Hello and welcome to the Cube. I'm Shelly Kramer, Managing Director and Principal Analyst at the Cube Research and I'm here today with Tara Murphy Doherty, the CEO of Govini, a leading national defense software company. Tara is beyond impressive. I mean, when I look at her bio, it's crazy. She's held leadership positions in technology across industry, government, and the nonprofit sectors. She's been at Palantir Technologies. She's served as the Chief of Staff of Global Strategic Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. See what I mean. She's had other senior roles. She serves on the Board of Directors for the National Defense University Foundation, the Board of Advisors for the National Security Innovation Program at the Reagan Institute, and she holds a number of other advisory board positions. She's a sought after speaker on a variety of topics, very knowledgeable about all things related to critical defense technologies and simple little things like nuclear modernization and AI, and really, she's totally focused on the U.S.'s competition with China. Welcome to the Cube, Tara. What an amazing background. I'm so excited for this conversation. Thank you, Shelly. I'm thrilled to be here.  It's really exciting to be able to spend some time with you. So, let's start with a quick overview of Gopini. I know that your company builds software that accelerates the defense acquisition process, and this is really important because this allows the national security community to build the capabilities that it needs to deter U.S. adversaries more quickly. No small thing, right? And I think that this is particularly important because I think in general, government agencies are somewhat slow to action. So talk with me a little bit about Gopini and how what it is you're doing is helping shift the defense acquisition process into something that is streamlined and efficient and doing the U.S. government the justice it deserves. Absolutely. Our mission at Gopini is to transform the defense acquisition process in order to make it a strategic advantage for the United States. I'd argue today it's a liability, and it's for reasons you mentioned, Shelly, it's slow, it's overly complex, and if the process can't move at speed, then the United States won't be able to feel the military capabilities that we need to keep up with the challenges in the world. So that's what we're after at Gopini. Yeah, absolutely. No small set of challenges, right? So you've got something called the ARC that I believe is the key to making all that happen. Is that right? That is right. So the ARC is defense software that is purpose-built for the defense acquisition process. And what is really novel about the ARC is it brings a combination of external commercial data that the Department of Defense in particular needs in order to make the decisions that are required throughout the acquisition process, and it combines it with artificial intelligence enabled applications. Think modern software like we use in so many parts of our lives today in order to execute this really important work. That combination has never existed before in a way that is designed specifically for this community of users and this particular process, and that's why the impact is so significant.  So being able to work to eliminate that and I think is an important part of this equation in general. Absolutely. Everyone realized when the pandemic hit just how fragile our supply chains are at the consumer level and then also at a national defense level. And actually, those supply chain challenges and that realization is really what started to usher in a lot of the broader change that we're seeing the Department of Defense adopt across the acquisition process. And so part of it is supply chain fragility and getting out in front of those challenges, making sure that decision makers and leaders and program managers who are responsible for this defense acquisition process are anticipating those challenges and then taking actions to either avoid them entirely or minimize the impacts. But then it goes beyond that into, okay, you have the suppliers that you need in order to execute this program. Do you have the parts on time? Are those parts counterfeit or trustworthy? Can you manage a program through a multi-decade lifespan all the way into its sustainment phase? And then of course, how do you modernize that program to become not just the capability that we need today, but that next-generation system that we need in order to effectively deter and if necessary, fight adversaries in the future. Yeah. So a holistic strategy is at play here, not just one simple tech solution that we plug in. It's a much broader thing here that I think that you bring to the table and that's key. It really is broad and that is an important point. Shelly, sorry to jump in, but it's something that people often miss in the defense acquisition process of the construct is they think about the word acquisition and they think, oh, this is about buying. Procurement. This is about procurement, exactly. Is this for writing contracts? Sure, that's one small part of it, just like supply chain management is one small part of it, but really what the defense acquisition process is, is it is the end-to-end system of conceiving of, developing, and producing, and ultimately fielding the weapon systems and platforms that assure U.S. national security interests at home and abroad. And that, to your point exactly, is very broad in and of itself. And requires a comprehensive strategy. Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk a little bit more about the impetus here and what drove you and your team to build the arc. And I'll admit before we dive into that that I was thinking about this conversation this morning. And a line from a Jimmy Buffett song popped into my head, and the fins to the right, fins to the left, and you're the only girl in town. And I started laughing because I think that we've got Russia, we've got North Korea, and we've got China. And we're dealing with all threats from all, and oh, by the way, let's add the Middle East in there as things intensify there. So we've got no small set of challenges, no insignificant number of adversaries. And of course, from a technological standpoint, I think it's not a stretch to say China is probably the biggest threat. So I'd love to hear a little bit of your thoughts about the threat that we face, the threats that we face, and really what you're thinking is there. One of the things that's really remarkable about working in this space is just how intense it all feels. I used to joke with my parents, why couldn't I have wanted to be a florist? Because actually, Shelley, not only are you absolutely right, but at this point, I would argue in all seriousness that the threat is existential. And certainly, the threat to the current world order is existential. So even if we Americans feel fairly safe at home, part of that is because since the end of the Second World War, we have been the global leader that has established not just the international system, but the values and principles that guide that system, things like a respect for human rights and international sovereignty. When you have leaders like Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, who clearly have no respect for that sovereignty, who disregard human rights, that's why it matters that the United States stays in a global leader position. And frankly, I would like it to be the leading global position. So the threat is significant, it's diverse, it's myriad, it's unrelenting. And this is all the reasons why we need, as United States, to continue to demonstrate that military might. We don't do it like the North Koreans do and put out a parade of rockets, whether they work or not. We do it by having a really, really effective military. That means an all volunteer force that is armed with the best capabilities in the world. And the reality is we have the best people in the world. We have genius in this country and values of ingenuity and creativity and innovation. We simply need to harness that better for natural security purposes. Yeah, no argument from me on that front for sure. And I think the challenge that we have, one of the challenges that we have in the United States is that when you're talking about communist nations where one individual has all-consuming power, and that's a completely different situation than here in the United States. And we've got a bipartisan system of government. We historically don't get along with one party and the other party and making decisions. The number of times I see ordinary average Americans complaining about supporting Ukraine. And I think about, do you really understand what's going on globally here? Do you really understand that the answer of, why don't we just let Russia take Ukraine? There's some of this that doesn't make any sense. We're thinking about the threat to Taiwan that China poses. And again, a lot of Americans aren't thinking about the reality of these threats. And I think that then trying to get consensus when it comes to budget and funding and dealing with the bipartisan issue. So it really is an issue. And I think that the U.S. is definitely not moving as quickly, certainly as China is. And I think the other thing that's important here is that when you're looking at China in particular, you're looking at a government that has just said, we're going to dominate. We're going to dominate in all things technology. And we are going to spare no effort. And we are going to spare no cost. And this is so important to us. And they just sort of, and not that individuals within the country have a lot of decision-making power. But I think that when you're dealing with communist nations, it's incredibly different than a democracy. And I think that's a challenge for us. Absolutely. The very nature of what makes our system of democracy strong, which is that there's room for debate, and there's room for dissent even, is also challenging when it's up against that single-minded kind of authoritarian approach. And your description of the Chinese Communist Party and how they have been not just determined but single-minded in their ambitions, both regionally and globally, is spot-on. We see this probably more than anywhere else in the field of artificial intelligence, where the Chinese Communist Party has been so vocal about becoming the global AI leader, about unseating the United States from a leadership position in both global politics as well as technology superiority. And it's brazen. It's brazen, which I understand the ambitions and I understand their own pursuit of their national interests. But when it comes at the cost of American security, that's where we need to draw a line. And that, frankly, should be among the most non-partisan opinions we've ever heard. It should be easy to agree on. Absolutely. Absolutely. And we've seen more agreement on countering the China threat over the past few years, really since the 2018 National Defense Strategy, than we have in a very long time. So that's positive. But we still need the government to function. We need a budget, like you mentioned. Otherwise, it's going to not just be hard to protect our own national interests. It's going to be really hard to attract new companies to work with the government. And that's such an important part of developing these critical capabilities that we're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the challenges