 Recording is on the grand echo cool so glad everyone could make it this is our September community chat we're going to be focusing on a topic we're calling defining success for Domain of One Zone and basically the intention of this is to kind of just kind of hear from everybody basically a man and I kind of sat down and drafted up some some like talking points on what people are looking for and in terms of analyzing whether something successful or not we get we get questions a lot like directed to us at Reclaim of like hey you know what metrics should I be looking at and then we always kind of end up circling that round to like well what do you want to measure like so I'm kind of always interested in hearing what what people what people view as indicators of success and obviously in some level that even comes back all the way around to like well what are you trying to accomplish right so we're gonna kind of walk through all that and I'm excited to kind of be able to hear from everyone who can contribute and record this because I do think this could be really interesting particularly for new schools but but also I think there's also a really cool opportunity for admins who are maybe stepping in who haven't been doing this that long or maybe they're like revitalizing their offering or things like that so I think this could be kind of cool to hear from folks who are currently doing this or or maybe you're rethinking it yourself on what you look at what you hope to see that kind of stuff so yeah so we're gonna basically kind of set this up as kind of a question and answer in a group here so we'll we'll throw a question out there I'm gonna kind of intentionally like let y'all sit with it for maybe a minute if you want to write down like notes in a pen and paper or in a doc you don't have to and then we're gonna kind of share try to get everyone's responses you can feel free to unmute at that time or put it in the chat that's cool too and we're just gonna kind of go back and forth like that and see where the conversation takes us that sounds good so yeah so we'll start it off I think the first thing that we have to kind of lay the groundwork with is like okay well why do you have domain of one zone on your campus like why do you have it at all what was the impetus and particularly for you what point did you join that were you there since the beginning of domain of one zone on your campus or did you walk into that or some combination I guess so we'll take like a little bit of time was doing that 30 seconds minute and then we'll have people share and like I said mute unmute or a chat is totally fine it would have been cool if I would have had some thinking music play here but I don't know how well that I come through on a video call doesn't always you can always sing there is a share I don't want to do that audio just audio option I should see which is nice experiment with that yeah you need to be more excited doing this talk please that's good thank you so much perfect that's time believe it or not so didn't want to share where they're at so why do you have domain of one zone on your campus what was the impetus I know it's kind of a big question and what point were you joining or involved in that process well I'll go first I guess so I guess I'm one of the old's not one of the very first ones but I was part of our program we started she's January 16 and for those of you don't know I'm Jim Luke I'm with Lansing Community College and part of our issue we didn't know what we wanted to do with it and I'm not sure I'm trying to write up a book level type thing of what our experiences have been and so I've been trying to make sense of it because we just kind of launched in as oh this is an experiment it looks interesting to have this capability and we don't know what it would do so we didn't have any way of establishing some metrics of really what success would be we're now you know I've been looking backwards and going so what did what happened and how folks have done and what I've kind of sorted out is that there's this there's been five things we've been trying to do and they would each tend to have different metrics and actually what we may need to do is as a school we probably need to pick narrow down some of this as to what we really want to focus on can't do all of it at one time but we were just was just literally to be experimental was it was a way to bring different uses of technology and different technologies to the question of teaching and faculty that you know otherwise everything you had was either you know LMS or you know you had faculty running off and getting whatever piece of proprietary stuff like Google Docs that they could bring in and who know what the heck was going on with any of that stuff so part of it's just been to experiment and try different ways of doing things in different classes and like right now we're playing around a lot with just how do you really use perhaps WordPress or now we're even thinking a matter most with the cloud for discussion and stuff tried to get past the problem of LMS discussions just suck and no one engages in it like they do in the real world social media why is that is it the media whatever so one uses experimental and we kind of measure that by how much weird stuff are we come up with not whether any of it succeeds or fails because I expect some failures the second purpose and we've actually not done well at this is the kind of portfolio identity thing that was pushed a lot and I've heard from a lot I think I've heard a lot of this from particularly grad schools I know our neighbors down the street at Michigan State use their program a lot to establish somebody's identity and and the original UM Mary Washington or the you Mary Washington things seem to be very oriented towards your portfolio and here's your identity as a person and we've tried that and we've never really gotten yet just a simple measure of how many folks do it and I felt interested in we've just never gotten that going what we have had a lot of success with is what I would describe as teaching applications it's either as a supplemental device to the LMS to let you do let a professor do things they cannot do in an LMS or in multiple cases we've got faculty that are running off and going you know what school says I still have to do the grade book in LMS but I'm actually running my course and I'm using WordPress as an alternative to the LMS I know I've