 Hey everyone and welcome to the first session for Discord. I'm excited to be here, it's been a while since I've recorded a session for a flex course for Reclaim, so I'm happy to be here. Thanks, Jim, for joining me. Yeah, this is a fun one. I think, don't we get to like reminisce about OER by Domains21 and how that came to be? I know, I have that framed on my wall here. But yeah, it's, I think this session is a great chance for anybody who is not sure what Discord is or has, you know, very basic, a basic understanding of it. Maybe you've been in the Reclaim at Tech Discord and you're just trying to get started or you're thinking about the possibilities for how Discord can be used for your own needs. So events, maybe a class, you know, a longer seminar or something. So this session is a great chance for us, I think, to talk about what inspired, you know, the start of Discord for Reclaim and how we got to this point with the Discord server that you know and love today. And we can, so yeah, I think we'll start with, I guess, talking about the history of Discord at Reclaim, how we got started and, you know, what led us down this journey and then we'll finish up with some really basic, you know, getting started settings in a Discord server. It's super easy to get started in a Discord server and so I'll be excited to chat about that in a little bit. Great. Yeah. And so in fact, you know, as you were asking me to jump in here with you, I'm not much of a Discord admin. So I know very little bit about that. But my start with Discord came actually in fits and starts as early as when we spun up Reclaim Video, we had this watch site that Tim had created where we actually had a camera trained on the TV. And then he embedded a Discord kind of like, almost like a form, it seemed to me like a form chat, I'd never used Discord. And he's like, yeah, it's really big in the gaming world. A lot of people who gaming, this is where they chat and communicate is on Discord. And so that must have been like 2018 where Tim had said that. And I was like, whatever, but I kind of like it didn't hit for me. And so the next time I heard about it was my son, who was doing a lot of Minecraft stuff was spinning up a Discord server for his class. And he wanted all of his class rather than to be in WhatsApp, which everyone uses in Europe, he wanted them to be in Discord. He wanted to do like a, you know, a fifth grade ed tech or a sixth grade ed techer. And he had mixed results with that because it's Italy. But that was the second time so that would probably be 2019 or early 2020 right before the pandemic hit hard. And then the time after that is when we actually did the digital ocean deploy conference in, I believe it's November of 2020. In fact, I can prove that because I actually found this right here, which is, this was a part of a talk, Lauren, Tim, myself were with folks from CUNY, and it was hosted by Aaron, Aaron Glass, who was working at digital ocean at the time. And we gave a talk and there's the video actually it's on YouTube I actually just archived it on my Baba TV. So like we have a talk, a video talk where we were presenting for actually deployed but the interesting thing there is to they ran the entire event using pre recorded videos. So an interesting thing just like we're using right now, that was done in StreamYard. And that was one of our first aha for the conference was everybody was, you know, and it would get even it had been for a year and change everybody was using video like crazy because it was pandemic. StreamYard was a really easy way to pre record sessions. And then you would put discord on top of it as a community where you could have channels for people to chat. And we had an aha moment, because we were like what the hell are we going to do for domains 21. Are we going to do it. It's pandemic. And we had come from pre COVID we were doing very regular domain of one's own workshops. We had conferences going every other year we had a lot of events that were just, you know, we were in a rhythm. And so when that happened and everything had to go virtual. It was sort of like, you know, what do we do and I think that deploy conference was instrumental for us because we were on the speaker side of things and it was so seamless where we were able to record in a private StreamYard space like this. We were able to produce on the fly. You know, it took all the pressure off of speaking live to an audience. And then the session was premiered to a discord audience and then we were able to engage with the audience in discord. While the presentation was running so we were able to do both and I think that that for us. Just, you're right it was like this light bulb moment but because the alternative at the time was okay are we going to have an eight hour zoom workshop where you have to, you know, be on everyone was doing right. Yeah, it just was a non starter for us. And I love the way that this setup protects speakers a little bit while also letting speakers then fully lock in with, you know, attendees or participants after the fact. So, you know, yeah, you're right it's hard to talk about discord without also mentioning StreamYard because they run one in the same for us and so then being able to work with Michael Branson Smith and Tom Woodward on the watch site just to kind of tie everything together has obviously made a huge difference for the way that we handle virtual events. So, you know, it's easy to kind of go into that space to but it just in terms of using discord as a way to communicate and participate it has changed the game I think. Will you indulge me, Lauren, can