FINISHED COPY
NINTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE
INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM 2014
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
"CONNECTING CONTINENTS FOR ENHANCED
MULTI-STAKEHOLDER INTERNET GOVERNANCE"
02 SEPTEMBER 2014
11:30
WS 15
EMPOWERMENT DISPLACED PEOPLE THROUGH ONLINE EDUCATION SVC.
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The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> SVETLANA MALTSEVA: Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to start our workshop. Thank you for participating in it. This workshop was organised by of Community of Higher School of Economy, Russian University. And the organiser of this workshop is Mikal Komorof (phonetic), and organizers of our workshop, Ajay Mishra CEO the startup company in India, Yuliya Morenets, a representative of association –- Ukraine, France. A year ago we started to discuss the services for migrants displaced people. And, sorry. I'm sorry. And I want to remember maybe some figures and some statistics it takes from United Nation report about migration. Immigrants, not all people, it's children maybe young people and of course they need education. Today we want to discuss the role of education for migrants for displaced people and I want to shortly introduce our speakers. Andrey Schcherbovich, and Yuliya Morenets. You see, she's also co‑organizer of this workshop. And I, myself, of course will participate in this discussion. I'm Svetlana Maltseva, Russia. We have a very short time, only 60 minutes to discuss I think very, very important subject because education is a great chance for all people and a great chance for displaced people, of course, refugees. And our goal to find maybe some decisions how to give this chance for them. I think that the plan of our discussion will be the first presentation of our speakers. And then questions, discussions, with the participation of remote participants. And I tried to determine some discussion topics but of course some topics may be added by our participants. I think that the full remarks to discuss who should finance the development and implementation of education services.
Today in the world you have different decisions. Maybe government, maybe some corporate university, maybe traditional universities. Maybe international organizations. Second, who will control the content and quality of educational programs? They would be similar to schools and universities. For example, if some of refugees or displaced people, they can use our services to study but then they must maybe have some transitional document about the education level from school, from university, and it's very important. And the ability of - of course the ability of education of educational services. So I think we must start and first short presentation.
>> ANDREY SHCHERBOVICH: Thank you, very much. I'd like my presentation to be started. Okay. Thank you, very much. I have slightly different approach which is completely different from almost anything you have in this discussions and I will talk about some issues concerning legal and international protection of migrants and refugees. I will use the term refugees on which is the best reflects people who need the most help. Of course in educational perspective it's also very important. Now we will move to the first statistics. These statistics is really understandable that in 2010 it was last of ‑‑ there was 3% of the world population was migrants.
And there are a lot of attentions of political nature but also other things, one of the reasons it was the Arab Spring by which a lot of people came from countries of the Arab world, moving to Europe, to European countries. This is very important to know that we are dealing with countries with slightly different culture and people they need to be assimilated in the host society. And for that, the educational need, educational services are very important for them. Migrants became the first European coast. They arrived, there's like a kind of illustration. Now we will move to the legal issues and the major international instrument of their protection is 1951 convention on the status of refugees and they are a lot of major agencies. I first would like to outline the higher commission for refugees, the major body within the United Nations within the universal structure dealing with the refugees’ issues. And after that when we are talking about the educational things, that will be firstly the UNESCO and their international government programs.
Now you can see the major refugees' rights among others. There are a lot of rights concerning access to information and education. Also some documents related to the Human Rights of refugees in the European Union. Now, I would like to move to some important cases where I found within the special reports of the UNACR and other important organizations. In Uganda where they provide access to the camps in the northern Uganda for refugees where they received access to services related to especially learning programs.
Also there are some programs developed for education, there's a kind of global initiative but the problem is I will talk in the final part of my report I would take about some challenges for that. The major activity in these fields are performed by the non‑government organizations. There are some basic challenges. I will outline just some of them. There are limited access for education, low quality and the lack of teachers, lack of financial resources, financing and general safety for the people. And this is a really big problem, some UNACR and other agencies outlined specific problems which we need to solve such an integration international education system provision education for all, investment in teacher's training, developing youth centres, the national system of education, and support for financial resources. There is a slightly shorter report and chance to outline some major questions. I'll be open for questions. Thank you, very much.