here is that a lot of the proposed solution to some of the problems that we're discussing is policy changes. And while policy is absolutely an important part of solving for this, there's so much more. And I know that that's really what a lot of what you focus on at Govini. Definitely. And as you mentioned in my bio, my background is in defense policy. And so it's near and dear to my heart, but it's not the answer to everything. And yet policy debates are fascinating. They're fun to debate. They're important. It's easy to focus on questions related to policy and questions related to authorities that impact the Department of Defense and its decision making. It's not always as much fun or gets as much attention to put on to the process side of this. And when I refer to process, I don't mean the series of meetings or organizational constructs that the Pentagon creates in order to make decisions. We've heard a lot about this in the news with the announcement of Replicator. I mean on a day to day basis, the organizations that manage major defense acquisition programs that are creating the capabilities, those weapons systems and platforms that ultimately are going to go in the hands of the warfighter. What's the process for managing those, for getting them created, scoped off the production line and sustained and ultimately fielded? That's the process that today has been completely, remains completely dominated by outdated manual approaches. And in typical government fashion, as the complexity of the environment has changed, their response has been not to actually introduce technology that modernizes the process, but simply to keep putting more people against it. And that is not going to, I would argue it's broken today, certainly not going to work in the future. Yeah, absolutely. And I find that when we talk about things like process improvement and process automation, these are not sexy, exciting bits of technology, but they're so important. And they're critical when your goal is to be able to move quickly. And I think that that's really what's important to keep in mind here. And these non-sexy process improvement pieces of the equation really play a vital role. They do. And we've seen large private sector enterprises learn this lesson. There is a point at which your organization has become so successful that you need process. And as the organization grows, you need those structures. And as you take on more complicated work and are doing more things faster, you need software that is designed for different jobs. I don't understand why DOD thinks that it's any different. And the reality is that the organizations have become larger, more complex, the systems we're creating are incredibly complex and novel. And yet everyone's still trying to run these processes off of spreadsheets. That's a big part of what's holding us back. The good news is it's actually easier to change, I think, than the policy problems. And it's certainly easier to change than an authority's problem that you have to run down with Congress. So that's a little bit of good news if we can get people to understand that this kind of software is now available for their missions. Well, and you know, what I don't think you touched on that I think is important here is that solving these problems sustainably and at scale and at a rapid pace, these are all part of the equation. And I believe that your solution is kind of purpose built for that. It's exactly purpose built for that. And we have seen tremendous changes among the program offices in particular that have adopted the ARC for their process execution and their program management across defense systems. So for example, we've seen reductions in time to execute those processes of up to 75%. That's getting three quarters of your work week back just by using modern technology and data. That's a lot. That's a lot. So what I'd like to do now is shift a little bit and talk about this, the defense technology space. And we've seen more and more interest in the part, on the part of venture capitalists in defense technology companies like Govini. I saw that pitchbook data shows that in the last four years at least 125 billion of venture capital has been invested in startups that build defense tech that compared to 43 billion in the four years prior. So we've seen a significant rise in VC interest. Why do you think? I mean, I feel like that was a massive softball question. But for one, the numbers alone are fascinating because it really speaks to absolutely a trend that is evident. And we're seeing capital flock to this space. I think it's a function of the fact that not only do defense budgets continue to rise. So there's a really interesting market opportunity here. But also it's clear that the future of warfare is going to be increasingly technological and that emerging technologies, which are dominated by America's innovative industries and the startups coming out of used to be just or primarily Silicon Valley now coming out of tech hubs all across the United States, these capabilities have a role to play even in operational military context. So that's incredibly interesting. And the combination of those two things I think is propelling a lot of this interest. Yeah, absolutely. I think that one of the things that I've talked about a lot over the course of the last couple of years is that when it comes to success at digital transformation and modernization initiatives, the mindset of being able to do it all yourself is really a very outdated mindset. And I think that that's really, you know, this is a great example of the defense community, the government agencies being able to partner with innovative startups who bring, you know, bring the ability. I think that I saw this, you know, this statement Silicon Valley speed, right? So we've got Silicon Valley seed, speed and US US ingenuity and expertise. And we add all of these things into the equation. I think it's, it's a no brainer, you know, in terms of being able to work with the Department of Defense and bring some of these solutions to bear in a really rapid way. Absolutely. And if the investments are increasing, then we need to expand the pool of players that are contributing and working together to your point. You know, a lot of the debate around bringing Silicon Valley companies or innovative startups into the defense ecosystem has been very critical of the traditional defense primes. And yet I think it is and not or. We should not be thinking that a startup or an early stage business that is at a venture stage of life is going to displace major systems integrators that do phenomenal, phenomenal things for our war fighters, but they can't do it alone and the complexity of the current environment and the requirements in terms of that technology insertion that we need to see into our military systems. That is where these new players need to enter the picture. And what's required and what the Department of Defense needs to do a better job of incentivizing is expanding that pool so that it's both. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about how important it is to bring new technology to the fore to counter the threats that China poses. I know that, you know, national media is widely covered, China's aggression in the Asia region. It's growing military strength is not any secret. You know, we've seen we've seen China playing games with Taiwan, threatening to blockade Taiwanese vessels, all of that sort of thing. So how can the Department of Defense strengthen the US position on the world stage and fend off the threat of China? Well, there are a lot of different levers they can pull. And among them are certainly number one, maintaining deterrence. That's all about making sure that your adversaries are in a mindset where every single day they choose not today to attack the United States or harm our national interests in some way. The most powerful thing we can do from a deterrence perspective is have a powerful force that is credible in terms of being ready to deploy. And that speaks directly to the defense acquisition process. And in fact, that's what the defense acquisition process is for. You know, you also mentioned earlier a really important point about Americans questioning support or I should say ongoing support to Ukraine, because I think it's fatigue, not disinterest that has them questioning it. But a second major lever in all of this are US allies and partners. Part of that is making sure that those allies and partners have the capabilities that they need. What we produce out of the defense acquisition process is not just for the US military alone. It's to make sure that Israel can defend itself against Hamas, that Ukraine can defend itself against an invasion from Russia. And the return is important in return for having the world's best network of allies and partners. It means we're capable of being able to fight a war effectively, no matter where it takes place around the globe. And that is incredibly unique and important to remember when you consider just how far away China is and the implications that creates from a force projection perspective. Yeah, absolutely. So I want to shift now and talk a little bit about, you know, we've been talking about next gen military systems. And it's important, it's progress, it's technology advancement. But you know, I think sometimes when you think about government entities, and you think about cutting edge technology, those worlds don't really collide. I've been in a lot of government buildings, and I've seen a lot of government equipment and things like that. And sometimes, aging equipment and platforms is a significant problem. So what do you see? You know, I know that you sort of have a front row seat to this. Talk with me a little bit about what you see in reality, and really how next gen technology is going to play a significant role in our success here. Most of our users today, actually, users of the arc are in offices that are managing programs in sustainment. And actually, 70% of a program's total lifetime costs typically fall in the stage of sustaining that platform or weapon system post production for decades. So it is a huge part of the overall process and overall ecosystem. When you think about the complexity of something like a nuclear powered submarine, or a stealth bomber, or a sixth generation fighter jet, these are incredibly, incredibly complex systems. And they're wildly expensive, they're hard to build. And so once you create them, they need to be not just available, but militarily, operationally capable for a very long time in order for our national defense system to work. That's one of the underpinnings that we have bet on is having the most sophisticated capabilities in the world. Look at the Columbia class submarine, for example. This is going to be a submarine unlike anyone has ever built before, and it has a projected lifespan of 90 years. How do you plan for what the industrial base will look like 90 years from now? When everybody working on it, it'll be dead. Exactly. And what does that mean from a workforce perspective and a skills perspective? We're seeing the department actually do some really interesting things in the area of additive manufacturing. And this has been a phenomenal application of the arc where they're looking in our data and using software to say, we can today, in the design phase, figure out what parts of these incredibly sophisticated systems can be 3D printed so that we're not reliant