You'll have to, first of all, forgive the accent. Secondly, I'm fighting a bit of a cold, so bear with me. First of all, thanks for the invitation to come. It's a real honor to be asked. This is also my first time in Scotland, and so it's a pleasure to be here. I was in Bath yesterday at the university giving a talk for the web leaders and their IT teams from around the United Kingdom, and they too reminded me that my accent was a bit off. So I'm going to talk about some of the big trends that we're seeing and hope mostly to be short and to get to a conversation, and I look forward to spending the rest of the day with you. Let me first say that I'm a huge fan of JISC and of CEDIS and I've been a student of their work now for almost a decade. I've been things like director of academic technology and director of e-learning for various universities and states, and most recently in community and technical colleges in the state of Washington where we had approximately 500,000 students and 34 colleges, and we were involved in both a significant amount of online learning but also open educational resources and I'll talk a bit about that. So I feel very much at home with my colleagues from JISC. Of course all of these slides are under an open license and Lorna has them and will make them available. I always like to start with the big idea of why we're here and what we're talking about and fundamentally in education we're talking about people having the right and in fact a human right to an education. And if you look at the United Nations Bill of Human Rights you'll see that recently they've actually added the right to an education which is somewhat interesting. They've not had this in the past and this is really because the capabilities that we have today and have had for roughly the last 10 years have changed significantly. And the main reason that we're talking about and having a serious conversation about making sure that everybody on the planet has access to educational resources and a quality education is because what we produce today and what we have produced for approximately a decade in education is digital resources. So what we produce in video, audio, slide decks, curriculum, textbooks, yes we may still use printed materials but there are digital versions of those things. And as we'll talk today, digital things have unique characteristics mainly that you can store them for almost zero cost, you can distribute them for almost zero cost and you can replicate them. So we can make a million or a billion copies of this slide deck, store it, distribute it for almost nothing. And that's different.  It's a very different world that we live in today and yet our structures in how we think about education, how we fund education, who gets access to education is very much bound up in old models of thinking around distribution and storage of knowledge. And it need not be that way anymore. So if I accomplish one thing today I hope to break old models a bit more and get us thinking a little bit more creatively about how we can share learning resources. Why is this important? Why have we dedicated our careers to education? Fundamentally because we believe that an education is a good thing. We believe it's a good thing for individuals, for families, for societies to have an educated citizenry. And if you look at the amount of money that governments spend around the world they spend roughly 5% of their GDP on education investments. And so the question, who's here from government? Okay, so the question is that governments are asking around the world and we'll be specific in a moment is how can we maximize the public's dollar in the education investments that we make? And I would argue that fundamentally right now we're doing a relatively poor job at that because our investments are based on old models and not models that take advantage of the affordances of digital things and of open licensing. So we'll talk about both. So not only do we, John Daniels mentioned a minute ago which was fun because here's a slide. Not only do we have this opportunity but there's tremendous demand for a higher education and it's increasing because more and more people around the world sort of are getting it that if you want to have a good life and you want to be recession proof and you want to have more money and have a better lifestyle and do well by your family that you need to have a higher education. It's simply a prerequisite to having a good job and being a contributing member to society these days. And so I'll let you read the statistics here but I want you to ask is you're reading this what do you think the odds are that the world will build four major universities that serve 30,000 students each to open every week for the next 15 years? Is that in the budgets of Scotland right now? From what I've heard this morning, I think not. And so that calls upon us to think in new ways about how we dedicate our educational investments. So the good news is this is not some crazy dream not something I cooked up on my way up from Bath last night on the easy jet but this is actually a decade long plus conversation that folks have been having about if educational resources are digital if we can truly share them at the marginal cost of zero and if we've got the licensing structure to do it what's possible? And so my boss at Creative Commons her name is Catherine Casserly when Cathy was at the Hewlett Foundation as a program officer she did a lot of the early investments in open educational resources. So Cathy and her colleagues funded MIT to go open Carnegie Mellon to go open they funded the Open University their open learn project to get started and many many other projects around the world and this is a quote from Cathy in 2006 she said quote at the heart of the movement toward open educational resources is the simple and powerful idea that the world's knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the web in particular provide an opportunity for everyone to share use and reuse it end quote. The very next year there was a meeting in Cape Town, South Africa that was hosted by Desmond Tutu and out of it came the Cape Town Declaration which is a really excellent document I recommend reading it if you've not seen it it's short the first sentence of the Cape Town Declaration says we are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the internet open and free for all to use these educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. So again amplifying this idea UNESCO actually coined the term open educational resources at a meeting in 2002 and what's more important is last year there was a big meeting some of you were there in Paris called the Paris or what came out of it is called the Paris OER Declaration it's a big OER conference there were 195 countries from around the world and there was unanimous consent around the Paris OER Declaration and it said many things about and in your I think in the openness handout that was provided for this conference you'll see the main points it's A through H but it said things like support open educational resources support resource around it support innovative faculty who want to step forward and do this but it also said point H which I'll harp on a bit today that governments should actually adopt open policies and an open policy is very simple it says publicly funded resources should be openly licensed resources even better publicly funded resources should go straight into the public domain which is even more free and gives you more access than under an open license and governments were having serious conversations about this so what are we talking about here with open licensing I think we all intuitively understand the affordances of digital things we understand when we've got a digital textbook that yes the production costs are high and yes the maintenance costs are also high but if we do that once and we've got that digital object we can actually share it with everybody at the marginal cost of zero we get that what was a bit of a challenge a decade ago is we had two choices in most countries around the world you had public domain and I'm not familiar with the laws in Scotland about how something gets in the public domain can anybody tell me yeah same in the US it's a rather unfortunate set of circumstances to get your work into the public domain in the United States first you have to die and then after you're dead you have to wait 70 years or not you because you're gone but the rest of the society has to wait 70 years and then your work goes into the public domain so that was option A for sharing your resources and option B was all rights reserved copyright where no one could use your work because it was all rights reserved you held all the rights there's nothing wrong with copyright it's just that 10 years ago or so when the internet allowed us all to share knowledge and information that's in education, culture, data, government data all sorts of information and our intention was to share what we had was all rights reserved assuming we were living and so what you had to do if you wanted to share is you had to have a lawyer and your lawyer had to talk with somebody else's lawyer and you had to write a contract that said here's our agreement to share these resources at no cost and these are the rights that I give you well most people in education most faculty and teachers don't have their own personal attorneys believe it or not and even if they could they probably couldn't afford them and so this was a problem there was nothing in between these extremes so a bunch of lawyers from around the world got together and said this is not a difficult problem what we need are simple free open copyright licenses that anybody on the planet can add to their all rights reserved work so the genius of Creative Commons a decade ago was it said we're not going to try to replace copyright we're not going to try to usurp that regime although there were several that said that that's exactly what should be done rather Creative Commons respects copyright says keep your ownership keep your intellectual property you the author you should not give that up and if you want to share you can add an open license to your work so when people do this so this is the basic idea of Creative Commons simple standardized way to grant copyright permissions to your work you don't need a lawyer it's free simple that's the idea by the way a colleague from open source software here we're having a conversation all these ideas are not new ideas these were ideas that were really developed by the open source software community for many many years before Creative Commons existed and all of the principles and ideas about sharing really come from from software all all the Creative Commons did was said we're going to take those ideas and we're going to enable you to apply them to creative works which are under copyright so when people choose a license you you have choice all of our licenses require attribution which means if you use my textbook use my course whatever it is you must give me attribution you must give me credit and that's we understand that in the academy right you use somebody's work you you cite them you give them credit the other three are options share like essentially says if you take my work and you make a derivative work you make an adaptation you make a big change to it that that new work that you produce must be licensed under the same terms so this is what wikipedia uses they use attribution share like non-commercial says what you would think it says you can take my work you can distribute it you can perform it you can use it for free you can make changes to it but you may not sell it you can't put it on the web and sell it for nineteen ninety five no derivatives says you can take my work but you can't change it can't make any modifications in education we tend to stay away from this one in fact the no derivatives uh... clause violates open educational resources definitions because of course educators change stuff right they take a little bit from here and a little bit from there and they mix it up and they change it and they modify it to meet the needs of their learners and to meet the needs of of the business community that they're sending their students into so when you mix and match those different conditions you get