>> SVETLANA MALTSEVA: Thank you very much, Andrey. I think the questions will be after all presentation. Now I want to give the floor to Patrick Ryan, he will tell us very interesting experience, for developing education that will services, yes?
>> PATRICK RYAN: Thank you. I'm really happy to be here. Before I joined Google I sent some time at the university myself, I was the chair of a programme at the University of Colorado, and in that programme I'll talk about that in a minute, we were very proud to have been involved in distance education before the Internet really made it possible and we recorded videotapes and sent them out to people and had this really interesting experience of how to administer an educational system using time shifting technology. And of course at Google we think a lot about education as the overall portfolio of things they're doing online. In both of those roles I've been in as a university professor and somebody at Google we tend to have an opportunity to dress down and be very casual. And I want to congratulate this group here on being the best dressed educational professor group at the IGF. I'm kind of bringing things down a little bit with my casual perspective here. And do I need to apologize because I am going to have to leave just a little bit early before the end of the panel. I didn't want anybody to feel surprised or that I was upset about anything being said, I have a conflict coming up at 12:30 so I have to leave a little bit early. I'll talk a little bit and then ask questions because I thought it was good of you to set this up with questions to get thoughts from the panel. When we think about digital literacy and education, a lot of different things come to mind.
On the one hand does it mean teaching people how to use the web at a most fundamental level and how to be safe and effective online? Does it ‑‑ are we talking about how technology can improve existing educational situations and conditions or is it how we can use technology just to improve skills, how people can retrain and do something new that they haven't done before. Of course the answer to these questions is all three are correct, all three are important. When we think about being safe and effective online we think this is a really important part of any educational experience. It's not just the content you're trying to learn and teach whether it's math or a foreign language or new skill. It's important to couple that with an opportunity to teach people how to be better citizens online.
This is one of the multistakeholder problems where everybody has a role, government has a role in setting rules and standards to make sure there are deterrents for bad behavior, in the private sector, companies like mine have to do what they did can to make sure the tools we ever are safe and secure. But users themselves also need to learn. We all have a responsibility to make sure we meet in the middle somewhere and we teach users how to be good citizens online, how to operate in a way that doesn't promote bad behavior. Teaching people to recognize phishing attacks that, sort of thing.
Technology can improve education in a lot of ways. You can take an existing course like we have seen from MIT and Stanford and putting them on the line. Anybody can get an education that's of the same quality of MIT and Stanford with really no cost to the extent of having an Internet connection. The dynamic is the exchange of information, it's not just listening to professors it's the acts of interacting and providing feedback and getting feedback from professors and graduate students and having that experience online.
And the one-to-many approach the Internet offers a lot of different things but it doesn't necessarily offer that additional complementary when you're engaging in an educational experience. People learn by doing not just by passively listening. At the same time, I think those of us who spent probably too much time in school to get PhD's and to have opportunities to give back to the university system, are starting to rethink how this whole online educational ecosystem might change things.
I don't know to be honest with you whether I would today have gone and gotten a PhD knowing all the availability of things in the richness that's available online and a lot of students are starting to think about that, rightly so. And we should be proud of it and embrace is. Particularly in the context of refugees and those people that are out in the world that don't necessarily of the access to funds, the access to the same kind of resources as everybody else has. Technology and the Internet itself can also improve skills. We have talked a lot about in the past couple of years about the value of the Internet economy and the multiplier effect that the Internet can have on any economy.
There's a lot of people that lose their jobs because of the Internet. In other words, because efficiencies, there's less of a need for certain positions and there's also a shifting of certain things from services whether it be the traditional shift that we talked about a lot in the United States of the kinds of services that are moving call centres to India and that sort of a thing, there's a lot of opportunities but the Internet does destroy job but it creates 2.4 jobs for everyone it destroys. You don't see it immediately. The 2.4 jobs that are created happen by virtue of having the populous be able to retrain themselves to educate, learn new skills and to get online. Let me try to answer the questions that you've asked and provide a quick perspective. The first you asked was who should finance a development and implementation of education? And I think maybe this is a little bit cliché because we are at the IGF but I'm going to dive in and said this is a multistakeholder problem.
