Erroll Hannes, dear guests, my name is Nils Lohne, I am Chief Editor at the Danish Business Daily Börsen and I am honoured to be here today. I will be your moderator for the first session with Peter Tupor from Anna Foods and I am here for the second time and I am really impressed by this event, fantastic event organised by the students. I will introduce Peter. Peter Tupor is CEO at Anna Foods. He is also a chairman now at Pandora and Peter had a master in business administration from Odense University. He took the position as CEO of Anna Foods in 2005 and during his time as CEO Anna Foods has shown an impressive growth. How did he do it? How does Peter Tupor work as a CEO and what is the new strategy of Anna Foods towards 2017? We are very happy Peter that you are here today. Please give Peter a warm welcome. Thank you very much. Does this work? It works. Great. I will take it back again, okay? So that I have my notes here. I always have a few notes. It's great to be with you. It's an honour. I have to say, butterflies in my stomach because I would like to persuade you, the brightest of you, to come and work for Anna Foods. Later when you are finished here, only the brightest. And I have great hopes actually. I understand we have 700 people in here today. 1500 apply. Sorry for the 800. So I know that you are bright, maybe. But one thing I do know is, as I understand that you are very quick on your fingers because all the tickets were sold in 90 seconds. And that is a starter, I can tell you that. It is probably connected with a bit of brightness. I am going to talk to you about not just Ale Foods in general, but I have been asked to talk about branding and strategic branding. And that is interesting actually at the moment in Ale Foods. Because we are completely changing the view on how we would like to brand our products, the company going forward into the future.  We don't know whether we will succeed. We don't know whether we will fail. But we are taking a big risk as we are changing everything we do in terms of branding. That will impact the way we think innovation. It will impact our supply chain, our production set up, the technologies we will need in the future. And it will impact also the people that we will need, the talent that we need to get our hands around in the future. Of course it will. Because the brands drive a lot of thinking in Ale Foods and is actually more than 50% of our entire business. And has a big impact on everything else we do. So that is what I am going to talk to you about. But before I do that I need to have just a small glimpse at Ale Foods, give you a small understanding of where we come from. And how we in a more broadly sense discuss and work with strategy in Ale Foods. That might be interesting for you. And it is also necessary for you to understand that in order to understand why we are changing our brand strategy going forward. All of that is of course affected by a change in our view in our industry, in the dairy industry, but also in other foods. A change in our belief in how we think the world is going to develop going forward. And we are letting that belief heavily impacting a major change process within other foods these years. It started just two years ago and we are in the middle of it as I said. So it is pretty interesting. Please do question, please do challenge because we are still learning about our strategy going forward. So a little bit about Ale Foods. One, we are owned by farmers. We are not on the stock exchange. Would have been nice occasionally because then we can get some money a little faster. But we are owned by 13,500 farmers. And they are placed in seven different countries. In Denmark, in UK, in Benelux, in Germany.  But basically our farmers that is the core of the business and they are our owners. So they are not only supplying the valuable raw milk, they are also owning the milk. And in paragraph one in my contract it says that I have to up the biggest cost we have in Ale Foods the value of raw milk. No other CEO in Denmark has that in his paragraph one. I can tell you that. Up the costs. But that's what it is because the farmers want a nice payment for their milk. And then we have to figure out how to do that. And that is when Ale becomes a company just like any other company. Doing our strategies, working with people, working in markets, working with customers. Here, Ale doesn't differ from any other company that I know. But it really starts with us being a cooperative owned by farmers. And that's pretty unique. And as you see, we are actually capable of serving quite a few people in this world. This is our milk pool. 13 billion liters of milk. That's much more than we consume in Denmark. That's a little less than one billion liters of milk in total. So it's a lot of milk that's coming from our farmers here in Northern Europe. And we are capable of serving everybody. And we could do that easily by making milk powder and then just selling bulk products, not caring really about packaging and design and advertising and innovation. And then we would not be serving our farmers very well because without innovation, we can't add value. And then I cannot live up to my paragraph one really to give them a high milk price. So we need to figure out what to do with all that milk that comes in. And it comes in every day, 365 days a week because cows, they just keep on producing milk. So there's also a heavy pulse in other foods. We can't miss a month here or say let's pause a little bit and rethink this. The milk is just coming in all the time. And we need to process this every day and put it into something that's valuable. And that's where our branding strategy comes in, as you will see in a second. This milk pool has also pushed other foods. Now we have had a strategy which you've said has been pretty aggressive over the last years. That has in itself increased the milk pool. But the farmers themselves are also wanting to produce more. And you'll see more of that later in my presentation. That pushes other foods to become in the beginning international. We're selling in 100 countries. We have subsidiaries, sales offices, production even in 35 countries around the world. So it has pushed also this enormous milk pool, other foods to become international. And now we're entering into what we think are more global other foods going forward. We're not quite there yet, but that's the aspiration we have in the current strategy. But it's all about adding values to all that milk. It's really quite a bit of milk here, I can tell you that. Aala has grown over the last six years, as you said. In 2008, that was in the middle of the financial crisis where in the world stopped, we actually produced and laid forward a very aggressive strategy.  We called it 2015. So there was a lot of years to work with this. And what actually happened was that we started at this growth journey and we've succeeded with it. We even succeeded with it two years before planned. The strategy was called 2015. No sexy strategy phrasing here. We are talking about farmers. They want to know where we are in the strategy and when it is finished and when it is time to discuss a new strategy. So we had a strategy 2015 formulated in eight. And in 13, we actually succeeded. We finished the strategy. We reached our target 80 billion this year. 75 almost last year. That was actually our targets. And what did we actually do during this period? We worked and why did we want all that growth? One, we have a clear belief that we must always be able to follow our retail customers. And in 2008, even before, but definitely now, our retail customers are growing. They're growing across borders. Look at NetoDance Supermarket is growing in many countries. We need to follow them. Look at Tesco. Look at Walmart. Look at Aldi. Look at Little and I could mention them all. They're all growing their businesses and they're growing them across borders. We as a major dairy supplier need to be able to follow them across borders in a meaningful way. That meant we needed more milk. That meant we needed more dairies. It meant that we needed more people and marketing efforts to actually follow the customers. Mainly in Europe because this picture is a European picture. We've always been on the markets outside of Europe. But this is actually mainly other foods growing inside Europe. As you see it, that's the bulk of that turnover through mergers and acquisitions as you see here. So that's one of the reasons why we thought in 2008 we needed to grow. But also because we know it becomes more and more difficult and more and more expensive to get your hands around and invest in the right technology. It's pretty advanced technology that we have in the dairy industry or in the food industry, I would say, as such. Let me give you an example. In the year 2000 the dairy in Denmark insulated servicing Copenhagen, 250 million liters a year, the dairy facility. Actually one of the big dairies in Europe. Great. Last year we opened a dairy outside London. More than one billion liters of milk, carbon neutral, completely different technology. Cost us two billion Danish kroner. Just it requires some size in order to be able to be efficient, carbon neutral, having an offering to the customers and the consumers that they want and that keeps on changing. So size matters. We needed also the financial strength to follow this development. And that has created a very strong European platform for all of us now. But now things are changing. And that's why I will tell you a little bit about how we are looking forward. And let me do so by, sorry again, looking backward. In 2013 we finished and completed our 2015 plan. And how did we work with that? I had personally 25 Muslimin battles to do this in this market, to do this with this product area, category, etc. And that was drilled down as I guess many companies do into hundreds if not thousands of different projects that all supported my 25 or the executive management 25 Muslimin battles. Things we had to do in order to succeed. Size but size in a meaningful way. Something that produced value. Market positions, customer positions, etc. Finished in 2013. And now we are with yet another strategy with a non-sexy word as I said embarking on the 2017 strategy still some years to run on this and we are on track I guess. I hope. And that is much more of a global a la food approach. What we need to do is to produce some thinking. And we are already quite a bit of down that line. Of how to get more of the milk that our farmers produce in northern Europe, the 13 billion liters of milk. To get more of that out to emerging markets, the growing markets who actually are capable more than anybody should think of paying a better price than what you shame on you pay when you go into netto and furtakes and superboats in Denmark. They are actually paying more for the milk and the cheese and the butter in the emerging markets when we sell it as branded products. And that's of course a big driver for us to understand how can we how can our strategy be developed so honor food truly becomes a global dairy. I guess we are if we measure ourselves up against competitors of the same sort but but we our definition of globalization stretches further and there is some journey here ahead of us probably beyond 2017. This is our strategy the way we work as I said 25 Muslim battles and this is much more this time about creating innovation and value on our market positions in Europe which previously was much more an aggressive