I ask you that. Sure. Thank you. I do want to say though. So, even before the deploy so deploy was huge for us for understanding discord, everything you said is exactly right, but this the kind of deploy was just a website with an embedded video. And when the StreamYard came up it would just change and then discord was completely separate. It was just kind of like there's a you can watch the video and whatever discord sits to the side and the discord engagement was really cool. But I was fascinated because one of the things is I'm not that long before then and let me see if I can find this thing hopefully I can. Not long before then, I was able to actually play with a site or I just came across a site called exp TV. And this is it. And it's, you know, just a video site that live stream so again streaming have been all the rage, but one of the things that caught my eye about the site was the way in which they had scheduling done. And I was like, you know, that's super interesting like the idea that you can see the schedule and everything. So whatever, you know, I kind of forgot about it and moved on. But then I found just a month later so that side I found in July of 2020 this site I found in July of 20 August of 2020. And this was cloud flares announcing how they built a TV station. You know, the TV station is kind of like what you said it's an embedded video this was kind of like what deploy was like and this is them on zoom and that's it but the coolest thing about cloud flares. They do it 24 seven and they have their own TV station which I love, but their schedule was like, whoa, like this is like, you know, a huge schedule and it kind of became the inspiration for how we did. The cloud flares were by domains which was, it's kind of out of sync now because we have to play with timings but all of these were particular episodes of our conference that you could then click on this. And this is the watch site. So in here, you have the watch site with the TV. And then we were actually doing this right within. Basically, this court, and it was all embedded in one place and I think it was just absolutely gorgeous. Right, how we had put that all together and done that so I don't know I'm indulging a little bit understand, but all of those elements came together and discord was the glue. Yeah, and I forgot the watch the original watch site was the actual TV frame where the video was embedded behind it. And then you could, you could scale out and just see that and it was like you were in the TV frame with us and if, if you attended that event or what you know we'll share links after this and put it in discord but the art for that was event was, I think my favorite art to date and that's all Brian matters. And Michael Branson Smith, like, oh we are. Yes. The guide was amazing. Definitely, and being able to expand and have the chat right next to the stream and to have it all work in different browsers, different window sizes, different time zones. You know, what if a session ran over and how would it auto, you know, auto correct and go to the next one like there were so many details to think through. But how we just, you know, the discovery of discord really did I think transform or just open the door for how we could do virtual events. You know, and I remember the really early days of thinking like, okay, well, is this, is there something here for reclaim, you know, because it's, it's a really big risk to introduce an entire new software an entire new tool to a group of participants and say in order for you to participate, you got to create an account. Like, you know, that kind of ask is big. So we did a new service and do everything right. And so we didn't want to go into that without understanding what we were asking and understanding the pros and cons and there's an early blog post that I have from the early planning days for oh we are by domains where I talk about just discovering discord and playing around with it and really our mindset at the time was, let's just start it until it doesn't work for us. Let's just go down this road until we can't anymore. And we never really hit any major roadblocks I mean there were a couple of things that we had to work through like if you remember the Titan embeds plugin is usually how we were embedding the chat next to the video player and I think Tyler has done a great job to help us move into a new age of embedding discord. So, you know, there are things that you have to work through a little bit but I think overall, let me make you full screen Jim, it's been such a cool experience. That's the Titans embedded to your point it went away but this was the discord channel for a particular talk embedded next to the TV so you could see the live chat. And we did the live chats for the keynotes in YouTube and for each of the sessions in in discord and that was super elegant and you could just again click on and off but like you said this went away. So we have to kind of think beyond that. Exactly. And so, yeah, I mean I think the way that we've it visioned discord for, you know, our events has changed as we've had more experience with it so if you've never played in discord before. Again, if you have a very basic understanding. It's very similar to slack or, you know, other messaging tools where you have channels that can categorize different discussions right. I can actually share my screen very quickly and kind of show you what a basic or templated server looks like so every discord space is its own window. And our first round of thinking about discord was exactly for oh we are by domains so here's the oh we are by