these several subjects, all of which of course are interrelated, education, scholarship and global civilization. By way of preamble, I would like to draw your attention to one of the distinctive features of our religion, which is the fact that we have as an integral element of the structure of our teachings, the concept of the supremacy of the rule of law. By that I mean that the laws and teachings of our faith are applicable to all members of the Baha'i community in irrespective of any other consideration. This is relatively unusual. So often in religious communities there are certain individuals who rightly or wrongly feel themselves excused from some aspects of their teachings by virtue of either their rank, their social standing or some other consideration. Whereas in our religion there are a number of universal principles applicable without distinction to all. I want to spend a few minutes before getting into the meat of my subject, I want to spend a few minutes exploring a few of those universally applicable principles. And I think they can be gathered together under the heading of the enlightened mind. We are all familiar with the fact that religions have as a matter of course down through the span of human history religions have concerned themselves with enlightenment. It's even being carried to the point of caricature. Janet and I have spent a few days being very lazy which included watching television in Northern California and those of you who have been equally indolent may be familiar with a TV ad for yellow pages. And in that TV ad some poor soul climbs a mountain finds an individual who is some kind of guru and a source of enlightenment and seeks guidance from him on how all information can be obtained and this enlightened soul refers him to the yellow pages. So be that as it may and the attainment of enlightenment has been the goal of religions. Our religion is distinctive in two ways with regard to enlightenment. One is the fact that to us the ideal state is dynamic not static. We differ radically from the ideal state expressed in various religions the paradise of a static condition the sense of attaining and enlightenment where one is basically static and unchanging. The other distinctive characteristic of our approach to enlightenment is the fact that we see fulfillment and enlightenment not exclusively in solitary pursuits but through interaction with others in service or consultation or some form of cooperation. To us the enlightened state includes that service oriented or cooperatively oriented interaction with other human beings. I want to spend a few minutes dwelling on some of the characteristics that I see in the Baha'i faith which pertain to enlightenment. There is a rather obvious hidden motive here. I'm deliberately selecting those characteristics which will be of value to me later in my talk. I'm deliberately selecting things which are universally applicable later when I talk about the educated Baha'i or the Baha'i engaged in scholarly pursuits. I will refer back to them and I will say as politely as possible see those things about enlightenment are still applicable even if you are involved in education or scholarship. Hopefully it won't be too terribly obvious but it'll be along those lines. One of the characteristics of the enlightened individual as I see it in the teachings is that he or she has an open-minded attitude to lifelong learning and I see this as a requirement imposed upon all Baha'is irrespective of whether they are literate or illiterate. The attitude of learning. I have had a close experience in contact with illiterate Baha'is and I notice how in many instances their attitude to learning is highly developed. Learning from experience, learning from observation of nature, learning from interaction with others and to reinforce my view that our teachings say to all of us irrespective of any consideration we should commit ourselves to lifelong learning. Obviously this includes formal but it doesn't only restrict itself to formal learning. The House of Justice in a recent letter said devotion to learning has been an integral feature of Baha'i life and belief from the beginning and as you well realize in the recently concluded five-year plan and the one on which we are now embarked learning is integral. Learning by experience, by reflection, by revision of plans for the next cycle or whatever it is stitched in to the very concept of Baha'i community activity. This learning of course requires an open-minded attitude as intrinsic to it but that open-minded attitude doesn't carry two extremes. It's one thing to be open-minded it's another thing to be gullible and naive and to believe all kinds of strange things which turn out to be superstitious or totally irrational or the like. So there are extremes in the approach to open-mindedness and we are advised in our writings to avoid the extreme of gullibility and naivety. Obviously it's a very complicated subject because a lot of great scientific discoveries have appeared quite bizarre in their original form. I remember the person who first discovered the concept of continental drift and how difficult it was for him to find a reputable journal which would publish it eventually I think it was the South Dakota Journal of Mines or something which was quite obscure at that time. We're told also that the enlightened individual's attitudes include those of a constant striving for progress and the achievement of excellence. Again applicable to all Baha'is, literate or illiterate, this sense of aspiration, the sense of wanting to improve oneself, wanting to improve one's performance in whatever activity one is engaged in and concomitant with that a sense of humility in relation to others. These are in the larger society often mutually exclusive. Those who aspire to excellence seem to feel it necessary to discard humility along the way as a means of buttressing their self-concept of excellence and that certainly is not part of our religion. We're told also that the aspiration to enlightenment should include respect for the accomplishment of others, constant encouragement of others toward aspiration. And in my brief and highly subjective survey of the Baha'i concept of enlightenment it seems to me that one should mention also that the enlightened Baha'i in our religion is one whose exalted aims and aspirations do not exclude him or her from engaging in the life and activities of the community including its mundane aspects. We are quite removed from the person who is so involved in the pursuits of abstract algebra or the mysteries of the general theory of relativity that he or she cannot bring themselves to help to set the table or do the dishes or to help to weed the garden or something like that. Abdu'l-Baha'i remains as always our shining example, not only of the profundity of his wisdom, the nature of his personal characteristics but his lack of inhibition about involving himself in the mundane aspects of the life. We have many rich examples of Abdu'l-Baha'i in Akka and in Haifa and how readily and in such good spirit he participated in the mundane aspects of the life of the community and service to others. And of course as you can well imagine the enlightened individual is one who retains and in fact fosters an appropriate degree of respect for the authority of Baha'i institutions. To us in this room it seems obvious why we wasting time talking about it. It's not so obvious out there because so often in the larger society there are individuals who feel that for certain reasons they don't have to follow what everybody else follows. They are too important, too significant, they have two and their characteristics are such that they can either dispute with the institutions or disregard them. We are as you well realize a work in progress as a Baha'i community. As such we fall down from time to time, we don't pretend not to make mistakes and errors but we do say that we learn from them, we try not to make the same mistakes over and over again and that there is overall progress. Along those lines one finds that occasionally some of our shortcomings include the sense of a segment of the Baha'i community feeling it is immune from the requirements of some aspects of enlightenment such as humility such as engaging in mundane aspects of life, immune for various furious reasons. For example because of wealth. Those Baha'is who are wealthy sometimes feels well we can get someone else to do that but not me. In fact I'll pay you to do it if you really want to. Or the highs of social status of high social status who feel that in fact it would be demeaning of their status of their prestige in the larger society. Sometimes it is a matter of family lineage. Having a distinguished ancestor or relative somehow seems to confer some kind of aura in the minds of the individual that he or she doesn't have to do what the rest of us are doing and sometimes it's a matter of education. The educated individuals should not have to concern themselves with all the trivia that the rest of us are dealing with. These are the characteristics of the enlightened individual and as I say there has been a deliberate purpose in my mentioning them because they I think pertain to what I want to say as I continue about education and scholarship. Let me now proceed to education before I do that. Let me see if somebody can give me a glass of water at some point because having drunk so much Starbucks coffee this morning probably needs some water for get too far along here. I don't need it right now. People using it as an excuse to flee from the room. We'll see how many of them come back. Let me talk about education. Education is under great stress in many parts of the world for a variety of reasons. It is not a popular subject to legislators and those who allocate the national resources of a country. The lack of funding means that as you travel around the world you see schools and universities the fabric of which is deteriorating. They're not in very good shape as far as buildings go. Salaries of teachers at high school primary high school and tertiary levels are low and not keeping up with inflation. Fees are rising astronomically in many countries and excluding capable students from education. There is an ongoing pressure for grade inflation, pressure to give good grades to people and a greater percentage of the students to get very high grades. There's a pressure to produce courses of lower standard so that grades can correspondingly be better. The system shows signs of corruption, an increase in cheating, the bribery of teachers, or together with the low salaries that teachers get, the downloading of essays from the internet, bullying and violence in schools, violence towards fellow students and toward teachers. One of the very significant stresses in the educational system is that the purpose of education is presented largely in terms of its income potential in making a decision about whether to proceed to advanced education, what course to follow and whether to continue in it. The argument is largely in our society presented in terms of if you do this you will get more income and it will average out ahead of the rest of the population