done that I've got there's a bunch of other faculty doing that because and so we're seeing that grow and again the key metric for us is our faculty asking for it and how many are they doing it that's that's our key metric the other thing we get a lot of is is a way to publish OER any kind of OER whether it's homework exercise packages we've got our own press books set up on DOO so got that and then the other one is increasing what I would describe as community stuff which is I've been trying to figure out what this is so that we can come up with a metric and what I've kind of figured it out is it's and this is where maybe where some of the commons in a box stuff fits or some aspects of that it's it's providing an online campus that fills the that big gap I mean schools provide the LMS but the LMS is just classrooms and then there's oh there's the school website which everyone knows doesn't really involve anybody because it's all marketing oriented you know it's it's you know it's it's like where can we provide spaces where student clubs can meet or do things or do you know do their stuff or we're faculty small groups of faculty like you know five folks that teach similar courses can all just put hey let's store our stuff here you know where anybody can link to it and reuse it and you know and you're not really sure is this an OER the heck is it type thing so so those are our five uses is in terms of formal metrics it's mostly just how many folks are doing it and you know are the when when the site comes up does it stay alive for more than a semester you know I count in other words I count the living after a couple of after a couple of semesters and that's how I'm measuring it so that's what we got cool anyone else want to share why do you have domain one zone on your campus what was the impetus where did you get involved and tell me if I'm wrong because I don't fully understand how it started I believe it was I was a student when it started so I believe it was under our full spectrum learning initiative that was part of our strategic plan so it was sort of push with that as more ways to sort of do teaching and I started as the pilot program as a student so that was super cool before we even had night domains and then I've been adminning since February that's sort of my background and how we use it we love to push portfolios but really what it's been used for is like last projects our department is doing all the freshmen that come in do scholarly blogs and we hope that they continue it we do have some people that do continue it so that's awesome but then like our art program uses that as like you do a software portfolio and when you're in that discipline and then you do your senior art proposal on there that's how they use domains and then we have some other classes that use it some spots and stuff so I guess as far as measuring it I sort of keep track of what domains are used in classes now that I've sort of ironed out the migration like sending out the emails at the end when students graduate sort of how much response I'm getting is sort of nice I feel like it's been a little bit more than it has in the past still really small numbers but you know that's really small wins so I did have some interest in keeping sites this half spring so that was super cool that I don't think we've had in the past so that's interesting so you're saying like how many responses you get to the email of like hey your sites going away because you've graduated and here's how you can move that's cool and like reaching out like cool how do I do this even though we do have instructions but just the reaching out and showing initiative I think it's pretty cool yeah awesome so I think probably most people in this call because we have a kind of core community chat group at this point but I'm like is at St. Albert College and I my last job was at St. Albert College and I will say I kind of selfishly this time around I I noticed when when those when you must have sent that email out because we got tickets at reclaim from St. like St. Albert people like cool a lot of St. Albert people right now some of them literally with SNC emails still you know in in some cases it's how I would notice or of course they're asking us to move their stuff so we have to know where it comes from but that was kind of cool to see a sort of where my heart to see too so that's cool and I hadn't really thought of like literally keeping track of that metric of okay how many are retiring versus how many people you know want help moving or or whatever that's cool Taylor I'm not sure how you want to manage I know you have other questions but I'm just scrolling through the chat and we do have a number of people who've been posting their experiences there so Jerry is talking about the history of domain of one zone being at University of Mary Washington being worked on by Jim and Martha and Tim and some other team members Ed talking about the SUNY system as a younger initiative working for open publishing and open pedagogy out of the OER movement and also looking at projects that can stand on their own without much help from the admin team a couple of experimental spaces sort of like Jim talked about Mo also mentioned that and also interest coming from staff campus and student offices organizations Shelby mentioned it that University of North Florida is about five years old and it's a faculty experimental sandbox space portfolios and online presence things like that I think that's covered most of the chat people can add anything that I've missed but I just wanted to get that out there before we move on or anyone else wants to speak and add something now yeah thanks but the thing that I added in the chat you know that Jim seemed to resonate with him as well was one of the things that I look at that I don't talk about loudly is what projects are there going and going strong that aren't requiring regular hand-holding from me you know wait is there proof that this is spreading across the campus for me the SUNY system are there people who are like diving in because that's that's gonna be a real measure of success for me yes that's exactly it Taylor spreading in a sustainable way I'm very scared of building things that only one person can do or only a couple people could do because you know someone might get a better job someone might leave us and then it's like okay does that mean that that disappears from that campus that that