I think everyone has the responsibility to contribute to the financing of online education. Governments certainly have a role of stewards of any educational system and that doesn't go away when government citizens are not in the country. In the case of refugees and others I think that responsibility is certainly remains with the governments and it's a really good opportunity because you can still invest at home and reach a lot of the refugees and displaced people. But it's also the responsibility of companies, companies like mine, and companies like Nasser's really benefit from having an educated people and being able to focus curricula and skills are particular things so the private sector has a role as well. But most importantly the users, the students themselves have a role. Education is just like in good. It's valued by anybody when they pay for it. Free is a wonderful thing but there's something about actually contributing towards something and paying for something and making that investment that also creates a certain amount of sense of wanting to actually get a return from that investment so I think it's important for all of these things in a very multistakeholder way to come together and be able the finance the educational system. The mix will be different depending on the situation. Who will control the quality? The traditional view is the accreditation systems. Every country has its own accreditation system. I'll be a little controversial here and say I also think in this particular world we can look to the Internet. Everyone is rating everyone online. If you take a cab with Uber, you’re rating your driver. There are opportunities to rate rank and provide feedback on a global scale. And I believe education can benefit from that as well.
We initially started to think about online education as being something completely different than the bricks and mortar world but the most successful online education systems are the ones that are almost accidental. It feels like they're integrated into the system. If I'm a student and I can take my class online, that can work as a supplement rather than as a completely separate entity. I think I'll stop there.
>> SVETLANA MALTSEVA: Thank you, Patrick. Now we are ready to know the opinion of Microsoft. So, Nasser, please.
>> NASSER KETTANI: Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this panel. I'm Nasser Kettani, I come from Microsoft and I cover eastern Africa region. This region has 79 countries, 400 languages, all religions. And all sorts of sophistication in terms of, you know, countries. So we have countries that are South Africa, Israel, Turkey, you know, Mid East and all of Africa.
And you can guess the sophistication of economies and technology in these parts of the world. And this is probably also the part of the world where we have seen in the last five years the most crisis in terms of refugees and displaced people and crisis happening all over much so that's something that we live in every day for a lot of different reasons. When I look into the issue of displaced people and populations, there are ‑‑ I think we need to look at that from different categorization because there are different issues that you have to deal with depending on whether we see people displaced because of war or natural disasters, or just political refugees or just migrants, people decide by themselves to leave the country to go to a different country so these are different issues and I think that needs to be addressed differently because the need will be different at how we address the need of those. And the reality that technology, Internet is one. But the overall technologies that we have today in our hands are able to address the problems and the issues of displaced people in different forms. And it's fascinate to see how technology can do that in terms of issues of tracking and know when people are, et cetera, providing basic services, whether it's health, other e‑services, emergency responses, information and awareness.
All sorts of things we can provide. Education is one of those that we need to look at especially for the younger population. Because in many cases when we look into when people leave their country whether because they decide as individuals or as a group because of wars, most of the case is because they want to protect their kids. And they end up taking their kids out of school, out of home, and they have to address the issue of living away but yet being able to provide those services to their kids. This is the issue that we are facing. The use of technology can support that. Patrick covered very well how technology can help in terms of education.
A set of new things happening, we talk about MOOCs today. But when I look at into how technology is evolving in terms of how we can learn anywhere, any time, on the go, at school, outside, how we can collaborate and share and have into experiences, how we can even change the way we learn we don't need to go to school to get the content of the teacher but we might go to school to do the exercises with the teacher so there are different ways in technologies. When I look at how additional technologies like machine learning and et cetera are how we can customize and address the needs of every student we will be able to serve this massive opportunity. But at the same time, especially from my coming, I see a lot of issues. Financing you mentioned.