over the course of several decades. This argument is of course weak. It doesn't work anymore. People who go into noneducative disciplines generally end up making more money than our poor souls who struggle for so many years to get a master's degree or a PhD. So it raises the question in the minds of a lot of people in our society what is the purpose of education, why should I expose myself to a system which is increasingly corrupt which doesn't have a financial payoff. For people of a religious background such as we are additional questions arise about education. They don't apply to the entire Baha'i community but one does meet from time to time Baha'is who raise one or more of these questions. There are those who are deeply concerned that if their young people embark upon education in a secular setting it will weaken their faith. That they should not study psychology because if they study psychology it rests upon the material concept of human nature and it'll take them away from religion. They should not study philosophy or economics or sociology or history or whatever because it'll weaken their religious faith. There are those perhaps not many of them hopefully who feel that religion contains all the knowledge one needs that as is quoted in the Hadith in the Katab-e-Ikan knowledge is a point that the ignorant have multiplied and that by pursuing education in a secular setting one is exposing oneself to this multiplication of ignorance. There are some of us who this recurs from time to time in various parts of the world who have an apocalyptic view of the imminence of catastrophe and that apocalyptic view of the imminence of catastrophe feeds into the fact why bother with education when the whole rotten mess is going to blow up anyhow and that then becomes a pressure on young people not to engage in long-term commitment of an educational nature. And there are also most recently with the last few years with the legitimate pressure for the core activities to be expanded and developed in the five-year plan there are those extremists who say that things are so urgent at this time that you should abandon your long-term pursuits educational or otherwise because we have to get this 1500 intensive programs of growth of growth nothing is more important than that give up whatever else you're doing let's just do this and after that maybe if there's time you can go and do your education. So there are these various pressures which apply within the Bahá'í setting beyond those that I had to which I have drawn attention of the deterioration of the structure of education and the facilities in the larger society. We have to look at all of this from the perspective of authentic Bahá'í teachings not from what people tell us this is what you should do and this is what's unpublished or this is what I know the House of Justice said but it hasn't said it out loud all this kind of stuff we have to we have to avoid all these things we have to root our faith in authentic Bahá'í teachings which can readily be examined and the accuracy of which discerned and we know that there is some accuracy in these various concerns that certain Bahá'ís have expressed there is some accuracy in the fact that one's faith can be weakened by secular education but it is intrinsically an inaccurate statement as we'll see presently the contrary applies the guardians writings refer to the reinforcement the mutual reinforcement between insight in the teachings and secular education. There is some truth the things are a mess and getting a lot worse but our sense of the transition in society is of two processes of decline and growth punctuated by events of a calamitous nature rather than in the apocalypse as it's conventionally expressed. As regards the pressure of the moment the needs of the five-year plan and the like these are legitimate concerns the House of Justice messages including its Ritz von message and that of 27 December 2005 do quite properly call attention to the pressing needs for concerted action on the part of Bahá'ís all over the world in pursuit of the core activities in the developing clusters which can sustain and maintain intensive programs of growth but these messages also distinguish between priority and exclusivity and the failure to make the distinction between priority and exclusivity is leading to distortions we know where the priorities lie the five-year plan the message of the House of Justice we can't think of any other way to say it more clearly than we are saying and the House of Justice does not call for exclusivity friends here at this conference have spoken to me privately and asked me with great sincerity is it all right to continue to have firesides who am I to say no who is the House of Justice to abrogate something laid down by Shoghi Effendi so forcefully as the need for individual teaching for firesides for proclamation for student activities on campus for all the other things that make for high life rich and meaningful beyond that anybody who has experience in enterprises whether they are business enterprises organizations of various kinds industrial activities or anything like that anyone with experience in that knows that exclusive focus on the short term needs is the way to do any enterprise be it a Baha'i administrative enterprise or otherwise that focuses only on the short term is doomed to be storing up trouble for itself in the future we have to with intelligent minds devote priority to the short term but not to neglect the long term otherwise we will find ourselves in a few years time lacking the resources to meet the emergent needs of the faith in years to come over the several decades to which Eric is so delicately referred as my Baha'i activities over these several decades which extends down about five decades I have noticed believers who have become so obsessed if you will with the short term in terms of their service to the needs of the faith that they have neglected the long term in their personal development as a result they found that after ten years they were unemployable they could not serve the faith they didn't have the skills they didn't have the the long term development they didn't have the orientation all they could do is continue to play the theme they had played which was applicable ten years ago and was obsolete now so the focus on the long term as well as the short term is very crucial the Baha'i teachings as I read them indicate to me a very surprising emphasis on education and the acquisition of knowledge I read again and again statements to that subject Baha'u'llah says knowledge is one of the wondrous gifts of God it is incumbent upon everyone to acquire it one is afraid to open a dictionary and look up the meaning of the word incumbent because Baha'u'llah says it is incumbent upon everyone to acquire it he says or Abdul Baha says to promote knowledge is thus an inescapable duty imposed on every one of the friends of God these and many other statements I think should be considered very carefully by any Baha'i planning the course of his or her life those plans should accommodate the strength of the statements of Baha'u'llah Abdul Baha and the Guardian on the duty the incumbency placed upon the individual to pursue the acquisition of knowledge the writings contain other statements pertinent to this subject of education pertinent to the fact of why we're getting education when you can make much more money as a yeah well I don't know there's probably some people in the room doing that so whenever you can make a lot of money as a mafia hitman I'm presumed there's none of those in the room a very insightful statement from Baha'u'llah in tablets after the Katabiaktas where he says knowledge is a veritable treasure for man and a source of glory of bounty of joy of exaltation of cheer and gladness unto him most significant statement where Baha'u'llah is telling us that the acquisition of knowledge is a source of joy cheer and gladness fundamentally one of our basic reasons for the pursuit of education is that it is a source of happiness not particularly around exam time maybe not when the results come out but overall in the course of one's life the life devoted to the acquisition of knowledge to the pursuit of education in its broadest as well as its narrow formal sense therein lies fulfillment contentment as Baha'u'llah says gladness and joy and Shogi Effendi is quite unequivocal in relating effectiveness of teaching the cause to this matter he says in one place or his secretary on his behalf if the Baha'is want to be really effective in teaching the cause they need to be much better informed able to discuss intelligently and intellectually the present condition of the world and its problems and these are just a selection of many many passages most everything I'm reading is either from the compilation on scholarship or a supplementary compilation on issues pertaining to the study of the cause both of which are published in recent years in that sense our answer to the concern about should I get education or not is refer to the writings refer to what it says about the importance of education its value in the teaching of the faith its personal reward in terms of happiness joy contentment gladness and cheer as Baha'u'llah says the universal house of justice from time to time receives letters from very sincere and devoted believers who say please tell me what are the disciplines in which the cause has a particular need and I'll study one of them these letters touch us they are they are moving they represent the devotion of a believer who's willing to put himself or herself in the hands of the head of the faith and saying I will do anything you like if you tell me to go and study astrophysics I'll study astrophysics if you tell me to go and study archaeology I'll study archaeology I want to do whatever will meet the needs of the faith at the present time the most common response of the house of justice and there is no universal response because things do change but the most common response of the house of justice follows the response given by Shogi Effendi to similar questions there is a passage where the Guardian through his secretary said concerning the course of study you may follow the cause is such that we can serve it no matter what our profession may be the only necessity is that we be spiritually minded and not be guided by purely material considerations and of course if one's orientation is toward the service of the faith as a dominant consideration then that transcends material considerations it seems to me that one should therefore not feel narrowly constrained in the subject one chooses to pursue in education obviously one has to consider employment because it is very frustrating to go through a course of study of several years and then find that there are no employment possibilities for it and that one then has to change one's line of work and one feels rightly or wrongly that much of the effort has been wasted that generally is not the case but nevertheless it is a source of disappointment so one should legitimately give some due weight to the possibility of education one should consider of course one's own talents and opportunities there are so