on a manufacturer that's around today being around in 50, 60, 90 years. That makes perfect sense. That makes perfect sense. So let's talk a little bit about the defense acquisition process. Is it a stretch to say that it's perhaps a little broken? Sadly, it's not a stretch. I think that is a very accurate diagnosis. And stepping back to maybe spend one more minute on what do we mean by the process? We've hit on a couple of points, but the entirety of the system actually begins with science and technology. That's the stage where we're conceiving of and experimenting with the early technologies that ultimately will be prototyped and then turned into systems that we actually produce. So you move from science and technology into production, where we're actually manufacturing these capabilities. And then we've talked about sustainment of those capabilities and modernization, all of which is underpinned by a need to assure that we have resilient supply chains to affect that whole process. That's incredible in terms of the scope of effort, the number of people involved, applied against the kind of systems that we're talking about. And so it's understandable to some extent that it's pretty broken today. What the department needs to do is it needs to figure out how can it take as modern an approach to that overall process as it's taking to things like our next nuclear-powered submarine or stealthy fighter. I think the point about it hasn't been popular to look inward at process improvement and process modernization is an important one and a really necessary step, also a very achievable step. And the last thing I would say is that when you think about the fact that these million-plus people who execute the defense acquisition process are really doing so without the kind of modern software that we all use to do everything from run our businesses to manage our personal finances, it's somewhat unbelievable. And so it's about time, I think, that a great innovative company steps in and builds modern software that is purpose-built and completely tailored to this set of workflows within the defense acquisition process. You will find no argument for me on that front at all. And I think that a lot of what we've seen in the past has been the Department of Defense's MO has perhaps been outsourcing to professional service contractors or employing other low-tech approaches. And that's really not, that's not what we're talking about. This is embracing best-in-class technology to get where you want to be quicker, more effectively, all of those sorts of things. And I know I will get no argument from you on that one. That's right. If you look at the amount of money that the Department of Defense spends on people to execute these programs, it's mind-boggling. Why not make sure that these people have the capabilities that they need to do their jobs, which are every bit as important as the jobs of the warfighters as well? Yeah, absolutely. So tell me a little bit about what Govini is doing to improve the defense acquisition process. Primarily, we are bringing, number one, the data that the Department of Defense has lacked to date because it isn't data that they maintain in their own internal databases, but that reflects the dynamics happening in the market around them. We talked about the importance of the realization around supply chain fragility that happened during the pandemic. There are myriad other trends that have highlighted the need that DoD has to consider data in its decision-making about the rest of the world. The Department of Defense is a global enterprise. It should understand the dynamics in which it operates. A great example would be adversarial capital making its way into the United States, primarily Chinese investors in some of these companies that we're trying actively to attract into the national security ecosystem. How do you balance that foreign investment and those threats with the desire to propel the American economy, of course, and like I said, bring them into the defense fold? Data has been a really important part of what we've done to help improve the ability of these offices to manage their programs. The second thing is we work with the government's data as well and taking first in class kinds of approaches to data at scale and being able to apply that machine learning and those schemas and all of that data work to traditional DoD datasets has been incredibly powerful. What happens is the program offices are getting insights that they've never had before out of the data that they already sit on today. That's been game changing in terms of being able to become more proactive about challenges that they may face in their programs. A great example would be part shortages. We have users who are identifying ahead of being notified by a supplier that a part won't be available on a correct timeline and using an AI driven engine to be able to surface, well, what's an alternative part that I can buy to keep my program on track? I'd say that that third element touches on the AI piece quite a bit, which is modern software that is designed to execute these workflows. We think about it as if you have a job to do and you are managing a defense program, you should not have to execute that job through disparate spreadsheets, email, and let's be honest, picking up the phone and calling that supplier or that person at the Defense Logistics Agency that you've worked with for 20 years to run down apart or understand what has happened to a particular vendor that just isn't good enough, it doesn't scale, it isn't efficient, and it's not going to get us where we need to go. Well, and I think the magic words here are single source of truth. And that's really a lot of what your technology does is it pulls all of this in, all of these disparate data sources together, the data is clean, it's normalized, it's consumable by humans, it's a single source of truth. And that's what we find all of the biggest organizations in the world are seeking that single source of truth as it relates to their data. And the government should of course be doing the exact same thing. Absolutely. It's actually a big part of why I joined Gavini six years ago now, which is hard to believe. But my experience working in the Pentagon is that single source of truth just didn't exist.  And we did so with our very best judgment and analysis that we could conduct. But it was very rarely ever data driven. That is wildly insufficient. It's also significantly changing in terms of how DOD is adapting capabilities like the ARC. I think it's been slow. That trend has been slow to hit some of these program offices that manage the defense acquisition process, because they're so spread out throughout the country. They work on far flung military bases in skiffs on classified information. And so they've been a little bit hard to get to, but I'm excited that the ARC is bringing this kind of data driven change and ability to make decisions in a different way to them. That's great. It's exciting. It really is exciting. And in the cheesiest of ways, I was on site visiting a client sometime last year, and it happened to be Honeywell and their lab facility, their research lab facility up in Buffalo, New York.  He said, I get to get up every day and work on things that make the world more sustainable and a better place. And I think that really, again, that's kind of what you wake up every day doing. And that doesn't suck.  And you know, I remember the days I was working in technology for a Silicon Valley company back in 2015 and 2016, when it was not cool to be working on US national security. And people, especially in the technology sector, weren't sure that that was a mission that they wanted to support. And through all of that, you know, I was interested in serving this mission from this particular angle. And I am absolutely thrilled to see that shift. We see more and more entrepreneurs, founders, people working all sorts of technology sides that want to contribute to this mission, too. And most importantly, want to work on something bigger than themselves. We hire for that at Givini. Our team exemplifies it. And one of the things that's great about it is, no matter what kind of day you have, no matter how frustrating that client or user might be, you work on something that really matters in the world. And especially if you're working with the people, that does not suck. It does not suck. You just wake up knowing you're working with good people doing good deeds. And I think that's key. So my last question, and we're going to wrap this show, is what one piece of advice would you give to founders and startups looking to sell to the government? Go talk to a mission owner. Figure out what problem your capability, your product can solve and focus on solving a problem for a mission owner. I think too often founders, entrepreneurs who want to contribute to this space get hung up on how do I go to market in this incredibly complex federal ecosystem? Do I have to hire a lobbyist and go talk to the hill? How do I win a contract? How do I write the proposal? Forget it. Take the most direct path to somebody who's driving part of the defense mission and solve a problem for them. Because the Department of Defense is full of people who are trying to break the status quo and better achieve the mission. And they make phenomenal partners to get things done, giving you an incubation space in order to prove the viability of your product. And there's a solid foundation and a much stronger one than just chasing the contract. Yeah, that's awesome. Great advice, Tara. So thank you so much, Tara Murphy Doherty, GoVini CEO. It's been a fantastic spending time with you today and learning what you and your team at GoVini are doing and keep us posted. I know you have exciting things happening in the future.