disappears from that culture definitely and I know that I've noticed this summer not in too many schools but in a couple there's been some admin turnover both in just a few spots and in some schools most of the team whether that's because it's a fairly small team or because the project is getting reimagined and so I think that's always something that schools want to consider yeah I mean I think that we're I'm hearing a lot of people talking about vision and measuring which are questions that we had kind of lined up here so you're all kind of getting ahead of us which is which is great so I guess what I'm gonna kind of tweak this question a bit and ask you know more straightforward if anyone has anything else they want to say specifically about what that vision is for domain of one zone and if it has changed did you start thinking it was this was going to be about one thing and it's kind of transitioned into something else I know that that has been touched on in some places but if there's anything anyone else wants to add to that conversation will leave space for it moving on so I also have am appreciating the part of this conversation that is you know talking about really who this is for and it sounds like we have a mix of things being you know kind of student-centered and things being faculty-centered so I guess one of the questions we have is how how do you approach the delivery of this project or this initiative depending on you know whether or not it's student or faculty-centered like what what are the things that you're doing to bring in your community members in a way that resonates with them and are you know how what is your administration doing I mean Ed mentions in the chat as well like what how does the institution measure success what kind of backing do you feel you might have from administration how are you communicating with administration about value and that kind of thing as far as supporting it some of you might be familiar with our tech bar but that's comprised of students that take domains equipment so then it's really nice because then at the end of the semester we can take those metrics and be like this is how many people came in and we supported so that's sort of nice to have that I guess besides just the overall metric of this is how many domains are used here are the class domains that were used and how many classes used it besides that and because we do the tech bar appointments anyone that uses it in a class I have fill out a form of exactly to get all of the details of so we can support the students that come in the best so we do have that data and that information hi all I can talk a little bit about what we're doing at UMW right now like like Annika said we also have what we call a digital knowledge center here which is peer student consultants that do all sorts of digital projects not just domain one zone COVID really slowed things up you know in a way that I think our faculty were like I'm not gonna do that right now you know so like bringing in new users and things like that you know at Mary Washington here I started in you know took over this group in 2019 and soon after that we were out so you know we've been rebuilding and rebranding and changing things around we're actually in the process right you know you know Jim groom's heart and love of UMW blogs which is thing he started you know now 14 years ago or so still running here but it's becoming quite a lot to manage so we're gonna archive it and spin up a new multi site that's a project we're working on right now so that we can have the tiers right so there's lots of there you know I look at I look at the multi site as the way in that is simpler or some faculty and some students the other thing that we try to do is package right now we're doing we're doing workshops this fall with our faculty on digital assignments so just trying to think about have a faculty member understand that you know digital learning support which is who I work with like we are fact we will help you consult you in creating the assignments and then we will also help you think about how to assess the assignments we'll also help you think about how those how it might line up to you know here we have a general education requirement for digital and intensive courses so how do those how can you take an assignment and line it up to digital intensive student learning objectives and so and then we have we also work with our DKC it's part of us right so then it's like the the the faculty does not have to have the expertise to be able to do all the troubleshooting and that's usually the place where they're like I I don't know how to do that I don't have time for that it's like we do that you know send your students to us ask us your questions all those kinds of things so we're really trying to build that you know tiered support around everything so that people think that they can actually pull that off so otherwise I think we find that you know if a faculty member feels like they have to have some high-level expertise which they always do because they you know don't ever want to look wrong in front of anybody right then you it's hard to get growth so I think by taking it step by step you know maybe you start with a blog maybe you start with some pieces like that maybe other students do a blogging assignment then you have them like in our common digital studies group we start to build more and more as far as like they use it or their portfolios students in computer science they're building their code and putting it up there you know those kind of things so it's it's like anything it's just a slow uphill march right and you just keep going and and the biggest thing that you know that I that I think to success in this is providing the support around it and making people feel like we got your back and whatnot just like you're on your own enough enough for me but thanks more more I mean to piggyback on that I do think support is everything right with the domain of one's own instance like building the the pieces that make it work and then we see it like you know the admins and the various folks getting the support they need to do that amongst the other things so yeah I mean I do think that is the the best recipe and on top of that then how are you going to use it what will it best fit with your community but having the support is you know we found that with reclaim it's not that different right like people want to be supported