But I think the first issue is the issue of prioritization. When a government prioritizes then issues of finances come in as second. But today I don't see that as happening. Not to point to any country but when there is a war and you have hundreds of thousands of people moving from their country to another country, the country that is receiving those, how can they prioritize in terms of how to serve the needs of the people, especially on education. Financing you mentioned and I agree with Ryan on the issues of this is a multistakeholder. I just want the mention in those cases it's hard for people to actually pay for their own education. And I value what you're saying completely. International funding organizations, international banks, institutions can support that and we need to have that access. But I think there are basic things in those cases that we need to address. In many cases we don't even have Internet access in those cases. Especially in my region. And I look into my region, it's a big set of whole wide spaces where there's no Internet connection so how can we provide online education if we don't even have Internet connection in many of those places? It's hard to orchestrate especially online, not to mention devices, how can people get ‑‑ it's hard, et cetera. And the final thing I want to say which is very tricky in terms of policy that we need to be very careful at is the issue of we have in this case vulnerable people that have moved from one place to another. I'm just focusing on those.
And then when necessity go online, et cetera to have education, then we have the issue of their, there's a whole risk in terms of on one side security, so we need to make sure they are protected from a security perspective but on the other side on their own privacy we need to make sure we respect their privacy. These are very vulnerable people and we shouldn't take the opportunity to actually provide the service at the same time, do it at the expense of security and privacy and we need to do that as well. Thank you very much.
>> SVETLANA MALTSEVA: Thank you, very much, for very interesting opinion and experience. And then Juan will tell us the experience of Estonia and education services.
>> JUAN: Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. My name is Juan. I represent Estonia Technical Society. E-stonia. (laughing) E-stonia is the term used to describe Estonia’s emergence as one of the most advanced E-society. Maybe you ask how we get there. Today's presentation I will try to cover very huge topic regarding Estonian government experience. I will talk about -- I will answer the question how we get there. We will take a look at the most popular social education oriented programs. And at the end of my presentation let's say to sum up I will tell a few words about our future. Estonia's new concept, E‑citizen.
So few words about our company. It's one of the biggest companies in the Baltics. We have representatives more eight countries. Many offices is in Estonia. And we are concentrated on Estonian countries just to remind you, we are the smallest country in the Nordic neighborhood but not the coldest. Estonia is the term used to describe the most advanced society. Maybe you ask how you get there. It's thanks to three factors like the partnership between foreign‑thinking government, pro‑active ICT sector and population. Information Society. Just let's take a look at the Information Society educators which gather just a few weeks before this workshop. The rate of Internet use in Estonia is one of the highest in the world. Just an example, a skilled user can manage everything without leaving their computer. You have more than 90% of E‑services card so those services are transparent. They are helping to deal with bureaucracy and as you can see we have 100% of schools and organizations, we have a huge number of public free wi‑fi areas. We even can vote via Internet and one year ago we had population census via Internet. In Estonia Internet access is not a privilege, it's a social right.
So let's focus on how we get there. First of all it all began from administrative reforms 20 years ago. After that we started social oriented educational programs in ICT and in parallel was launched project. As you can see I'm holding in my right hand the presentation you see the older one and in my hand the newer which consists not only to applications which are responsible for digital signature and identification but also biometric data. The next logical step after ID card was mobile ID, mobile ID was my favorite. It's actually the same way to identify citizens as ID card but more convenient. Why? Because you don't need a special computer, specially equipped with a reader and you don't have to install special software. You can be mobile.
So after that was launched Estonian information system. It's a virtual private government network which providers distribute secured unified web service base data exchange framework. It's a secure network which combine all different departments, government from government to private sector. Let's take a look at the most popular E‑services in Estonia. As you can see, approximately a dozen of them are from E‑health and so on.
>> SVETLANA MALTSEVA: And the e‑education.
>> JUAN: And the e‑education, of course, thank you. Okay. Let's focus our attention at the Estonian educational ICT educational programs and one of them is our famous ICT demo centre. ICT demo centre its purpose is to showcase the nation's ICT solutions all in one facility providing visitors with hands‑on example of what they are and how they work. As you can see today we have a lot of different members. Some were born from startups and a lot of well‑knowns such like Skype, Microsoft, and so on. Another interesting educational cross‑border educational program is Baltic ICT platform. This platform is focused on development across border services via Russia and Thailand. It allows generalized practices in the field of e‑services across border region the ability for instance for students and for investors to talk about their potential startups and to think how they can corporate not only in one country but in across border corporation. What's next, maybe, you'll ask? I suppose that after the E‑government, here comes the E‑citizen. To my mind it's very interesting concept. Our plans to assign a digital identity to all its citizens. And even beyond. Going one step further, the Estonian government announced it will issue ID cards to all residents and non‑residents.