to us from under the ocean there, Chris, but we just about got the theme tune. Just about got it anyway. You're in the office, aren't you? Not a prison. And it says Friday 15th of October. So it looks like we've got the wrong slide deck up, haven't we? So shall I navigate to the one that we're actually doing today, which is not Webinar number 43. But it is in fact Webinar 24. So let's actually get the correct slides up. I've also started the recording. Today's session will be recorded. So here we are. It is Friday, the 12th of November. We haven't travelled back in time. I'll notice that I didn't update. It should be XLIV at the point, shouldn't it? But for those of you who haven't joined us already, my name is Chris Morrison. And I'm Jane Secker. And together we chair the Copyright and Online Learning Special Interest Group for the Association for Learning Technology, as well as running the website copyrightliteracy.org. Indeed. So today it's going to be a good one. We've got the following. Got some copyright news, as ever. We've got some events. We've got interesting research and some papers have been written around this area. But the main event today is about becoming a copyright specialist. And we've got three fantastic speakers, Hannah, Simon and Kate, who we'll introduce later. Although many of you actually need, they need little introduction being regular contributors to this webinar. But a really excellent topic, I think, and very topical because there are a number of vacancies in this area going on at the moment. And I know institutions looking at how they provide specialist support. And as usual, the future webinars. Anything more to say? No, no, no, let's click on. Yeah, let's get started with what we've been up to this week. So last met. We actually ran, so we've had Halloween, we've also had bonfire night, haven't we, since we last met. So now we're doing our monthly webinars. And we ran this exciting competition to see if anybody could have a go at creating what we called a cool pumpkin. We really wanted somebody to try and carve our logo in a pumpkin. Now, I have to say, a bit disappointed with the number of entries. So if the community could kind of step up their game for the next competition we do, because there was T-shirt in the off-in as well for the cool gang T-shirt to win. Anyway, we did get an entry, didn't we? And we do have one entry. The good thing about it is that it was absolutely amazing. It was brilliant. So Nora and Cameron from London South Bank University posted this. The pumpkin with copyright symbols for eyes. It's scary grin spelling out the word infringement. So that was pretty special. It is amazing. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Nora's joining us today. We have dropped her a line and we are going to arrange to get her T-shirt sent to her as well. Yeah, there's actually, if we put the link up to that, the tweet that she sent, or if you go on Twitter and have a look for cool pumpkin, you do find she took like about four or five pictures of it and it's amazing. It is absolutely amazing. So I think a well-deserved cool gang T-shirt going to Nora and just to let you that, you know, we do expect a better effort in our next competition. We'd like to actually have to do some proper judging, wouldn't we Chris? We would, yeah. And it is the seasonal time is almost upon us. Let's not talk too much about that. I think it's still a bit early, but we're hoping that we might be able to get something going that maybe towards the end of the year, we would have some participation in. Absolutely, yes. I am grabbing that tweet link. We can put that in the chat. Yeah, yeah. Although it would probably be easier, Jane, if you could do this stuff, because you know, I'm out of my comfort zone here. I'm normally surrounded by all of my guitars and my tech and back in the office. Nothing less. Stop growing. I'm going to stop moaning. Let's move on. So just a reminder that our webinar blog archive is on this page. So I'll leave that you, Jane, to put the link. Yeah, I'll do it. We are also working. Don't worry. Also to say we're working. Greg Walters at Glasgow has been working very hard with Steeler Alt to create the YouTube live and the YouTube playlist of the webinar recordings as well. So once we've got that all up and running and we've agreed how everything's going to work, we will be sharing the links to that. I think they're actually already on there. You could search the playlist actually at the moment on YouTube that Alt put up with some of the webinars. And I think we've got a link on the page actually that goes to it as well. But what we will see is properly indexed and all the kind of previous recordings going up in over the next few months or so. So yeah, really grateful to Greg and to Alt for getting that arranged for us. Excellent. Right, on to copyright news. Coming to you from under the ocean again. Okay, we've got a couple of events that we talked about last time, which remind us that learning on screen with the fantastic Bartolomeo Milletti running a course on copyright and creative reuse in education. It's an online course. And that's on the 30th of November, I think. So I think it is. Yeah, yeah. I'll just pop the link into that one. Yep. So if anyone wants to go on that course. The next one is we have the book in still open, I think for the site winter forum. That's going to be on the 25th of November. So a couple of weeks time, but we've got a few events coming up and there's some really great speakers at that event. So I'll just pop in the link to the event right. We can get tickets for that. And yeah, looks yeah, another good event. Something else that's a little bit further ahead in the future. I'm a bit of a copyright history nerd. I went to a great talk by Kathy Bowery that create organized earlier this week. She's an Australian academic who's talking about kind of copyright and authorship. And but there's actually going to be a webinar or an event happening in relation to all the digital resources that create have been creating on copyright history. So I've just popped that in there. I think that event is actually the 15th of December. So it's a little way ahead, but looks looks like a really interesting. And if you're not on the create mailing list, what I would say is it's really worth signing up to. You should get a weekly email from them about the sort of stuff that they've got going on. And yeah, really, just just for those of you that aren't familiar with creators, the research centre located at the University of Glasgow and also University of Bournemouth that have been doing work for many years in looking at copyrights history, but also copyright policies supported by evidence making. And they've created this copyright evidence wiki, which you've got there and also supported copyright user. So an excellent thing to be aware of and to be following if you're not already. Absolutely. Yeah. So new research that we, yeah, yeah, it's as good, isn't it? Yeah. You doing it? Or am I doing it? You can do this one. You explain it. Okay, so we, yeah, we picked up this article that was published in the Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship from two Canadian academic librarians. Celine and Amanda have written a really in-depth article about copyright anxiety or copyright chill. If you want to find out more about the difference between those two things and the research they did, I recommend reading the full article. But what we're really pleased about is they wrote us a summary. So a kind of way of promoting the article, but also we've sort of found sometimes, you know, having just a more accessible summary gets people more interested in it. And actually, yeah, we've had like huge traffic on our blog this week, because people come in to read the post that is then taking them obviously to the article. But we're hoping to do some more collaboration, aren't we, with Celine and Amanda? We are indeed. Potentially some more research about how this copyright anxiety scale that they've developed. So it's what, yeah, have a look and watch this space. Yeah. And copyright chill, it's not the same thing as Netflix and chill, is it? No, it is not, Chris. Okay, right, so let's move on. Josie Fraser, so you actually went to see Josie talk earlier this week at the Creative Commons event where she shared the work she's been doing on the ethics of open share. Okay, so you explain. Yes, you made it sound like I actually went out of my house somewhere, but no, yeah, this is some work that Creative Commons have been doing. They've got four working groups, one of which is headed up by Josie Fraser, who is at the Heritage Lottery Fund, I think now. But Josie's writing a post, it's called Beyond Copyright, the Ethics of Open Sharing. And it was a sort of consultation in the first instance. And then they've kind of got a working paper out there that's meant to spark both the discussion and contribute to the debate about kind of, you know, going way beyond, as I say, copyright, talking about when you might want to share content, the ethics of doing that, when it's not appropriate to share as well. It's good, it's a good piece. So, and it's a 12 minute read according to Medium. So you can, you can sit down for knowing it's not too long. Okay, I think that's it, isn't it, on the copyright news? I think that's us for copyright news, yeah, for the time being. So we move on to topic of today, which is becoming a copyright specialist. And we'll introduce our guest speakers in a moment. But the background to this, we thought we'd give some context because we were involved in writing a paper, a report with Philippa Hatch, who I have seen is on the participant list. Hello, good morning, Philippa. So Philippa, Jail and I did a study. Happy days, happy days at the University of Canada when we were... We did indeed, yeah, back in. Getting into all that data, weren't we? But four years ago, we were asked you to fill out a, and I'm trying to copy, you can paste the URL in there. So we got some findings from it. So copyright specialists in education, culture and institution, who are they and what do they do? And a lot of it was to try to see really are they the copyright police? Because I think that's how they often, people in our types of roles have been perceived over the years. But what exact, what positions they were in, where do they sit within the organization, and what did they actually do every day? So what did we find? Yeah, some interesting stuff. So we found, so we'd actually done an earlier survey of copyright in, across libraries, copyright heritage institutions, copyright literacy survey that we did in 2015. And we found really similar findings in this later survey. We found 66% of institutions had a designated copyright officer. Now, what's interesting is we've always said, well, yeah, but it's higher in higher education because 66% of institutions included public libraries who responded, national libraries, etc. And in higher education, according to the research we did in 2015, it's about 74%. So it's more reliable actually to use the earlier data because it was a much bigger sample than filled in the second survey. But we did find most of these people are based in the library, most, but kind of, I guess, you know, there is quite a percentage you are not. So 63%. But also interestingly, in addition, or sometimes instead of having a copyright specialist, 65% of institutions had additional staff who were involved in copyright matters. So it touched on other people's jobs. And we could see that there was quite a significant investment in copyright support. One of the things in the report was about what pay grade people were on and stuff like that. So if you're interested in that, the data is, as I say now, a couple of years old, but there's some interest in stuff in there. We also, we asked people about where their, what their favourite sources of copyright advice were. And obviously, this podcast or this podcast, this webinar didn't exist, did it? Neither did our podcast. So what came up really, really strongly was that people use List CopySeq, which I'm sure we would probably all say similar things still. People went to the legislation and they also went to the IPO website. So these were the kind of the top places. And people were actually using books quite a bit. So we put an example of a book that might be written about. A random and neutral example of a book. The other books are available. And I would say that all of the copyright books in the facet range are all excellent. And I would recommend looking all of them. They all have something slightly different to offer, of course. Yeah. Okay. So without further ado, I think we should hand over to our speakers because we have got three fabulous speakers who are going to join us. And they're going to go in the order that's on the slides. They're each going to talk for up to 10 minutes. And then we're going to hopefully have some time for questions at the end. So I think the first up is going to be Hannah Pyman, who's at the University of Essex. Hannah has done some amazing work on copyright. Anyone who's played the copyright dough game that she developed with Catsons is an amazing, fun game. And really it's been great, Hannah, actually having you as part of our community and seeing you develop from a new professional into somebody who's really getting their feet under the table now. So Hannah, I'm going to hand over to you.  