many dear Bahá'í friends in other parts of the world particularly the third world who yearn for education struggle to get opportunities and often are disappointed so it's no use going to them and preaching to them about they'll must go and get an advanced education when these poor souls are struggling to find the resources and the opportunities to acquire any kind of education so those of us who have opportunities are in that sense privileged and need to take advantage of it there are special needs in the cause which arise from time to time I want to mention a few of them but I should also caution you that these needs do change with the passage of time at the moment for example the world center is desperately in need of certain kinds of people which we can't find we need people for example to help our international Bahá'í library make a much needed quantum leap forward in its functioning we need people with master of library science with a specialization in informatics so that we can use the cutting edge informatics to develop the international Bahá'í library we need archivists who have a skill in modern technology for archival for information retrieval and the like we have a desperate need for people in conservation in conservation science yeah one meets so many people who have a bachelor's degree in chemistry and say what can I do with my bachelor's degree in chemistry one of the things you can do is do post bachelor's degree work in conservation science and help us at the international level or at the national level and the like to conserve the precious documents of the faith the paper documents the tablets the authentic writings the historical documents of the faith and beyond that conservation in its broader sense of object conservation the conservation of textiles the conservation of sacred artifacts and of course of holy place buildings there are needs at the bible center in the engineering disciplines of facility maintenance of the cutting edge facilities at the on the arc and of the various professional trades and so on these are needs at the moment they may not be needs in five years time we'd ordered to put all your eggs in one basket and say I'll train for this because you may find that the needs have changed with the passage of time but they are certainly very legitimate and very pressing needs and I suspect their needs that are going to be intrinsic to the high world for decades in the future because what we do at the world center in terms of library and archival development of the like will later be translated to similar activity in the larger national communities and then the smaller national communities all over the world we're told in our faith that one of the important parameters in the acquisition of education is the need to always give preeminence to the authority of the manifestation of god the house of justice says in the simultaneous endeavor to pursue their studies and to delve deeply into the Baha'i teachings believers are enjoined to maintain a keen awareness that the revelation of Baha'u'llah is a standard of truth against which all other views and conclusions should be measured this is certainly very very important because as you as the words say the revelation is the standard of truth there are lots of things out there which are an accepted part of secular education some of them conform to the Baha'i teachings some of them don't when we find things that don't conform to the Baha'i teachings we should not allow ourselves to be shaken in our faith we should not become obnoxious towards our teachers and adopt a position of superiority and try and educate them in what Baha'u'llah says because that's pretty counterproductive apart from obnoxious but at the same time we should not allow our faith to be in any way disturbed having said that I think one needs to be very careful of this subject there are many aspects of the Baha'i teachings where one has to be very careful to avoid rushing too quickly to judgment for example astrophysics there's been some probably still is some controversy in the astrophysical community about whether the origin of the universe is a steady state creation or a big bang and our writings speak of creation as being without beginning and without end that being so I think we have to be very wary of rushing to conclusions and saying Baha'i's support the steady state model rather than the big bang model both models are still work in progress both will probably be refined other models may emerge I think we have to be cautious on this regard with the innumerable letters have come to the House of Justice in recent years about cloning and what do we say about cloning and the response of the House of Justice as I understand it has been very very cautious basically saying let's see how things develop let's see how what science uncovers there are a number of issues that are yet obscure it has refrained from making any kind of dogmatic or ex-cathedra statements on cloning because it is a very very complex subject the same applies to the question of evolution and of course we've had this very excellent discussion here at this conference and in relating the the various theories of evolution and intelligent design vis-a-vis Darwinian evolution and the like and I think that's very good because there is an element of care and caution a refusing to rush to judgment or to adopt a narrow perspective or too quickly rushing to say well that's wrong because it's contradicted by Bahá'u'lláh and same of course applies in the evaluation of theories of psychology or of sociology or indeed of economics obviously we have a different perspective on the nature of man which affects those disciplines yet at the same time those disciplines have so much to offer of validity I have made a brief reference and I won't dwell on it too much but you find in these two compilations to which I have referred that the guardian has developed at some length in some of the pastures of his his writings the reciprocal mutually reinforcing relationship between secular knowledge and insight into the Bahá'u'lláh teachings there are instances where he refers to the fact that study of subjects such as sociology history economics and the like and I think they know more than examples provides insight into the Bahá'u'lláh teachings and then there are other pastures where he says the exact opposite he says that study of the Bahá'u'lláh teachings provides insight into the secular disciplines of history economics and sociology and the like and I think far beyond the concern about education weakening one's faith is the fact that if it is pursued in an appropriate manner by believers who are strongly rooted in their religion far from weakening their faith it reinforces it it gives insights of mutual benefit seeing deeper more deeply aspects and of the teachings and also being able to contribute new insights to those secular disciplines I wanted to before I leave education to draw your attention to the strength of the guardians admonitions to us to the acquisition of education and I can do this no more effectively by reading to you a statement of the guardian which I find quite astonishing he says it is just as important for Bahá'u'lláh young boys and girls to become properly educated in colleges of high standing as it is to be spiritually developed the mental as well as the spiritual side of the youth has to be developed before he can serve the faith the cause efficiently there's a wealth of information in that passage which is not gained by my reading it so quickly its first sentence almost borders on heresy here is the guardian of the cause no less saying it is just as important just as important for Bahá'u'lláh young boys and girls to become properly educated in colleges of high standing as it is to be spiritually developed it's an incredible statement and you can't say well that was what he said on that day to that particular person there's a generality to the statement and it's reinforced by many other statements we have in the letters of the guardian and then of course the second sentence is equally significant the mental as well as the spiritual side of youth has to be developed before he can serve the cause efficiently we can all serve the cause we all try one way or another to do it efficiently is something else and the guardian is here pointing to the balance between the intellectual or mental development and the spiritual development in order that this efficiency may come into being let me move on because time is rushing by two other things I want to speak about the next subject I want to address briefly is the subject of scholarship and this can be brief because a lot of things have been said and a lot of things have been clarified in recent years however there are some issues that have come up in recent months and years that I've become aware of in my functioning my present functioning as a member of the house justice quest these are some of the questions that I notice believers are asking firstly should faithful believers persist in intellectual inquiry and scholarship when it has attracted such controversy and questioning of provisions of the covenant I think we all know that there's been this controversy and who are in the on the internet and various other places and occasionally intruding into some of the letters of the house of justice of individuals who have purported to be part of the scholarly behind community and questioning the covenant and raising all sorts of issues and I'll be saying very nasty things about some of us and the like and so one raises the question is it not better to stay away from the whole thing for a few years until it all calms down because I don't want to be a source of controversy and contention maybe this is not a good time to go into behind scholarly activity another question is is it not self-indulgent or irrelevant to engage in behind scholarship when there is so much emphasis on the advancing the process of entry by troops and the core activities of the plan and thirdly how can unquestioned faith and the validity of the teachings be reconciled with the inquiry and investigation that's part of scholarly activity these are questions I notice that have been raised by very very sincere believers their questions people are asking their questions that are unequivocally answered by authoritative Baha'i writings of recent years and particularly with the authority of the universal house of justice the faith has without any equivocation emphasized the continuing need for Baha'i scholarly activity again and again we have pastors from the guardian and from the house of justice which say without any hesitation we want more Baha'is to be engaged in scholarly activity don't hold back don't run away don't feel afraid that it will disturb your adherence to the covenant or that you'll be a source of headache and dividend and nuisance to the Baha'i community go for it be part of the Baha'i scholarly community the house of justice has said in a recent letter or a letter written on its behalf by its secretariat the universal house of justice regards Baha'i scholarship as of great potential importance for the development and consolidation of the Baha'i