in the work they do I can see Jim you have your hand up yeah thanks so I got kind of a two-part question for everybody else here from what I was hearing and I'm wondering does the DOO you know your program your effort how do you put this I in our place it's like it came along it would there was this you know we had I had this idea and DOO doesn't really fit organizationally anywhere so like yeah we get some funding from IT and we get tolerance from IT which is about the most we've been able to get even the formal e-learning group has never wanted to touch it and has actually fought it and so we're under our Center for Teaching Excellence finally and and all this kind of stuff so we've actually had to kind of create this space in the org chart and in the conception of the organization where we live and so one of my own in and so the second part of the question my first part of the question is is is that just us or have others had that kind of did you fit in somewhere oh yeah this is a normal thing and the second part of the question is if you didn't fit in right away how are you informally measuring or not measuring so much as assessing your own progress and your own health I guess you know and I don't know that I have one good one is I just kind of for me it's just been yeah how freaked out do I get every year at budget time as to whether or not I'm still gonna be here you know and now that we're actually hiring somebody I'll be up for two years temporarily I mean I'd rather have permanent but you know now I'm feeling like oh well we've at least gotten to I feel like we've succeeded now because we're accepted that we're here you know apologies to the queer community but I kind of feel like yeah well we're here and we're you know we're here and we're we're gonna stay type thing deal with it so I don't know what others think so Jim my position in SUNY you know I wrote a grant that got the roll the you know the ball rolling and we were piloting a shared infrastructure where there's 64 campuses and I'm trying to recruit other leads and I was at an institution where I was at that time part of the IT team we've since moved into academic affairs but we're like looking for where would it sit in other institutions and I saw very frequently exactly what you're talking about oh the Center for Teaching Excellence is like bought into this but they're having problems with their academic technology department and so like I like pull aside that lead and be like hey this is a touchy subject for some academic technology people like like I would not say this is like I would not be going out and being like forget Blackboard screw the LMS like that this is gonna get you in hot water that'd be start start putting into your you know elevator pitch like these are systems that can work integrated together what belongs in Blackboard what belongs in an alternative system how can we co-exist and and and really you know think about that kind of talk because some places it's situated in the library some places it's in IT some places IT wants to make sure it doesn't fall back on them if it breaks because a lot of IT departments I mean if it runs on electricity we're expected to support it and that's frustrating for us and I'll say like a lot IT departments don't appreciate that that's the situation they're into there was a joke that a former co-worker of mine at SNC made was like do you need an IT representative there because they're gonna use the lights today so that was that was a you know particularly maybe not great taste joke but I will say it's it's interesting too because depending on like that has such a dynamic of like where in the org chart it lives but also I mean the org chart doesn't tell all right like that doesn't describe the relationships between the little dots on the org chart and and or the boxes that those dots live in right there there was a point when when like the at in a previous role or if there was an ultimate question about either the LMS or Domain 1 zone I was the same as me right so there were there were times where I got to leverage that and be like I don't think you should do this here and there'd be a really I thought you were the LMS guy I was like yes but also let me turn my hat around you know and that was I think enlightening for me because I do really agree like as much as I personally don't really like like LMS is in general very much I think there's a place and an ecosystem that all of these tools live together and I think it's sort of a pathway right I think some some people are gonna start out not wanting to use one or the other at all and need to find a combination that works for them whether they're comfortable in one or the other maybe they're a new teacher and just need to focus on something it's complicated right but then that also has a lot to do with how you measure these things as well over time like there I definitely found myself making some charts with numbers that go up whether or not I liked I thought they were meaningful you know because it needed to tell the right story so Ed you're muted I just want to add one more thought about like how we talk about the sometimes the tension between IT departments and domains one of the things that I always say in defense of IT departments is everything that IT runs is too big to fail if blackboard goes down for 12 hours that is a disaster of monumental dist proportions if your individual blog went down for 12 hours that's sad but we can fix it and get over it and so when people come to me and say like well IT doesn't do anything IT won't work with us and everything like I always like be like wait in defense of IT everything that they do needs 1000% uptime and I'm going about to teach you some things where you might break this if you go and like install 15 contradictory plugins on this site it might go down but what's cool is we can also fix it you know so we're talking about a different scale and a different intention with this project and that might be one of the reasons why you go back to blackboard if that doesn't sound fun to you I have a nice LMS has 1000% support but if you are interested in tinkering and doing something that you couldn't do in the LMS I've got a space for you to Ed first-time caller long-time listener thanks for calling in but I did want to say that I think one of the things we found dealing with IT departments who often you know as we understand running infrastructure and