domain server you can see it's, it's actually been shut down or closed but I still have an archive of all of those channels that we used at the time so you can see, you know if you can see the little lock next to everything so it is locked down and the only thing that folks can see is the notice that hey this has been closed. And we, you know, have an archive going somewhere else. And the same thing happened with the workshop that we did after the fact, Jim if you remember, we did. Oh we are by domains was so cool and it was such, you know, such a cool massive event with simultaneous tracks that we thought, okay, we're going to replicate this, but for our workshop for our domain of one zone folks, and we created a whole other server just for that. And then I think we were that was excellent I mean that was another really like it reinforced the combination of prerecorded live and live discussion and discord, which kind of led us to say this is something when we in 2022 dreamed up, bringing at tech more thoroughly into it that we were going to make this part of actually our, our company, right. Exactly, and I think, you know, we saw the benefits of discord, but I didn't like how, you know, so much not not work that's the wrong word but it just took so much effort to get folks into a space, and then you have this beautiful collection of conversations that happened over the course of events of the event, you had this growing community there were conversations people were introducing themselves to each other, and really connecting virtually which is what we loved, but then the event was over we were like, well we can't maintain the space indefinitely. So we just have to close it and then all of that goes away. So when we were thinking up reclaim at tech, and we knew that we would have all of these virtual events. We wanted to build out the discord space to be more permanent to live around pre during post event. And so now we're kind of I think in basically a third iteration of our discord. You know, I'm excited to have a channel now for the conference, you know, and really kind of build a conference into this. And then let the conference pass and still have discord here, you know, so it's been cool to see what it has been cool and you know I take it for granted now, but like we did recently a domains to one workshop in discord with live video live video and pre recorded video in stream yard and it's a really elegant like solution and then we have the calendar events of each session so you can pick and choose what you want to go to. You can watch if you want to chat you can chat but like discord keeps all of that now it helps us kind of managed to flex courses and you know discourse is nice because you don't have to be in it. Discord is nice because you don't have to be in it all the time. But like when you have these targeted events or you want to go someplace to bring a community together. It can work quite well. And I had mixed feelings early on with it being closed versus open right like I like things to be accessible but as the web changes, there are real limits, like we saw with some of those open tools during the kind of early pandemic like you know you got these zoom bombers and you started get this. And then it just kind of killed the vibe so managing some of that control over these environments has become a reality and I love what Alan Levine did with this course and how he kind of built on a forum, much of what we did in discord but it's a lot of extra work. Right and we'll also you know continue to talk about even how this reclaim discord space will continue to change you know as we think about you know this next year of reclaim ed tech so you know we'll carry those conversations into future sessions too. But you know I do appreciate kind of what you're saying Jim around the protections that discord provides and as a server admin owner you know the permissions that you can set for different roles are very just nuanced you have a lot of flexibility. And in some ways that can work against you if you get to granular but we'll share recommendations for just trying to simplify some of that, but then also kind of the the onboarding security that's just built in you know you have to verify your email address in order to you know join the server there are other settings in place that we'll look at here in a second like you could set up two factor authentication if you wanted. So again it's and that gets more into security right but it's just trying to find a balance where you're not hindering folks from joining but you're also protecting the community space. So showing folks that would be really useful and I think as you bring that up one of the things we remarked about as we did OER by domains 21 with the great folks at all was how little help and support we were afraid it was going to be a ton of overhead. And in fact in the end, people got in they used it it wasn't a problem like there were crickets when it came to support and help it was amazing. Remember yeah kind of that we have a static HTML help site that I'll even share from this workshop because we were really concerned like this is a brand new thing you know we want to make sure that for folks that have never seen this before that they understand how this works. So it kind of onboarded folks through the other thing that you can do and I'll show this to is you can have sort of stepping stones so when a user comes in for the first time. You can encourage them to go into announcements or to introduce themselves in a certain channel and sort of give them a starting point. You know which is is really nice to so I've showed a little bit of the OER by domains one. I don't want to get into this one too much just because you know it does have, you know, more user information. I can also kind of point to our our reclaim road show so this was our domain of one zone workshop, where we took the same idea and then scaled it down for a group I don't even remember how many people joined that workshop. 