one of these six open copyright licenses uh... and again that these are free they don't cost anything i should say right up front people always say you know what's the angle what are you trying to sell how are you funded is this some corporate scheme uh... creative commons is a very small organization uh... about twenty five people headquarters uh... and we've got teams around uh... the world we're funded mostly by foundations who simply are glad that we exist because we make it easier to share on the web so we're not selling anything just to be clear if you look at our licenses on a continuum uh... when i say at least free to most free we're not talking about costs there is no cost to use the licenses we're talking about degrees of freedom that you're extending to other people uh... if something's in the public domain people can use it to do anything they want with it they don't even have to give you attribution they don't have to give you credit creative commons attribution or cc by so the by is like a byline this book is by uh... lorna cambell that's that's what by and then by essay etc so you don't kind of go down this the licenses get uh... more restrictive not to say that that one is better than the other we have six licenses because different people uh... need different restrictions on their work for different reasons uh... and so we maintain all six licenses uh... but more often than not an education we try to stay toward the top of that continuum and here's why uh... if you uh... if you line up the licenses and ask what can you remix together so one of the benefits in education materials that are openly licensed is that you can take up something from m it open courseware and something from the open university and something from uh... university of glass gal that all have open licenses on them and you can mix them together and create something new uh... and that's a benefit and you can see where there's a green check you're allowed to remix different license works and where there's an x you're not and so to be up toward uh... up toward these gives you more degrees of freedom one of the reasons why people around the world use uh... open licensing and creative commons in particular is not only do we have uh... teams of lawyers around the world that makes sure the licenses work in every uh... country and every legal jurisdiction on the planet but our licenses also come in three layers so you would imagine a legal document would have legal code it would be a big long any lawyers in here no good let's talk about anybody have any good lawyer jokes so uh... it's a you know it's a twenty page document and it's what you would expect it's about a bunch of legal jargon that you would take to court if anybody ever violated your your copyright and that's good to have because it's you feel good about your rights being protected uh... but most of us don't read that and really frankly don't want to read that and so most people read this what we which we call the human readable deed which is i think kind of funny it's like lawyers aren't human so we have this human readable deed for the rest of us and it's written at a grade six level uh... at the bottom of the deed you can see a variety of different languages that you can quickly translate the license into and the idea here is to make these licenses accessible to everybody so if i'm a teenager uh... in the Czech Republic and i'm looking at this MIT course and i want to know what rights i have to modify it to use it uh... to share it forward uh... that should be accessible to everybody and not just somebody with a legal degree so that's the human readable deed and this is what most people see on the web and then any tech folks in the room i know there are several appreciate that the licenses are also machine readable so there's actually machine code in the licenses that tools on the web can read so for example if you go to google's advanced search and you search for algebra, textbook or whatever you can actually filter your search results at the bottom of the screen by usage rights and what google's searching against our creative commons licenses on the web uh... we try to make this very simple even though this is our license chooser it is pretty simple most of us still think it's too complicated and we've actually just stolen the top product development guy from mozilla uh... to redesign all of the tools around uh... creative commons technologies to make it even easier for people to use. Our goal is to have this be a one-click thing. I'm going to add my license add the license to my work uh... but nevertheless if you go to our homepage and click on get a license you answer two questions it tells you what the license is you put in any metadata about it what's the title of your work who should get attribution and then you copy the code you drop it in your web page and you're done if it's a different work like a word document or a pdf or something you can change the format and apply the license most people though actually don't get licenses from our website they get them on the web on different platforms so people that upload images to flicker flicker allows you to add a creative commons license to your work people who upload videos to youtube we've all heard of youtube uh... you can choose a creative commons attribution license and put it on your youtube video and this is growing so fast that might my stats are out of date but i think there's something like forty or fifty years of cc by licensed video now on youtube that you can remix in youtube actually gives you a remix video tool so you can leverage that so there are just a few items out there on the web uh... this number is probably low by half our our data analytics are frankly lousy and that's something else that we're working on right now not just for us to know how much is out there uh... but what's important is we want to enable you to know how much of your work is being used and by whom and what the derivatives are so our goal is to give every license or every author who is licensed their works with open licenses actually have a nice little dashboard where they can say i'm a faculty at the university of glass go and i've shared my textbook under an open license how many people have used it how many uh... different translations have their benefit my book how many classrooms around the world are taking advantage of this has my book forked other different versions of my book out there and so we're working on on that right now this is not some uh... some u.s. centric in fact we've got teams in seventy four countries around the world you'll see that there's actually a uh... scottish affiliate uh... these are teams of lawyers educators sometimes people from government uh... people from uh... culture so there's musicians artists all share this this basic idea that they want to share what they produce and they want to help other people learn about that as well and so uh... these are fairly eclectic teams some of them are small two three people uh... some of them are very large uh... fifteen so like the team in australia uh... it depends on on which country were adding more all the time i think mongolia was just added a few weeks ago uh... creative commons as an organist as a global organization works across uh... several areas education is that the unit that i lead uh... but also we work in uh... science and data somebody from okfn no but uh... open knowledge foundation i think many of you know we work very closely with them on science and data uh... government philanthropy i'll talk about that in a moment uh... culture which is really where creative commons came from came out of the uh... artists and musicians uh... photographers who wanted to share their works online and glam glam is galleries libraries archives and museums so this was something that i had no idea about when i came to creative commons two years ago uh... but libraries are actually wanting to share their works online and the metadata about their works uh... online uh... in museums as you might expect they have this mission to share uh... their works with the world uh... and then a median platforms we talked about how we integrate with platforms uh... there are several big adoptions out there wikipedia obviously has just a few materials online uh... flicker there's something like one hundred seventy five million cc licensed images uh... and then of course higher education which is where we work the open university has an amazing site called open learn where currently they take about five percent of all their content and put it under a creative commons license and they share it with the world this has this has real impacts lorna mentioned when i was with the community colleges in the state of washington uh... we built something uh... called the open course library which is the entire general education curriculum and we put it under a creative commons attribution license anything that we built was under a cc by license but we took before we built anything we looked around the world at at other projects were willing to share with us because why in the world when we recreate the wheel right we might be revised and took so we took from m it open coursework which they've got their twenty six hundred courses online all openly licensed we took from the open university and we translated uh... some things so that it was appropriate for community college and technical students because an m it physics course or an open university physics course was a little bit too high of a level so we we modified it but we didn't start from zero so the uh... this organization the open coursework consortium was mentioned uh... this is also ten years old this is uh... really all the universities around the world who have this idea of sharing and are openly licensing their content uh... they get together annually and and share more this is also happening in primary and secondary uh... schools uh... in the united states we call it k-twelve kindergarten uh... big oer projects uh... all over the world one of them nearby in poland uh... where uh... we've got a very strong team in worcester and they help the government understand that not all polish uh... primary school students had access to textbooks because the parents uh... have to buy the books and the net result of that is that roughly half of the kids didn't have the government looked at that and said you know what that's unacceptable how can you learn if you don't have the learning resources that you need and so for a uh... about fourteen million uh... u s a year i don't know what that translate to and in polish currency i'd have to look uh... but for you know for for a national government that's a very modest investment uh... they're actually putting out our piece so anyone can can build these books including the uh... commercial textbook publishing industry uh... but the condition is is that on all the books there will be a creative commons attribution and so the different school districts in poland if they want to make modifications they've got the legal rights to do so it's all in polish it meets the national standards now all the kids can have it was a relatively simple solution so we don't have time today but there are literally hundreds of open educational resource projects around the world we've thrown this term around a bit but what does it mean this is the definition that the hewlett foundation uses that most uh... project key off of so the u nesco definition that we see the others use very similar definitions and i'll let you read it but what's really important is that for something to be or it must have to uh... characteristics one is that it must be free at meaning no cost it must be gratis or is the open source software community likes to say uh... free is in free beer uh... but it also must you must have the legal rights to repurpose the resource uh... so you must be able to change it in the or our space we say you must have the legal rights to do the four ours and the four are so that the rights to reuse so i can take your thing and just use it as it is i must be able to revise it so i must be able to change it and make it my own so that it meets my needs i must be able to remix it so take some of your work and some of your work and some of mine and mush it together and create something new and i must be able