community as it emerges from obscurity and that statement of the house of justice I think is without qualification and it does no more than reiterate statements made equally as strongly by the guardian so those who have some concern should not do so at the same time obviously they should be smart and intelligent they should make themselves strong in the covenant they should become steadfast believers in the cause they should immerse themselves deeply in the provisions of the covenant understand it at a deep fundamental level so nothing can shake them and the nasty statements that somehow that sometimes appear on the internet will not be a source of spiritual disturbance to them the second question of self-indulgence in relation to the core activities I think I have referred to and I will refer to it again presently certainly it is not self-indulgent we do need Baha'i scholarly activity just as we do need the priority to the core activities of the plan it is not either or it is both together the third question of unquestioned faith in the validity of the teachings reconciled with inquiry and investigation is again addressed in the writings of the faith the preeminence of the authority of Baha'u'llah together with the use of the rational process to explore to acquire deeper insight the writings and particularly now the statements of the house of justice have emphasized and this has been taken from a very long letter addressed to this North American Association for Baha'i studies so I don't need to dwell on it too much the house of justice addressing this association has said among other things that no attempt should be made to define too narrowly the form that Baha'i scholarship should take there are all kinds of people and they should be encouraged to do all kinds of things the house has called for the mutual respect and tolerance and that Baha'i scholarship should embrace those whose principal interest is in theological issues as well as those whose interest lies in relating the faith to the contemporary thought in the arts and sciences again all together rather than either or certainly the guardian has referred to the need to correlate the teachings with current thought in various disciplines that's certainly true it does not allow us then to denigrate the work of those who are carrying out very important activities of a more theological nature or even of a more abstract nature all together mutually supportive rather than why you're doing that instead of this or that's unimportant and this is important I remember many many years ago I was exposed to an iniquitous subject called projective geometry and Councilor Aghdasi made some reference in his talk yesterday whatever to non-euclidean geometries this was one of those non-euclidean geometries resting upon a series of axioms none of which made sense for example one of the elements of projective geometry one of the axioms is that parallel lines meet at a point called sissogy which is an interesting word without any vowels in it meet at the point of sissogy well two what's that two me two minutes okay I'm gonna I hate to break the news to you but I'm gonna take a little more than two minutes the point of sissogy and I exposed myself to projective geometry I struggled with it and I decided that I obviously needed to acquire the insight into it low and behold after many hundreds of years of development of projective geometry down through the Middle Ages it turns out to be of vital importance in certain areas of of astrophysics and radio astronomy things and the like so we have to be very very careful of condemnation of anything of a scholarly nature finally let me move on to the saying a few words about global civilization I don't have much to say so we can keep Erica and like reasonably happy not very but reasonable you might well say why is global civilization being mentioned essentially in the same breath as education and scholarship our writings indicate that there is a sequence to the development of the world in the dispensation of Bahá'u'lláh the establishment of the lesser peace that we're working towards we have the unity of nations we're engaged in in the process of evolution to the lesser peace this will lead to the emergence of a new world order and the establishment of the most great peace and the guardian says then will a world civilization be born and flourish well that's a long way down the road even the youngest of us will be an old fossil by that time so why are we concerned with global civilization at this time we do so because of an intriguing statement of Shoghi Effendi where he says that where he refers in promised days come to the administrative order of the faith and he says within this administrative structure and embryonic civilization incomparable and world embracing is imperceptibly maturing the world civilization is off into the future but its embryo is within the present administrative order and therefore it is both legitimate and important that we give some thought to it in this context in order to do that and this really is the final point I keep saying this to Erica it isn't quite the final point but let's keep her happy in order to to foster this global civilization there are three things that I want to recommend we do the first is a very obvious one development of our spiritual attitudes because that's a foundation of civilization as I think Beirut Sabet in his excellent presentation on secret divine civilization is the afternoon referred to the nature of civilization described by Abdul Baha certainly our spiritual attitude is foundation to that our personal conduct our development of manners I'm showing such terrible manners to my my organizers but everyone else should show good manners okay development of manners courtesy cleanliness neatness of dress that's one aspect of global civilization we're required to work on right now the second one is the scholarship aspect we need more Baha'i scholarship in anything you can possibly think of because that will enrich us as part of the development of the embryo of world civilization for the future and finally and most controversially I want to encourage all of us who are centered in scholarly activities not to neglect the core activities of the plan it doesn't mean you have to become super mad or super woman and work 25 or 26 hours a day what I'm saying is that those of us whose passion is scholarly activity should also be aware that that scholarly activity relates very directly to the core activities how does it relate to the core activities it does so because intrinsic to the core activities is the Baha'i attempt to solve a problem which has defied the power of every religion for the past 6000 years for 6000 years the followers of religion have tried and failed to break down the dichotomy between a few hyper active overworked leaders and a mass of followers who are required to be passive to follow orders to sit there and be quiet and do what you're told this is not what the Baha'i faith is about the Baha'i faith is about a active community of people who are actively involved at every level in decision making in creative thinking in exploring the teachings no such community has ever existed in the religious history of humanity and we need to establish it if we don't things will not work the administrative order will not function the Baha'i electoral process will become ossified unless we solve this problem if we do solve it it will take us decades the core activities of the five-year plan with the participatory element with the lack of an authoritative guru to guide the the consultation represents a major commitment on the part of the faith to break down the false dichotomy between the hyper active leader and the hyper passive congregation and I think it is important that Baha'is of a scholarly orientation contribute to this if for no other reason then it will result in a vast increase in the manpower of the faith as a matrix from which will come the future scholars and the future scholarly endeavors it is therefore a matter not only of the needs of the cause it is a matter of basic self-interest those of us who are interested in the scholarly pursuits of the faith out of a matter of self-interest our adherence our support of the core activities to the faith will produce the new generation of scholars the new generation of intellectual activity of fertility of creative thought of innovation which will make the Baha'i community alive dynamic full of energy and fresh thinking and contribute to the richness of the cause and I'm leaving before they throw me out


And they have named this library the Bernden-Roger Alden Library. I mentioned only one building in my address and that was the need for a new library. A great library is the heart of any great university. The library represents an opportunity to learn and grow. As an international student, I feel safe here. It's a very friendly place. The people who work here with the front desk or other custodians, they are very helpful. The reason that I come here more than anywhere else is because I cannot focus in my dorm rather than people walking around and talking really loudly while I'm trying to do something here. The mood is just let everything be and do your own thing. That's important to me. I want students, faculty, staff and members of the community to enjoy being in this building and to use this building as a part of their daily life on campus. But we also want them to understand and be exposed to some of the history that's here on campus. And for the libraries and for the university, Alden is a significant part of that history. He was an emergent leader in higher education and in the business world. He started an enormous number of initiatives, the building of the Convocation Center, the building of Alden Library. One of the main things I learned about Dr. Alden, how open he was to talking with students, he would often ask students, how was their day? Any student that would appear to be lost, he was sure to help them out. Fernan Alden had a huge impact on the university. This library is named after him. This was his place. This continues to be his place. And I think the library represents a place for students to come and learn, as well as provide support for students. The display cases which recognize and celebrate Dr. Alden were conceived for a refresh in the renovation of the second floor. I thought it was a way to share his accomplishments as president and as namesake of the library with the individuals who visit the library today. In 2011, I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Dr. Alden on more than one occasion and I found him to be an absolute delight. And one really could see his energy, his engagement, his enthusiasm and his love for Ohio University. Having that personal experience with Dr. Alden made me very much want to somehow have the display communicate all of those amazing qualities that he possesses as a human being, which he certainly used in his presidency, but also shared with the university after his departure. It's an opportunity to tell the story of Dr. Alden's impact on Ohio University and particularly of his special relationship with the libraries.