And hopefully you're ready to go. Can you just do a sound check with Hannah? Yes, I'm ready. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. So just popping your slides up now. And you should be able to navigate through them. So take it away. Thank you. Thanks very much for the introduction, Jane. So yeah, I'm Hannah. I'm from the University of Essex. I want to first of all put a quick apology out because I have got some background noise going on that you may or may not hear as I go through. So apologies for that before I start. Second disclaimer, I realise now that I've termed my presentation becoming a copyright expert. And actually it was copyright specialists. I feel like I've already overrated myself before we begin. But anyway, I wanted to say first of all that I wouldn't necessarily describe myself as an expert at all. I still feel very relatively new to copyright. So what I'm really going to talk about is how I have learnt and how I'm still learning about copyright through my work. Okay. So first of all, I'm going to start by talking about how I got into copyright, which was through my work in interlending and document delivery, working on reading lists. So I started in the library at Essex as a graduate trainee straight after university. And after this, I got my first permanent role in interlending and document delivery. So copyright came into this with regard to copyright exceptions for interlending, making scans of theses, document delivery in general really overlaps quite a lot with copyright. As I learnt more about these kind of things, I began questioning some of the policies that we had in place around interlending. And it seemed that mostly when I asked why we did things the way we did, the answer I got was kind of that's just how we've always done it, which I'm sure many of you will be familiar with. So when I was met with that, I started to look into ways that we could reshape some of our policies. It started with just really basic things like we'd always been printing articles because we thought that copyright meant that we had to give them out in print rather than digitally, things like that. So just little things that helped me to start to learn more about copyright and how we could be using it in a better way for our students really. And my role then developed to also include coordinating the digitisation of core resources as we moved to using Telesis Fire reading lists. So suddenly in my role, I was making decisions on our use of the CLA and ERA licenses, and I was using Telesis Fire digitised content to make manage our digitisation service. So as you can imagine, I learnt quite a lot about copyright quite quickly through doing this, and especially was learning more about copyright exceptions and using these to allow as broad a use as possible of our core resources on reading lists, where the CLA license didn't cover them. So that was a way that I really learned a lot more about copyright a bit more broadly than I had before. Through my time in this role, I also began educating academics on all of these points as I was teaching them how they could add resources to their reading lists in kind of a copyright compliant way. And I needed to really establish what those academics needed to know in terms of copyright to create their reading lists legally, but also what they didn't need to know. So kind of getting that fine line between what we as copyright specialists need to know and what our kind of target audience for these things need to know as well. So that also helped me to kind of establish more what is essential knowledge about copyright within our kind of users and within ourselves as copyright specialists. So to enable myself to do all of these things, I needed to actively go about learning more about copyright. So I attended various conferences that were all really helpful for me. I gained a lot of knowledge and I met some really helpful people. At one conference, for example, someone told me about Liz Copyseek, which I hadn't previously been aware of, and I signed up to this. Since then, reading through conversations on Liz Copyseek has been really helpful for me. I've been able to see how others make decisions and the things that they consider when making those decisions. And that's been really invaluable for helping me think about how I make my own decisions. Even reading about things on Liz Copyseek that were somewhat irrelevant to my role helped kind of establish a mindset around risk management when it comes to copyright and the general ways of kind of going about making copyright decisions. Also, of course, I was able to use Liz Copyseek to ask some specific questions that we had and I've always got really helpful responses. So thank you because I'm sure lots of you are here today. So as my knowledge on copyright developed, others within the library began to ask me if I could share my knowledge a bit more broadly. So I've already touched on training academics with regards to reading lists, which continued and increased, but I also began training other colleagues within the library. Following this, our scholarly comms and research support manager asked me to deliver a copyright session alongside herself for early career researchers and postgraduate researchers. So my expertise at the time was copyright for teaching, which she and her role had less experience of. And it's a probably previously been a gap in our library team in terms of someone having that kind of knowledge as it hadn't been seen as needed before we moved into using TALIS for our reading lists. In doing this teaching session, I began to learn more about the publishing side of copyright as well as the education side. And it really interested me. So I volunteered to help run sessions using the publishing trap and copyright, the card game and the open access escape room. And this enabled me to learn about a different side of copyright. I was also learning about this kind of publishing side of copyright a bit in my masters that I was doing alongside working full time. And so I studied distance learning from the University of Sheffield, the library and information services management course. And there's an academic libraries module that I took, which did touch upon copyright. But I will say, admittedly, I did learn quite a lot more from my work than through my course, but it did help to kind of have some background knowledge. Okay, so as my knowledge developed and I finished my masters, I successfully applied for a new role within our library where I became information literacy coordinator. And this overlapped a lot with scholarly communications. So my work around copyright for publishing grew as my work around publishing for kind of education decreased. My colleague Katrina Sinsbow, who by this stage was my line manager, tasked me with developing a new game alongside herself based on an initial idea she'd had when attending ice pops. This game became copyright dough, which some of you may be aware of. And I very much learned about copyright as I went along with this. And it became a very useful tool for myself long before we used it to teach others as I was developing it. I learned a lot more about the things we were going to teach from the game. My role then became permanent as scholarly comms coordinator. And I then began delivering and designing sessions on publishing and open access, which included lots of overlap with copyright, as well as our copyright specific sessions, which we've continued to develop. I've also now in this role updated our lib guide pages on copyright, and I'm looking to completely redesign these as soon as I get time. Okay, so I've done a lot of work and learning on copyright at this stage, but I wanted to become more part of the community to broaden my knowledge further. So when Chris and Jane set up the Alt Corsic, it seemed ideal for me. I'd been watching the copyright in a time of crisis webinars, and I found them to be really helpful and interesting. Alt Corsic shows and allows me sorry to contribute to discussions around broadening knowledge of copyright within the sector, as well as broadening my own knowledge at the same time. It's also allowed me to contribute to webinars such as this, and also to speak at I can't believe it's not ice pops. This year I've also been on secondment as the scholarly comms and research support manager, and so I became a key contact within the university for copyright and publishing inquiries. This has really given me an opportunity to put my knowledge into practice and see more kind of real life examples of the kind of situations I'd previously only really taught about. I also still support the digitization team with some of their more complicated decision making, and so I try to keep up to date with that side of copyright as well, and Alt Corsic, Liz Copy Seek and these webinars helped to allow me to do this. So the key points I wanted to kind of end on is that if you're interested in copyright, volunteer for things, venture out of your comfort zone to learn new things, and don't be afraid to ask questions or admit you don't know the answers. Also read, read as much as you can, and keep up to date with things that are going on where you can, and learn from what you're reading and from the people that you're talking to, and also be confident in what you've learned. I think that's something that we sometimes all lack as copyright specialists, and be confident in their knowledge that you do have. I also just wanted to finish by saying that joining a community has been really beneficial to me, and I would definitely recommend it to others. It shows that lots of people have the same issues and questions as I have, and it's allowed me to discuss these with these people and learn from others as I go along. So finally, thank you all for listening to me today, and if you have any questions at all, please do let me know. Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah. That was amazing, really great, and I see that they're awesome. There's a question there in the chat. I think what we'll do is we will move on to the next speaker and we'll come back for some discussion later, but just to say we'll find the link, but Hannah's excellent presentation on Copyright Doe. I'm pretty sure we have that as a recording, and blog post that Hannah's written, which gives a sort of background to all of that. So certainly there's an opportunity to dig in to the work, this excellent work that's been going on in Essex, but thank you again, Hannah. Yeah, we'll come back to that. I think the question is about the strategies for gamification. So maybe I'll be thinking about that, Hannah, and we can discuss that at the end. So I think, yeah, your Copyright Doe session was really, really popular, and I'm sure people are interested in the process you went through to develop that. Okay. Yeah, I'll put some information in the chat as well. Okay, lovely. Lovely, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, that'll be great. That'll be great. But we'll come back to you in a moment, because without further ado, we have another fantastic speaker joining us this morning. Coming all the way from Malta, I believe. We have Kate Vassili, who some might say is the UK's longest-serving copyright officer. I wouldn't ever be so impolite, Kate, to say such a thing. But you certainly have been working in this space for some time, haven't you? You're trending a very thin line there. You're doing very well. Continue. I think it's 22 years now. Yeah, I have been around a long time. I'm sorry, Tyre. But I think it's good to have somebody also who's worked in the field for a long time as well, because I think the contrast of coming into a field being quite new is also, really, what makes you stay, Kate? What is it for you that makes you get up in the morning? You'll see, other than trep to Malta. Okay, I'm starting with an apology as well, because while Hannah was speaking, somebody started drilling on the wall next door, so bear with me. The morning for that is the morning for drilling. Okay, so becoming a copyright specialist, and I'm calling this my accidental journey, and you'll see why. So was it my childhood dream? Obviously not. I hadn't even heard of copyright, like most people in my generation, let alone copyright officer role, so that wasn't the reason. I really aspired to be a fashion designer, really, and I was really interested in fashion. And these were my first attempts. I used to dress my Cindy doll. This isn't my picture, but somebody obviously had the same talent as me. And then I used to badger my mum to make me close by drawing pictures and telling her what to do, and she used to hate me for it. In reality, I didn't know what I wanted to do, so I accidentally ended up doing a beard in education at Goldsmiths. Initially, I wanted to do art, because that's what I liked, but the art course was full, so I was told, and they persuaded me to join the beard course, saying I could move. That didn't happen, so three years later, I dropped out. I was working at WH Smiths as my Saturday role from school, and as a cash officer, because they thought I was a genius just because I got a B in O level. So when I left uni, they took me on full time until I decided what I wanted to do. A kindly neighbour took pity on me and got me an interview at the company he worked, which was Stuart Wrightsons International. They don't exist anymore. They were taken over a couple of times, and now I think they've just sort of disappeared into the ether, but that was a wow. Working in the city, I was just so amazed. But again, that was a credit-controlled assistant, so in finance again, so you can see accidentally I've gone into accounting from my first interest in art and fashion. After that, I left to work as a system of financial accountant for Xerox, Europe, Middle East and Africa office, and won a wedding and two babies later, and a move to Marlowe, which I couldn't do. My husband wouldn't move, even though Marlowe is an amazing place. I ended up doing various temping jobs, again in accounting. And the final straw was when I got a part-time permanent job with a PR agency, which was great in some respects. I got to meet Kylie Minogue and Gary Barlow and got free beta kits to Peter Andre and the Spice Girls, but the accountant was really reluctant to relinquish any power, so she had me stuffing envelopes, really, of invoices and the stylists' bills or pay slips and things. So I thought, I have to get out of here. And my aim was to find part-time, term-time-only job that I could do while looking after the kids. And wow, the perfect job came along in the local paper, wanted a copyright assistant. Part-time, term-time-only, box ticked. Education to A-level, box ticked. Accounting experience, box ticked. No prior copyright knowledge required, which was amazing. So I applied literally for the first criteria, because that was my goal. And this was the Bounds Green campus. I don't know if anybody would probably know, but oh, someone did. Katie Keneer used to work there. Yeah, we worked there. It was like a big industrial unit, but it soon closed down. And Wendy, wow. So my tasks were, at the beginning, to process the photocopy requests and payments through the CLA CLARX system. Many of you won't have even heard of this. It was back when every single photocopy request we had to do, it was paid for transactionally. Bit like sects now. So it was paid by extract per page, number of students. And that was why they needed an accounting person. The other reason they didn't want anyone with copyright knowledge I was told was because the law had just changed and also the licensing. So they needed someone to learn from scratch and not have any prior history to confuse it. So also I had to do direct permissions as well where they fell outside the license. And back then we used the CLA CLARX system, which was an online database to determine if something was licensed or excluded, et cetera, which was a bit of a nightmare because it was never right. And we had to phone them all the time to clarify. So it meant learning copyright and licensing from scratch. And my then manager wanted to offload copyright. She hated it. So she wanted to concentrate the staff development and she literally pushed me to go to every conceivable copyright training session out there. I studied the CDPA, the licenses closely. I joined this copy seek straight away. And that was absolutely the best tool for me. Because at the time it had all the oldies like Charles Oppenheim, Toby Bainton, Laura's Bebington, Sol Picciotto, and they always used to debate things. And it was hilarious. It was quite amusing at some times. I also read extensively. So any cases, articles, blogs, IPCAT blog was really good and Outlaw.com when I go to as well. And then later on I studied the other terms of the other licenses too because that sort of got shifted onto my role as well. Eventually my manager retired and I ended up doing all the copyright training for academic staff and other staff as well, but also for students. So postgraduate students and also the media study students who use a lot of copyright content as well. And that's continued throughout my career. So all change. First we had the InfoSop directive. Again a lot of you won't have heard of this. It's when the government or EU parliament wanted to harmonise all the European copyright laws across all the states. This failed miserably because they just let every state choose which exceptions they wanted to add to their law. So we ended up with a sort of mishmash again. So it didn't do anything. What it did do is introduce the non-commercial aspect in the exceptions. Later we had the UK CLA and DAX copyright tribunal case. And this is what instigated the removal of the Clark system. So basically we were paying twice. We were paying massive licensing fees and then paying again for the transactional copying. So that was abolished. Thank God. And that was when the University of UK copyright and Guild HE copyright working group was formed basically to help with that case. And now you know it as CNEC. We are now the Copyright Negotiating and Advisory Committee. So during that time about 2004 I decided to start legal training. The reason for this was mainly all the comments I was getting and the questions I was being asked is what is your legal background? And what is your background and do you have any legal training? So of course I felt like a bit sort of a bit coerced. So I did the law degree but I wouldn't say it's necessary although some people feel comfortable having the law background. Then the license changed again. It became the photocopying and scanning license. So we had to learn all the new aspects of that and all the different requirements and restrictions that came with that as well. And then it's been changing ever since as you can see from this slide every time we negotiate new licenses changes as well. And then we came to COVID-19 and Brexit which as you know from these webinars caused a headache for everybody. My personal journey as you can see I've been sent to present various countries across the world or to to help promote products like TADC and DCS. So I would say my journey hasn't been boring at all. As you know I'm now immortal although that's nothing to do with copyright. It's still an opportunity that I would not have envisaged when I started out my career. The requirements are the same continue to maintain awareness and changes of copyright legislation and licensing and then to provide expert advice to staff and students. Although I do manage the digitisation team I also provide advice to scholarly comms to publishing to all sorts of research students and staff as well. So I'm basically an all-rounder for all things copyright and I'm learning all the time. And that's all I can say. That's my journey to copyright. It wasn't intended at all. Kate that's amazing. I don't know if you've been following all the chat that's been going on during your time as well. I think we're now at the point of you've got to write your memoirs and it's going to be turned into a film on just discussing who's going to play you. Yeah Rachel Vice I think absolutely. Yeah yeah I think we might. I do like Rachel but they're all pretty amazing. Oh I'm really flattered. Okay thank you so much. It's such a trip down memory lane for many people as well. Yeah a lot of people have heard the story before. It's a fascinating journey yeah absolutely absolutely. I want to get our last speaker on and I hope we are then going to have a little bit of time for a few questions and discussion. So I'm going to move this on Kate but really thank you so much and really appreciate you doing this because I know also you're heading back from Malta just straight after this webinar aren't you. So if you have to disappear before the end to catch a plane we will know why. You are the Jet Set Copyright Officer. So thank you very very much and it's now my very great pleasure to introduce our third and final speaker today who is Simon Cox from University West of England. He's entitled this journey of the anti-expert so Simon we're looking forward to hearing what you've got to tell us. I might have oversold that slightly but we'll see we'll see. Oh god I can see the spelling mistake I'm the Koi right specialist yeah yeah so I'm really sorry first of all I'm really sorry for my spelling which you can't see on my notes but that is going to bug me all the way through but there we are so I'm more sorry that you get two pictures of me looming out at you from from your workplaces or your kitchens or wherever. It's just a show though when I was allowed the bloke on the left 25 years ago I was 25 then I'd just moved house to my first house just moved in with Katie my partner I'd scored 151 runs and I'd had that that sub-editors dream of a headline in the evening post in Bristol yes odd enough being having red hot cocks out there is is not necessarily always good for you for the sole sadly not anyway so there I am I'm just about to work at UWE so three months later and and in and that began a journey well I heard myself then crikey okay so when I came to this 10 minutes I thought I can give this a go and my subconscious has been worrying away ever since up until about yes the afternoon to think about my journey and what it is to be an expert and it's good practice because I'm I'm about to mortify my daughter by appearing on a careers panel at her school and given that I always embarrassed her it's going to be a new way that I can offer excruciating pain to her sadly you don't get any pictures