22. Yeah, it was but smaller in relation to the conference right so we wanted to see okay can discord work at different scales which you know it definitely can. And you can see sort of throughout maybe I can make my screen a little bigger here. You can see you know we have like an information section for just announcements so only admins can right here we started getting a little more creative with our branding, adding in different stickers and emojis for the events. We had a guideline section with code of conduct and allowed folks to you know choose their pronoun which assigns to their profile role which was very cool so this was a new bot that we were able to add. And then we had help desk section so if you did have questions during the event, you could write them here and we would respond, you know, in the same space so you weren't having to email and be somewhere else it was all collected. You know and then we had a workshop session general discussions around certain topics that made sense for this event. And then in, in addition to typing channels right we also had voice channels so people could jump in and just have a casual conversation. And I really loved that as well we had a hang out one. I think for the oh we are by domains we called this. There were hallway chats, so we tried to recreate that idea at a conference where so many valuable conversations just happen in between sessions right. So, you know during lunch breaks and things being able to jump into a voice session and just see who else pops in. It was so cool and so rewarding. I forgot we did all that. That's right. Yeah, there's also so when you're a server admin you have some access to stuff behind the scenes so you have an action log and you can see who joins a server who leaves a server. That can be helpful for support reasons just to know if people are having troubles getting on. You know, and the same thing was true. So you could see we recreated some of that for our reclaim road show where we also had a staff channel. So this is where we started adding in okay different tiers of moderators so we had our admins, we had reclaimed staff. I think for the oh we are by domains one we also had, you know, like here you can see we had chairs session chairs staff and admins they were all different roles with different permissions. We did karaoke and discord at one point if you remember so in other sessions, you know, we'll be able to talk a bit more about all of the potential of discord because there's a lot even that reclaim is not taking advantage of. You know you can bring in music and again there's a whole gaming community that does way different stuff. You know, but for our purposes, I, you know, we have created a virtual event template and so I can actually share this with anyone who's interested in creating something similar for their community. Like I said a class, a singular event, something more permanent or long term, you know that has that basic information section, you know different discussions, you know being able to connect in a hashtag for a certain event. That was such a cool moment when we were able to bring in the Twitter hashtag for an event. You know you can schedule messages and sync with something else like slack. So there's lots of really cool. That was great. When we would say in five minutes, this session will be happening and only are by domains 21 and that really allowed people to kind of just you don't. And reminders are important in the space like this that you may not be familiar with and just that link to go to it or to see it and it would bring you back to the OER by domains 21. What we were calling the TD guide, which would then put you right into the video and then you can still chat in discord or chat within the video, as if you were in discord with that embed. So you unlike deploy. We kind of integrated at all with the video and the chat together. So it could be as if you were just part of the session. And that I think did change. I think in some ways it moved beyond the ones we had seen and made them a little bit more. I don't know integrated and interactive. Absolutely. Like, and here's the example gym of one of the scheduled messages. So the only kind of clue that the user gets is that this is a bot. But I liked that we were able to send messages from the event itself, not from a particular person. And I thought that that was really important. You know, if you've ever tried to run an event, people pick out the person who's running it and then they get all the questions. Right. So being able to have sort of a faceless announcement to say, hey, here's what's running and here's what's happening. And then, you know, to really point folks towards the help desk for questions. You know, again, it's just one of those strategies when you talk about running a virtual event, you know, being able to brand things and accordingly. So I loved this and being able to schedule that stuff in advance was also super helpful for a virtual event that especially with multiple tracks. You know, that stuff is happening at the same time on its very specific timeline. And so to be able to schedule messages in advance prior to the event even starting and then to know that okay all of