strategy and now we put our focus our growth focus I would almost say the entire growth focus outside of Europe on the emerging markets and that exciting world that should deliver the growth for us going forward. It's not going to be 12 billion liters of milk that we will put out there but we have to put a lot of milk out there and we don't have all the answers today as to how to do that but we know that we need to find these answers we know that we need to develop new products and new market positions outside of Europe outside of US where we are also strong in order to be part of this very exciting future and that will as I said change our brand strategy it is changing our brand strategy it will change and is changing our innovation strategy and it will also change the technology that we will buy and acquire going forward. There are two reasons why we are so obsessed with growth and growth outside of Europe one is that our farmers due to legislation in Europe are set free they are allowed to produce whatever milk they have been quota sized so far they will next year April first of April be allowed to produce whatever they want if they can worry they are coming I can tell you they're already preparing now we're seeing five six growth in our milk pool now we'll see that next year and that's going to continue for at least for the next five six years and that's based on 13 billion liters of milk so when we meet hopefully three four years from now they would have grown their milk pool our milk pool with 20 percent what to do with 33 billion liters of milk that's three times the times the Danish market we have to find three Danish markets somewhere in this world now they're not right there available so we need to break it up into markets and categories and what do I know that's our challenge so we will still be growing but we'll be growing predominantly outside of Europe and we need to find the right brand positions in order to create and market positions in order to create value on all of that milk coming in so that's an inside out force that drives our thinking and some of you would say wrong listen you have to listen to the market it must be the market that drives you I'm sorry we are cooperative that's how it is our owners want to produce more milk so there's an inside out driver in olive woods and there has always been there and then we need to translate that into how this becomes a market driven issue and luckily enough there is plenty of reasons why to grow outside of Europe and that is our market driven logic this as you can see I guess some of you have studied that already this is share of world GDP emerging markets up against the advanced economies or or developed countries they're bigger than us already there's a lot of people so they are probably on an individual level poorer than us but there is a fast changing and it's happening now change of this world just on a on a very high level financial as a high level financial analysis and I'll now break that into what that impacts and can we see an impact on the dairy market and there is there is now in many many decades or several decades actually a 100% correlation between the consumption of dairy fruits of dairy products and other food stuff as well but dairy and the growth in GDP in any given market we so we know there there's no there's no big issue around China you know they're growing their GDP and guess what they are at the same slope growing seven eight percent the dairy consumption and they've been doing that for many years that's why of course we are very interested to keep up the momentum and hope that China will keep up the momentum because that alone will produce a heavy demand of dairy products but this will shape and is shaping the way we think going forward there will be over the next couple of decades this world will need to feed not six billion but nine billion inhabitants the middle income will grow from 2.5 to five billion and that middle income are prime targets or consumers of dairy products as I just mentioned to you so we know there's a lot of demand out there the horrible or not the horrible but the challenging thing is actually that this world doesn't know how to feed nine billion people today I'm sure that we will as the world develops and as we as a company develop and the dairy sector develops we will find ways in order to make you know to feed the world somehow but if you ask people today how can we feed in a meaningful way in a sustainable way also nine billion inhabitants of this world nobody has the answer that is challenging but it's also a great opportunity to a company like us to participate in how can we help feed the world and at the same time create value to our farmer owners on raw milk and that's why this is a really a core of our strategy going forward how to be far part of feeding the world knowing that we don't have the answers now we don't even have enough cows in this world combined not only in other foods to feed that dairy consumption going forward how do you do that well you breed some more cows yes but if you do it at the pace that the cow today normally would like it to be you will not hit the target they'll you will not have enough milk out there so how do we do this that requires a lot of thinking and doing look at this one urbanization driving wealth I'm in China four five times a year and I'm amazed every time how you know Beijing I just came back last Monday you know when you fly over Beijing there's a pops up oh this was not there last time and it just keeps on developing this urbanization process but it also drives wealth and in terms of dairy you know suddenly you the whole logistical situation around dairy refrigerators in people's home becomes something that is possible and this will this picture will change fundamentally I think and I hope for you that you have understood the way we think markets and consumers and customers going forward because it's a completely different world everybody at the moment in the dairy industry not only other foods are deploying resources into China into Southeast Asia into Middle East we've been there for many years even into Africa now you can't travel through Nigeria airport without saying hello to at least one or two competitors from the dairy industry so we are all deploying a lot of thinking and a lot of resources manpower into this exciting very new world we just opened with the help of the royal family six months ago an innovation center in Beijing and we are opening next year a center a sales and commercial center in Kuala Lumpur so we are constantly deploying more and more resources into this area look at this one because everybody up talking China but China and India and United States and Europe can be inside the geography of Africa and Africa will write about the time when your careers peak I guess be have a population which is bigger and there will be quite a few middle or many middle income people at that time so when your career peaks Africa will be bigger than China and Asia and and China and India are you studying that somehow now we are I'll tell you a little bit about that and preparing ourselves for this future I think that 10 years from now we will talk about Africa with the same respect and it will be talking town like like China has become today in Alephuz we are right now working on this although it's a bit premature and the market is not that big it's growing rapidly I can tell you that we are setting up a new dairy facility as we speak it has to open next next spring in Nigeria of all places we just found a CEO and a sales director and we need a marketing director so it's open for it's difficult at the moment in that part of Africa I can tell you that we opened last year in Ivory Coast a small dairy facility that's also pretty difficult we are bidding now for a company to buy a company in Egypt together with all our competitors so it's going to be a nice price I can tell you that and we are planning at the end of 2000 and open to open of all places in the world a small dairy facility in Djibouti here we need some very young and adventurous people but that is us setting some platform going forward why because the emerging markets will account for 90 of all growth opportunities in this world that is why we are working with Asia Southeast Asia Middle East Africa etc South America as well because that's where the growth comes from and isn't that nice but the real scary thing is that this rapid growth is happening so fast at the moment in our industry that in during the next five years I know that yet again within our industry will be created winners and losers and we refuse to be losers but we don't know it can happen because this is you know unknown territory to the dairy industry which basically is a US New Zealand European good old 100 year old way of thinking products and yogurts and things like that try and sell ribo hues in China with the chopsticks it doesn't work I've tried it so it's new products that are needed will we find these products we don't know but we have to give it a serious try and it's going to be difficult because all of these emerging markets they have different habits now in Africa they this and they they know cheese by the way because of the old colony France and European colony colony time they know how to eat cheese in China they don't know cheese they really don't know cheese but there will be cheese in China it's just a matter about who finds out who finds out what kind of cheese and not only different product and and consumption habits but the values behind that the way they view products is driven by different values as a consumer you have to find out what are these values and how do you approach them from a branding point of view which leaves me to this issue that you have asked me to talk about and this is going to be as long as what you've just heard but not longer we are at the moment changing a lot of things as I said in ala foods we are coming from maybe a hundred different brands and sub brands when we have a quiet company you inherit a lot of brands nice brand brands in that company in that country or in that region but has nothing to do with the neighboring country that we are also doing business in and that has become quite an expensive maneuver actually to run all of these brands we spend more than two billion danish kroner a year in marketing just advertising throughout the world and we need to leverage and get some scale around our marketing and our product portfolio carefully of course because not every as I just showed you not everybody wants the same products but we have taken a decision that we will and we are in that process work with three brands going forward lure pack fantastic product hundred countries castello fantastic product 80 countries ala 30 billion franchise we have a turnover 30 billion in the ala brand all over the world I would guess but with the ala brand as a mother brand the real brand with a lot of value actually advertising and marketing ala as a brand and some of you say can you do that with it's the company yes we can that's the ambition but it's also the risky part of our journey and where do we start our thinking well the thinking started two years ago and we spend a year developing our thinking and now we're rolling it out throughout 2014 and probably the next three four five years it starts with our mission and vision it starts with the thinking that we are owned by farmers we are there for the farmers that's our mission and we want to be part of that