to redistribute that new thing that i've created or or the thing i took from you i must be able to share it with everyone else and if i don't have the legal rights the legal rights to do those four things it's not an open educational resource so we've talked a little bit about mucs uh... you know today uh... most mucs out there are not truly open they're not all we are uh... the good news is the europeans are starting to uh... show the world how to do that properly so there's uh... the uh... what is it open ed up or open up opening up education and there's a series of mucs around that uh... not just in in uh... europe but uh... they've got they've got israel now and and russia and several other countries uh... and they're actually starting with the idea that mucs should actually be openly licensed and they're making that up a bit of a precondition to join so um... this is spreading right and what's interesting is that funders are now starting to say we like these ideas and in fact uh... purely from a funders perspective one of the things that funders governments foundations other people that have money that want things done uh... they want to see impact for their investments and they want to see a return on investment they want the highest uh... efficiency that they can possibly get for the dollar invested and i know that that those are discussions that are happening here i was watching on the news last night uh... you've got less money and you're trying to figure out how to be more efficient with the dollars uh... that you're spending i should say the pounds that you're spending uh... and and foundations are no different we'll get the government's in a moment uh... so the punchline on foundations is that they're starting to require if you take their money you put an open license on what you build you don't like those terms don't apply for the grant it's that simple so some of the benefits of all we are uh... search and discovery so be able to filter on the web and and have tools that can actually see all we are helpful uh... here's what the legal rights give you and let's be very clear if i uh... to everybody knows coursera the the mook right so universities big universities are giving coursera content if you and i work at uh... the university of edinburgh and this afternoon we say wow look at that really great coursera course let's take that or take parts of it and use it in our course for our lectures tomorrow uh... if there's no open license on it if it's all rights reserved we just violated their copyright uh... we are subject to prosecution under u.s. copyright law because it's a u.s. organization and we could be sued under international uh... copyright treaties it's it's serious business uh... if it has an open license on it the the the story would be we don't even ask need to ask permission the permissions are given to us in advance because there's an open license on it and as long as we comply with the terms of the license which it would depend on which creative commons license it is we can just take it and we can use it tomorrow that's the difference right so it really is uh... meaningful some of the things the legal rights get you is the ability to make a translation so we're talking about the polish uh... uh... k-12 books if you wanted to use those here in scotland uh... that them being in polish probably isn't useful to you and your students but you could translate them uh... into whatever language you wanted uh... making books accessible is also critical do you have national accessibility laws about every it doesn't matter what disability somebody might have you must provide the educational resources in a way that meets their needs uh... i don't know about your universities but universities where i'm from i do a very lousy job at that for the most part and we tend to retrofit courses only when students come to those classes uh... so if there's an open license on something if you didn't do a good enough job somebody else can fix it and they don't need to ask your permission before they modify your course to make it accessible these are probably the two most important aspects though of oer if you can't customize materials in the twenty-first century and you're a teacher you're working with the wrong material so i i i live in washington state in the northwest uh... in in my state uh... are and i'm a little upset about this because i have two young boys they're eight and five years old they're in the public schools the books that the government provides to my boys are on average ten years old uh... including their political science books and their uh... so you know pluto is still a planet and all this garbage and outdated information and the books are only available in paper and i i talked to the teachers in the schools uh... where my kids go to school and i say you know how do you feel about that and they're very upset right because they know better and what they really like to do is modify those resources or use other resources but they're required to use these outdated uh... materials and my boys are actually afraid to use their learning resources because their paper uh... we have to sign something that says if my kid loses the book i have to pay for the book and my sons know that a hundred and fifty dollars is a lot of money and so the net result of that is they refuse to take their books back and forth to school because they're afraid to lose the books because they don't want me to pay me what kind of system is this right this is nuts and so the uh... the ability for uh... for faculty and teachers to be able to do that is critical affordability obviously important as well uh... i i anybody know how much textbooks cost on average for higher ed in a year in the u.s. about roughly a thousand u.s. dollars that's good that's a good thing so the united states especially in the community and technical colleges which is about one half of the population of higher education uh... the costs of textbooks can be twenty five to fifty percent of the cost of going to college or to university so it's it's uh... it's very high so to the extent that uh... open educational resources have a cost of uh... that's meaningful and it allows people to get to their degree faster it allows them to get that job faster allows them to get back into the economy quicker than they might have otherwise so uh... so that's all nice and sweet and wouldn't it be wonderful if we had world peace but is this really gonna happen and how what are the arguments with governments specifically about how to do this so with governments it really comes down to this uh... they need to understand that uh... most of our systems in education are built on this concept of rivalrous resources if i have something i have it and you don't right and we that our systems are built that way it which makes a lot of sense because uh... resources a lot of resources are rivalrous and it is a zero-sum game uh... but digital resources are not and so to the extent that what we're using for resources are digital and they can be shared the marginal cost of zero uh... we need to think about that so a couple uh... quick models i don't know if you can see this but slides will be available we actually uh... we made this up for a uh... a government recently who needed to understand the current structure of academic research and what open access research looks like and the current structure of funding educational resources and what open educational resources looks like so this first is how research tends to work in most governments around the world government announces an RFP you want to uh... fund the research on pancreatic cancer right so you announce an RFP uh... scholars uh... then get that grant they do the research they write the papers they submit to the articles they submit to journals on submission they must turn their copyright over to the journal so now the author no longer owns or the public owns nothing and the professor who wrote the article owns nothing the journals then published mainly closed access journals your libraries have to subscribe to those journals again using public funds now the public's paid for it not twice but how many universities are there in scotland twenty four okay so now the government's paid another twenty four times and if there's multiple libraries on the same campus maybe more than that the public is granted little or no reuse rights to those articles because if you're not a student or a faculty member at those universities you don't have access to that research and the net result is slow scientific progress why well because if you can't afford a fifteen or twenty thousand dollar your journal you're out of luck you can't read the research that's the model today this is a new model around open access governments are putting out money putting out our fees for pancreatic research but they're saying there's an open license requirement in the money so if you take this money uh... after embargo period you will share what you all the same stuff happened scientific research happened they submit they tell the journals upon submission look i i i my hands are tied i've got this requirement i have to share what i write it goes into the traditional journals under embargo period meaning the public doesn't get access for six months or twelve months something like that it's a negotiated time period but then after that the public and download the articles from an open access repository in many cases full reuse rights are granted meaning there's a creative commons license on the articles and what does that result in well a lot more people in fact anybody in the world can get access to that research now and uh... and in fact science moves faster big surprise uh... there was a case in the united states recently uh... high school kid anybody see this is actually pancreatic cancer research basically this is high school kid he's in classes teacher gives him an assignment assignment is find a medical test and improve it what kind of assignment is that for a high school kid right kid has a biology class he says okay so he picks pancreatic cancer because i think somebody's family had had it personal issue for him so he looks in the current test in the u.s. is takes something like three days the blood test cost five hundred dollars seems reasonable to me right that's not long to wait for a test kid says too long cost too much so he goes he does research he keeps hitting these paywalls can't get access to the articles goes to his his library at the high school they've got nothing goes to the university library oh sorry government has trimmed our budget we've had to cut journals so he couldn't get access to the journal so he ended up doing all of his research or most of it in open access journals where he could get access to this and that result punchline on this is the kid redesigns the medical test so now it doesn't take three days it takes five minutes it doesn't cost five hundred dollars it costs three cents it's a factor of something like twenty thousand percent cheaper and much faster and you don't pull blood anymore you can take a q-tip and swab the inside of your mouth use the dna to do the test and his test is ninety nine point nine nine nine percent effective which is a higher rate of effectiveness so the point here is what might be accomplished if you start to make information make research make knowledge available we don't know because we've never done it before right but the fact of the matter is there's roughly five percent of the world's populations got access to high quality education higher education today there's a whole lot more people that want to come in that aren't able to get in because of the way that we structure similarly here's what it looks like for education two minutes okay so these are the arguments for government right we say what government here's how much this is what textbooks look like if you took a two hundred fifty page textbook you would could you copy by hand you could do print on demand but here's how much it cost a copy by computer point zero zero zero eight four cents here's what distribution costs look like right so for all intents and purposes copying and distribution is free here's what properly disrupted markets look like so here's movie television songs etc this is what you can get today for about eight u.s. dollars