support right it can be thankless to be part of IT department and I think one of the things some not all but a good amount are fairly happy to say yep take our WordPress multi-site where they're seeking us out so that they don't have to run that because you know some of the tools that we run and host our targets and they are not necessarily always like you said high priority so they aren't able amongst the other things that to do so a lot of times it's not as I would say like antagonistic for us in IT departments like a lot of times they're very happy to have us take over a lot of this stuff and work with that and so they can focus on these enterprise systems the integration piece that you're talking about for a variety of reasons is super interesting and you know it's a mixed bag of worms I mean Jerry was talking about you and very blogs for over a decade we didn't do single sign-on because we wanted independence from IT department in that we didn't want to have to like you know find ourselves being you know held to different standards but at other points it's it could be really simplifying the process so that IT department is there's a spectrum there of working along with the folks and we're finding like we often have pretty good relationships and oftentimes they are even on the other side of helping us find stuff that's wrong with our domain of one's own or we're a press multi-site that we didn't see and in fact I've become a big fan right like I very different from my you know edu punk days of trying to screw IT now I'm like can you help me with this IT now you are IT Jim thank you Jerry I was waiting for you to say something that pounds me you've become the man awesome I think that um Taylor what do you know correct me steer me back if you want to do things differently but I think that with the time we have left it would be um most beneficial to talk about our last kind of question which is um especially since we're talking about support um let me find the questions uh it is what do you feel like you need help with from us gathering to uh tell your story all the stories you've been sharing with us here um to make any cases you need to make or to just assess what what's going on with domain of one's own um in your community you know what what do you feel like your what pieces are you missing what what what do what would be helpful for you that we can start looking into in terms of uh usage and assessment how hard would it be for you to generate for a campus a support um report which said we received blank number of tickets from this you know and uh here are some of the common you know problems that people are seeing and and here's my thought process for this one of the arguments against domain of one's own often seems to be well how could you support 500 applications or 500 possibly use cases you know and and and one of the things that i was always surprised at in the first couple years is how little like broken things i was going into fix it wasn't all that bad so being able to say like okay we have like we escalated 20 tickets to reclaim hosting last year and here's the kind of things that they were might be a way to track you know um some kind of engagement yeah ed i can jump in on this um and hello everyone um it's always a pleasure to hear um how domain of one's own is going on your campus uh so it's definitely something that we can grab on our end we have those metrics and can see okay how many tickets did we get from the SUNY email addresses for example and we can see we've been track metrics on our end to see what types of questions you're we're receiving um you know even how long those tickets are open things like that so that's definitely something that we can provide for you all um just let us know if at any point that's something that you want i i will also say too that when it when we talk about supporting domains in general there's always a conversation between what's offered versus what's supported and i think that that's a helpful distinction to make sometimes um and something that we definitely recommend thinking through where just because you're offering it and making it available doesn't mean that you can necessarily support every application in house to the extent that you might support wordpress for example so um you know i might recommend saying like we can offer all of this and all of this is possible and look at the potential of what folks are doing and highlighting the community work that was associated with that but know that you know right now we have capacity to support your wordpress projects your omeka and your scalar projects and everything else you know there's a lot of open source documentation and yeah yeah so that's kind of been my approach or what i've seen how it has worked for for some schools but i'd be curious to know how folks are handling the support models as well yeah installatron is i'm responding to eric's comment and uh i'm responding to eric's comment and the thing but installatron it's kind of nice and high eric well and and that's that's kind of immediately what i was thinking about too based on what lauren is saying here like i don't know i haven't like we definitely offer an installer for website baker cms i've never heard of it um anyone using it i mean um and and like you know that that's but i always kind of viewed like conversations around that especially with students and faculty as like itself a valuable thing right because part of if you're like embarking on a new project right like if you're like i want to do something that does this part of the the thing i was hoping i was hoping that domain of one's own would um sort of the process of making something on domain of one's own would teach people is some of the skills that you need to get started on that journey of you have to decide on a platform and you know that kind of starts for like students and faculty on whether or not they're even going to use domain one's own they might use something else right based on whatever their needs are right um but um but then applications definitely part of that and knowing like is this something that i can get seek help on and there's a lot of resources out there for me or not maybe this thing isn't get updates very often and there's a very small community so i could use it but know that if i come in run up to a weird problem it may be more difficult to fix um so that that to me was always kind of a um i was always like