of before 1998 I had much longer hair and there are some there are some good pictures of me out there from Reading in 91 and Glaston in 92 but we'll leave that we'll leave that okay so let's do my own slides but not the ones here so my journey so yeah the most boring part of my journey is actually the last part of getting this job but I'll give you a potted career history in that so about two years ago two and a half years ago I found myself in a bit of a predicament I'd been managing the immigration service at UWE and I'd been here for a long time by that point and my teams were being restructured I had managed two teams as part of that service and part of that restructuring meant that they didn't need a me anymore which is on one level I was really happy because all of my teams were being moved on effectively but as you can imagine by that point a mid mid-40s year man with two kids a cat no dog at that point that's a certain amount of pressure so I was more than relieved to find myself in a redeployment position and being told well there's a copyright and project officer role out there and that might be up your street and to go through the process and to get the job I come to this I came to this knowing nothing I'd worked at UWE for God knows how many years before that 20 plus 25 years by that point and I'd worked no more than a hundred yards from the library throughout that period and I probably I'd taken out one book in that entire period where my partner was teach on a teaching program at another university and needed to borrow a book so my knowledge of the library and other areas was limited so that's not the sound I'm grateful for any of my chances to get this role on I'm exceptionally grateful but it's I come at this from a really a limited experience position but that said I think the part I find interesting is actually the whole process showed me that you do have skills and they are transferable and this is the kind of my reflections on what it is to be whatever this expert role is so let's get let's get Billy up okay so Billy so Billy there I do like Billy Billy Bragg but I think this is from quite early on so we're not talking recent Billy that's probably talking to the tax man about poetry Billy I guess but yeah so I kind of always say that I've got a few very limited qualities that are probably undervalued and ultimately I've kind of bring it down to oh dear that's age I fear so my my soul skill I've always thought is I can read relatively complicated stuff understand it relatively quickly and turn it into relatively easily explained stuff I can I always felt that's not that's not a massive skill but it's one of those things where I think oh crikey I've underplayed that and actually it's quite a good one to have I'm realistic enough to know that I'm not like a big I'm a thinker but I'm not like an academic thinker like Emily I again have lots of admiration for the work Emily's done only Hudson's done with the whole approach to exemptions and that kind of thing but I'm kind of conscious that I don't come from that angle my background is very much from that Billy Bragg perspective of being a bit of a sticking it to the man kind of a thing to a certain extent so I my background going back is one of working in student funding so helping students get the right level of funding the right level of welfare benefits challenging decisions made by housing benefit teams and student loan company decisions and going way back by the local authorities when they manage this stuff and I kind of always did that from a bit of a yeah looking at regulations trying to spot the gap in the guidance to see what was said and what wasn't said and going back and saying I don't think you're right I think you've not it doesn't say this you should do this this or this and give or take I've kind of everything spun from that kind of I say passion and I kind of overplay that but there's a bit of a passion thing to that and it led on so I ended up doing immigration advice again supporting students with that kind of thing and moving on I kind of grew an experience I managed teams I grew teams grew as legislation came in around immigration I took on institutional stuff but it was all based on that kind of absolutely all based on that kind of thing of really looking for the gaps the other thing that I do and this is not a plea for questions just yet is I'm quite curious and I kind of I was thinking about this and actually I do two things one I kind of always have this rather negative assumption that I'm probably the least knowledgeable person in any room I always think I don't know the answer while always prepared to go look and the second is being quite curious now I've done jobs including this one where being curious is a benefit because if I'm not being curious about work stuff I end up fixating on whether Starbucks and Costa actually owe me money because I've had black coffee for the past 15 years and never had any milk and I kind of think if that's five people a cup surely the only about 1500 quid by now equally I ponder whether if you've seen the film independence day which is an aging reference I accept when will Smith fiance gets into the gets into that storage ducts and as the tunnels exploding with that which you really have survived it's kind of the pointless stupid stuff that I've kind of I do in the rest of my life but that's getting a bit niche more usefully I think when I've gone to training events I've done that been to namey corns events and with this role I've always been happy to ask a question and whether I've kind of I like asking questions I like I don't like that void and I'm quite conscious when I give in presentations that that gap where you say any questions is is like really panicky because you're really thinking crikey does anybody care do they have any questions and I can already see my daughter's peers looking at my rather aged gray face thinking these talks are a load of all rubbish there what has he got to tell us but so I've always asked a question sometimes from sympathy sometimes because I am generally curious but I've always found a way to ask a question in this role it's quite easy to believe I'm the least experienced person in the room because I'm so new I still think I'm so new so I think it's I've always been I kind of I'm good at thinking I'm the least experienced person and for me it's a way of keeping myself in check even though I've been doing those other roles for years and years and years I always wanted to challenge myself to say is what you think true true and you need to find out again and reacquaint yourself with that I should stress at this point there is a difference between challenging yourself and feeling a bit rubbish generally I've done feeling a bit rubbish generally and it took me a long time to convince myself that actually what I would think of as doing down is actually a fairly rigorous approach right and then he keeps on going to the wrong so this is now the end I wonder what I wrote for the end uh yeah I have rambled and ambled quite enough uh I generally I'm never sure what level of insight I can give to anybody about being an expert for me it's it's only ever been a journey through a slightly personal journey based around a bit of neurosis a bit of passion about being curious now if that means that I've turned into an expert then that's great it's just I again I don't consider myself to be that I consider myself still to be the person always learning and always trying to find a bit of a loophole somewhere and there you are Simon that's brilliant thank you so much for that I think we've been we've been commenting on the chat as you've been talking I think certainly what you're saying resonates with me what why is copyright interesting it's I mean clearly it is interesting but what interests is interests me is what the values are that come out of it what is it about you and your place within the community that you're working with and how can you help people do stuff and how can you in fact find those things within the law within what looked like fairly scaly scary formal frameworks that appear to be rigid sets of rules and in fact aren't they're things that that clearly do have you know legal force but nonetheless you're working your way through that and it's you've got to be able to to sort of work on that basis so that's great shall we so we've we've stopped sharing the slides and I think we have a few minutes I think yeah if anyone would like to ask questions I don't know if our three speakers would be able to pop their cameras back on and be willing to answer anything so we're going to ask what questions do you have not does anyone have any questions I mean I know we've had a lot of we've had a lot of chat here but I do have a question actually if I if I may jump in and ask all of our panellists in it it's it's really about where you sit as a copyright specialist within the the organization and so I find myself you talk to people who are extremely learned educated qualified but they don't necessarily know they as much about copyright as you do so how does that fit in an academic environment then and you're talking to students but you're talking to two academic colleagues or others who who you know need your support but there's that feeling isn't there between well are you an expert or not which has been through all of those presentations I wonder whether can we start can I start with Hannah actually Hannah if you've got any thoughts on that because you were the one that throws that thing about expert in inverted commas yeah um oh sorry I think where we struggle is that we are kind of seen as the expert when it comes to teaching and delivering training sessions to PGRs and early career researchers and academics would probably come to us but I think where we sort of struggle is that actually there's a lot of professional services staff that would really benefit from knowing more about copyright but they probably don't see it in the same way and that there's kind of pockets of knowledge about copyright or intellectual property or different aspects of these kind of things that overlap within different sections of professional services and it's actually bringing those people together that we found to be really difficult so I mentioned that I want to redo our copyright pages on our LibGuide actually on the university website we've got information about copyright on our library pages there's stuff about intellectual property say on some of the other pages IT I've got some stuff about copyright kind of on their pages and it's all this kind of disjointed stuff when it comes more to the professional services that's something I really want to spend time on to bring bring all together so I think there's probably several people within the institution that would describe themselves as a copyright specialist but getting those people together to pull our knowledge is probably what's missing um I don't know if that answers your question as well yeah that that that makes sense and that's certainly what we've been trying to do more of here at Kent um but and Kate so you know you've been you've been in that position over the years and I think presumably people know at your institution you're the go-to person when it comes to copyright um so how do you feel that that has developed over the years do you feel that people uh kind of when you first were in the role would question what you were saying and now it's easier to do