part of the dairy industry that also creates the future market-wise and consumption-wise but we are actually using very much our cooperative heritage and fuel our brands with a cooperative heritage and some would say oh that must be dull listening ala it's by ala because it's owned by farmers it's more sophisticated than that I can tell you and in Denmark it doesn't work it works fantastic in China they get belief and trust Danish company owned by farmers they master the value chain from cow to consumer all security aspects throughout that value value chain we trust that brand fantastic tick Middle East exactly the same Africa exactly the same it's only here in Denmark we are a bit odd against ala foods but we're working on that as you know it even works in the UK where we started this campaign a few weeks ago what we are doing in ala foods at the moment is that we are combining a unique history a culture which is unique being a cooperative the ability we are not so many are actually capable of controlling the full value chain of the raw milk to the consumer from cow to consumer that's unique even in our industry and that's our value proposition we're combining that with our brand portfolio that we are cleaning up now and we will gradually over the next two years see that we are that we are using it into our advertising campaigns in a different way of course because we are not mindlessly global we are what you would call global so so we are blending this global approach with a very local execution of how we do it but the inner DNA is our good growth identity we call it I could speak for two hours on that and I don't have that time but that drives this little flower in the beginning in the middle drives our advertising our brand portfolio it drives what we call clear operational evidence so throughout the value chain are we we're working with quality programs that are unique to what farmers if you want to be a member in ala foods no matter what country then you have to live up to certain standards it could be ethical standard animal welfare standards quality standards that are unique to ala foods and that uniqueness is then put into our brands and the way we communicate going forward without having farmers all over the place as you will see in a second we call this good growth it's our identity and not speaking two hours about this just saying to you high level we're combining the company entity identity together with the brand identity so we're commercializing actually the value chain of ala foods and bring it to life in front of the consumers and it seems to work at the moment just as one example this natural growth behind that is a stand that we took some years ago where we said we don't want any artificials in our dairy products you can make fantastic yogurts with artificials you know get your mouth feel and it tastes like wine you know anything you would like so it also limits us but we have no artificials we have a very strict gmo policy etc because we're driven and obsessed by making sure that our products are as natural as possible and i could continue around that that flower or not i'll not do that it of course creates limitations in our brand portfolio but it also sharpens our brand portfolio and our customers know about this so where are we now in 2014 we invited 450 marketeers in ala foods to a three-day session in Copenhagen from all over the world Russia China Denmark wherever we have marketeers 400 to 450 all together real-life market marketeers work with them with the purpose that they should understand our identity understand the new strategy and not only that but also become believers that took more than three days actually but most of them are believers today and those who have the one year are not believers will not have a chance of a long strong career in ala foods because we mean this really strongly they're not caked out but they're left a little bit alone and then we worked with them to understand the need of collaboration because we've come from a situation where 450 marketeers in different markets had their own brands their own agenda and a very very local approach we need to collaborate some more and we are in that process that's actually the big change part of our of our strategy and it looks promising at the moment and then on the final day they started to create some ideas and that was great fun so where are we now let's have a click and i'll show you two minutes of video at ala we've now started on a new journey a journey to bring us closer to our consumers for them to make room for us not only in their homes but also in their hearts in order to maintain sustainable growth and strengthen our position in all our markets we must ensure a special place in the minds of the consumers natural goodness is our promise to consumers and our new communication concept has been developed to build and tighten our relationship with our consumers and to increase loyalty for our ala brand to do so we're removing the complexity of all our brands towards a more simplified brand structure with core products concepts and endorsed brands at ala we deliver healthy great tasting dairy products that are based on natural goodness products that are simple natural wholesome and nutritious and we believe that goodness matters that it satisfies something deeper feeding our body and soul that it is a vital thread running through our everyday life let in the goodness is our new and powerful payoff it's there to encourage consumers to enjoy more goodness every single day it signals enjoyment health and naturalness and on the emotional level it positions ala as genuine and caring in our journey we are now establishing let in the goodness in all our markets to link ala to good healthy natural products that nourishes body and soul products that are a natural part of the small good moments in everyday life we have created a brand new visual identity for our products and a master brand communication platform which will be rolled out across all our markets where local execution will be adapted to the needs and cultural differences of each and every individual market that is a powerful statement behind all this i don't know if you feel that but but let me let me explore that with you it guides our innovation programs completely and if we can make it work in a second you'll see how that will happen are you coming up there yes there it is these are our growth platforms so when our skype innovation center opens next year all of the people working there will work with these four programs no matter where they produce or develop products our chinese innovation center will work with these innovation platforms it's what we call knee stage which is you know describing needs that are actually generic and we have investigated that through thousands and thousands of interviews with consumers from china to to to Copenhagen and there are clear commonalities but the products that they want and enjoy are different but the need that they are that they want fulfills are the same so that will guide our innovation and as you saw we have relaunched the ala brand 30 billion danish krona turnover and not only in danmark we're not quite finished there but it will be but all over the world you'll see that in china in a second that we have changed the face to the consumer as well and then you will see and that's very new you will see that we below and it doesn't work in here gentlemen in there you will see that the global concepts that that we will develop below the ala brand it could be as an example a good to go as you see it in danmark today it could be a breakfast position good start as you see here these are swedish by swedish proposition the products will be different and of course if you have a good start or a sub brand or or good to go positioning under the ala brand in china the products running in that concept will be different but we are unifying what we want to do with consumers because we think that there are some commonalities and let me give you an example of why it is important not to become mindlessly global just look at look at the value of health it's a world trend everybody talks about health but if you're actually dig into the various regions the interpretation of health is very very different in the european markets it's about less sugar less fat more protein less salt in africa it's about affordability and getting actually more fat more sugar more calories and in china it's about do i trust the product do i die from the product and we need to interpret that take that health platform that we're working with in in different ways and then i'll end up by just saying this is those of you in the back can't see it and you would probably say could that be in dan super market in vertex a setup there that he's showing yes it could be but it's actually in china Beijing last week and if you get closer into it you can see that we are talking about hands christian Anderson and fairy tales that we are talking about trust that we're talking about about long danish history that we're talking about danish farmers completely different message but basically the same concept that we are driving and we're rolling that out over the next next couple of years all over the world two billion marketing program every year bloody risky extremely exciting and the brightest of you are welcome to participate thank you i will try to moderate the discussion and to all of you i will encourage you to ask questions to the pigeonhole and vote for them and i will try to pick up the questions with the most votes peter the most the question which got most votes i will ask you how do you act on challenges from example scientific reports that questions the health benefits of your raw main raw material milk there's only one way of doing that that's approaching these scientific reports and they do occur with science otherwise we can't speak together luckily enough the science community has changed its view on dairy and then the fat the dairy producers so you will actually see that the bulk of the understanding of of dairy is getting into a much more positive momentum if you go back 10 years ago it was very negative but that is changing on a world scale and then two weeks ago came a funny completely misunderstood swedish report that said that you could die or you you you risked dying with the risk of death were increased 15 percent per glass milk only i think extra bread thought that was to meant be taking serious and it died in one day that report is long gone but you said in your presentation that a la is an inside out company yes because of your owners i guess that means that basically you only have one raw material the milk does that make you a vulnerable you only have one raw material and if you have got problems you are out of business if if that raw material was doomed to be a raw material that this world doesn't want then we would be in trouble but we all start right after the first breath that we take by drinking milk from our mummies i'm not scared so you're not feeling no vulnerable okay um how has the crisis in ukraine and russia's relationship to europe affected a la uh very brutal uh our business grew seven between 35 and 70 the last three years in russia we had bought a company over there uh that when we are in all the cities with a la is known it's everybody knows a la foods the mts are shelf are the shelves are empty at the moment we sell nothing so uh we have uh come from 1.1 billion in turnover to russia to zero in one day that's