a month here's what music looks like anybody subscribe to spotify or any of these services right it's amazing fifteen million songs for you know ten dollars a month and it's free if you're on your desktop it's just if you want them on your mobile phone you pay the ten bucks a month so why would you even paid ninety nine cents a song anymore you basically get access to all of the music in the world for ten dollars a month not a bad deal here's here's here's the comparison right for twenty dollars a month you kind of get access to all the movies and all the television or you can lease one textbook uh... from a commercial textbook company now which markets have been properly disrupted by the fact that their services and their products are digital it's a government's are starting to ask and educators are starting to ask when the marginal cost of sharing these resources is digital what should we do with that capability because clearly this isn't doing cap so and then and then uh... frankly this i asked three questions when i sit down with governments uh... and i tend to get answers yes to all three right do you understand efficient use of dollars saving students money increasing access so this is happening california just put out five million to build fifty cc by licensed open textbooks british columbia saw that and said that's a good idea they put down another uh... money for another sixty u.s. department of labor put out two billion u.s. dollars two years ago for u.s. community college to build next generation programs in green technologies advanced manufacturing allied health guess what they put a creative commons attribution license requirement in the grant it says this as if you take the money whatever you build or revise with public money you will share it you don't like those terms don't apply for the grant you think anybody didn't apply for twenty million dollar grant they all took the money and they said we're happy to share so just uh... to wrap up couple more points uh... this also the white house just on the uh... open access and academic research just told it's twenty three largest agencies n i h national science foundation nasa department of education said from now on we're not doing that old academic research model now on if people take public money after a twelve month embargo period they'll have free access to it this is what all these things are talking about it publicly funded resources should be openly licensed let me just get to a final slide here since i'm out of time so maybe my favorite church ill quote to close it up so church ill uh... said if you have knowledge light up let others light their candles with it right and what he's getting at here is that if i share my knowledge with you it actually does no harm in fact uh... we're both better off it's a non rival risk knowledge is what we pedal in higher education and given that it's digital now and we can share things at the marginal cost of zero with open licensing we should do so and this is what's important to keep in mind and frankly this is uh... where we need to stiffen our backbones because the fight against these ideas is significant from existing business models which don't like these conversations so the open access model is being fought strongly right now by a big company called el severe which is right across uh... the ocean here in in the Netherlands that owns a big chunk of the academic journals and why are they fighting well because they're a multi-billion-dollar industry that makes forty six percent profit i'm sorry thirty six percent profit margins on their income there's no other business on the planet that makes thirty six percent profit margins why do they well because you the government's are paying for all this they pay for nothing they get all the copyright and then they sell it back to you twenty six times i mean it's a great business model if you can get it uh... is it a good deal for us and so this is what we need to do but what we also need to keep in mind is we have to hold all existing business models as secondary priorities to our goals of being efficient with public monies and with foundation because if we're not leveraging the tools of the day uh... then that's that's our fault if we've got students that can't afford and can't get into education it's only because we're not leveraging the tools the technical tools and the legal tools that we can so uh... my organization stands with you if you like these ideas in a final thought for the twenty-first century the opposite of open is no longer closed the opposite of open is broken thank you very much thanks cable a few minutes for questions for you some like presentations from summer all other aspects questions for cable you skipped over particularly because you ran out of time you talked about what is given up for free fully by internet and you talked about efficient models how do you the various peaks how do we retain what we do sell there are aspects of accreditation student support materials absolutely how do we find that sweet spot between the closed system how do we fund it and the system still funds that support accreditation yes i was asked to repeat the question so people online can hear i'll summarize if that's okay uh... so given given these trends uh... and if universities fully engage in these ideas how do they what's the economic model how do they still make money and i would extend your question to say if universities get involved in mooks and you know online learning at a mass scale will people still come will they still pay tuition what does this mean for universities so i think there are several answers to that one answer is well several of you are probably familiar with clayton christensen's disruptive innovations theory right disruptive innovation so christensen if you don't know him as a Harvard business scholar and basically what he says is if your business or service you know goes digital especially what happens is that new entrance to the market can come in relatively easily because the cost or the barriers to joining that market are lower than they ever have been so think about newspapers today if you wanted to start a newspaper twenty years ago you'd better have several hundred million pounds in your back pocket if you want to start a blog you can be up and running in five minutes not the same thing but anyone can start to contribute so i think part of the answer to your question is universities today don't really sell content well universities sell is access to great faculty they sell student services they sell an experience of getting away from home and joining a new community they sell access to colleagues that you're going to be peers with in your professional career they sell finding your mate they sell all sorts of things and i think a lot of people will still pay for those experiences so i think it's erroneous to say that students are paying for access to content if that were true why does anybody go to MIT anymore MIT has been giving away their content for a decade when MIT said they were going to give away their content everybody said you're nuts nobody will go to MIT anymore and big surprise their admissions have only gone up and i don't know of any university that's opened up its content that's seen a decline in admissions people go for different reasons so i think universities don't have much to fear about open educational resources i also don't think open access is just a huge win on academic research if you're a scholar a university to get access to knowledge faster and less expensive and remove the middleman and the inefficient processes that's only a good thing i think what universities have to fear most is that they have not been disrupted yet by digital technologies we've not yet seen online learning in particular seriously disrupt higher education i think it's coming i don't know when we'll just have to think about that but again my boys are 8 and 5 i have no idea what their options for college are going to look like i expect that what they're going to be able to do is to take some of their courses in something like a MOOC and get credit for it very easily because pathways are already being created from non-traditional sources like MOOCs or other learning experiences into traditional accreditation i was with Mozilla yesterday we were talking about open badges when we were in Bath Mozilla is actually talking directly to Fortune 500 companies and other big multinationals and saying what skills and competencies do you need in your employees what do you want including good writing skills and diplomatic skills the ability to work with international teams and so not just tactical skills and they're backing those skills and competencies into badges so was anybody in the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts or anything like that we had badge sashes if you think about badges they were discreet information about what you knew and what you could do and you had to perform those tasks i have to put band-aids and put a tourniquet on you before i get my emergency preparedness badge so if you think about that that's much more information and better discreet information that you can do as opposed to walking into my office and you can see all my pretty degrees that are on my wall but they don't tell you anything about what i can do and in fact you called Ohio State University and says so what can cable green do we're thinking of hiring him there's not a single thing that Ohio State could tell you about me and so we have a really lousy way i mean degrees think about a degree a piece of paper that's used as a proxy to tell businesses whether or not they should hire somebody so i think that these bad systems are going to be replaced and disrupted we just don't know how


Good evening from Washington. It is eight o'clock here, and we are having polls closing in 17 states right now We've had a couple polls closed earlier in the night and our election cycle in Covering these elections tonight polls closed at sort of rotating times across the country so at eight o'clock right now is sort of the biggest poll closing time that we've seen so far and Some of the polls that have closed earlier are still too close to calls for example, Florida is Everything will probably come down to Florida in North Carolina, and we're seeing raw vote come in from Florida It's very very close. So this is an exciting election night, and we're happy to be with you and take your questions We have our first question from Legos All right, hi Betsy, how you doing? Great Betsy my question is about the electoral college Can you please tell me the history of the electoral college and how the electoral college all started? And why is it that it is possible for you to win the popular vote in America? And you might not still be pressed there like I'll go I did in 2001 the popular vote for the electoral college But where's the game? Thank you. Sure, of course. Yeah, the electoral college at you. There's 538 electoral votes each state is allotted a particular number based on their population So a state like for example, Florida Has 29 electoral votes, but a state that's sort of equal in size Montana has a lesser population, so it only has three electoral votes and the electoral college was put in place by the founders to sort of guard against You know one particular area having too much power So you're right that the popular vote somebody could win the popular vote, but not win the electoral college You need 270 of those electoral votes to win That happened before in 2000 and in order to get the electoral votes from the state It's it's not done proportionally So it's done what we call a winner-take-all basis So if you win the state of Florida by just one vote You would still win the 29 electoral votes of Florida It doesn't matter how much you win or lose by the winner-take-all situation So the candidates right now as you might expect are focusing their efforts on some of these states where it's Tossup so in the last couple of weeks We have seen the candidates crisscross just those probably eight to ten states right now that are toss up States trying to get those electoral votes Hillary Clinton is coming into this race with pretty much a large lead Among there's several states that we call the democratic blue wall states where have they have voted in the