the reminders all of the announcements are going to go out and I don't have to think about that. Live, you know, absolutely. And, you know, just looking at your discord, like basically different groups. We are by 23. Obviously we work with them on the we are by the remains 21 but like they're doing a lot of their ramp up to that conference in this court. And they're really like it's going to be a virtual and an in person event. But I feel connected to that event by just being part of their discord and following along and getting any announcements and in some ways it's a lot more centralized. I want anything for that conference. I go there and I look through the channels and find it. And that's a kind of long term advantage of something like running discord for your organization. Absolutely. Yeah, the we are by 23 conference, we are by 23, we are 23 conference. You can see where my head is with by domain. So but it's a great space and I love how they're combining the, you know, the in person and the virtual stuff. I think that's super cool. And I'll be excited to see how that happens in the ed tech space to the other example that I'll show. So these are some older ones. So I'm a part of the headless WordPress discord channel and you can see that they've even branded things a completely different way. They've got archives channels, which is interesting. So maybe they're not in use anymore, but they're still available. And then I like how they're using emojis in their channel. I think that that's super cool and maybe something that could help folks to have another visual cue for where things live. So maybe that's something we could try in the future. So there's not a one size fits all, you know, every server is going to look a bit different. You can see they're using kind of these emojis to say hi to people. Like I said, for the virtual event template that I created, it's very, very basic, just so you have a starting point with starting roles. So I figured we could kind of walk through basic settings in a starter server. If that works, Jim, unless other things. Okay, I think it's brilliant you created this virtual event. Like how would someone get it and then import it? Yeah, so I can either send you a link to it or give you access to it. So I know when the OER folks wanted to start running their own conference events after OER by domains, they now have access to the server and you basically template it. So there's a section in when you're a server admin, you have a list of all of these extra settings down here, which again, it allows you to create new event. You can create events, categories, invite people directly. And you also have a whole section for server settings. There there is a server template space. So you can actually template it out the server and send someone a link directly for that. So that's what this space is. It's created purely for a template purpose, but kind of jumping in through in some of these settings just to kind of give you a look behind the scenes. So the overview tab allows you to brand and name your server. So that stuff is all changeable after the fact. You can set folks to go to an inactive space if they haven't been there for a while. We don't really take advantage of any of that. And we really tried to simplify this one. So there's no real system messages that go out. We don't have pop-ups or, you know, want to promote any kind of payment anything because Discord does have a whole boost side of things where you can, you know, monetize things. So you can see some of that throughout. And we just we ignore all of that for the purposes of how we're using Discord. Like I said earlier, you have the ability to create different roles, which is really helpful depending on your events. You can have admin staff chairs we created for this one. You can have participants, which is just the basic role. And then you can see some other roles in gray that are here as a result of the pronoun picker. And we also have another integration with me six and Zapier, which I'll cover in a second, but those are their own roles as well. So, you know, I could go into staff, for instance, and go to permissions and then decide exactly what I want the staff role to be able to do. So this is really nice because maybe, you know, I want the reclaim staff to be a part of this, but I don't want to give them the permission to delete the server, right? So there are still limits and being able to decide some of that is really helpful, even just for basic roles. So I love the granularity for Discord roles. You can add in your own emojis or even stickers, you know, animated gifts, essentially. And so I love, again, being able to brand it. That's been super fun. The stickers, though, remember, I don't know for which one they were a little bit too much with the intros and reclaim at tech. It was like, oh, no, because they would, that's you got to mind the stickers. That's all I'll say. Yes. And I think that that's, you know, you could see that in the headless WordPress one is the example. There's just a lot of moving around, right? And it can feel a little overwhelming. So we have, we do have a couple custom emojis for the main reclaim at tech one. Same thing for events. Maybe we'll pull in the reclaim open art or something. But yes, stickers, I'm sort of moving away from a little bit. You can create a widget and have it embedded on a site. So if you want to really promote the server and invite folks even to a specific channel, you can do that really easily and it embeds really wonderfully. We've covered the server template, you know, but being able to template