So, good morning, everyone. Jo's virus got his hands on some NATO property, and now he's dropping hacker spaces and not bombs. So, please welcome. Good morning, Schaar. I'm here to talk about the Beehive Tech Campus, and in order to really talk about that, we have to talk a bit about the narrative. We are here at a hacker camp, and a hacker camp is an excellent place to share ideas and really talk about stuff and come up with new ideas because you hear about older ideas. I mean, if you look at former hacker camps, like, well, you see the lines here, companies sprung out of that, ideas sprung out of that, tools that better the world and society as a whole, and which is awesome. So we have to keep on doing this. But if you look at the what the heck and and and the hacking at large, ohm, last year, Schaar, and even if you count the international ones, the CCC, the stuff in England, and the Fred Fest in Vegas, you still come up with, well, a week, a year, maybe, because some of these things are once every four years, like this one. I mean, it's awesome, but it doesn't happen that often, which means that by communication in this matter, where our efficiency is close to 2%, right? If we could be doing this non-stop, just imagine what kind of ideas and new initiative could sprung out of this hive mind of mine. That would be brilliant. But we as a hacker community, we're only at a 2% efficiency if we look at these kind of communications. That's weird. Well, you might say we have stuff for that, like hacker spaces, because they don't exist only 2% of the time. True. I mean, hacker spaces are a very good place to share ideas, not unlike the stuff we are doing here today. But then again, yes, there's lectures during the day, you can do that in a hacker space, and you can have drinks that tends to happen here as well. You can do that in a hacker space, and some hacker spaces, you can even sleep and actually, well, live for a bit, but it's not catered to actually be living on premises. And as you might have noticed, because you're here a couple of days already, a lot of the actual adheres happen over drinks. Right? So it's not just looking at some dude on the stage saying, explaining his idea. Actually, having meaningful conversations later, so unscheduled stuff, that's brilliant. So doing what you want to do, but sharing with others, is probably better offline. Hacker spaces. I'm a member of hack 42, which is an item. That's a crappy picture. Well, we used to have our facility in a ex-nado base with, we were Blurred on Google Earth and everything, and now we move to this property. Next door, there's a church we can use, that we even used for hacker weddings, and this is a very functional hacker space, and it's just, it's not just technology. We talk about all the things that are interesting in the hacker community. So it works. It works perfectly, but it's not a hacker camp, because yes, we get guests every so often, and we have, but it's not as this. It's not the international world coming in full-time. So how to mitigate that? I have a dream. My dream is to buy this piece of property. Yes. This is an actual Panopticon prison. It's designed, well, to house criminals, of course. That's what you do in a Panopticon. It's designed in 1800 something, in the time that drawings were still made with pen on paper. It, the idea is that you make a round building with a huge open space in the middle and put a guard in the middle, and that guard can, can be watching you 24-7. So it's not unlike today's society, where you're totally watched online, and what happens if you perceive that you could be watched 24-7, you start to behave better, and better in this situation means that you're not behaving badly, because people might be watching you.  And that's good, because if you fail often enough, at some point you will go like, whoa, this actually works. But before you have the actual idea that, that works, and that you'll be willing to spread out, to, to, to share with the world, you have to be able to fail, and have ideas that you keep private. If somebody could be watching every step of your thought process, or your design process, or your process, whatever, you become less creative. Because once there was a guy that said, he was a guitarist, and he said, when I'm on stage, and I do something really stupid that happens to sound brilliant, that took months to figure out how to actually do that really new weird stuff on, on your strings.  Right?  The steps before were not meant to be shared. So, constantly watching people this bad thing, that makes it less creative, and so a pro-optical prison is a bad thing, I think. And, well actually, if you are a prisoner, your main thought process I can imagine is to get out of there, which it's an escape room basically, and it is. Well actually, we'll get to that. So giving prisoners the perception that they're constantly watched will make them less creative and thus less likely to escape prison. So the thought process for a prison makes sense, but for society it shouldn't be. Okay, so we're going to use this evil thing to do good. And it's not just this building, it's a whole facility. Yeah, we like to think big. And because it's rather old, it has some peculiar building style. This is the actual front gate. I think it looks awesome. But the main structure, so the dome itself, is huge. That's four layers. Every layer consists of 50 cells, which are tiny, because they're prisons, and it's a huge open space in the middle. This is the map of the complete facility, and I'll show a different map which only outlights the actual buildings. Now, the round middle thing is the dome. This is the entrance where you saw the castle doors basically. This part at the bottom is newer. And we're planning, so that's officers at the moment, and that's what we're going to use it for as well. Because you can imagine this will cost a bundle of money, not just to buy, but also to upkeep. So we need to have a stream of cash coming in. So we will be giving tech companies, well companies, but most of it will probably be tech. So companies we like that share our thoughts and ideas. We'll house there for fee, of course. This is also a newer building, which is a bigger open space. We're planning to host a hosting facility there. And of course, we're going to call it high-secure hosting, because it's in a prison. So that's going to happen. And the building, the tiny building up top, that's also a newer building. And that's we're going to change into a bit more luxurious housing for people come over and don't want to have those cramped spaces. So it is either VIPs of people who actually fork over a lot of cash. So yes, we will be talking about cash. I know we are sharing economy and we want everybody to do to get what they need without and everybody should pay the same. Yeah, sure, that's brilliant idea. But then this will probably not happen because this needs an investment. What will we be doing in this facility? Well, we have room for 200 hackers. So that's a tiny village. And they will doing hacky stuff. Two years ago or a year ago, I don't know when you first heard that there would be a hacker camp here now. You didn't know what was going to happen. It's just a couple of thousand nerds in tents doing cool stuff. That was but all you knew at that time. And that it probably would be awesome, right? You didn't know the amount of tents and what the actual lectures would be about. And you had a vague idea of what would happen because it happened before. Well, this is comparable. So if you actually want to know what we're going to do here, well, you have to wait a bit. Because we don't know, we're going to do awesome stuff. Yes, there will be some housing and yes, there will be living quarters and there will be lectures. But that's about it. More of what we're actually going to do is up to the community. And like I said, we have 200 rooms that people can live in. And the idea is to make it fluid. So you will not be able to probably not be able to buy a cell and start actually living there. The idea is to rent it for a set amount of time. So you want to do a project for let's say two months. So you live there for two months. You don't have to, but that would be the optimum. And we'll get into the monostructure later because it's not just for wealthy hackers. That's definitely not the idea. But some revenue has to be in there. So this is the main hole. It's huge. And to give you an idea of scale, in that open space, you can fit other buildings like this one. This is the actual White House. According to Wikipedia, this fits in our open space and you can still walk around it. If you're not into weird political structures, this also fits two blue whales back to back. And then you can walk around it. And if you take a space shuttle and put it on his nose or on his tail, whatever, then you're a couple of feet short. So that's about the height of the... Well, if you take the nose cone off, which you want to have next to it anyway, so then it does fit. So it's a huge space that we can use. It's a huge open space. So imagine what you can do with that. I mean, there's rails across the balconies. So you can make a huge 3D printer out of that thing. You can... There's room for that. And so it's going to be a creative stuff. And what's going to happen is actually up to the guys living there. The guys doing their stuff there. Of course, there will be some structure. I mean, we're currently with five guys who have thought it up and we're trying to make this happen. And we're basically facilitating a space where awesomeness might spawn, not unlike a hacker camp. Except, well, we have roofs and other facilities. But these are just five guys. Some of them have a hacker background. Some of them know how to actually deal with buildings. So it's a group with different backgrounds that hopefully can manage this. And to heighten those chances that this will actually happen, of course, some adult supervision is required. So we started... We asked some guys to join our advisory board. So actual grownups who will look at our ideas and tell us if they're stupid or it could be better. As for now, one of our members is Bart Jakobs. He's an IT professor in the Nijmegen. He has an awesome network and he's a cool guy. On Sylvain de Leste, because also for network and the link to our hacker community. Jaya Ballou, she's a CIO from KPN. So she basically to show that we will have a tie-in with actual companies. And yes, she's part of a big company. But if you know her, her mindset is basically that of ours. She is a hacker. And one of our latest additions to that group is Peter Milenaar. There's no picture of him online available as far as I could see. We're working on that. And his experience at the moment is very good at lobbying at different parts of the world to get funding and ideas to come to life. That group will grow. That group will grow because we need more people to actually help us with ideas and what else to do. Timeline. So what is actually happening at the moment? About two years ago, give or take, the prison that we're talking about was an actual prison. Actually, that was three years ago. Yeah, well, at some point it was still a functional prison. And for some reason, the Netherlands lacks prisoners. And so they decided to close that down. And then we have a facility with a lot of rooms. And then in the world, stuff happens. So we got refugees. And some people thought it would be a bright idea to house refugees in this facility. And that actually turned out to be a good idea. But PR-wise, putting refugees in prison, it doesn't sound right. So after some point, they decided to relocate those guys, because most of them are guys, and to actually close the prison again, which turned out that the people living there, not in there, but in the surroundings, so the neighbors basically, they started to like their refugees. Because this subset of refugees, they kept busy and they integrated with the community, and they were really part of that community. So there came protests from the community, because they wanted to close this prison and get the refugees relocated. That protest was successful. And the facility remained open housing refugees for more than a year, longer than was anticipated. So having the local community on board apparently has pull. And we noticed that, so that's what we're doing. So we are in contact with the local municipality and also with the community there to figure out what their ideas are and how that influences ours. So what I'm explaining is basically lobbying. We are explaining what we're going to do and because, well, we call it a tech campus, but it is a hacker campus, and hackers, well, you guys know that a hacker is not an evil world, an evil word, but explaining that to the outside world takes some effort every now and then. But doing that in a meaningful manner and very slowly will give that idea to the outside world that we're actually doing good stuff, because I do think we are. So timeline, at the moment we're lobbying on several levels. So we're talking to the municipality and also to the government, because this building is owned by the Netherlands, the government, so no local level. And they want to get rid of it. And of course the department who has to get rid of housing has one mission, fork in as much money as humanly possible, because that's the idea. At the moment, real estate in the Netherlands, if you want to do something with a building, you have to have a permit, right? That's the way it works. And the local permit states that if I now buy this prison, the only thing I can do with this is start a prison, because that's what's in the permit. And actually at this point it's housing a escape room, which is kind of is within limits of that permit, I reckon. But if I got to buy it, I can do absolutely nothing with it without a change of that permit. So what is happening now, that the government who owns the building wants that permit to be as wide as possible, because that will raise the price. If I'm allowed to tear down this building, put high-rise in