last six election cycles For a Democrat Adding up those electoral votes. She is sort of over where she needs to be And the situation like Donald Trump is coming in with very little margin of error He has to really win all of those toss up states Which is why when I talked about Florida a little earlier a lot is gonna come down to whether he can actually pick up The state of Florida and North Carolina, Ohio some of these states and get his vote tallies up to 270 Thank you Great, we have our next question here Hi, basically, thank you for joining us a Lot of people are talking about what will happen to a Republican Party if they were to lose today But what do you think would happen to the Democrat Party if they were to lose to least popular candidate of all time? There would be a lot of a lot of discussion within the Democratic Party If that were to happen, I think you saw some of fracturing within the party during the primaries Bernie Sanders was not a candidate that many people Thought would do as well as he did He attracted a lot of young voters to his campaign a lot of more kind of far liberal voters into the process And I think that at that time you saw the Democratic Party sort of saying well We need to come together at this point and I think the Clinton campaign probably you did a good job in that respect after somewhat contentious primary to Kind of heal and put the party together I think much and they did a much better job than looking at the Republican Party He was also very fractured during the primary process They haven't come together as much as the Democratic Party Hi Betsy, how you doing? Hi, it's Rafa once again, and I have got another quick question for you In the event there is a tie in the elections Events that there is a tie That both of them got to almost the same electoral college votes at the same time Yeah, because that it almost happened in Florida in 2000 So take for instance Florida was inconclusive in the event that there is a tie. Is there a provision in the American Constitution for a runoff? There's no provision for a runoff and when you say tie You mean the electoral votes are the numbers are tied as I mentioned there You have to get 270 electoral votes But if you take 520 538 and you divide it in half you can get 269 So we could have a situation where there's 269 269 in that case it would be tied if that happens The election would then turn to the US House of Representatives and each state would get one vote So no longer would we have a situation like a state of Florida or a state of California? Having more influence over the election each state would be given one vote and the congressional delegation at that point in each state We decide who where that vote is going to which candidate is going to if the situation like that happened if you look at the congressional makeup of The states right now that would be heavily in the Republican favor if that was if that was the situation But there's no there's no provision in the US Constitution for any sort of do-over or runoff or anything like that Hi, I have a question for Tom. Great Okay, I'll say look guys my name I want to know how the electoral votes are distributed among the states because I noticed that It's not the same number for every state. So how where those numbers are located past it. Thank you Well as Betsy said they're distributed based on population. So each state gets a number of electors roughly proportionate to their population and Essentially what happens is the population determines the representation in Congress. So Maryland for example, which is the closest state here to DC They have a population that qualifies them for eight house members every state in our US Senate has two senators So Maryland has ten electoral votes as they have eight house members and two senators And so because every state is guaranteed at least one house member and every state gets the same two senators No state has fewer than three electoral votes So there are actually seven states that are so small in population that they only get the minimum three electors And then the district of Columbia also gets three electors So it's not exactly proportional to population because again each state gets the two Senate electors so to speak And so the smaller states actually have a little bit more voting power because of the extra two electors for the Senate And then what happens is every ten years we take the census in years that end in zero So the next census will be in 2020 and then after they finalize the data in 2021 They will reapportion the US House of Representatives and states that are growing faster like Texas and Florida We'll gain house seats and because they gain seats in the house They gain electoral votes since the electoral votes are equal to the number of seats in the Senate and the number of seats in the house Hi At the moment there are two major political parties in the United States Is there any chance that you could have a third one as major Furthermore What's process and procedures does it take for someone to emerge a candidate of a party? Thank you Well, it's very hard to get third parties in the United States We have the most stable two-party system really on the planet. We haven't elected a Candidate other than a Republican or a Democrat to the presidency since the 1850s and we have very few non Republicans and non-democrats. We have a couple of independence in Congress from Maine Bernie Sanders for a long time was an independent before becoming a Democrat from Vermont basically 98 99% of our members of the US House and the US senator Republicans and every president since the 1850s has been a Republican or a Democrat and the reason is structural We have single-member districts with plurality rule That elect pretty much every member with a few states exceptions like California, Louisiana and Georgia which have runoff systems, but In effect single-member district systems with plurality rule means whoever gets the most votes wins the entire district And so finishing second and certainly finishing third or fourth as a minor party doesn't win you any seats to take a relatively recent example Ross Perot ran for president in 1992 He won zero electoral votes because our electoral college is also Effectively a series of single-member district and plurality rule contest whoever gets the most votes in the state gets all Like all of the district gets all the electoral votes So Ross Perot got 20% of the vote almost and got zero electoral votes And there were about 300 candidates who ran for the US House of Representatives on the Ross Perot Independent Reform Party ballot and not a single one of them won a seat in the US Congress So until and unless we change the voting rules or the structure of our elections, it's very unlikely that third parties Will gain any traction in addition to that the two major parties often act like a duopoly They control the debate system for the presidential debates. They control the campaign finance rules They make it very difficult for third parties to get on the ballots in the states They usually have to get 5% or 10% of the signatures statewide So for as much as you hear fighting between Republicans and Democrats There's one thing that the republicans and democrats generally agree on which is the two-party system which benefits them I've got a quick question just to follow up on what you said about Ross Perot Why was he possible for Ross Perot to get about 17 million votes in 1992? And he didn't get a single electoral college votes Earlier with the electoral college in the winner-take-all system in the primary in the election So for example, unless Ross Perot won a state He was not going to get any electoral votes, but he got enough votes to Pretty do pretty well in the popular vote and got 19 of the popular vote But because he didn't win any states because he didn't have enough in one state. He didn't acquire any electoral votes Ross Perot was able to As a third party candidate. He was a self funder. He had a lot of money He was able to fund a lot of his campaign. He got a lot of media attention He actually got into the presidential debates But because that structure that tom was talking about he did not have a political party of any significance behind him To do a lot of that ground game campaigning that we see going on right now To turn out voters to get to the polls that is all Just from a practical standpoint the political parties put a lot of effort and money into that process And he didn't have any of that. Um, he basically You know had a one person campaign if you will I had a couple of consultants, but he didn't have a huge political party with Limitless expenditures voter files Research information to get behind him. Um, so he was able to get that popular vote of and you know get 19 percent But uh, like we said, he was not able to go over the top in any one state to get any electoral votes Good morning. My name is baimi. What are swing states and how important are they to this election? Well swing states are basically states that are relatively evenly divided between the two parties in terms of their competitiveness And they're important to this election and every election because essentially because it's winner take all as betsy and i've explained It doesn't matter if you win a state by one vote or a million votes You win all of the electoral votes in that state And so the two campaigns and the two candidates spend all their time in the states that Because we have very sophisticated polling and so forth We know are going to be very close states, you know that are two three four five ten percent difference between the two candidates Whereas they don't spend any time in states that are overwhelmingly republican or overwhelmingly democratic states Which in most elections is you know 35 or 40 states are really not even under discussion And so the election map really narrows down to at best 10 12 Maybe 15 states and as you get closer election today Maybe only six or seven states because those are the states that could tip either way and by tipping either way They could tip the total electoral vote Toward one candidate or the other so it's all about the swing states and really actually not even all the voters in the swing states It's not like Some of our swing states like virginia or north carolina or florida It's not like 100 of the voters that are undecided even in those states about 90 of the voters are strong democrats or republicans It's just that they're about 45 each And the fight is over the last 10 percent of the voters in those eight or 10 or 12 states Yeah, which is why we've you know following the campaign news from there You can probably see that candidates are only spending time in those swing states because it doesn't make sense For example for a candidate to put their resources in a state that they know that they're not going to win Because building up that popular vote doesn't matter So a state like texas which the last couple of election cycles is what we call a red state a republican state That there's no way that hillary clinton is going to be spending her valuable time and resources Campaigning in a state like that on the same token Donald trump is not going to be spending his time and money in a state like california Which has been historically a democratic state for the last couple of elections So they really focused all of their attention their time their effort their money their staff In these probably 12 states that can go either way in the election Are are there any laws that restrict the electors from Voting with or against their their um the state's popular vote? And if so as when when's the last time that that happened? Uh, about half of the states have what they call um, uh, laws that against faithless electors Electors voting for a different candidate other than the one To whom they are pledged those laws for the most part are unnecessary because the not just the parties But the specific candidates get to choose who their electors are in the state Now we've had reports of a couple of electors this year who said they may not vote for the candidate of their party If their state wins that if their party or a candidate wins that state So we could have a faithless elector a person who essentially defects from their commitment The most recent time this happened was in 2000 