something out and share it, you know, has been super cool. And I also talked briefly about integrations, but this is also such a game changer to be able to have web hooks and pulling Zapier to handle things like, you know, the Twitter feed for hashtags, the blog feed. So we sink in blog posts this way. This is how I schedule messages through Slack, you know, so a lot of functionality there. And I've actually blogged about some of the Zapier rules that I have and they're public so you can copy those zaps as they're called if you want to use them with discord. So I'll be sure to share that stuff in the chat. Yeah, that stuff was amazing. Like you really automated it so well so that, you know, a lot of the work was being done during the conference that you had done weeks before. Yeah, again, it just takes the pressure off, which is I'm all for especially when you've had a virtual event and you're already concerned about your internet working, you know, you can't be concerned about the other stuff that's just relying on a very specific time. So for most of the servers that we've created the bots and the apps that we're integrating are very simple. This is my quick list. So pronoun picker allowing folks to identify how they choose we've got the me six bot which this is actually sending notifications. When folks join and leave the server, which I think is just really helpful to know, and you can customize those notifications both publicly for the user or privately for discord staff. And then Zapier as I mentioned which handles a lot of like extra stuff. But this space can be super big so there's actually a whole app directory that allows you to just integrate with all kinds of, you know, whatever. So there's a lot there trivia, I wouldn't be surprised if there was like an actual karaoke bot gym so maybe that's something we play around with at some point. But there's, yeah, there's a lot of possibilities popping back into the server settings though. We've talked a little bit about moderation and rules for folks joining. And so right now we have always said it to our folks need to verify their email and that's all they've got to do. And that just proves that they are human enough to join. You know, and so you can change the language for that you can add in server rules that people have to agree to before they can actually see the space. And so I think discord has just done a really great job of, you know, kind of giving you those examples so I could, you know, click a category and it's going to auto fill some of that for me. So again, it's just it's really easy to get started. And you can kind of preview some of that too which I think is really nice so you can see exactly what it looks like when someone's going to join the space what they're going to see and agree to before they join. Can I ask you something, Lauren? When we did this for anyone of our events, often we had the additional precaution of sending the invite only to folks who either had registered or so, you know, on top of anything that invite to the server can be somewhat hidden if you're doing this for an event which, you know, further make sure that you don't get trolls in there ruining the experience. Exactly. Let me actually figure out where that is as well but you can you're exactly right you can customize the invite and really kind of break it down for who can get it and then you can reset those links. So for whatever reason a link, you know, becomes compromised and is found by, you know, a larger audience that you don't want, you can immediately change it. So I have really here it is. Yeah, so you can, you know, create let's say okay when we want folks to join the server we want them immediately to see our guidelines or code of conduct space so you can create that. And then I think how we've handled it in the past is actually create an invite link directly here on the specific channel. So you can create a space right there. You know and copy that and then that's the link and then that invite link can be edited or used after a certain time, which is great and push the link obviously something you get an email when you get invited to the talk or to the to the conference or to the community and it does kind of a lot of times with that zoom bombing and all that stuff it was because it was linked on Twitter was linked openly and people jumped in and that's that can be an issue when you're running an event there's no two ways about it. And that is such a hard, you know, line to find where it's like you want it to be open and accessible and findable. I mean, you also want to protect it. And so how do you, you know, make sure that people know where to go and it's not too hidden, but it's also not open for everyone to see and that's a weird concept when we're talking about making things open you know it's it's I know what I'm saying but it's it's it's challenge truly. But kind of getting back to some of those server settings and sort of the security side of things, you do have the ability, like I said to build into factor authentication if you want to scan for, you know, data that shouldn't really be there. You know, you can have the discord sort of do auto moderation for you depending on, you know, maybe flag words or things that you've set. And then you can kind of keep an audit log. So, if you are modest, you know, moderating the space you can see who's done what at a given time. And that's really nice. So even just me creating that invite link is here. And then if you've banned someone, you know, they go to this space. So you do have you do have the ability to blacklist the folks if for whatever