where we are now and then we'll take it from there on we've bought a local company producing cheese in russia uh to maintain the brand profile we don't make a lot of money out of it but just to keep our brand which is valuable alive in the russian market and that's what we're working with now and as i understand it put in said that this would take 12 months and he normally does what he says so we are ready to open up 12 months from now uh because we're not only the ones only the only ones hurt it's more than three billion liters of milk 300 000 tons of there's a lot of cheese that's seven eight times the the amount of cheese consumed in danmark that has been blocked from the russian markets and if you look into the supermarkets in russia the the the the shelves do look empty it must some it looks as if it won't last forever but i understand it last 12 months that's what putin said it costs a lot of money but that's how it is how do you keep your brand alive while you are out of the russian market well as i said we have a local company producing some volumes and we are trying to up that volume finding milk we've had a success with that the entire south american hemisphere has not been for many reasons closed by by putin and we have partners and dairy one dairy in in in south america in brasil and we are using that they're already delighted by that the people there to actually start to export back into russia that was not the reason why we bought that franchise and had that jb from the beginning but it comes handy in now so i think that we are selling at the moment 30 percent of what we sold and that's pretty good actually so we're keeping the brand alive if you violate the embargo you can go to prison if we are not violating it we are very careful and talk to the to the to the do you see politicians about this in this situation do you see your competitors take advantage of the situation no no because russia has very little ability to service itself in dairy and in many other food areas so so everybody are blocked and it hurts everybody okay we have one question now now please stand up and present yourself my name is christopher and i have a question for tubo about the standard of products you talk a lot about emerging markets and different standards how do you ensure that you keep your promise of an scandinavian a la quality product in emerging markets as china so they do not only survive eating your products but also have the pleasure of Scandinavian quality now we call it northern european to be honest well it starts where we actually have the cows it starts where we have the production and it puts a limit actually at the moment because we could actually produce products to china out of our us facility for example in wisconsin we could do that but that would be compromising the brand value that we have put into the chinese franchise so we are not doing that so we are our brand marketeers are very careful to live up to that position that we have created it gives limitations but it also sharpens the profile and and and i'm believer in a very sharp profile i hope that was an answer given that most people outside northern europe are lactose intolerant how will you target for example the emerging markets yes and isn't that a wonderful thing i also thought that chinese were lactose intolerant but that's something somebody got that wrong many years ago in the danish science society or whoever it was they are not end of story super we are busy here not more than the rest of us by the peter you have many nordic leaders in your organization how do you build a global mindset in your organization that's a very tricky tricky thing actually the only thing that really works is to move people around to make sure that people from our nordic markets from our danish market where we have most of our quite a bit of our employees get the chance to get out there i've been myself in south arabia and middle east for many years in germany so more and more of those or those who want to make to be honest a career in other foods and to want want to be leaders in this process need to understand that they have to go out there and blend with different nationalities and work live with their families for some years otherwise you just won't make it leadership wise or leader wise but we have the great opportunity to have many chinese sitting here in in in china who also have an aspiration so we speak all kinds of languages now that we didn't do some years ago because we believe that the only way of actually answering your question is to make sure that we in real life get some diversity into any organization or that we have here or in the various different markets you said in your presentation we are there for the farmers are you really helping the locals in africa or just milking them i think that it's necessary we haven't cracked that not completely but but in order we must earn the right to be in an area like africa and which means that we have to involve ourselves in things that are not just purely business driven and we are in the process of figuring it out in some of these markets whether we should enter into school programs but you don't really sell products but we're actually helping education of children or should we actually go into what we are best at helping local farmers to become more efficient because they are not is that because you as an international company you need to have accept from the community we need to have accept exactly from communities not only the local communities but also the communities of europe in danmark we are scrutinized of course by all kinds from from all all angles and we have to have so much transparency and have the guts to to have some transparency that we that we show to the world what we are doing and i can tell you that's probably one of the real difficult things about these emerging markets that you have to do things that are not necessarily here and now delivering to your a profit and loss and and helping your balance is too much it but it's delivering it's giving you the right actually to be in that market to make money in that market and that's something that is new to us and and to the rest of the world actually you need a license to operate again a license to operate a license to operate you can say that okay we are running out of time peter and i would like to ask the last question i'm sure that many people here would like to hear your answer on that if you are a student who wants to have a career like yourself what is the key advice you would give big secret is that a lot of my career has been made it's been made by coincidence everybody says that so be prepared for coincidence because you can't if you are obsessed by planning your career you will definitely fail especially in my place when i meet people who are obsessed by that i just you know i don't like that feeling so but stick to make make sure that you're good at what you do and that you enjoy it sounds funny but i actually really mean it that you enjoy what you're doing that you're happy along the way and make results today and don't spend too much time about thinking about where do i want to be 10 years from now but you have to think of course about in the broader sense where do i want to be good and that was what i was trying to tell you maybe it's not the smartest thing to become a marketing expert in how people in or who's want to consume products maybe you should have an approach which is more targeted to some of these emerging markets which will the day that you will apply to hopefully to become the CEO of other foods if we exist at that time 20 years from now then you better be knowledgeable in asia you better have been out there and you better be knowledgeable somehow in africa and if you're really good then you've also been there then you have a chance thank you peter the time is running out thank you very much


Welcome, everybody, and thank you for, we're off indeed, Debbie. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for joining the OpenEd SIG for one of our webinars, and we're delighted to bring you today Mahabali from Cairo, all the way from Cairo in Egypt, who's going to talk to us about the process she has been engaged in as she prepares for next week's OER 17. A crucial moment for the Open Education Community. Great, we have Mark from California. Isn't it something like 3 a.m. in California, Mark? Thank you for coming along. It's wonderful to have such a rich community, and yeah, rich has nothing to do with money, you know. I've discovered that over the years. I think, near the age of retirement, I've realized that richness is so much more than money. As I was mentioning before, this is the year of open, so we're particularly thinking about openness this year more than ever, and thinking about how important it is that despite whatever local conditions we may have in our contexts, whether it's in our schools or our institutions, within our countries nationally, whatever those contexts, education needs to reach beyond borders. Education needs to reach all people, and learning and learning opportunities need to reach all people. I'm so overawed with Christian joining us as well. It's wonderful to have you all in the webinar today. Fabulous. So I'm also going to remind you that this week is Open Education Week, and this event, along with many, many other international events that are happening with a focus on openness, are listed on the Open Education Week website, so please do take a look and explore that. All you have to do is Google Open Education Week, and look out for the hashtag Open Education Week, hashtag Open Education WUKWK, on Twitter as well, to see what's going on and to engage and to think and talk about Open. France is welcome. Good to see so many of you here. It's really exciting, and I'm so glad that we managed to boot up the hamsters to get our collaborate room working today. Thanks to Martin for that. So I hope you've made your introductions. You've got to meet each other a little bit within the chat there and explore the interface a little bit. Here's what we're here for, and we're here to meet Maha. Let me tell you a little bit about my own experience of meeting Maha, because just to give you a little bit of context, I'm sure we've all got stories about how we've met Maha as well, and do share them in the chat. I met Maha really through another online connection, Simon Ensar, who I've worked with for the past few years, connecting students for language learning. And Simon is very, very good at networking, and he introduced me to Maha. And as I explored and as I read her blog, I really felt I got to know Maha, not just as a person who is passionate about education and learning and a person who is open-minded and willing to engage with people beyond her immediate context using digital tools for that, which is maybe not surprising given her background in education technology as well. But also, I felt through her blog, I felt I was getting to know Maha as a real person. And at that point, I realized that the virtual connecting part was really just a bridge into adding yet another exciting and engaging and interesting educator into my wealth of personal learning network that has come with connecting. And I'm sure many others have had that experience as well. But I have to mention that when I went to ALT one year to an ALT conference one year, Maha and I, unbeknown to ourselves, were staying in the same hotel. We actually shared a lift on the way to ALT one morning. And I looked at this lady and thought, I know you. I know you from somewhere. But I thought, no, no, no, I'm just, I'm thinking that might be Maha, but why would it be? Why would I? So, yes, I resisted saying anything in a very English way. You know, you don't approach people until you know who they are. And then, of course, we bumped into each other for real. And I watched Maha present at ALT.  