We had a dc elector right here in the district of columbia A woman who simply refused to cast her electoral vote. And so technically there were only 537 electoral votes cast in 2000 Of the 538 there have been other moments in 1988 one elector who was not happy with michael dukakis the democratic nominee Voted for loyld benson the democratic vice presidential nominee So loyld benson running for vice president with dukakis actually got one electoral vote There was a faithless elector back in 1972 But in the history of the electoral college the number of faithless electors is just a few Dozen out of hundreds really thousands of electoral votes cast and the reason is because these electors are party loyalists Who are loyal not just to the party, but to the specific candidate and so they cast their votes With that candidate because they're loyal to that candidate and they were essentially put on the slate of electors Because of that loyalty So who do you think is going to win the world series next year? Not the clubs and not the cubs again. I think uh They'll have a good shot. How about the washington nationals right here? That sounds good to me They're getting better every year. They keep Stepping on their toes in the playoffs, but uh, I'll put I'll put in an early bid for the for the washington nationals I wanted to see if either of you can talk about what measures the u.s. Has in place to Make sure that elections are free and fair and also prevent fraud I think you're starting on anything. Uh, well The problem with the elections of the united states is that It's a federal system So there are as many different state laws about voting And elections and election rules and how votes are tabulated and counted and whether there's early voting or absentee ballot voting And how long the periods are and how many days in advance you need to register we have essentially A composite quilt of 51 different state laws and in the district of columbia here, washington dc Despite that and despite the possible problems of access to the ballot and Long polling lines and some of the things i'm sure you've heard reported We have advisors and people who are supervising and overseeing the elections The parties have their own lawyers the candidates have their own lawyers And the secretaries of state in most states supervise the board of elections And it it is a non non-partisan officers who are who are managing and supervising the election So we have election watchers and outside groups. We have both parties watching each other mutually sort of assured Check against either party Trying to you know manipulate the elections. So it'd be very difficult. We have so many counties in so many states to coordinate a systemic voter fraud or manipulation or Vote counting or vote rigging And so, you know, there are always some problems in some of the states We certainly saw some problems in florida in 2000. We've seen some problems in north carolina this year But a systemic cross national problem is very unusual precisely because It's different states and different counties regulating it and you would have to have a massive conspiracy for there to be any widespread fraud And we also have the department of justice that there's civil rights division Overseas a lot of the poll watching in specific areas that maybe have had trouble in the past So I think there's probably you know 500 or so poll watchers out from the department of justice Strategically placed to make sure that there are no irregularities And you know, we can't under emphasize the importance of lawyers in washington So, you know, even on early voting on nevada a couple of days ago The trump campaign has filed a complaint Saying that the polls were kept open later than they should have been And so that went before a judge today and there's there's been an initial ruling on that that He that he was unsuccessful in sort of that appeal to the case because there was this issue of When the polls were closing people were in line Letting them vote and the trump campaign said the polls were closed and then they bust additional people in And they didn't find they didn't find that to be the case Yeah, hi, um when I was in the 70s I was in business school and there was this guy We had a pub on the campus and who he every day he would come in drink six or seven beers pass out But before he passed out he said his family was going to ensure he became a governor and later the president That was george w bush Can you speak also mit romney was in my class too so At harvard business school So the point is uh, can you speak a little bit about political families and dynasties the clinton's the bushes? Even the romney's again, you you know speak a little bit about I think somebody night you're in the listeners here would Uh, like to hear more about these political families. Yeah, of course. There's another generation coming up Under the uh clinton's and the bushes. Yeah, but you notice we're not here tonight sitting talking about governor jeb bush as the republican nominee, so He has he has a couple of sons It's never too late.  Um, he didn't even get close So, you know I think a lot rests on you know, who the candidate is the time You know this the the climate right now for trump was such that he was disabled to take off and and jeb bush just didn't have a chance Against that. Yeah, I think there's a certain share of the american electorate that's kind of tired of dynastic politics I mean we came very close Obviously to going sort of bush clinton, you know, uh bush and then clinton again Right because hilly clinton came very close to winning the nomination against barack obama in 2008 And I think if she had won that nomination in 2008 it was clearly a democratic year Given where bush's poll numbers were and you know voter fatigue and it's very hard to win three elections in a row for either party And I think hilly clinton would have won maybe not by the identical margin that barack obama beat john mccain But I think she would have beaten john mccain And we would literally have gone from bush to clinton to bush to clinton Directly in a row now we're going to go bush to clinton bush to obama and then maybe to clinton So with a bit of a stutter in there still have sort of two dynasties one father son one husband wife It's a little bit different. Um, I guess the one point that I would make is It's fascinating to me especially on a gender level. Maybe betsey has something to contribute here like The history of women getting elected to office the first women to break through the door Have often been women who didn't win in what's called their own right They won because their husband died or resigned or ran for governoress or ran for senator for a different office So the first governors the first congresswomen many of the first u.s senators were either daughters of or wives of politicians and they kind of inherited their seats And so I think there's probably some women maybe younger women who are like boy I wish the first woman president didn't have to be a former first lady whose husband sort of opened the door for her And we could have won with the first woman president like obama won in his own right as the first black president, right? He wasn't like vice president and then the president died and he became president He won in his own right. He won a primary one of the general election And I think there are certain women maybe even many men who are like boy It would have been cleaner for the first woman to sort of win come out of nowhere for elizabeth warren or sarah pale And whoever to win But unfortunately the history is just the opposite the history is very much what we're seeing right now Which is a former Former first lady a wife of a politician breaking that glass ceiling and winning after her husband held that office previous Right and but in fact that that does pave the way I mean those are always sort of the first steps and then we will eventually have someone in their own right Uh, a woman, but you know, it's interesting I because I don't think she has as much as of an asterisk next to her name in that respect Unless you really think about it Because she has seen as you know, she was secretary of state. She was a u.s senator It's not like she was first lady, um, you know last year and now she's running and then bumps right in So, um, you know, you can sort of see it both ways But it's funny that you said that because I was actually just talking about that yesterday with my daughter Like it can be done and in the future you won't need your hubby to pave the way right, right? Which is a good sign and of course many of our u.s senators and we have a record number going in We have 20 women. I think in the u.s senator all-time record Um, you know, they're they are not women who followed their husbands or or fathers into the senate They won in their own right and so this is changing in pretty much every elective office governor senator US house and state legislatures. It's much different now Uh, but president is a little bit, you know, it is still the highest office And it looks like well if if she wins we'll have our first female president who was a previous first lady and that's not the worst thing This has been a contentious election to say the very least I'm just wondering what you think The winning candidate can do to unify america and to rehabilitate The u.s's image globally following this Well, I mean, you're right. It's been very contentious and the electorate right now no matter who wins is very It's an angry electorate. Um, it's a very fractured country And um, what we're seeing right now just even in the exit polls that that are coming in right now I'll just read you a couple of things. Um, that four in 10, uh, americans are bothered by the hillary clinton email Scandal and six in 10 are bothered by the trump email scandal and um, you know, the mood is definitely much more darker and more pessimistic Than four years ago. We're seeing that in the in the exit polls. So you're right the next incoming president Does have there's not going to be I don't think this traditional what we call honeymoon period After election we saw that a little bit with barack obama in 2008. I don't think we're going to see the same thing here If hillary clinton wins, I think we were going to go Into congressional hearings and investigations and you know, I don't think any of this is going just to end If trump loses, I don't think he's the sort of person that will go quietly into the night He's obviously built up a movement. Um, what is the next step for that? Some people think, you know, is he going to form His own media network? Are we going to have trump tv happening? Is that he's going to, you know, constantly sort of be that thorn in the side? And you know the the electorate right now is very torn. So If no matter who wins, you know, if trump wins as well, there's going to be a lot of upset people And to see whether they can actually govern and a lot, you know We're going to look to congress too to see sort of what the balance is right now in congress We have a system of checks and balances. So A lot is going to depend on Who controls congress who controls the senate as far as, you know, what the new president is going to be able to enact But I don't think we're going to see in any situation any kind of honeymoon period coming for the next president Yeah, I don't think the country's going to be any more unified may in fact be more divided and there may be a Subdivision within the republican party that they have to sort of work out their own Internal fight between, you know, the insurgent trump wing of the party Which is, you know, running against the establishment wing of the party You know, I have a sort of theory of the case about this election and it really goes back to the last two presidents George bush, as you may remember, he was mentioned earlier by the gentleman who went to uh, Harvard business school with him You know, bush ran as this united or not a divider He was trying to heal all the fighting of the clinton era and the Impeachment of bill clinton in in response to the to the intern scandal And he won the election and at the end of his eight years the country was actually more divided than when Bush came in and that was despite having 9-11 as a potentially unifying event then obama This unifying event