Overview of the 2nd World OER Congress and Its Objectives – by Mr. Gasper Hrastelj, Deputy Secretary General, Slovenia National Commission for UNESCO, Slovenian Focal Point for the Organization of the 2nd World OER Congress
Mr. Hrastelj invited all participants to attend the 2nd World OER Congress, scheduled to be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, from 18 to 20 September 2017.

Why Slovenia? – by Mitja Jermol, UNESCO OER Chair, member of the Steering Committee
Slovenian OER initiatives started back in 2003 with the creation of Videolectures.net. It is hosted at the Centre for Knowledge Transfer, Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia. It is the world’s biggest academic online video repository and has won awards. Its content is mostly in computer science areas, specifically: deep semantics and reasoning; light-weight semantic technologies; social computing/Web 2.0; data/web/text/stream-mining; and others. All content is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives (BY-NC-ND) licence. The Jožef Stefan Institute (JSI) is the leading Slovenian research institution for the natural sciences (with over 900 people) in the areas of computer science, physics and chemistry. The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Centre for Knowledge Transfer have approximately 60 people working in various areas of artificial intelligence (machine learning, data mining, semantic technologies, computational linguistics, decision support), eLearning, and technology transfer and dissemination.

Some portals and products that have been produced are:

• Enrycher (http://enrycher.ijs.si/)
  
• VideoLectures.Net (http://videolectures.net/)
  
• Event registry (http://eventregistry.org)
  
• Search-Point (http://searchpoint.ijs.si/)
  
• OntoGen (http://ontogen.ijs.si/)
  
• Document-Atlas (http://docatlas.ijs.si/)
  
• Qminer (http://qminer.ijs.si)

The Opening up Slovenia initiative started in 2014 with the aim of making Slovenia a model state in the field of OER and making a reality the policies of the European Commission’s Communication on Opening up Education. The Opening up Slovenia website allows students, practitioners and educational institutions to share free-to-use OER.