weirdly happy when i got questions about that i was saying like i see that there's lime survey and i want to use that for forums and i go oh you know like as an admin i'd be like i haven't used that tool but you should check it out and i'm going to install it too and we'll see what we come up with and i found most often that folks were receptive to that and say like let's learn together on this when i was an admin um and obviously sometimes people will be like okay that's not what i need something that is you know rock solid and going to do this i was like well maybe you might be interested in the college's license of qualtrics right so that's that is different um the other thing too i will say just kind of in response to jim your luke your comment in the uh the chat there just about um the ratio of requests that we receive to for support you know one of the things that we talk about a lot when you're putting any kind of digital work online especially as you're associating it with a dot edu domain there's always that risk of you know what if people are posting something that's risky and how do you handle those types of scenarios right and i always i it's something that i'm always fascinated by i have been with reclaimed for many years and i i think we've received like five copyright takedown notices like ever you know or you know really big issues where students are you know have done something that's not okay and we have to suspend the site and you know do damage control like that never happens um and so that type of ratio is something that is always good to reinforce too so um anyway i just wanted to to mention that but that's always a surprising thing for me i i think actually just to to point to that loren because i think it's funny we got one of those five mpa recently and it was because someone had hacked a scaler account and it put out all of these like mba course material from a publisher had figured out a way to get it in the scaler book and the publisher went after that and it was at a random university and it was a hack for scaler and that was interesting it's like the only people who care about the mba you know are the ones who have this like course they're selling somewhere and it shows you how broken that system is regardless but yeah like we don't really deal with it on the regular and we don't get complaints from the school which is always telling because that was a huge reason before we started all this to say well we wouldn't want students to put anything i mean how many times jerry you've managed that tom you've managed wordpress multi sites that are in the tens of thousands of sites and i bet you could count them on one hand yourselves it's interesting very and it's under reported how little of an issue that is frankly the the other thing i'd say about that is this is this is all covered under your other policies for institution anyway so students are going to do what students do no matter what students are using for whatever they're doing so um some of this is just like yeah this is a conduct issue that needs to be taken care of and and that's how we we've handled it in the past and like jim said yeah i there's there's only really one that i remember i had to do something about so yeah and and to that point too the concept can also be applied to giving folks the freedom to choose their own domain versus assigning them a domain based off of you know single sign on metadata first and last name you know sometimes the concern is that oh if we give students the choice to create their own domain they're gonna go out and create something inappropriate and again that never happens it's just not something that we see so i always think that that's just a pleasant surprise i really do wish more people knew that because i've definitely gotten questions about that uh pretty recently actually and i feel like it would be nice for them to know that they can have more trust in their community yeah that is a good point i thought taylor this was going to be a big reveal session because you're looking for for data i mean this is anyway a big reveal on some of our projects yeah um well you know that would have made a lot of sense um right here i can say something that i think would be helpful is there some sort of dashboard that i don't have to go and like find a bunch of reports to know who built a new site is it getting any hits are they creating any new links can i look at those links can i just have a stream of the stuff that's people are doing um uh because if i have to go out and find all that on my own i don't have time for that but if i have a list of just a stream of links here's everything that's happening on your system and i can go and randomly look at those or if i have an hour i'm going to go look and see what people are doing now and that takes me down all kinds of things that actually end up being oh student can i feature you on this page because we want to include this or here's something that you know here administrator look up look at what our students are doing it's like that piece is this is where not having a gym room work for you anymore really sucks because jim always knew everything that was happening on um w blogs and would be able to tell us all about it and that was the thing that helps you understand the value of it and how to sell it and make people understand that yeah there's good things happening i love you too jerry i will say um some of that stuff so like um new sites created and um for domain one's own we are working on something to put like account creation stuff and what domain have they picked right right at your fingertips and that is something i could demo when we planned that when we announced this workshop i didn't really have anything to show but now i do so that's why i was like it would have been a good thing um but um one thing that um tom woodward has been helping me a lot with is this um and that is not what i wanted to share wrong screen great there we go um so this is state you and right now we're looking at putting a version of our um last logins uh report that we have um right in the word press interface so that you can log in and just search for stuff so um right now i have um email this is very rough at this point like i have a lot of changes i need to make to the report um but the actual interface is the is tom's work um and that this i've been really happy with i think the potential of this to be um for us