reason that happens. I will say I've never had that be the case. So I mean knock on wood, but you know I think what we've done so far has has worked well enough. And you know just some other, you know, settings. So right now we have our rules or guidelines channel is set to the help desk. And so that's why it has a different icon, compared to the others. It's just kind of discord way of flagging this as, hey, you need help. This is where you go. But I really love the headless WordPress what and how they've added in other visuals for the. That does work with the visual. It does kind of make the channels pop a bit. I like it. Yeah, so like if I added in, I'm not sure how you would copy it in I'll need to figure that out but I love the idea of doing that. I was going to try and change it on the fly and I don't think I can. And then the other one I wanted to share too is that welcome screen. So we talked about okay once someone agrees to the rules of the server they verified their email address. You can kind of give them a starting point to do list so introduce yourself make sure you're familiar with our guidelines and stay up to date with the announcement so I love that this space can be customized as well. And you can preview what that looks like so this is kind of what someone would see right away. And then you can click that, and it's going to take them right into the introduction space to introduce themselves. So, again, it's just, I like the onboarding stuff that discord has in place to start. Alright, looking at the other stuff. I think we've about covered it. You know, like I said there's a bit of monetization stuff that I really don't get into. And then you can see the full list of members folks that are on the server, which is really nice. And you have the ability to kind of categorize that. Another cool thing if you look at the reclaim hosting server and I don't want you to give away any like but there's that events thing to which is super elegant where you have those calendar events that show up and can kind of highlight what's coming at reclaim. Yes, this events section was not available when we were starting out in discord so I love that discord is adding this they're adding in new features what seems like monthly at this point. But yeah this is really cool and I think their discord is really leaning into the idea that this is a space for virtual events. You know, if I were to create a new event here, I have the ability to, you know, set the location in discord. So if we wanted to change our community chats and bring them into this space. You know, we could they just need to have a recording option, because I know we like to record those community chats otherwise I think they'd be in here. But I also, you know, one of the some feedback that we've received in the past is like, you know, some things don't need to be recorded and that's there's also big value there that people can speak freely without feeling like, you know, you know that pressure of something being recorded So I would love to find a way, you know, to bring in more of those casual conversations and just space for connection outside of recordings. And I think that voice channels and kind of a scheduled event in discord would be an awesome way to do that. I agree. I do. I think, you know, again, you get used to it so you take it for granted but like discord has been amazing in terms of allowing us to build out community intentionally and build it out so that we can provide a kind of, you know, walk that line that you talked about security, certain amount of freedom to just have a discussion. And, you know, a little bit far from the maddening crowd in some ways of places that have gone a little bit off the wall like Twitter and stuff like, you know, kind of refocus is it on the thing. Yeah, and I appreciate that. I think it has filled a gap for us at reclaim where prior to having discord, you know, we had Twitter, we had our community forums, and then we had support guides and tickets, and other stuff to obviously but I think that this is really helpful to actually talk to other humans that aren't reclaim in a space, you know, that has a little more flexibility, it's a little more live. Whereas, you know, I think there is a time and a place for our forums, you know, but this is kind of a nice middle ground, I think between like a tweet length response and forums which sometimes feel a bit formal to me. The forums can be very transactional. They're great because you look for them because you need something, but a place to kind of maybe share something, hang out, talk, I mean, like, obviously your time and commitment will, you know, vary based on how much time or commitment you have. But it doesn't have to be I have a problem or this is an emergency or this is a fire. It could be like I had an idea, which is a very different discussion, right? Exactly. It's, you know, a chance to chat with other folks that are in your field, you know, and it's not more, it's not like a support thing. It's more of just like a community thing. You know, that's really what it is. That's the difference. So, but yeah, kind of getting back to the events and stuff, being able to say, okay, this is a voice channel, you know, or it's actually going to be a stage channel where we're going to have a presenter and an audience. Again, not really something that reclaim has taken advantage of in this space, but knowing that that's a potential, I think is really cool and could be something that we maybe think about even for the July virtual recap side of Reclaim Open. But yeah, you know, for some of these events to be