there and sell apartments, then it's quite easy to make a buck. And therefore it's also quite easy to place a huge bid on that property. If I'm not allowed to do anything with it, then of course nobody would want it, and the money they will get for this building would be quite low. So the government wants the permit to be as wide as possible. But the municipality, so the local government, wants it to be less big. Because, well, it's the part of town where, because this is that's the middle of town, but the part of town where this facility is, is a quite quiet part of town, and they don't want to have a gazillion people there. So turning it into an amusement park will not fly well with the local municipality. So that will probably not be on the permit. But what will be, that's basically, it's not fighting, they're negotiating at the moment, what can actually happen. So what they did a couple of months ago, they started a public inquiry, a marketing inquiry, so to figure out what people like us would want to do with this building. To figure out how wide the permit had to be widened to actually make a sale feasible for a good price. At that point there were 11 parties interesting in acquiring this piece of property, and they had to submit their plans. So what are you going to do? How are you going to fund that? And we're not talking about numbers yet, they need to have an idea that it's feasible what the parties are doing, and if there would be an actual party, an actual serious party to endeavor this idea. That resulted in a very expensive report, of course, because reports should be expensive, otherwise they don't exist. And in the end there are five parties left who are interested in this facility. So we lost six competitors and four down to go. That's what we're doing at the moment. And of course we're not waiting for the property to do cool stuff. We're here as well and we do cool stuff. So, and like I said, I'm a member of Hackerspace Hackverse 2 and we have a church which is also not tiny. So we use that church to give lectures because it can house quite a lot of people and to spread the word that we're going to do this beehive thing. One of the lectures we did was by Bill Binney. He also gave a keynote here. And yeah, that was a good name to get some people in that are not just from the Hacker community. And that was excellent.  And after that we had a talk by Mitch Oldman. He's also currently at the camp. And he gave a talk about Silicon Valley and why Silicon Valley is as successful as Silicon Valley is sometimes and why carbon copies that are tried to be made out of Silicon Valley because other parts of the world also want a Silicon Valley, why they fail. And that was excellent. So it was exactly what we needed to spread the word. And besides that, like I said, we want to have a local reach. So at some point we sent a letter out to local community and inviting them for a workshop to enhance your digital security. So normal people, not RT folks. And it still, you get invited to a hacker group that's going to tingle with your laptop. So we teamed up with local police. So the police was inviting people in to secure their laptop, which was awesome. And that actually gave us an excellent outreach to the people living in the neighborhood because now they go like, we like those hackers. Those hackers are cool. So having us as neighbors might be not such a bad thing. And one of the other activities we did with Ansela van de Leest, she gave a workshop targeted to young girls between the age 12 and 17, I think, to fight online harassment and how to digital defend yourself on that. Social capital, I was talking about that. Like I said, we want those cells to be rented out. And rent means that there's a price. Some people will not be able to afford that price. That price can be paid in many ways. So if you can't afford it money-wise, if you contribute enough to the community in there, that price will go down.  If you think it's a cool idea and I can really share my ideas there, your rent will probably go down. That also goes for communities as well. And we want to make it local and keep it local. By that I mean we're not going to source a cleaning company from the next state, but that's going to be local. We can do that.  They did that in Utrecht and they actually got a social involvement award for that project. So we should be able to mimic at least that and make it in also place to live in. And that's basically what I have to say about this. I expect there to be quite a lot of questions. And if that's the case, please line up and if there's any interest, please leave a note at these things and we have a Twitter and a Facebook account. So for that, that is this and I'll be taking questions now. Thank you. Yes. This is more of a comment than a question. Did you consider school for programmers, technologists, school of the modern renaissance specifically dedicated for people in underprivileged minorities, potentially refugees, people with low education? Absolutely. I mean, like I said, we already did two workshops teaching how to digitally defend yourself and we're looking at the local community to actually step in and like I said, there has been living refugees there for quite some time. So getting them in again to help out and to do stuff and maybe do a course or so, that's definitely on our radar. Second question is about the branding because the building, it is the best example of Panopticon. Did you consider naming yourself Panopticon? Yes, we did consider that, but in the Netherlands there are three buildings that are identical. So we have three present. And one of them, the one in Beheida, the foundation that is taking care of that is called the Panopticon. So that would be weird. And because of the shape and the buzzing activities that we want to do there, I think Beheida kind of does the trick as well. But yeah, we did consider that. And these are some aerial pictures that we found online because it's still a prison and of course we can't fly drone there. So we didn't. Okay. I was at home in 2013 and there was a workshop on hacker basis by David from Cyberhippototalism. And one of the persons in the audience as well, I'm from hack 42 and we don't allow people to sleep over there because blah, blah, blah, blah. What did you make your, change your mind? I'm a member of hack 42. I am not hack 42. So this is a project that's pruned out of hack 42. But it's not hack 42 going big. It's one of the buildings in here. Well, there's one building that will be basic. By the looks of it now, hack 42 will move into this facility. It will not be a hack 42 facility. It will be a facility that houses hack 42. Hack 42 will be one of our first renters for a good price. And it will do its heckery thing. Hack 42 will not change. It will just move. Does that answer your question? Yeah. So probably within hack 42, you still can't sleep.  They're totally separate. Well, not totally. But they're two legal entities. Yes. The one on the back. So how are you funding the initial buyout and how are you, what's the financial model, what's the, how are you going to maintain that?  That's basically the question. Yeah. And who's going to own it afterwards? We've been, of course, we've been thinking about this and thinking about this hard. As it's community thing, crowdsourcing sounds like a ideal match, except these kind of numbers, because we are talking about really big numbers, are quite hard to actually crowdsource. So we are looking at funding in alternative ways. And yes, I'm quite vague on that. I do agree. So we're working on it. Let's put it like that. One of the pitfalls you can have, suppose Facebook comes on and thinks this is a brilliant idea. And they decide to fork over 20 million. We really should say no to that offer. Because then it would be a Facebook thing. And if it's a cool project funded by Facebook, I'm pretty sure I'm losing quite a substantial part of my hacker groups that I need to actually get in. So am I against funding by Facebook? Not necessarily, me as a person. But if they found the whole thing, then yes. And if they, so I would not want them as an angel investor or as a substantial investor, if we have this up and running for a couple of years and they come on and we want to give you guys shirts, I'd probably say okay. Does that give an idea of what we're going? So are you planning at least like a majority share to stay with you? Absolutely, yeah. We don't want to rent the property as a foundation. We want to buy it so it's ours so we can make actual decisions. Because if you get money by, suppose you work on funding by, for example, Facebook, at some point we will do something that will cross them. I mean, there's definitely that possibility. So then pulling funding would be a bad thing. So we don't want any revenue in that can stop at any given point because we do stuff. Yes, thank you. In the front. Very interesting. Small questions. Looking at the model itself, it seems very similar to artists in residence. Have you considered to review the current model of artists and residents, artists? I think in Netherlands there are many of them in Europe too. They have way of funding too. Would you join such kind of project or is it completely separated or artists are too different on hackers? At Hack 42 we already had an artist in residence so we know the concept. And bits and pieces of it is definitely comparable. So if we find, I don't know, a very interesting hacker project doing something in Brazil, yes, there should be funding to fly him over and to house him and do his stuff. So it basically, it's a pay-as-you-can thing but we decide if you can or not. And so yes, artists in residence, hackers in residence, it's, yeah, we're taking bits and pieces from other ideas. So if you say it's comparable too, I can't disagree on that. Yes, thank you. Oops. You're good. Hi. By the way, it's an amazing idea. I had one question about the funding but you ended up answering. So my other question is, do you believe this will resist to the zombie apocalypse? It depends what causes the apocalypse but I'm pretty sure we can keep the zombies out. Awesome. And we're trying to, well, if we buy it, in the end we want it to be as sustainable as possible. So we want to create our own energy but of the bad that will not happen because that takes a huge investment. But in time it will become greener and greener. Let's put it like that. And the buildings are awesome. The walls are awesome and that will definitely take something out. And unlike this field, this is above sea level. So we're good. For now. For now, yeah. The back. Really interesting talk. So my question is another funding question. So there was a blockchain talk before your talk and there was a blockchain talk. Yes. So in the Ethereum Foundation there was this kind of decentralized organization that they created for funding perhaps. Have you considered doing a crowdfunding campaign based on cryptocurrency? And the people who invest have a shareholder decision. Yeah, I want to avoid the joke. Like make an ICO, why not? If we're gonna do a money drive and get money in, I frankly do not care in which currency you pay me. If you throw gold bullion over the fence, I'm good with that. If you want to give me a Bitcoin share, but we will not be handing out pieces of the pie of influence in the structure. So there will be no buy-in. I want a 20% share. Here it is. You're allowed to pay a 20% share, but that will not give you 20% influence. Great. That was the thing. You're very insistent on wanting to buy the property. That's correct. Have you considered doing some other construction? For example, friends of mine do something on one of the old Dutch waterline fortresses, and they have the construction that Stadsbosby here is still the one who owns the property, but they have an Erfbacht construction, and that means that Stadsbosby is also continuing to be investing in things there. Maybe they're interested in making that combination. You don't need to do everything yourself. They're not. I personally think the best idea is to actually buy it, because then you have a say of what you can do with it. This is a monument, so you're still bound by quite a lot of laws that you can actually do with the property. It's not a complete property as a monument, and upkeeping a monument to spec takes a lot of money. But actually it's not my decision per se, because Rijksgebouwdeens, the actual owner at the moment, wants to get rid of it. They don't want to rent it out. So that option is basically off the table. So we can't even choose it even if we wanted to at the moment. Are there more questions? We have two mics open. That's it? Oh, there's one. Hi Joss, thank you for your talk. We've met earlier, maybe you remember. Yeah. You showed us a picture of J.A. Balu. Yes. Actually I'm working at KPN now, where I work at the Security Services Department of KPN, and I'm responsible for strategy execution there. How can we, or other big companies, apart from fundraising, funding this idea, help you with making this a reality? Well, KPN is an excellent example of a big company that slowly starts to listen to hackers, to the hacker community. And it's doing an excellent job in that. And so spreading that idea, spreading that mindset, and also spreading that a hacker camp like this is awesome, but that has to happen more. So embrace your hacker and do that there. That would be an excellent idea. So making it known that this initiative exists and work with it and maybe get an office there. I don't know. So if you want a remote office there or have it as a shared working space and just say upfront, yes, we want ex-working spaces there for that amount of time and we will be paying that amount. That will quite seriously help us in our funding efforts. Because then we can go to people who will supply the money and we say, well, we have these rentals already lined up. So you see it's a viable plan. So that will be a helpful thing. Thank you. More questions, still to open mics. Okay, so we're done then. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.