And I'm so delighted that she's speaking at OER 17 because I know we're going to learn so much from her. I've learned so much from her already. And I know she's not only a wonderful person, she's a great mum. And as many of the women in this room will be very familiar with, and the men, let's say, let's not be sexist, she's very used to juggling the demands of career and children as well. So I'm delighted to have her with us today. I'm going to pass over to Maha now and do a quick check and make sure your audio is OK, Maha. And we're really excited to hear all about your personal perspective on open practice that I know you've been working on using your blog in preparation for the OER 17 keynote next week. So Maha, we can see you. That's lovely. Salamu alaykum. Can you hear me? Yes, we can indeed. Thank you for the very, very, very warm introduction, Teresa. It feels very different when you feel like someone's introducing you and they actually know you. So they're not just reading off a bio. And I love so much what you shared. I did think you were going to talk about the elevator story first before you said how we got online. But it actually makes more sense to say how long we've known each other online before. I mean, they've been a lot of the people in this chat I've met online. And there's a couple of my face-to-face with a little like transit.  And when Teresa invited me, this was very honored. And then at the same time, I was like, oh my god, one more presentation to prepare ahead of the conference. And then I also realized that I actually had a little bit more time to present this than I have at the keynote itself. So I can't preview the keynote, girls. I could actually just finish staying the entire keynote. So instead, I'm going to talk about my process of doing the keynote. I'm usually looking at the chat while I'm talking. So if you want me to answer something right away, I might notice it and answer it as I go. And that's my Twitter handle in case you don't already know it. So the first feeling I got when I was invited to OER 17 was I felt like an imposter. And there's a lot of reasons, I think, for that. I think it's one of the things that most academics have. Anyway, I think going through a PhD makes you more imposter-y because you're suddenly given this title that people are supposed to now expect you to be an expert at something, but you're still the same person you were the day before you got your PhD, which was the least senior person in your environment, pretty much, except for the beginner PhD students. But with the OER specifically, I felt very imposter-y because I knew there were so many other people who had so much more experience with OPEN, who did so much for OPEN, and who, even in terms of activism, do a lot more than I do. And there are a lot of people who have institutional support for OPEN and so are able to do a lot more than I do. So this is a bit difficult. And I keep thinking, oh my god, well, I have. I mean, I was invited, I think, in August or September. So I've had a lot of time to build up these imposter-y feelings. And I keep thinking, well, I could be using this time to read more. And then I keep telling myself, no, but they didn't invite me because they wanted me to prepare for the keynote. They invited me because at that moment in time, they thought I would add value to the keynote. And I kept trying to think, what is it that's unique that I've got to ask? And I still don't know if what I've got to add is new, but you're going to have to listen to it anyway. And if the keynote is whatever comes out of the keynote, I'd love a chance to get to talk to everybody outside of the keynote. And for me, that's the privilege of being invited, is that I can get to talk to everybody else outside of my own keynote. It was fun preparing it, but I think more importantly, just being in the same room as people and being able to talk to you afterwards and beforehand. And if you're staying at the hotel and if you're free in the evening, I'd love to sit and talk to people at lunch whenever you guys are free. And so, yeah, I did reflect on my homework on Gopin over the last year. And I did realize that I'd do a few things. And I'll talk about it, too, within the keynote. But the keynote is going to be about a lot of things that go wrong when we go for open, but at the same time, trying not to discourage people from trying it, even though these mistakes will happen. And a lot of you might have seen my blog post on fixing the short response to trousers, which is, and I solicited from people ideas of stories that they can share related to open education or education in general, where sometimes trying to fix something creates a different problem and that sharing these stories will maybe help us all learn from them. And I also started to think about, you know, I've done some work which was on last year on self at OER. And I think in some ways, since I'm being open, it's just an attitude or a way of being that isn't necessarily something that works for everyone. And that works for me offline as well. And so, I'm so open that I can barely keep a secret. Like telling me I'm doing a keynote like six months before this keynote is happening and telling me how to stay quiet about it for three months or something, that was just really, really hard. And what I would do is I would tell some very cool people, I have a keynote, but I can't tell you where it is. And I can't tell you what it's about, but I have a keynote. You know, that kind of thing that I tell people and I think they have no idea what really or something seems to have someone to tell if there's something happening to me. And I'm also so open that every time I have an idea for the keynote, I have to share it. And that means that I change my mind a lot because sometimes I share an idea and people give me feedback and then they'll help me change my mind. And so, that's actually a pretty cool thing, even though not necessarily, the people commenting weren't necessarily going to be the people at the keynote, but it's still helpful to know what other people think about when I'm thinking of the moment to see how receptive they are. So there was a blog post that I wrote about the Mr. Men and the Miss series of books and that got a lot of good responses. And one of the first things I thought about my keynote was something related to that series. And vlogging about it just made me more comfortable going ahead and keeping that in the keynote because I know now that this is something that seems to resonate with people and they won't think I'm being silly. Hopefully, I mean, hopefully, a lot of people won't think I'm silly. Maybe if she was, that's okay. Those who have kids or who interacts with kids or remember being kids themselves, which hopefully all of us do, hopefully we'll find something there for them. And so, I think I have maybe six blog posts or something related to the keynote, one of which Sheila helped me go ahead and write about when vanity in the keynote about what you wear for the keynote. And right now, I'm writing this post for a prop hacker. I collected stories from people about mishaps that have lost into the main keynote. So people whose luggage cups lost, like Lauren Ternovich, which happened at the LC Conventory I met Teresa, her luggage got lost and she had to go buy new clothes and I, before her keynote and things like that. So I'll hopefully I'll publish that soon as well. And in general, from what I said so far, like I took a more process orientation towards how I wanted the keynote to look and to be and to feel, there's a lot of content in it because I've had six months to prepare. So I have like, I don't know, 50 pages of content or something, the idea, I think about so much time to post quotes and ideas and then trying to organize them and trying to make them fit into 35 minutes is actually quite difficult. I speak really fast, as you can see, but it's still a lot. And to put the term you, what was more important but I don't want to keynote this broadcast. So I don't want to be brought like, I don't want to talk to 35 minutes like I'm talking right now. And I wanted to have more interaction with the audience. I want to have more interaction with the virtual folks. I wanted to have a lot of questions but also a lot of people thinking about what they want to do.  And that still might happen in mine, I'm not sure. I also want to see that there's a way for people to feel like the keynote is useful in some way to them and adding some value. And I've got at the end of the keynote I've got a Google Form asking for feedback, for example, for people from what they want, what they found was valuable and what they would have liked to have in the keynote that were up in there. And during the keynote I'm going to ask some people like Christiana and Sheila actually who volunteered some of their stories to actually just gonna walk in with the audience and talk to them about, ask them to share some stories. And I've got little, just little things where hopefully people will participate in our other parts where I'm just talking for stretch because Julie's like, we want to hear you, we don't want to hear everyone else.  Someone's asking. Oh, I don't want to be broadcast. No, I don't mind being broadcast. I'm on all over YouTube. Francis was asking about that. No, I'm all over YouTube. I don't mind being broadcast. I mean, I don't want to be one way. That's why I'm on my broadcast. I know if I wanted to be more interactive with the story. Yeah. Yeah, that's more of what I mean. So I don't mind people sharing the slides. I've actually got a link that isn't up yet. I scheduled it to appear just before my keynote that has a link to my Google slides that are commentable. So people can post comments on my slides if they don't want to ask a question out loud or if they're virtual. And they could post the comments there and I'll respond to them asynchronously. Obviously they could also tweet to the hashtag I'm imagining that the hashtag at the end of the keynote is gonna be, my ad mentors might be too many. I'm being very optimistic here, obviously. But I know a lot of my friends tweet, so I'm assuming people will do that. But I thought people can post questions or comments on the slides and then that way I can respond to those over time and it could be a conversation that goes on beyond the 35 minutes, hopefully. So that's kind of what I'm hoping for. And we're also doing a virtually connecting session that same day at the second half of lunch, so virtual folks and anyone else who wants to come and listen to that conversation can join that as well. Hopefully, yeah, this is not too overwhelming for people, but anyway, I'm keeping a lot of the content secret, but I've shared little parts of the content with different people. Some will be at the keynote something long with some people like my mom and gotten feedback on them. And that sort of helps me with my confidence a little bit. I'm a pretty confident person, but this imposter thing is pretty difficult to get over. And then one of the things that I thought about was that I wanted to make the keynote