Is this the future of digital citizenship or the future to network society? I truly believe it's our future and to sum up I would like to say words for famous ICT scientist that it's not so much about the size of the country but the thinking. The size doesn't matter actually but the thinking matters. You need also to think and think differently. Thank you for your attention. After our workshop I will answer all your questions and show different E‑service demos. Thank you.
>> SVETLANA MALTSEVA: Thank you. And unfortunately we have no ‑‑ you want maybe to tell someone and I think we must start to the session of questions and maybe some opinions discussions, please, Yuliya.
>> YULIYA MORENETS: Thank you, I will try to be very quick. Good morning, everybody. And thank you I'm very happy to be here today and thank you for this invitation and great cooperation during the merge of our workshops. I wasn't supposed to be here today but a colleague of mine with whom or organization, we tried to launch ‑‑ but he wasn't able to fly so I'm happy to be here today.
My name is Yuliya Morenets. I'm interested in this topic and we have arrived to this subject because we have seen that vulnerable people and among them displaced people and migrants there are more fragile, vis‑à‑vis the online threats so I thought we to have do something about. So to be short I would like to present what we do as an organisation and afterwards maybe how the private sector and governments can help us. I was actually very happy to hear yesterday during the high level meeting the number of ministers and deputy ministers who underlined this is very important to integrate and make the access to the disadvantaged people easier and I think we all agree the rights to formation and education is a basic right and the online education can bring closer actually this access to Internet and to the implementation of disadvantaged people and migrants. Just a few words what we are doing.
We do have an initiative developed with the ministry of education of Portugal and with the city of Strasbourg because we are based in France will be launched in November of this year. We hope the private sector and Microsoft will join us which is the European observatory in vulnerable people. One of the chapters of the European observatory will be based in Malta and will have full research and development of capacity building and online programs. So I invite all stakeholders who are interested in working together. Just another word what we have done in the line of education, we have developed a course for local authorities because we believe the role of local authorities is very important for the implementation of today's vulnerable and displayed people in Information Society we have developed and here we are in the subject of our discussion which is available online how to better integrate migrants in the Information Society. The public and private sector who help us to better develop easier actually this online education programs and to work with the vulnerable people.
We think that this will be very useful to have the digital inclusion strategy and I can take the example of the UK digital inclusion strategy which was launched in summer which was a fantastic policy actually document for the inclusion, better inclusion and better access to the Internet of these marginalized disadvantaged groups and of course we can have the online education is mentioned in this strategy so for us this is very important to have these documents in place. Secondly how the private sector could help us. We could work on the development of this best practices. The role of private sector is mentioned as Patrick was just mentioning before the role of private sector. And third we think that the role of local authority is very important for the implementation of these ICT strategies for the development and implementation of educational tools and online education programs. So thank you.
>> SVETLANA MALTSEVA: Thank you, very much, Yuliya. Now we want to give the word to the floor. Maybe somebody wants to ask some questions or maybe opinion or maybe from a remote participants who have some questions.
>> There's no question, actually. Sorry.
>> SVETLANA MALTSEVA: What question?
>> There is no question actually.
>> SVETLANA MALTSEVA: No question from remote participants?
>> Actually there's some groups to who wants to connect to a remote hub, I'll talk to them and let you know.
>> In fact I found out there's a comment in our remote room from Ruth from united kingdom about the thing is now we have online education courses, course strategies, some of them are free of charge. Actually the quality of the courses is not measured by students because only 20% of them finish courses at the end. And they were talking about model, when they provide courses for free but to all students that take the course, for instance, 400 US scholarships, who helps the students to take it more seriously. It's a complicated question. Services which are provided for free, in fact, but, you know, not probably seriously by young generations, what do you think about it?
>> The thing is that it's about value by students of free courses available online.
