. It's like, oh, no, this is in my tool. This is literally built in out of the box on my LMS. So I can go and start using it. And if we get a couple of million people using it by next year, it'll be going. We can really get it going. We just need to get the platform to a point where it's usable. Can you get this as a date next year? Because a lot of our members have been disappointed on Monday morning when you announced that it will be postponed. And they're really looking forward to it as you do. What is the internal roadmap? What do you think next year? When I say next year, I mean next year, full of content, like very useful. We're going to work very hard over the next few months to get the MoodleNet software up to scratch. It's disappointing what happened with the team. One person left, then another, then the whole team left. The problem was that they were never really connected with the Moodle HQ or the Moodle community. They kind of operated in their own little vacuum. And I let them do that because a lot of them come from social media. They come from the mastodon world. And that background is good. And in software development, we call it a Skunkworks project. So it's where you give resources to a small group of people and you say, go for it. And I kind of let them do that. And they did things in different ways. They didn't want to do it the way we developed Moodle Core. They see that as like old fashioned, big processes. We want to be small and light and nimble. And they're like, OK, do it how you want. Show us, prove to us that it can work. Prove to us. If you deliver a great amazing product that everyone likes, it's going to be a great thing. And unfortunately, we couldn't really see the product until quite recently because there's a front end and a back end. And if one of them is broken, the other one doesn't work. And so only recently, we actually got a look at it. And it became very apparent that it was missing very basic things and that they were a long way from being finished. And I think the team was kind of recognizing that it wasn't going how even they would have liked. So a lot of them just abandoned. And they didn't really feel like very close to the Moodle world. They were just contractors working on a little thing. So I've learned a lesson, which is not to do that again. And to make sure that we're much more integrated, that it's the Moodle community is really involved in a way here. Our Moodle developers are really involved. Because it's part of the Moodle platform, right? MoodleNet. It's got to be really part of it. So we'll get there. I think what we have is usable. There's actually a meeting tomorrow, a MoodleNet meeting, which I love anyone who's interested to come along to talk more about this. And it's going to be in the networking cafe. We're going to use that for a big meeting for the first time. So it'll be fun. It will be our lunchtime at the same time as our Moodle Association UX. Oh, the lunchtime. I'll bring the lunch. Once again. If you're in the lunchtime zone. So kind of building on that. You had mentioned in the summer of 2019 that there would be some working groups for higher ed. And I know that higher ed is very invested in OER, at least in the United States and also in MoodleNet. So there's a big push in higher ed here for MoodleNet. So we haven't heard much about those working groups since. So what will happen with that working group or in general, how do you plan to gather feedback and needs from universities to kind of move these projects forward? Yeah. Those were an initiative of our CPO at the time, Chief Product Officer, Grie Steen. She was running them and we were waiting to hear what was happening, all of us. And I'm not sure how far that went. And Grie left after a year at the end of last year. A lot was going on and no one had the responsibility for keeping that going. So we didn't. To me, I think the MUA is this group. The MUA is the higher ed focus group, if you like. It's mostly higher ed. UX workshops also are going to have a lot of people from different fields. From different sectors. So we're gathering it all there. They're just general open sessions for everybody. We are mostly still, as you can tell from attendance at MoodleMoodle, a higher ed focused platform Moodle. But it's very interesting with the workplace and some of the other things. It was a presentation earlier with the UN and their Blue Line Academy thing with 4,000 learners from all across the United Nations. Those kind of users are really interesting as well and the sorts of things they're doing are really... We want to work for all of these things. But definitely higher ed is where my heart is because that's the basis for making the world a really better place. Universities for me are a super important place to prepare the citizens of the future. And we need to really help those teachers as much as we can. Especially because they're all under attack. Funding being dropped, trying to force into training organisations. And it's something we can actually do that will help a lot. Yeah, so... I'll leave it there. Well, the MIA has a lot of individual members who are representing individual classes or K-12 or whatever. And they mostly struggle to really go for Moodle workplace and get these kind of tools which are there as well as most of European universities who cannot or don't contract with partners but run Moodle on their own. So a lot of questions have been around about the roadmap of tools which are in the workplace making available for these guys who are not able or not willing to give away the whole managing rights of the platform and things like that. Could you tell us a little bit more about that because we are seeking for a lot of functionalities like these kind of groupings and all these managing things which we see at the moment with this event platform and working on that. Yeah, I've been having a lot of fun playing with this event platform. I've been very involved in the building of everything that you're seeing here. It's so much fun using Moodle and workplace for it. Like I'm having a ball. Even when I'm up at 5 in the morning trying to do some CSS. So we've got... Look, if you look at our numbers, Moodle is the mainstream LMS platform but the core development team is 40, 50 people if include managers and everything around it. It's tiny, really tiny. And that's all we can afford because we give away our software. We're stacking up considering the difference between other platforms and software projects. We'll have thousands of developers on staff like paid in project management. Whereas we have this small core team and we have a lot of community doing their own thing, loosely managed, we work together and that's how open source works and it's brilliant. We do a lot with the very little in terms of funding. But it is always a struggle. We could definitely use more. I want to make everyone happy. I think everyone deserves to have the... Our software should literally be easily to everyone who looks at it, the best possible thing, the best package. But to get there we need more resources. And so I am very... As a CEO I'm constantly... In fact way too much of my time, 80% of my time I'm thinking about how to fund everything and business stuff, not product stuff. I would love to spend that way around. 