sort of like choose your own adventure type of keynote and let people work together and do things and Josie and Aline and Rebecca and like, almost everyone was like, no, you're all about the inclusion of underrepresented voices. I remember what Aussie was like. I was, maybe there were like three people of color in the entire conference, that's a bigger conference than we are. And they were like, you know, the inclusion of underrepresented voices then interacting with the others in the room is just reproducing the privilege of the white, probably the white men because men are often more confident to speak up or you know, to more confident people. And so what I've done is first of all, there's a lot of people for whites who are underrepresented in different ways or marginalized in different ways or have confidence issues or who require help to be included as well. But the other things I've done is, first of all, in my call for ideas for the shirts and trousers problem, let me explain that quickly so people have another block post. Basically, it's an Egyptian expression that came out of a comedy play where the person is saying, actually was quoted it. It says, I came to fix my jacket and I spoiled my trousers. And I was thinking of examples of that that happened with open education, they tried to solve a problem and create a new one. And so I asked particular, there are some people who posted their answers with comments on my blog, some sent them privately and some that I solicited. And I made sure that there was some representation of men and women and people inside and outside the room in that set of people. So I solicited some people who didn't do it naturally. And the other thing is throughout my keynote, I tried as much, I tried in the beginning, it didn't work very well, but I tried in the beginning as much as possible, quotes only people who were not normally quoted a lot in these contexts, who are people of color or women who are outside of the US in the UK. And I think I've done a relatively good job with that. I will still end up quoting some other people because they do good work. There's no reason not to quote them just because they have some from which. But I've learned from them all. But I also did define value in making the efforts to find voices that were different from what we were used to seeing. And also, from bringing some theory and some ideas from totally outside the sex field. So something that I learned about through my PhD, something that was shared with me completely outside of the idea of open educational or educational technology. And to try to bring those in.  They're usually the ones who have a level of privilege that allows them to be in that third space that can reach more people. So it's never gonna be perfect, I think, but I tried to do that and I still hope, hopefully there'll be still some interaction between what I didn't want it to be. The other thing I realized, and I don't know if this is the case for other people, and you can tell me in the chat, Lucille, when I was invited to participate as a keynote speaker, I became more confident to participate in conversations that other people were having about open education, which I didn't realize that I was less confident about before. So for example, there was a conversation between Jim Groom and Mike Coffield, and I can't remember who else. Maybe more than one. So three pretty big names in the field. I thought something and I was sort of, I had a different view than all of them. And I decided to write a blog post and a very strong one and I felt like, yeah, I could have an opinion about this, even in front of a coffee experience. I'm not a keynote speaker, they don't know that yet. But I can sort of participate in those conversations and that helps me a lot. And when you take that step of participating in a conversation in that more authoritative way or something, it sort of allows you to take more risks and say more than you normally would have and feel like, yeah, I think there's a thing that you should listen to me. Whereas before I always felt, oh, how nice of you to listen to me. You know, oh, look, Jim Groom retweeted my thing but it replied to me.  So just to kind of, one of the key things about both and participatory of online learning is that you can be nobody.  I still can't believe that's where I've gotten in this very short amount of time. And I'll share something at the very end also about why that's like a really big deal to me. And again, I'm recognizing my natural sexuality in all this. So yes, I'm a woman. Yes, I'm from this part of the world here in Egypt. But at the same time I have a lot of privilege. I learned, I did my master's online. I did my PhD remotely. So I had a lot of experience working online before I came to this. Before I had a blog, before I was open. And having a PhD, having a good English, being in an institution that is one of the best in my country, all of that is a lot of power that I have. Thank you, Kelly. And at the same time I'm very small in my institution. I mean, people, I'm very talkative and friendly and I've been here for a while and people like me and everything. But I'm really tiny in terms of the amount of power I have locally. Besides my personality, I don't have a lot of power. I'm not the lowest person on the ladder, but I'm not very high on the ladder. I'm not tenure track for American institutions, so I'm not tenure track. And I'm at the Center for Learning and Teaching rather than at another department. Yes, I'm faculty, so that's something good. I teach one course a semester and a half, of course.  Someone recently went, when they did the, what's up with the laptop then? That's a global teacher. I think her name is Lisa, Lisa Turner. She said, senior academic coming from Egypt isn't gonna be able to bring her laptop. They're like, I'm not senior. I'm a senior in what way? I could be flatter, but you think I'm senior as a position or something. Or I could be like really offended that you think I'm that old. But I don't think she meant it. I think she just meant, you know, I'm keynote speaker, but she's calling out senior.  So, just that. And the other thing is, it's very difficult to finish the keynote by keep changing it every day. Every day I talk to someone, I'll find something else. She likes saying she thinks women are correct when I do the treatment. Yeah, it's probably the case maybe the man here could share. And Kelly's saying, I think working in the open we define suspiciousness as a power. I agree completely. And I think Bonnie Stewart's research shows that, right? She shows, you sort of get a new power structure that's semi-parallel. It's not completely parallel because it's not completely different. There are some people who are powerful everywhere, but there are a few of us who are very small in our real-life conflicts, but who gets this opportunity to do it outside. And I'll talk a little bit about that in the keynote. So there was open 1917, but I think coming from Virginia, just an open online course, and someone told me about it, and I said, oh, do you need someone to still pay the week? Because now I'm a keynote speaker, I can actually offer that. I can tell, oh, by the way, you know people think I know something about open, so if you want me to do something, I'll do it for you. So that was very funny. We're getting in there, and I still paid a week, I still paid a week on open access. I tried to build with one of our guests over the Hangouts for that. And I think Debbie joined one of the Hangouts and did a totally global in South Africa, which is another open event. Well, I know they had 16 last year, obviously, also. So I'm learning every time I get into a conversation about any of these things. I see things on Twitter, I have Hangouts with people, and I learned new things about open that I didn't know about, or they changed my mind about something. And I feel like, well, that fits with what I wanted to say, and I keep adding it. Or I realize, oh, no, everybody's talking about that, so it's nothing new, maybe I shouldn't talk about it. And I'm very lucky with virtually connecting, which I don't know how many people in the room are aware of virtually connecting. It's basically a way to, I mean, if you're like, if you do, I know if I'm not doing it. It's just a way for people who cannot be at a conference to be able to have conversations with people at the conference virtually via Google Hangouts. So unlike this room where there's a privilege to the person speaking who is me, and everyone else needs some sort of permission, I think, to speak. I'm not sure maybe you can also speak if you wanted to, but with Google Hangouts, there's only 10 people, so it's limited in terms of not with people there, but usually anyone can speak whenever they want to. And virtually connecting, well, we have a presentation on it at the conference, inshallah, and we just published a post on the OER 17 blog explaining what it is, because one of the barriers is participating in it. We're trying to make it more inclusive, and one of the barriers, is people don't even understand what it is. Or, and I think it was Yushio, who was saying on, I think, Martin or Orphan's blog, that you, I first imagined that virtually connecting was just for academic people, and it might be just that we say academic conferences, but we don't really mean that, we just mean at-tech education conferences that we go to. And the whole thing started because I have, because of being a mom of a young child who's older now, but once she was very young, it was very difficult for me to travel and leave her behind or take her with me. Either way, it was pretty complicated. And there were really conferences where I had several presentations with a lot of people who I collaborate with online, and being on Twitter is just one and nothing anymore. Now, Sheila's saying that she's going to virtually connecting with them for the likes of them. And this is why in the blog post we published, we mentioned, and you know, we put a post, you know, we put the, I think we embedded it. The last year, it opened up in OER 16, we had one with Katherine Cronin and Jim Groom, where they were sharing these headphones. And they were, you know, Katherine and Jim, if you've ever talked to them outside of their keynote, or even Jim inside of keynote, they're very informal people. And the people on the hangout were very informal as well. And because we have virtually connecting as almost as many conferences that we can handle, like for a team of over 100 people. And so whenever someone's going to a conference and anyone else is interested in being at the conference, we get to have these conversations. And so it keeps us all who can participate and anyone else who wants to join us up to date with what's going on everywhere. So I don't have to go to a lot of conferences every year to know what's happening, to have my finger on the pulse of something like OER or open at 16. And I didn't have to travel to do that. And that's one of the great things about open is the great thing about online. And it has so much power, it can be so empowering for those of us who can access it. And the key for a thing that we think about a lot is how to ensure that those who might benefit from it to have the access to it, kind of like what Teresa was saying at the beginning in terms of the goals, I think of the open aspect, right? And so if you're interested in participating in virtually connecting at OER or 17, whether you're on-site, if