happened while he was still running for president He had an economic catastrophe of epic proportions And he ran as a no red america no blue america no white america no black america unifier a healer of the breach And the country is a little bit more unified at the end of his eight years But we still have really high record levels of party polarization between blue america and red america between democrats and republicans between left and right So I think this election was both parties have tried that they gave the republicans a chance to heal the country They gave the democrats a chance to heal the country and they just said no way We're just going to double down and I think that helps explain why Both parties which is counter-intuitive and irrational both parties nominated the least Approved candidate the candidate with the highest net negatives Hillary clinton was the least like candidate in the democratic field in terms of her approval ratings And donald trump was the least like candidate among 17 republicans in the republican field And I think it's a war against each side against the other frankly from this point forward because you didn't hear a lot of talk Maybe a little bit at the end with every clinton about let's bring the nation together She said you know i want to represent the people i've voted for me and the people who didn't You don't hear any of that talk from donald trump He's not talking about trying to bring the nation together and heal the wounds of the last 16 years So I think our polarization is going to continue I think it's going to get nastier before it gets nicer And I think we're going to have a really contentious period that's going to perhaps involve investigations trump threatened to To prosecute hillary clinton and try to throw her in jail if he won and Republicans are already talking about impeachment of hillary clinton if she wins and I don't know that the democrats will go after trump He's not in office and you know, I don't know what they could do to him But um, I think it's going to get angrier and more divisive before it gets better Um here in Nigeria, we uh consider political godfatherism as a A major challenge to our democracy But do you see it Like that and I you you call it thanks to see our obama Companion for clinton Do you see that as uh or consider that as political godfatherism? Was a stake of the american government in the in the regards He's over here Yeah, I think it's it's sort of a different concept. Maybe yeah Sure, sure, um, you know, um We have the history in the united states of the of we talked about earlier the strong two party system and Barack obama at the end of the day While he may be present in the united states is also literally the head of the democratic party And it is in his interest as such to elect Someone another democrat to be his successor For just the practical purposes of of his party But also to continue sort of the legacy that he's built up during his presidency He wants to see that the work that he's done Continue in that same vein. So, um, you know, there is There there is a long precedent of having our our Incumbent presidents be out on the stump campaigning openly and vocally For their same party successor. Um, what what you don't see as much as other members of the cabinet Especially members of the cabinet, um that, um, for example, secretary of state secretary defense and the attorney general Who sort of kind of take a step back in a political season and you don't see them as much Advocating and being involved in politics, but for sure the president and the vice president Are definitely out there, uh campaigning strongly for the same party successor I think the one thing that I would add here is that that's Almost always the case in most elections and for both parties You see former presidents, former vice presidents, first ladies Former second ladies, the vice president's wives out on the campaign trail for the campaigning for the current party nominees and we clearly saw that obama Mrs. Obama, uh, joe biden Bill clinton, of course all out on the camp al gore, uh giving doing events with hillary clinton What we did not see on the other hand were either there's only two living former republican presidents They're both named george bush and neither of them voted for trump and they definitely didn't endorse or support or campaign with him The only living ex republican nominee, I believe who showed up at the convention for the republicans was bob dole john mccain did not show up at that convention dick cheney the former vice president did not show so that Sort of talks speaks to what I mentioned earlier, which is The republican party is having a little bit more internal division right now than a much more unified democratic party And so that may change again in the future the next republican nominee may have Bush or excuse me Both bushes and cheney all come out and and go out on the stump But this republican party is internally divided and trump is a big part of that reason, of course Yeah, I saw the report today that george w bush voted and he actually left the the top of the ballot the presidential ballot empty He didn't vote for hillary clinton, but he didn't vote for for donald trump either Sorry a slightly more serious question on this occasion so A lot of the debate has been around the negativity around both candidates be it on the international stage as mark mentioned earlier Or be it around the fact that there's ancestral politics in play so if we were to wipe the slate clean and Both of you were to have a clean vote Who would you have in terms of historical presidents elected today and for what reason? Which historical presidents would you elect today for the next term and for what reason? Not the two candidates right now Neither of the two candidates we've written both of them off for moving on I mean, I mean who can argue with thomas jefferson or hebram lincoln or fdo I would probably vote for franklin roosevelt I mean washington and lincoln were very important presidents, of course But in many respects roosevelt was the first modern president of the presidential power era And built the early forerunner to the modern sort of american welfare state and and governance and Modernized our department of war as it was called and fought the second war war So Though i'm no disrespect to lincoln or washington. I'd pick fdr Yeah, I I mean, you know something also interesting to think about is I think we right now in a country want Want to see a government that is actually doing something So bringing back somebody like lbj who was the master of the u.s senate He can actually get stuff done. He knows how to get legislation through the senate And maybe that's what's needed right now too because we're sort of in this Position where people are so upset at washington because nothing here actually gets done Can you talk about gerrymandering and uh and how that affects us elections It affects them a lot I mean I just wrote a book about how the republicans have this stronghold as I call it on congress and to a certain degree they have that stronghold because They benefit from gerrymandering now they benefit from gerrymandering in two ways One which is not their fault democratic voters particularly non-white voters are just inherently clustered in and around city areas and the inner suburbs That's not because of any evil, you know Mustache twisting plot of the republican party on the other hand in 2010 they very strategically determined And had a plan the red map plan to further maximize the republican share of the congress by Trying to find ways to pack as many democrats into a few districts as possible In states like pennsylvania and states like texas and and elsewhere so And to their credit I mean both parties should try to do it And in fact president obama has already announced that one of his primary agenda items after the election Will be to try to do something similar in the 2020 cycle to what the republicans did in the 2010 cycle to try to rebalance the gerrymandering maps Back now in the senate there is no gerrymandering because the district is the state so you can't redraw districts because Entire state gets to vote so it's really only a phenomenon in the u.s. House And of course it is it can be an important phenomena in state legislative races as well for state house and state senate Yeah, and the end result of that as we see in congress a more and more divisive on the extremes so There's there's not a lot of people now in the middle to govern And you know candidates in the u.s. House of representative incumbents are more worried in a lot of cases about a primary challenge Than they are a general election challenge. So if you're in a sort of safe republican district you You formulate your positions as being more To the right because you're scared of having being primaried from the more conservative wing of the party and similarly goes with Democratically drawn districts The incentive for the member there is to be more liberal because they're concerned about a challenge in the primary for there So at the end result you have members who don't want to vote in the middle that don't want to do compromise Because they will have a challenge in the primary and then they'll lose their seat. Yeah Have a question Do you see the electoral process in the u.s. Changing anytime soon from what it is right now and has been for for quite some time Do you see any changes coming? You know in in the future after this election Was the very beginning of your question you were cut off there Do we see any changes coming in the electoral system? Oh in the electoral system Very difficult to do any sort of make you know changes on our electoral system You know, it has to really have to go through, you know, a constitutional amendment process To do any significant changes to to the electoral system Which is very difficult to get a constitutional amendment through congress and it has to be ratified by the state So, um, you know, there's been things that have been discussed for example Why are our elections on a tuesday? Why are they why don't we have them on a saturday? There's been You know certain things like that that have been brought up But nothing has there's been no movement to actually make any sort of significant changes Yeah, I don't think the electoral college is going to change anytime soon It's you know, george bush as was pointed out earlier. He won the electoral vote even though he lost the popular vote A misfired election 2000 john carrey actually came pretty close to winning the electoral vote Even though he lost the national popular vote he had flipped ohio he would have won I think if each party had lost despite winning the popular vote Maybe we would have had a bipartisan movement to rid ourselves of the electoral college and have a national popular vote And change the constitution, but that didn't happen. And so I agree with betsey I you know, some states are changing a little bit their primary processes States are changing some of their early voting rules. It's really incumbent upon the states to change make these changes. So But on a national constitutional amendment process It's very very difficult to pass constitutional amendments. They require two-thirds of vote Both chambers of congress and three-quarters of the states to ratify in there I can't think of any amendments that can really get through those kind of high threshold super majorities We can't even get a supreme court justice We can't even get a supreme court justice and confirm the senate, which isn't even 60 percent controlled by one party So the idea that we're going to get a constitutional amendment through and we've only had 27 amendments ever and only 17 since the founding period is is is a bit of a stretch Given we're here in the year of potential women power I think some of our views here would be surprised to know that prior to their husbands becoming president Both Hillary Clinton and michelle obama was the Main breadwinners and made considerably more than their husbands when bill clinton was governor of arkansas He made 35 000 a year his wife was making around 200 000 a year as a corporate lawyer And also michelle obama was a senior executive in a health system in chicago When you know bill clinton was running around the south side making again about 30 000 so I