that and and also because you have actually a legal qualification what's your thoughts on on that it's sort of a swings and roundabout situation so early on obviously people didn't know existed and quite quite a few years on they still didn't know existed um despite me sending out regular emails about the copyright license and audits that we were undergoing etc etc which of course the amazing panic but to be fair I think it was those cna audits that sort of pushed the wider community to to be more connected so my copyright web pages aren't within the library they're actually sitting on the intro staff intranet under the same ones as the ip team etc and I work closely with the ip team so any ip questions I get I can normally give an answer very basic answer but I would refer them on to the specialists especially when it's regarding publishing contracts etc and funding agreements also with the scholarly comms team I work very closely with them as well so we've sort of got a lot closer I had a problem with the learning online learning team because they tended to just grab copies of my pages and upload them onto their site but I soon stopped them doing that when I pointed out that their pages the information was way out of date because they were copying so now I've sort of trained them to link to the copyright pages instead of copying them which was a big challenge at the time but it's working now and I think it's worked well over the COVID period because I was giving them information that's up to date without you know having that but yeah they sort of trust me more now now they know I also have a law degree it's easy okay yeah thanks Kate and Simon you know you're also talking about your approach and your recent in this area and through the where you know you've been doing a lot of having as we all have having to do a lot of representing and discussing about copyright risk how's that change then in relation to what people expect from you and the kind of awareness there is I think again we don't we're not mandatory in terms of training here I think the interesting part for me is I've always it's I think trying to find somebody who's got a proper vested interest in what you're doing so I with my various professional services roles I know people I know people but I know people in various other way so I know people in finance and that kind of thing so I think it's it's trying to find another route to go through to get to your right audience so I know the head of finance at UE and I know that that's probably a better angle to present risk to and get of movement within faculties and departments because there's a pounds and pence type of angle coming from my immigration background where we they're like the institutional audits from the UK VI everyone has a collie wobble about because there's this kind of precipice view of we won't be able to recruit international students and there's nothing that focuses the mind more than a risk of losing money in my experience and if you can get that buy-in from somebody who's going to be who has a a pounds and pence view on it which is dreadfully dull and a bit accounting based but it's trying to find the right route into things I kind of if I'm not getting the response from a local level program level I'm going to try and find a way where we can make it more relevant thanks Simon that's great I noticed that it is now 12 o'clock so I think we're going to need to wrap up the discussion but what I thought we do is if you're okay to stay here maybe five more minutes I see that might need to go but yeah but we do have that we've got some interesting questions coming up about mandatory training and I think in most places it's fair to say it probably isn't mandatory although Jill was just saying it was hers but have you just seen the question from Billy about what would you say the basics of being a copyright specialist I think that's I thought that would be a really good sort of final question to ask the panel ready to see if you could boil it down what is the sort of basic principle of how you go about doing it clearly there's more than one okay go first as well yes let's go okay go on that plane you're muted sorry I thought I clicked it we have an in-house lawyer as well but she refers everything to me because it's not her specialism but I would say the basics are you start with her CDPA 1988 also all these amazing books by facet publishing and certain authors that we very know but really well but also the licensing terms are the key if you're working in academia in higher education so that they're your basics to be a higher education copyright specialist and everything else you just learn along the way the job list copy seeker archives are great too thanks Kate thank you yeah and do head off if you need to we're really grateful for you to join us yeah yeah okay thank you bye everyone bye shall we go to Hannah next yes let's hi yeah um so assembly taught Kate said I think kind of the known about copyright licenses and exceptions and things like that are obviously crucial and from my perspective in scholarly comms knowing about publishing different copyright licenses and kind of third party copyright when it comes to publishing and I think really a fundamental thing of being a copyright specialist and something that I always tried to go back to is thinking about that kind of risk management approach and thinking about appetite for risk and those kind of things and I think always just put in yourself in the shoes of the copyright creator and thinking how you would feel about it if it was your work that you'd created and the way that it's being reused and thinking about any potential harms I think those kind of fundamental principles are something that when we sometimes get tied in knots about the legislation or perhaps the more complicated things you can just take a step back and remember those principles and that's what I find to be the most kind of helpful thing to remember yeah that's really important Hannah it's that we always talk about risk about it's not clear cut right and wrong in many of these situations and just framing it in that way I think is important thing so Simon can we go to you yeah I was gonna the risk thing is kind of intrigues me because I think I can never tell whether I placed the discussion on risk at the beginning of any thoughts about what's happening or at the end because you can spend a lot of time going through exemptions and and exceptions and the whole set of regulations but if you end up with this what's the risk and I can never tell whether that's a trump card or one to keep in the background and the other thing I've just it's it's it's reading and it is to a certain extent being interested in it I kind of I did get obsessed around at the beginning of the pandemic the difference between providing the whole online film program thing the difference between in hotel streaming of music and films to televisions as opposed to the web and all sorts of it I got quite hung up on because it just struck me as the legislation was harking back to a different age to when we found ourselves in but that's thanks for that Simon yeah that and that is quite that's one of the consistent challenges in copyright is that the laws are really conceived at the time when the technology was different and it always struggles to keep up and actually is a lot of hard work and without contradictory information about exactly how you should view something from a legal context and so I think just just to to wrap up on because I think also Billy's question was related from position of being a lawyer and I think there is from what Jane and I've always said is that being a copyright specialist is not the same thing as being a lawyer we can't we cannot provide legal advice and in some ways it's about having that context specific information and trying to put that information to be accurate about the law to use and draw on sources of authority but to add something else to it that is very much about what is the organization what are the people within it trying to do and how can you facilitate and make that happen so I think that's come through really strongly in all three presentations and we're all very different yeah yeah yeah yeah and I think people are enjoying hearing um I'm I'm actually starting to think Chris we could have a book collecting people's journeys or something and let's add it to the list of projects there's there's not enough we're not doing enough no no no we're not like you know I always like find us things to keep us busy in the dark wind today so yeah so yeah but thank you thank you Hannah thank you Kate thank you Simon and yeah future webinars go go for it the next scheduled one we were we've we've been in touch with the intellectual property office who were scheduled to do one early December they're not going to be ready to do that but in the future we will be hearing from the intellectual property office on their IP education framework which is going to be really interesting to see that um so that'll be in due course so the next one we've decided to skip that not slot another one in so we've got our Christmas special coming up on 17th of December so if we will be in touch with people about what we might need you to prepare for that yeah um we're kind of building this as confessions of a learning technologist that's sure that's a working title what we want to hear from is from the learning technology community about their experiences of copyright we know many of those who join in are from within library teams that have as we've seen the scholarly communications and the reading list focus but but what it looked like for those who are actually advising on the nuts and bolts of how you use learning technology and how we already have one volunteer I think signed up so we're just tracking down a couple more learning technologies so if you know anyone who arm you can twist tell them what fun they'll have if they join us and then February is going to be a really exciting month we um we have a week um that's uh is celebrated usually in the US and Canada it's called fair fair dealing fair use week and uh we will also send you some further information about our thoughts for that but we are really hoping to uh yes it's 2022 you are right 2022 yes correct we're we're hoping um to uh see if we can encourage lots of libraries to put on events during that week similar to uh the sorts of things that you do for open access week but more about that we're going to post on list obviously and and do a blog post and of course the technology session is also next year not earlier this year it is yes that's true we we are a year behind ourselves we are um so there's the formal end as always we like to end on something a bit silly and then so what is this this is a meeting okay so I invite you to meeting so this is just to say that it has tentatively accepted the tentative meeting at 10 to 10 uh in 10 to 10 um I don't think there's much more we need to say about that I don't think there is either I think I think okay that just shows how our minds work sometimes yeah kinds of pointless we're always very efficient and effective yeah okay so uh on that note thank you very much for your time thanks again to all of our amazing speakers um and no doubt we will be returning to this topic in some other form it's really important um thing to see how we personally and organizationally respond to to this area of work yeah thanks everyone bye