80% of my time on product stuff. But instead it's all about business that we always trying to do that. And so the workplace approach was a way to fund Moodlecore. So workplace is something that people will pay for and we are not trying to... We're not saying to universities we want you to go to workplace. We've made it very labelled. It's for workplaces. So we're sort of saying here's some things that you can't get elsewhere. If you pay for it you'll get them and you'll help fund the Moodleproject. And we have a plan to... Those features all dropping into core over time and every release we've put some workplace features in. Every single release since workplace started. And we have more coming in every release to come. So it's just kind of the advanced version that you can get. But I'm 100% committed to keeping them in sync. So they'll never be... They'll never be a time when that is like a separate product that forks or something or that, you know... It's all about Moodlecore. Moodlecore is like the big... It's the big golden apple that we need to be focused on and this is just ways of funding it. So you talked about bringing some of those workplace features over into core. I know lots of people really like, you know, the UX and things in workplace. Kind of along that line, is there a plan to create the ability to have customization at the category level in core going forward? Right now it's just not very easy to kind of have theme one for sciences, theme two for maths, for example. Is that something that we might be able to see in the future? You can't set themes at category level. I thought you could actually. Maybe it's just in workplace. No, no, you can. You can. It's just not quite as intuitive, I think, as maybe people would hope for. I think it's the question. Well, you know, intuitive is a difficult word. Is it intuitive to a student who has to move between different classes in different areas that the whole interface changes everywhere, everywhere they go? It might not be. So there's always different angles on these things. Generally, yeah, Tim's saying you have to turn on the option if anyone hasn't got it, but it is there. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not aware of anything particular on the roadmap, but I guess if it came up a lot in in these workshops we're doing, then that would help. There has been a lot of questions around in the forum and in the chat, as you can imagine. I will pick up just some of them. One is about accessibility. Just not find it anymore. The VCAG 2.1, I think that's about accessibility. What goals would you like to achieve with accessibility? What would you say is crucial for a movement? Well, we've just done a lot of accessibility work. We had an external review. There was a talk earlier from Jun, if anyone hasn't seen it, covering all the accessibility work in detail from the team. Quite a lot of focus on that. One of the things you're not seeing yet is we're planning an integration of accessibility for the content. So accessibility checker in the content. It was meant to land in this release. It will land in a release in a very short time, maybe in a point release. But that's important. That's kind of where a lot of accessibility goes wrong is the content that teachers and people make in the system. So, yeah, we've got to make sure that's going. But it's definitely an important part.  So we kind of have to balance as we move forward on a lot of fronts as well. I think, though, objectively, if you look at the accessibility of Moodle against a lot of other systems, it's quite good from previous work that's been done. We focus on the negatives, but there is a lot of positives, too. There's a question over there from Karen, actually. If I could pick one out. The next one, in fact. And really, I see the same problem. Walking around, somebody says, ah, I heard some people left Moodle HQ. Moodle HQ is at the end of his life. What would you answer them? How can we prove that we are sitting on the right boat? Oh, look, hiring people is difficult. Anyone here who hires people, especially in a global organization, we have people who are like 12 hours out of sync with the rest of the team. And it's difficult. Internally, we've been working really hard on this. So we have some new ways of managing our work that we'd never had before that we've done this year. So, for example, we're using a system of OKRs, which are objectives and key results. And we've set, at the beginning of the year, our management team, which is about 15 people, have set goals for the whole company and those translate into team goals and then they translate down into individual goals. And now we're using a software package to track all our objectives and we map key results against them. So everybody knows when we meet objectives, because there's a result, a measurable result. And it could be, you know, there are thousands of people registered to that thing or, you know, so many dollars were made, but it could also be some quality level of something. And so you have this structure of objectives and key results and then in every kind of team member and their manager relationship, we have like one-to-one meetings now on a weekly basis. So all through that tree, there's all these one-to-one meetings and the meetings are about, well, how are we tracking against the objectives and are we reaching any key results and let's update the information in the tree so that everyone knows what's going on and so this is a way of getting way more organized and definite than we had before. Now, go back to the history of Moodle, which was, you know, me hacking with a loose collection of people around the community who got into it as well and it was like, you know, a lawyer would say, oh, I really want to fix the backup system. I'm like, yeah, go for it, mate. And he goes and fixes it and builds a backup system because he's hacking away for a month and stuff would just happen and it was very flat and we didn't have to worry about objectives and