you're on-site, let me know or tweet to be connected. If you're virtual, was this the color it gave you, Teresa? Anyways, this is also the Slash OER 17 BC. That's just a link to our website, which says which sessions are happening at which time, and there's a sign-up form. And you can join a particular session. That's great. Yeah, the colors change to the template that we have for the open-ed state, I'm afraid. So your links are now green from your slides, but that's just the template from our... Oh, I wrote it in the chat. I'll be easier for people to click. So those of you who can't make it, you'll find out which sessions we're having with them. And those of you who are on-site, you can walk in and take a look at a session taking place. Christianne is one of our, Christianne Friedrich is here, we're looking at is one of our buddies, so is Teresa. We have sessions with them. We have sessions with Sheila. We have sessions with Martin Coxe. And we have all the keynotes. And I've invited a lot of other people, and it's okay, some people aren't comfortable with it, so it's totally okay if they don't want to join. But if you're interested, you can join and you can watch both virtually on-site. And we also have a presentation. So you can also come and listen to the focus groups, you know, the results of focus groups we've been doing about inclusivity and so on. It's a lot of it, if you're all up, it's open education in general, not just virtually connecting. So I think it could be a nice session for others. Yeah, I have other things. Sorry to interrupt you, Mahadeva, but I have to say virtually connecting as an additional channel within the conference is really, really welcome. It's, you know, I know that I've spoken to people at all about this before, but it's just, it's like opening the window to everybody. And it's that sort of informal contact that you have as a result of either watching or participating in virtually connecting sessions that really helps you extend your learning network and understand people and see a different aspect to people as well that makes them, brings them closer. So really grateful to you for taking that initiative and making it available. And it's a big team of people. So I co-founded this with Rebecca Hogue and then also became my co-director with us and we have a large range of people. Some of them are very committed. One of them is Simon Enser, who introduced Teresa and me to each other. And he's one of our virtual buddies actually for helping me with this event to happen. I think it's one of the sessions, Teresa has Martin Hoxie as a guest and John Robertson, and then I think Simon is a virtual person for that. But Sheila was saying virtually connecting to us on the 10th, and look what I have. I made this. This one is a picture of Rebecca and me and Martin Hoxie and Martin Muller as both of these are virtually connected to each other. And I love that you can see it very well. It's our Twitter picture. And then on the other side it has the logo. So if you see the logo, we're trying to figure out how to let people know where we are because we don't know where we're going to be on site. But you can see the virtually connected accounts or as you see this logo is on Marvel's probably doing something with it. The other thing is, while we were doing the focus groups for virtually connecting, a lot of people said, well, people who join virtually get a chance to talk to the keynote speaker in a very intimate environment. And then people who are on site don't get that chance. We've heard that criticism before, but it was elaborated on. And what I was thinking of is, I'm going to this event where, inshallah, I already know around 50 people. I know because I counted them because I'm giving them gifts. So I know that there are 50 people on site, at least that I know. That I know not only like they follow me on Twitter, but as in I talked to them, there are some of them are very close friends, some of them are acquaintances, but I know them. And then there are other people at the conferences that I don't know that I'd like to meet. And how do I, as a keynote speaker, let people know that I'm accessible to them during the conference? And one of the things I did was make sure that I presented other sessions so that there are smaller groups of people and they feel like they can come closer to me. So other than walking around during my keynote, being in two other sessions means that people will have a chance to see me up close and talk to me before or after that if they wanted. It ends up being too much of my time that it's not free for me to walk around, but it also means people will know where I am at any point in time, or at some point in time. Maha, we just seem to have lost your audio at the moment. And because of the system we've got that it's back. Yeah, it's back. Yeah, it should just rethink. So it'll still be caught in the recording. Did I talk too much? Did I talk too much? Which part of the show? Which part did you not hear? Oh, what happened? You felt pretty fast. I said, I typed, I'll tell you why I typed. I typed because I don't know how to say Marianne's name. And so I typed this in Mr. Kim, and I think that's why I lost audio. It's hurtful. Can you hear me now? No. Yeah, absolutely. No? No worries about pronunciation. I think that's Maureen. It's like an Irish spelling of Maureen, yeah? Maureen. Okay. So that's good to know. I'm going to have to tell the virtual buddies who are going to be voting her session. It's a Gaelic name, yes, I thought so. Because I'm going to make a little joke during the keynote, but you guys can have a preview of it. Christian already knows this, but you'll usually say my name wrong. My name is not Maureen, it's Maureen. And it's not difficult to say. It's just Maureen, it's just Maureen, and I look at the vowel sounds. Hi, Pauline, did you want to ask, I think? Okay, I guess maybe not. Just see, yeah, somebody picked a mic up there, but okay. Well, Pauline, did you want to say anything? No, I'm sorry, I was trying to mute my mic because the telephone went, I did it the wrong way around. Stop it, Pauline, is this Pauline Ridley? That's great. We all have these names, so we all have the same problem with my name as well, but there you go. I don't know how to do anything with it. Because the S and Z are the three of us, Teresa. Teresa, yeah. Yeah, it is, but yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Right, now I know. Okay, I'm about to finish, actually. Yeah. So I'm about to finish this, and then hopefully you take questions if people have any questions. I just keep working on this, just reminds me of the harder work of making open community culture open more locally. So I think when people talk about my activism, I think my activism is very incomplete in that sense. I mean, it's not, I don't want to evangelize for open in ways that don't make sense locally, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about why it doesn't always make sense to evangelize for open. But also, it's back to what it is about open participatory online learning. It's much easier just to make a difference there. So doing something like virtually connecting was actually much easier for me than to get people here to adults like an open access policy. I'm still working on it, but it takes so much more time and effort and there's so institutions, there's so much more complex. And again, like being not the person in power, working with the little people to try to make it a big change takes time. But we also have an access to knowledge for development team over here. And they do a lot of great work. It's just that we're not always doing the same work. So it's always something to think about. And this quote from Sarah Ahmed reminds me of why I'm open. And so we always need the spaces outside the institutional spaces to be able to talk about the problems that are happening in our institutions. And that's what helps me survive. Like I wouldn't be able to survive without Twitter and virtually connecting now. Because that otherwise I'd be just talking to myself and just discovering that these people exist out there and that I can talk to them. And we are different in so many dimensions, but in our hearts and in our minds, we're very much in the same space. And, you know, Teresa started this just before we went live, I think, talking about where the data's were written. And I remember how I felt when the Brexit vote came out and I remember how I felt when Trump won. And I think I was very much empathizing with what you guys were all feeling at the time. And yes, of course, my Facebook is pretty filtered. I know one person who voted for Brexit in my entire Facebook feed. Trump has a different story. It was in my laptop right now, but all of my American friends are anti-Trump, obviously. Because probably if they, so a lot of those, you know, don't worry, let's not talk about that. But then, and then when the laptop then happened, I had so many offers from people. I did a hashtag, run me a laptop. I don't need a laptop on time. But I was just making fun of what was happening. And it's not funny for other people. I can survive on Google's live on my phone. But most people who travel for business, whether they're from this part of the world or the arts, are being disempowered by this. And putting the laptop and the public in check baggage is, as far as I know, a very bad idea. It could get damaged, it could get lost, and often gets sold. So it's not really an option for most people. But I did get a lot of offers from people. Oh, we just lost you temporarily again. I hope that's going to come back any second. I get on the day. There we go, it's rethinking. And since it's a thing, it's a little bit more suspicious, you can always see it. Yeah. You are indeed. Am I back now? Yeah. I think it doesn't like it when I look at the tech chat. When I touch the tech chat, we will have to. It's not a multitasking. We don't understand what the tech chat is. We always have to battle with the bandwidth, don't we? There's so many things going on. And I think that's really crucial to what you're saying about openness as well, isn't it? Yeah. We need open spaces because we need to be able to be free to think. And everybody in the room has reacted to that quotation that you just shared with us. Open spaces matter to us, whether it's blogging in the open, tweeting openly, connecting with people. They matter because we're human. We don't always want to be somewhere that belongs to someone else. And I think that's really crucial in what you're saying. And I love this slide, Baha. Sorry, I'm going to pass back to you. No, that's just a slide. I mean, there wasn't anything in particular I was going to say about it, except that I keep outing people to it. And I keep realizing that I forgot someone important. I think I forgot Audrey at some point. How could you forget Audrey Waters when you fly like that? But there's also a lot of people here that you might not recognize, and that's important too, because there was, I think, some research, maybe the funny story so much, where people often retweet or promote the work of people who are more famous or more known than them. And I think that's something to know. Someone like Audrey doesn't really need to treat her so she's more or less. So there's a lot of people out there whose ideas and thoughts are really, really helping you learn. And I think more people would benefit from learning from them. And a lot of them are on these pictures