able to say, okay, we've got an upcoming community chat, you know, here's what it's going to be on here's where we're going to meet. Here's the folks that have shared their interest. It's not really something that we've pushed all that much for our crew here to, you know, we don't this number doesn't mean much to us right now. But knowing that, you know, if you're in this space, you know, that could be an RSVP that could be saying like, okay, if you're interested and you can't you're planning on attending RSVP by clicking interested, you know, and then that way I'll know. You know, so I think that, again, there's a lot of ways that you can. I'm not going to cancel the event. But there's a lot of ways that you can, you know, use this space, even how reclaim is using it or different to that so. We don't even have the talking about discord flex course listed there. That's another event we could have right exactly and then I mean, if you like right now we have the Reclaim Open website for this but really this is happening in Fredericksburg, Virginia so I do think you know you can tweak things and stuff. But even just the flexibility that I think discord provides is really cool and you can see a lot of similarities in our space now after you know we've run a few of these events so we have announcements which is really just for you know, the reclaim staff to talk about things and it doesn't get, you know, lost in conversations so we keep this as the important announcement space. We have our guidelines for the reclaim hosting, or for anyone joining this space, and you can't. No one else can comment here so it's not an editable space it's just a chance to see, you know, what, you know, what's possible here. Discord help of course then we've got our general discussions channels for different events. So that is really the change that we've seen in this space versus, you know, previous versions of discord is instead of having an entire server for an event, we now have a channel for that event. And that has worked really well and I could see us, you know, maybe archiving some of these kind of like the headless WordPress site, you know, or keeping them around. So there's a lot a lot here and I think in future sessions we'll get into how the space will continue to change over time. You know, you can see we have a reclaim only channel our action log. All of that stuff is here similar to other, you know, servers as well so I think you provided a great overview of like, you know what it means to just get up and running with the server. The idea of using that template is amazing because that kind of pre populate so you're not starting from scratch. And then, like, you know, playing around with it like just looking at this I'm like why don't we do a regular weekly karaoke in reclaim at tech because I really want to do carry out and I know not everybody does but there's probably a couple of people and that would be a fun place to do it. Yeah, or just like, you know, what I've, I would love some sort of like coffee chat or just a chance to connect, you know, try to recreate some of the office setting, you know, seeing your colleagues or peers and an office space. Not that the karaoke wouldn't be awesome I'd love to do that too but you know something kind of community chat ask without, you know, a theme or a topic but just like, Hey, Fridays from 12 to 1230 we're hanging out here and having lunch together if you want to come, you know, and just like making use of those voice channels. Just trying to build that connection in virtual spaces I think Discord does a really good job of helping that. Yeah, no, I dig that. I like it and it gives me an idea actually of another use of the watch site, but I'll save that for another time. I think we have probably spoken longer than we planned for on this session but it was good I it's nice to kind of remember how we got started. You know what inspired discord for reclaim and then the iterations that we've gone through to get to where we are today. Yeah, and it's kind of you know it has gone to like oh you know maybe we can use it from a conference to basically a linchpin of us building out community as we move forward and that's been a really big development that we claim we catch this catch can given the size of our company and what we could do, and we really kind of said we want to do this and we want to do this well and discord was the way. Yeah, and the last thing I'll say to is, I think in previous workshops, a lot of what we the feedback that we received was like, you know I wish there was a way that I could go, you know, talk with these other people after the factor can you share email, you know people were kind of like writing their emails on paper for we left these events. You know, and just kind of providing a space that reclaim necessarily doesn't have to be a part of the conversation. You know, we can just help facilitate and bring people together. You know, it's not a one size fits all it's not going to capture everything, you know, there's still things outside of discord, obviously, but I have really loved being able to see folks from different schools connect and engage with each other without reclaim having to, you know, be be there in a way so it's nice to be a part of it, but you know you also don't want to feel like you have to be a part of every conversation in order for that connection to happen to so I like tender for ed techs. And on that note. All right, anything else Jim. Can I know that's it. We covered it all. All right, well thank you all for tuning into this first session and we'll see you at the next one.