>> NASSER KETTANI: Well the experience we have right now is that I mean, massive online courses are taken seriously by students. You know, especially in parts of the world where they have the opportunity to listen to MIT teachers and Yale teachers and get some very good content. So the fact that it's free is good. However, overall, I think the fact that education is free is to some extent depending on countries and the cultures in the country, the country where I come from education is free for everyone. And that's by itself doesn't give the students and kids are not valued because they feel it's like okay I need to go to school, it's free, they're not paying for it so they don't value it. Especially because they are still young. So it's very hard to ask somebody who is ten to value something. However, and that relates to K‑12. When it comes to university the story is different because now we are talking to a generation of people who are supposedly are smarter, more mature and they can make a decision. In that case I think the fact that university is free is from my perspective I think wrong. I think we need to find a system in which university has to be paid so people value it but for people who are vulnerable who cannot pay for it then we need multistakeholder to support that but I don't think university should be by any means free, that's my own perspective because that's not a right, it's a choice for people because they are already 18 they have to make decision whether they want to go there or not.
>> YULIYA MORENETS: Thank you. I would like to have a different approach whether the online education system that you mentioned is free or not, generally it's open and free at least in France and a number of European countries. When we speak of displaced and migrants what can be the procedure to let them know this exists, this is available for them, and accessible in language that they understand so I think it's a whole package if we can call it a package. It should be a kind of local procedure or local strategy if you want to call it like this at the local level that should be implemented to let this particular population to let them know this exists, they do have this opportunity in order to be better integrated in society and they have this opportunity to follow this online course, whether it's free or not. Thank you.
>> SVETLANA MALTSEVA: Thank you, Yuliya. Maybe somebody wants to add something for this topic from the floor? Nobody? Okay. Andrey, you want, please, miss. First, then you. Please, please.
>> (Off mic.) Displaced and I'm just wondering, the empowerment, we are getting off track a little bit about asking if it should be free or not in university level. I mean, I'd be interested in how do empowerment displaced in refugees and not whether or not the cost or not, but how, how.
>> Thank you very much for offering the question. In fact when we are talking about empowerment we are talking about one point, transformation of education services from education to mobile services, services available through mobile forms and so on. Then we talking about empowerment displaced people they're talking about services developed for first of all mobile solutions, available, and actually some refugees and displaced people always bring their cell phones so we have some kind of connection with them through the telecommunication service. And when we are talking about empowerment we are talking about special education courses focused on let's say trying to help to assimilate and adopt under the conditions where they are in fact.
Some psychology educational courses, psychological, how to adapt under these conditions when you don't know anyone around and so on. Second if we are talking about traditional education services so traditional education, so continuation of education when you're somewhere outside of your country. Third, talking about education courses talking about life skill courses. So in terms of place where you are so where you can buy some food, and so on, because sometimes we don't know language of the region where you are or sometimes you don't know actually where you can buy your own traditional food as well. And it's also crucial point from another side. From another side we are talking about traditions, we are talking about role. And actually talking about courses which should be developed to empower the displaced people and refugees to understand local laws and local system.
>> SVETLANA MALTSEVA: Thank you, please your question?
>> AUDIENCE: My name is Camilla, from Indonesia. Actually we would like to learn a lot from you because we have been talking about how you support the online education like you mentioned before there's a problem about infrastructure that could be the challenge for online education. Because we are a consultant for gender perspective on educational system and we see how is the gender gap among men and women how men have more access to Internet and technology. In our culture our parents will send the men or the boys for universities or schools or study about technology because women are not ‑‑ they marginalize woman because they feel it's not women's field. If you're talking about gender gap and we are trying to support online education, it can be more gender gap that how men can get more access to Internet and online. So what we are trying to do right now we are trying to integrate gender and ICT into our educational system in Indonesia. So what do you think about this issue, about gender, Internet and educational system online? Thank you.
>> SVETLANA MALTSEVA: Thank you, very much. It's very interesting aspect and of course unfortunately we must stop our discussion because our time is ‑‑ maybe we take five additional minutes to our time but I think it's maybe very interesting aspect, very interesting idea for future discussion. Of course we must discuss it and you must do our services adapted to these problems and to solve this problem. Thank you, very much, for all. And thank you very much for speakers for participants and have a nice discussion for in other workshops.
(Applause)
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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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