including colleagues in my face-to-face environment on the right top right over there. And even though a lot of them aren't officially open educators in the ways that we understand them, but they are open educators in different ways, and that matters as well. And some of them are not open for very big reasons. And that has helped me learn a lot too about why I shouldn't be already evangelizing. And I know I'm still evangelizing, but it sort of helps me think about it a little bit more critically and more tertially. And again, a lot of these people who are open and a lot of people like trans as well are very critical about how they're being helped by people like Katherine Cohn. And a lot of people on these slides as well are critical of it. And so I was hoping to find colleagues who feel like I'm doing the Oscars and forgetting someone, but. And this is a preview of, you can't see anything on it now because I'm gonna publish just before my keynote goes off. And I've got my slides and the video stream and the survey at the end asking people feedback on this link. Hopefully it will work. And then it'll be easier for people to follow the slides if they prefer that and put comments if they want it to. And I'll stop talking now and listen to you guys. Thank you for having me. Wow, the force, the power of the person that is Mahabali has just been bestowed upon us. I feel like I'm still steaming. My brain is still steaming trying to catch up with the things that are coming out here. It's just amazing. Thank you so much, Maha. And there's so much there as well, sort of watching the chat as it went through and listening to you as well. There's so much there that was particularly empowering for people and it's great to have that. It's like plugging into a battery. This is what I've been hoping for for OER 17 that I can meet up with that community of individuals. And as you say, we're open in different ways at different times in different contexts, but we share those important values and we share that commitment to education and learning that goes much more broad than just learning from a particular institution or a particular individual. So it's so great to see Erica then saying, right, I am an open educator. Now I know what I am. That's wonderful and yeah, very inspiring. And thank you so much for coming today and for leading us through that process you've been going through around open. I'm going to finish us off today just with the headlines really of who the Open Ed SIG are. We're a special interest group. We're supported by ALT and without their support, we couldn't organize events such as we're doing today. So very grateful to ALT for supporting us, but we are a totally open community. You don't have to be an ALT member in order to participate in the Open Ed SIG. The only login you'll ever need is if you wish to post on a forum and really as you can understand, that's really just about making sure that we know who we're talking to. But the Open Ed SIG you'll find and you'll find with the link as well to our webinar. I'm just going to pop this into the chat here. So the Open Ed SIG is totally open. We have a blog. We have our webinars. Deb is in the room here. She helps me sort all of this stuff and has prepared a really nice template for us here in our little community space. I just put that link into the chat there. So do take a look. And that is where under webinars, you'll find the recording for today's webinar. Do join us on Twitter and do participate and continue to keep this impetus moving forward for our first year of Open, because this is where our focus really is. And as I say, we're supported by and very grateful to the support of the Association for Learning Technology and the Alt-C community that you'll see, hashtag Alt-C as well on Twitter. So I would ask everybody to play with your emoticons for a minute and choose the applause emoticon to pass our applause on to Maha. And then I'm gonna come around and ask for questions. And I can see we have got some hands raised for questions. So if anybody wants to ask a question, all you'll need to do is to click the talk button on your mic and we'll be able to hear you. We've got a big round of applause going on in the chat for you, Maha. Thank you very much for everything you've done for us this morning. Just charge this up. It's gonna take a while to come down. But I'm not planning on coming down. I think I'll stay up here. Let's take a look in the chat and see if we have any questions or queries and just taking a look back. If you have a question for Maha, do pop it in the chat or just pick up the mic, press the talk button and you can talk into the room. Some yeas and whoops from Wales, wonderful. I'm glad to see so many people expressing how excited they are about next week's OER 17. I certainly am. I'm not sure as I'm getting a bit old these days I'm gonna be able to participate in all the community events but I'm gonna do as much as I can. And I certainly look forward to meeting you in person and same with everybody in the room, please. Do, if you see me, grab and say hello or tweet me and let's get together and let's get to know each other. And of course, join the Virtually Connect session. One of those I'll be running. I think Christian's running another one. Yeah, some people are saving questions for next week. I'm gonna do it for the next week after me now. I've got, I mean, I just got a problem that I don't know what I did but I clicked something and I tried to get back into the room and I can't see it. Oh, I can see it now, okay. Can you see it? Yeah, the boxes for the re-enchat you can literally pick up and resize so they're individual to your own machine. So you'll find them under, you'll find it under tools and chat if it has disappeared. I found it now, so I was in the chat but I was looking at something different in the room. Great. So I need to check with baby. Sheila asked me to be connected. Hi, it's Francis here. You're the one that asked me. Hi, Erica had a hand up. So maybe she'll just ask a question after I've asked mine. Ah, I loved your quote but it really made me think about what an open space is outside an institution because one of the reasons that we speak outside institutions is because we have things to say that we don't feel able to make public. And so, you know, what is an open space? Is it, you know, can it be a private space, a semi-private space? I don't know the answer to that but you might have some thoughts. This is a very good question. And I think maybe you're one of the people who thinks about this a lot. And I think, one of the small things I'm gonna talk about in the keynote is that what, the keynote title is hiding in the open. And one of the things that hides in the open is a lot of the things that allow us to be open happens in private and nobody sees it. So I'm just gonna say this very quickly because Trenton is going to ask the question. And the Trenton and I have a very individual private relationship with people in the open.c and it allows us, we interact with the open as well on each other's blogs on Twitter but there's a different relationship that's happening beneath that, you know, behind the scenes that helps, you know, strengthen that relationship with other people and see it. And it just happens with a lot of different people in lots of different ways. And some conversations for us to really understand each other, to really emphasize with each other are things that I cannot say in the open. But I trust Trenton, I want to tell Trenton about that, for example, and this is the only way to do it and that enables us to be better together in the open. And there are people who aren't safe at all in the open. We're not all equally vulnerable online. And actually I was very excited to find that Tanya Zaria-Liz is using a quote from one of my blogs about that, talking about, you know, we're not all equally vulnerable in the open. Robins Rosa was recently talking about she has students who are in the witness protection program. And she can knock them to bloodline lines. Like that's a really risky thing for them to do no matter how online you go. That, you know, that's not something urge to want your students to say to do. And Kate Green also talks about things like that, you know, and that private and public and open, they're not like open is not the opposite of private. And I actually don't know if I understand exactly what she's saying. I don't know if Christian can type in what he thinks. Do you understand that? Because they're doing it towards opening a session together. But that's, yeah, so. Thank you for that. And thank you for that great question, Francis, as well. Because there's always a sort of risk, because we perhaps end up talking to so many people about open who have no idea what we're on about, that we kind of gloss over the complexities of what we mean by open. And sometimes I think the feedback we get from people is, oh, well, it's all about just sharing everything, putting everything out there. And it's much more complicated than that really. And I think Catherine Cronin has done some great work on this and the spectrum of open as well. Christian, sorry, you missed your name being mentioned. You were mentioned as a person running a virtually connect session. And as a person, I hope that I will actually meet and speak to next week. Yes, the self-censorship, that's interesting, Shilorini, isn't it? Because we probably think about these things as we write, where do I write? It's certainly in the online context. Where do I write? Where will I do it? But I kind of think as well, we think about these things in the physical world. And there are things we can probably, parallels we can probably make. So you may decide where to hold a meeting because the actual selection of a physical space may send messages. And yeah, I think we probably do think about these things without even being aware that we're thinking about them sometimes. So maybe just having that opportunity to talk with others helps us to clarify what we do when. And I'm not a great believer in hard and fast rules either. I haven't found that possible, perhaps, because I'm quite an undisciplined person. And I can sort of react as Debbie reflects there. I can sort of just react on the basis of what I'm feeling instinct. But yeah, having the chance to express something, whether it's stop thinking, stop and think and reflect personally about it, or to have these opportunities to meet and talk really helps. Do we have any other questions? Yeah, Francis, as ever, you're really enriching the discussion here as well, thinking about, you know, the sort of insidious use of power. And you know, that soft power that is rarely mentioned, but very important. I'm scanning through the chat, but I'm not seeing any other questions. What I'm hoping is that people actually have made connections through today's session. Because within this room today, there are some fabulous open people and some great connections. So yeah, let's strengthen those connections and continue to reach out. And we have that wonderful excitement as well now about next week. And I'm so looking forward to meeting everybody. I have to say a big thank you to Martin, who, because without his help this morning, Martin Hawksy, we would never have managed to make the recording at all, because we were having all sorts of problems with the room when we first got started this morning. So thank you, Martin, for getting us up and running. I'm just going to switch the recording off now.