Hello everyone, my name is Deeksha Jain and I secured the 22nd Rankin Civil Services examination 2018. In this video I will be talking about e-governance. So, what is e-governance? It is the use of information and communication technology by the government to enhance the range and quality of information and services that it provides to various stakeholders making governance more efficient, effective, smart and also at the same time strengthening democracy by improving accountability and transparency. So, what are the major pillars of e-governance in India? The first one is the people. For e-governance to work in a healthy manner, they need to be digitally literate people who are able to navigate that digital governance properly. Number 2 is the process. Changing and simplifying the process in the digital sphere is also important. Third is technology. Secure technology which can save the personal data, important information from cyber attacks is also required. Number 4 is resources, financial resources for infrastructure and for improving the technical and digital literacy of people is also required. So, on these four fronts we need to focus to improve our e-governance model. We will now look at the journey of e-governance to some extent as it has developed in India. In 1970, the importance of e-governance was realized for the first time and the Department of Electronics was created for the same. In 1977, the National Information Centre was set up, the NIC. The NIC network also came up in 1987 and state governments like Kerala through Akshaya scheme started delivering some services through e-governance. Recently, Karnataka has taken up the Bhoomi project in which it is digitalizing all its land records which is also a form of e-governance. In 2006, at the central level, e-governance was taken up in mission mode and National e-governance program 2006 was launched. The Department of Information Technology was established in 2012 which was converted into the Ministry of Electronics Information Technology in 2016. After that, the latest we had the digital India project which focuses on creating digital infrastructure, ensuring digital delivery of services and improving digital literacy and making digital India more accessible to people. And the basic legislation which covers the entire information technology sphere in India is the Information Technology Act 2000. It provides a legal recognition for all the transaction carried out by means of electronic data exchange and it imparts lawful recognition to e-commerce and many other digital services that are provided today. This act was also amended in 2008 to focus more on cyber security, cyber terrorism, data protection as well as privacy. So, there have been to improve the data security and cyber security of the country. We have had many initiators like the CERT-IN which was brought in. There has been M-COVERCH, NCIIPC to protect the information infrastructure, NADGrid has also been there. So, there is a lot of focus on cyber security to ensure that e-governance functions in a smooth manner. So, now let us talk about the benefits of e-governance. Why is e-governance so important? In a day and age where more and more transactions are taking place in the digital arena, more and more data is available which is being tapped by commercial institutions for profit. It is important that the government also make use of this digital wave to ensure that it is improving services and its own efficiency so that the citizens can benefit from the welfare schemes of the government properly. So, the major benefits of e-governance are it increases accountability and transparency. Whose responsibility is to do what? Who is the sanctioning authority where the funds are going? Everything has a digital track. So, that increases the accountability and transparency to a great extent. Number two is the least time, least cost and the least space. So, in that way also e-governance is important. It reduces red tapism, then it improves service delivery. It also facilitates centralized storage of data which the economic survey also this year talks about and how it can be beneficial for governance as well as citizens. It strengthens democracy by improving trust of people in the government. It is an environment friendly process because it is paperless. It also facilitates efficient communication and coordination between the various wings and departments of the government thereby improving the efficiency. Sound management of information for planning and decision making through the management information system, geographical information system can be used for better policymaking also. While all these and there are many other benefits of e-governance as well there are certain challenges. First being the technological challenge. Till now there is a lack of interoperability between various applications, various departments of the government. So, if there is a centralized database, if there is interoperability then it will improve the efficiency and it will also help us in reducing leakages. Second privacy, privacy which has been declared a fundamental right by the Supreme Court needs to be at the forefront of the data revolution because in e-governance privacy of the citizen needs to be ensured so that the government or any commercial establishment is not unnecessarily into the citizen's life. Third is standardization of data encoding. Basically this problem is there because earlier when physical records were the sole, were the only records available then most of the data was often non-standard. The unit of measurement from one village would be different in another village, there would be different words used in one region and another region. So, there is a need for standardization of this data. Second is organizational challenges. First is challenge of human resource because the people working within the government, they also need to be trained to be operating all these e-governance modules, applications and softwares. There is bureaucratic resistance which needs to be overcome. Lack of resources and lack of training are other factors in this area. Other challenges are there like infrastructural challenges, there is poor connectivity, we have yet not covered the country 100 percent with the internet or broadband accessibility. Digital divide is there, it is not just about accessibility to internet, but also the language barrier, literacy barrier which manifests themselves into the digital divide, diversity of language. So, e-governance needs to ensure that just because people don't speak a certain language are not left out of development. So, there needs to be focused on interoperability among different languages of all the government portals. And lastly, the e-governance modules, websites, applications need to be more citizen friendly. So, that the more simple and quick that they are, the more people can be taken on board the digital wave. In the end, I would also say that we are making considerable progress. There has been Jandha Nadha linking has led to a lot of e-governance has percolated leakages in by using schemes like Narega Soft, leakages have been plugged, more and more people are being brought under financial inclusion and digital inclusion. The UPI system was formulated by India and it has made digital transactions very efficient. 98 percent of the export and 90.95 percent of the import documents are now processed online and 100 percent of passport and visa information is also present online. So, a lot of considerable development has happened in e-governance and it is continuing to happen. Many state governments have taken initiatives Bhoomi project of Karnataka, Telangana has a scheme where it is co-leading the data of all the people on the basis of their name and addresses. So, it is a revolution which is coming e-governance is the future. We need to ensure that in this wave the privacy and security of people is not compromised. Thank you and that will be all in this matter. Subscribe to our channel and click on the bell icon to get latest updates on upcoming videos.