don't think a lot of people here would know that they actually Supported financially their husbands political careers and not the other way around That's true and uh, you know gender equity and pay is a big issue You've heard hillary clinton talk about it a lot equal pay for equal women and there are you know Continuing residual disparities between what we pay men and what we pay women Uh, obama's first act signed into law was not the stimulus package It was actually the lily led better act which he signed on like Day nine of his presidency or something Which guarantees equal pay for equal work for people have the same experience and the same degree and so forth It's not equal pay for people have different qualifications or experience But so I think we're going to continue to see Less of a gender gap and in fact when we look at women under 25 who live in cities now There is no gender gap that young professional women with college degrees living in urban areas actually make a slightly more Than men it's the first time in american history We've actually seen a statistic where women Outgain men in terms of their salaries, but you're right about hillary clinton and michelle obama, but they are exceptions to their generation They are not the rule right that's it. Yeah, I think both of the uh, you know President obama and president clinton would tell you that you know, they're Their their spouses have been you know full partners with them and they are they are sort of these political partnerships And um, you know obama says many many times that you know michelle is this kind of the secret weapon And he looks to her for a lot of guidance So you know those two those two candidates would not have come into being and not have the success they had I don't think without without their wives. That's right Can you talk about um the role that the latino vote might play in this election? A lot of the media is saying that this might be the first election where um Latinos really um Make a difference in terms of who win and come out of big numbers. So can you just talk a little bit about that? Yeah, latino voters are the fastest growing population of voters in terms of rate of change. I think we're going to see an increase of 10 to 15 in the total latino votes cast I can tell you right now that about one in five latino voters this year Uh is a first time voter had never cast a vote before and the latino population has A greater share under 18. So they're going to continue to grow moving forward Latino population is largely concentrated in a small number of states half of all latinos live in two states alone california and texas But uh, they continue to expand their population in fact are more than 10 of the population and now Half of the states including states like connecticut and rhod Island states you wouldn't think of as latino population states So on election night here when we look at swing states, you're talking about florida Nevada, colorado Where latinos can play an important role maybe in virginia other states are overwhelmingly democratic or republican states like california and texas Which they're sort of a latent power there So they can certainly swing the presidential map and they can certainly swing some of these uh senate races competitive senate races But while they are growing they don't turn out as much as other demographics, right lower rate of turnout among Among uh, Hispanics and it'll be very interesting to see in this election Just because of the the nature of the election and the issue of immigration and um, you know, obama's, uh, I mean, excuse me trumps You know rhetoric on that issue if that will have motivated more more Hispanics to turn out Can we uh examine what? Implications of each individual candidate will have for Relations with africa and with nigeria specifically if they're elected I'm sorry. I honestly don't know much about us policy related to nigeria And I don't know that either candidate has made a public statement specific to nigeria if they have I I did not I do not know it Yeah, I mean I I think just you know more generically speaking I think you'll probably see for example, you know in a president clinton administration A continuation of a lot of the policies that obama has put in place I think we're less clear on what a president trump administration would look like in that respect He's a little bit more of a wild card when it comes to Issues of foreign policy and we know generically what his attitude is But he certainly hasn't put out, you know a five-point plan On sort of the public diplomacy and dealing with the region or anything like that Yeah What about uh, social media and now that social media is everywhere What kind of role is it playing in the way candidates campaign and kind of the way that they reach voters? I think it has a bigger effect on younger voters because of social media We know from contacting rates People who say they've been contacted by a campaign or a party or a candidate That those rates tend to be higher for for voters under 40 under 30 and the part of the reason is because they're on the internet more They're on tumblr. They're on twitter. You know various platforms in a way that their parents and grandparents aren't Who are you know contacted by traditional means telephone? Door knocking and of course many younger americans don't even have a landline at home They just own a cell phone exclusively So and have apps on that cell phone, of course on that smartphone So social media is having some positive effects Obama had some great apps where he would help you organize your phone and find swing Voters in your phone address and which you know and point out which ones live in swing states and ask you to call them So we're seeing campaigns use very sophisticated technologies Doesn't catch every voter or every citizen, of course, but they're getting better at that on the other hand I think social media is sometimes poisoning the national conversation. It gets a little bit ugly We saw in some senses our first twitter candidate Donald trump who's you know up at two and three in the morning sending out tweets about you know last night's debate Or what he thinks about hillary clinton? So I think there's also some polluting effects of social media Yeah, I think the danger and that can come to where Voters right now are able to kind of live in their own bubble and social media You have people who are able to essentially they don't open themselves up to debate or discourse between Considering different opinions. So you can follow just certain You know certain people on twitter you can subscribe to certain people on facebook You can read certain political blogs and you can just sort of have your own Political opinions regurgitate it back to yourself in a very easy way And it doesn't sort of allow for the consideration of maybe other perspectives or ideas And then you know, but you know back to what tom was saying earlier the candidates have really I mean I noticed today just logging on to my facebook page. There was a pop-up. Have you voted? You know, here's where you can vote. So the candidates are out there Using social media. I don't think anybody's used twitter as much as we've seen donald trump do I think they've actually taken away his twitter account the last couple of days Which I don't understand why they didn't do that weeks ago. Yeah, probably winning this thing Yeah, yeah, yeah, but um, you know, I think uh social media has its positives and negatives as anything does Uh, I read um, that's to become a u.s president one has to be uh At least 35 years is j criteria for that one or 30 years or 32 years Has to be one 35 years old as a criteria to be president And one I just read that uh to become a president of the united states The minimum age should be 35 years. Yes It's 35 it's 35 years and you have to have been born in the united states And you have to have been a resident of united states for the past 14 years Yes, my question is why 35 years minimum. Why not 30 or 32? Oh It's actually kind of arbitrary the founding fathers have different age requirements for the three Federal branches 35 for president 30 for senate and 25 for the house um, there's some notion that Politicians would sort of work their way up from the lower house And so they could be younger and then the senate a more mature or austere institution So 30 and then the presidency for 35 You know back in the founding period in the late 1800s, of course people didn't even live that long So that was considered older 35 than it is today If the founders were back writing in constitution the age requirement might be 45 and 40 And 35 for the presidency in the senate and the house who knows right because people are living to 70 years old You know average age in the united states whereas back in the colonial period. They were living until their late 50s. Yeah so In the discussions around fund raising and the way in which money has been Generated for this campaign. Do you think there's another lasting indication on the way in which pittacle candidates reach out? to private business Reach out to charities reach out to hedge funds for example in the case hillu clinton And the way in which money is generated for pittacle campaigns in the future I mean The money situation is getting worse in the wake of the citizens united ruling passed by the supreme court in 2001 And so I think we're going to continue to see more money Not less money in politics and more what they call dark money money that can't be traced to It's original contributor or donors and that is problematic in my view from a small d democratic standpoint when You don't know who's you know funding ads and you don't know who's funding candidates And uh, I don't see the flow of money, you know ceasing or abating anytime soon No, I don't either and you know the candidates spend a lot of time raising money There is disclosure requirements for money that they actually raise themselves But you know as tom mentioned there's this whole vast area of dark money Where people can contribute seemingly limitless amounts and we don't know who they are And you just the candidates can't coordinate with them So they may even be on or off message of what the candidates want And you know we even in the house and the senate we find you know members that are elected You know immediately the next day have to start fundraising for their next campaign and they spend a lot of their time instead of governing Going and dialing for dollars as they call it To try to get money to be reelected. And so there is no incentive You know just to actually stay and do the work that they've been Voted upon to do that. There's this constant pressure for reelection and raising money And the cost of you know senate races has gone skyrocketed through the years And the same you know goes for the the presidential as well Right obama is the first billion dollar presidential candidate and uh, I don't know philary. You'll get that far this year Yeah, so uh, we've sort of crashed through the billion dollar, you know fundraising ceiling and I don't know that we'll go back Yeah, there used to be limits. Uh, well, there are limits if you take federal funding for a campaign Limits spending limits that you can spend but you know obama was the first candidate to say forget that right and Yeah, I don't need to be limited I don't need to take uh Government funding for a campaign because I don't want to be limited on the expenditures and I can raise the money myself And so thank you, but no, thank you I think we might have time for one final question Well, I think it's time for us to wrap up here So from all of us in lego, so we just want to say thank you to betsy and tom for joining us I think we've all learned a lot tonight I know you guys have a night of engagements all over the world So we're glad that lego's could be a part of it. Well, thank you. Thank you. And if you want to continue the conversation We're actually going to be doing a series of events until 2 a.m And you can join us online at um at It's already 2 a.m here. Oh, I mean 2 a.m eastern time So maybe you guys should go to bed, but they've got they've got cocktails. It looks like you're drinking a lot So if you want to follow the conversation further or send questions online, you can go to share dot america dot go Thank you. Thanks guys