key results. It was a smaller, kind of more hacker ethos. But to present one of the problems that we've been seeing, we're finding we need to impose a much more structure and so we have been doing that and I think that's really going to avoid the problem. So MEC, for example, you know, I trusted people to do a good job on that and when it turns out that something's delivered that isn't meeting the levels of quality and we have to start again, it's really sad but I have to make the hard decision to do that and spend more time on it rather than just delivering something rubbish, you know. I'm very happy with MEC now and the current team are fantastic and MEC is like, you know, good now and MoodleNet will be the same. So, and look, sometimes people leave because their life is changing and that's fine too, you know, totally fine. That happens. Everybody should have that freedom. I just think it's the thing about confidence and Karen asked about, where do you think that, or what do you think with people who are starting to lose confidence in Moodle and that's I think quite important thing. So I'm trying to explain that it's very important to me that we have the confidence of the community that, you know, we are spending a lot of time on our human processes, managing a bunch of humans, you know, to write software and produce products for people to use. Yeah, we're just coming near the end. You're on mute, Amy. I have one final question and that question is, you know, there has been some turnover with Moodle, as is with any company. Going forward, how do you envision the relationship with the MUA working? We aren't currently having regular liaison meetings and I think that we kind of all understand there's a lot going on right now, but how do you envision us strengthening our working relationship together to meet those goals, objectives that both you have and the community has for Moodle? Well, there are some very clear OKRs in Sonda's team for this. So maybe Sonda wants to answer that. But yeah, the original design of the MUA was that we interacted on fairly specific points of the process. I didn't want us to be all up in your grill all the time. It was kind of like you guys give us what you need and we'll figure out a way of making it happen. So I think over time and with some of the people in the MUA in the past few years there's been a definite shift towards, you know, a more closer working relationship and I think that's a good thing that we do need to do that. So yeah, you know, anytime I've been invited to speak with the MUA I'm there and I hope the team is, everyone in the team is the same. But in the end, the MUA needs to figure out what it wants, what it needs actually, not wants, needs from Moodle but that very clear to us. Because yeah, we can't get involved with, when it's at a, oh here are a thousand things that need doing level. Like we already have that, it's called the tracker. We have thousands of things to do level already. We want the MUA to just give us one thing to do. So hopefully the MUA is working that process out too. Thank you. Sandra, do you have anything to add? You jumped in with your cam. No, I just, I guess Mark will call me out. Look, I sort of agree with Martin's last statement that it would be great if, you know, rather than 10 or 20 things, we get one or two things from the MUA and can focus on that a bit more in detail. In the past, we have had several people more closely involved in managing the relationship with the MUA and staying on top of the projects. I think it's been a long past year or so that has mostly fallen on me and together with all the other things that I juggle, that's quite a challenge. But we're putting some extra people on the team. For example, Kate, who you've all met, she's going to be helping out a bit more with that sort of stuff too. So I hope we can sort of pull things together and streamline things as we go forward. Thank you. Well, we come to an end with a very last question. I think it has been in the forum because it remembers me a little bit. We are still people. We are not only working in machines and somebody asked, Martin, did you already move to Barcelona? Yeah, look, I'm not going. I don't think now. What was the coronavirus? And, you know, even before the coronavirus, I was travelling, I went 12 times around the world last year in distance and that was very uncomfortable for me in terms of all of my carbon impact. And I was thinking, you know, I'm not... I was justifying it like, well, you know, we are working on platforms that save people travelling and, you know, it's a plus and minus thing. But, you know, it's not a good example and I would much rather spend the time working on things like this conference and, like, for me, this is how we should do all our moots ongoing. This event site is actually, in my mind, a new product, a Moodle events product. We already got a lot of plans for version 3. And the idea is we would just make it available as a venue to anyone who wants to hold an event. You would come in and you would set up all the conference, the speakers, the sessions. It remotely controls Moodle and creates courses and forums and links everything up and it makes a, you know, a really nice experience. And you just use it. And I think with this sort of stuff going on, I don't need to be travelling so much at all. And a lot of the reason for me going to Barcelona was to be closer to Europe and closer to the rest of the world. Right now, I'm very glad I'm here in the country where I have, you know, I'm a citizen here. I have full healthcare. If I was in Spain right now, I would be an immigrant and a coronavirus and everything. I would be an immigrant dealing with the Spanish healthcare system. It's not quite as convenient, right?  Well, that's a pretty small thing. So, yeah. But I will visit. Sometimes. I'll probably do a world tour every now and then. We have a plan for a Moodle documentary where we travel around and visit all these really cool places in all countries where Moodle stories are and bring a cameraman. The one that, so, Kasia, you introduced me at the Vienna Moot, that guy. I was speaking to him. He was keen for it. I think we could make a really good Moodle documentary where we all work together. Okay, thank you very much. We're just over the time already. Thank you, Martin, for joining us. Thank you, everybody, for asking the question. And I would love to see continued discussions on the conference or within the MUA. And, yeah, just continue what you said. Stay healthy and see you soon. Thank you very much. Yeah, everyone stay well. Thanks for joining in. I'm having a great week. I hope you are too.