Hello, good afternoon and welcome to this presentation. This is a presentation about how to make a tier 4 general student visa application outside the UK. I'm just going to navigate my way around and my name is John Hitchman. I'm a student advisor, immigration and finance. I've got a dual role at SOAS, but part of my role is to talk to students and applicants like yourselves about how to get a visa to come to the United Kingdom. And there's a very long link there, sorry we couldn't make it shorter, but this is a link to SOAS webpage. And if you go onto this website, you're going to find some very comprehensive guidance that explains to you how to make a tier 4 application. And the page is split into two. There's applying inside the UK and applying outside. So if you look under the heading, applying outside the UK, you're going to find two pieces of guidance. One of which tells you about the documents that you're going to need and one that tells you about the online visa application process. We're going to go into a lot more detail talking about that now in this presentation, but the guidance is there. It's all written down, so it'd be really good for you to use that when you actually get around to applying for your visa. Okay, so this is what we're going to be talking about today. How do you make your tier 4 general student visa application? How do I apply for that? Where can you apply for it? When should you apply as well? And then quite importantly, we're going to talk about what documents do you need? How much money as well? You're going to need to show that's obviously a very big question. And then we're going to sort of talk about whether you can bring family or not. And finally, at the end, we're going to have a chance for questions. So any questions that you have, if you'd like to type them into the text box, and then at the end of the session, we'll be here to answer those questions and anything you think of at that time. So don't worry, we're not going to disappear. And I'm here with a colleague, advisor and a colleague from admissions as well. So any questions you have about this whole process, we should be able to answer those for you. So let's get started. So who can apply for a tier 4 general student visa? So firstly, you must have been accepted onto a course that serves and have an unconditional offer for studies. That means there aren't any other qualifications or anything you need to do. You've already been given an unconditional offer. And tier 4 is part of what we call the points based system of immigration in the UK. So you need to score 40 points to be granted the visa. You get 30 points for the CAS. That's the confirmation of acceptance for studies. Now the CAS is an electronic document that's created by the admissions team. So has on the UK visas and immigration computer. So it's a document created by us. But the one you apply for your visa, you'll have a reference number and that reference number will be known to the people issuing your visa and it all connects up like that. Now the CAS isn't a letter or a piece of paper. It's an electronic document. And all the details that you need to know about the CAS, including that it's long reference number, will be sent to you in an email by the admissions team. So that's 30 points. And then for the 10 points, that's for maintenance. That's what the UK visas and immigration call maintenance or most people call money. So it's showing that you've got enough money to support yourself while you're studying in the UK. Okay. So how do I apply for this visa? So you use the online application system that I mentioned and that we have guidance for on our website. And then you pay the immigration health surcharge and that's currently £150. So it's increasing to £300. We think possibly in September this year, so hopefully you're going to pay the £150 rate and that's £150 per year of study. So if you're doing a three-year program, then you'll be paying £150 for each of those years. And if you've got four months at the end, you'll be paying an extra £75 for that. And that money covers the cost of your NHS healthcare. So the NHS is our healthcare system in the UK. You'll be paying for that in advance. So any healthcare that you need will be covered by the immigration health surcharge. And there's a fee for applying for the visa. That fee is currently £348. That's going to stay the same until next year. And then also you need to print a cover sheet and submit this cover sheet. We're supporting documents, which we're going to talk about in a lot of detail later on in this presentation. Then you'll also need to give you a biometric. So you may never have done this before.  You'll also be interviewed, a credibility interview. That's a very simple interview where somebody will be speaking to you and asking you questions like, why did you decide to study the subject that you're studying and why are you studying it so as and what led you to this? Maybe what your career aspirations are. So it's nothing to be worried about. We have some guidance about this as well that we link to on our website. And then for certain people coming from certain countries, you might need to have a TB test as well and you can find a list of those countries online or that's also linked to from our guidance. Okay, so where can I apply for the visa? So you normally apply for this in your country of nationalities. That's the nationality that's stated in your passport. Now, you've got a star there. The exception to that would be people that are outside of their country of nationality with a right of residence in another country. And what that really means is that you're in another country with a visa type that isn't a tourist visa. So you're not just on holiday in another country. You're there as a student or maybe a worker or in some other capacity, but you're not a tourist. So if you're in that other country with something other than tourist visa, you could apply for tier four in that country. And then once you finish your online application, you book an appointment and that'll be to go to a local center in the country that you've applied in. There'll be some instructions that are given to you about where to go for that appointment or it's located.  The interview will normally be conducted over a Skype line. So you'll go somewhere and sit in a room and speak into a laptop or a computer. And then you submit your cover sheet and your application form and the supporting documents. And then a 30 day vignette is issued and that will allow you to travel to the United Kingdom in time for your studies. And the vignette is a sticker in your passport. So it's a stick on page with your photograph on it that allows you to get to the UK. And then once you get here, you can collect your biometric residence permit and that's a plastic card with a chip in it. That contains all that biometric information that we've discussed. So your fingerprints and your photograph that's being digitized at your appointment. Okay, and when should I apply? So you can apply up to three months before the start of your program. And the important thing to remember before you apply is to make sure you have all the documents listed as academic evidence. So the academic documents in your CAS, there'll be a list of documents that so as a scene, in order to give you an unconditional offer. And UK visas and immigration will generally want to see all of those documents. Okay, and then also as we've said, you've got to meet the financial requirement. You've got to show that you've got the money to support yourself. So your financial documents have got to be absolutely correct to the UK visas and immigration guidance. And we'll talk a bit more about that, but for very detailed specific guidance that's on our webpage that I mentioned earlier. Okay, so we've talked about documents. What are you likely to need? So you're going to need two passport photos that meet the UK VI photo guidance, which you can find online, which we link to as well. You're going to need to include your current passport. You're going to need your confirmation of acceptance for studies. That's not a document that you submit, but you'll need that email in order to copy information from that into your visa application form. Then you're going to need original qualifications that are listed in the CAS. Okay, perhaps proof of English language ability as well if that's listed in your CAS statement. And that could be a number of different things. It might be a language test, or it might be one of your degree qualifications that was taught in a country where people speak English. And proof of maintenance as well. So that's your bank statements that meet the guidance. Any of these documents that aren't in English, you'd need to get them officially translated into English to be acceptable. Now, the only exception to these documents and who needs to show them are people that are classified as low risk nationals. And you can find out quite easily if you're one of those. And this is also known as differentiation arrangements. If you are a low risk national, you don't need to provide those financial and educational documents. So you're providing a lot less information. But you are signing something in the form that you have the document. So you still need to hold the money and you still need to have the qualifications and keep them at home. If they are requested, you can submit them later, but you just don't need to submit those at the time. And then how much money do you need to show? This is a really important question that students often ask. So if your program is longer than eight months in length, you're going to need to show the full fees for the year. So the whole fees for the first year plus 11,385 pounds of maintenance. If your program is shorter than eight months, you're going to need to show the full fees for the program plus 1,265 pounds for each month or partial month. So for instance, if you were studying a course that was five and a half months long, you would need to show six times 1,265 pounds because the half month, they would round it up to a full month. So month or partial month, be aware of that. Now, if your fees are shown as paid on your CAS, you don't need to show that money in the bank. So if your full fees are shown as paid on the CAS, you just need to show the maintenance amount if it's more than eight months, 11,385. Now, you might be receiving a scholarship or sponsorship or receiving loans, an educational loan from your country of origin. And if that's the case, you can use documents to prove these and if they cover your full maintenance and fees, then that's the only documents that you'd need. But perhaps they don't, perhaps they just cover your fees or part of your fees, and then you need to show the remainder held in the bank account again. Any money that you show in the bank, so sorry, like actually going back, you can use money held in your bank account and you can also use money held in your parents' bank account. And any money that you show must have been held for at least 28 days before the date that you apply. And when we say the date that you apply, that's not the date that you go for your appointment, that's the date that you pay online for the visa application. So, can you bring family? Yeah, if you're on a postgraduate programme of over a year in length, or if your government sponsored programme of more than six months, you can bring the family members of what will be called dependents.  And the maintenance for dependents is slightly less, but you still need to show money to support each family member you're bringing. So, for a course of more than eight months, it'll be £7,605 for each dependent. And for a course of eight months or less, it'll be £845 per month or partial month. So, hopefully this presentation has been useful. If you use this and our guidance that's online, we'll hopefully have a successful visa application. And we'll see you at SOAS. But if you have any questions, we're here now and we're ready to answer them. So, thanks for listening. And please fire away with any questions that you have. So, Peng Cheng has asked, if my passport is ready for the end of July, is it possible to apply for the visa? So, yeah, it should be okay to apply for a visa in July. The processing time is supposed to be 15 working days. That's side of the United Kingdom. That isn't always the case, but it generally is. So, that's about three weeks, you know, maybe a month if you wanted to round up. So, that should give you plenty of time to get here in time for September. Okay, well, we're still here, but otherwise, oh yeah, okay, we've got a question from Amy. How long does it take for a cast to be issued? I'll let my colleague Sean tell on to that one. It just depends when you've requested it. We're dealing with the moment with CASIS submitted at the beginning of the end of May. And we're prioritising CASIS for students who start early, like the beginning of September. Thanks very much for watching and listening, and we'll see you all soon at SOAS. Thank you. Bye-bye.