to build on this and add more stuff to it because i think i've been really interested in reporting stuff basically since i mean since before i started that reclaim really um but i think we i kind of realized and like the team we realized that like the first thing we had to do is make these things easier to get to because right now um some folks are very comfortable with like sft ping csv's and going through them but that doesn't work for everybody and it's certainly not convenient um so this is kind of the first um step to that is make this stuff accessible right now um what this does is really just here's the last time a person logged into uh domain of one's own from sso this is their c panel username this is their email address this is the primary domain name on the account and this is how much disk usage they're using um and i think there's a lot of room to grow from here and do really cool things with it but i will say right off the bat it already solves one of my biggest complaints which is if you are going into domain of one's own to try and find out like what people are doing you can go to the user's panel and wordpress of course i'm i'm not actually going to show that um but um but uh you have no way of knowing what their primary domain is from there right like that is better found from um whm or whm cs and but that's not where our at least it's not where i was when i was an admin spending most of my time i was doing most things from wordpress that i think is the most convenient way um so yeah so there's there's room to grow here i want to add more stuff to this report but of course this layout isn't going to work for everything right like this this won't work and we'll have to come up with probably a different report to do things like include um you know well what applications are installed on a particular account right that that's probably um my my personal next thing i would want to include is like all right can i get a list of like you can find this if you go into whm and look through installatron you can see every installation that installatron knows about which is a pretty complete listing about as complete as you could reasonably get um because i i doubt very many people certainly i've never done this but i don't think many people on domain of one's owner like manually installing wordpress and setting up databases you can do that but i don't think many people are um but i think that would be the next thing is i would want a really clear easy to follow report of like this is every install try to install this is the application this is the user account it's associated with this is maybe when it was installed um and go from there and i think um jerry to your point too there is unique things that you can do in wordpress multi site on top of that because it is one wordpress install and i'm not very well versed in wordpress multi site but it seems possible and reasonable to me to know things like what's the last post that's been updated across the entire network that seems possible and you know um whereas i think you could do that in domain of one's own but it would be uh trick because you'd actually have to query every single wordpress site in the database to check that not impossible but but yeah so i'm kind of excited to grow from here basically and we'll be working on rolling out this a cleaned up version of what i just showed to domain of one's own soon i don't really have anything to announce because i have to i'm still working out the details and um figuring out how we can do this in a clean way but yeah i'm excited about it can i ask for two things on that mm-hmm one thing the first thing is a request not to make this dashboard vanilla but make it a little bit opinionated in that and what i mean by that is if you've got filters in there and you think from your experience that a good you know test that someone has got a completely stale account is that they haven't logged in in a long time and they aren't using very much space put that button in there like possible stale accounts and filter two things at once to give me a list of like hey these would be some good accounts that would be like good to offload you know like you we've talked about this in past there are kind of things that you know by feel and if you could build bake that into the system to start with i think that would be really helpful to me and then the second request is make it an action dashboard and what i mean by that is um if there was a column i could click and go mass email right from the same interface so that i could like use it as a communication tool that would be the tops for me of being able to be like okay using this dashboard i've identified that these 50 accounts are the ones that are most likely to be pulled off the system click the button do it right from there because i was always like as an admin i'm still confused about like okay i have to pull these eight reports and i get this list of like 50 people i need to do but then i need to email them from whmcs and whmcs has no place to input those email addresses so now i have to find them again on a list like if i could just email from the place i'm getting the data or have a possible path forward workflow for that yeah from workflow that would really help we we do off oh sorry pali i was just gonna say really quickly that it wouldn't it's not in the dashboard right now but uh you can download csv and excel copies of the full last login csv from what taylor and tom are designing and you can put filters on them to say show me last login and storage usage and things like that so it is an extra step to download that and apply the filters yourself but that optionality is still there well in yeah and and what i'm hearing from from that ad is a couple things so one thing that it doesn't do it all right now and i don't really have any way at this point of knowing how possible or easy is it would be really nice to you know i showed you can search and filter it but that's just a display right so it would be nice to filter it and then get a subset of the data right from the tool and then do something with it which that gets into the doing something with it part i think there's kind of two reasonable pathways and one is you know hey can we come up with really clean and documented ways to get data from here and put it someplace else and do something with it right and that may be whmcs's tool and i think maybe long long term aspirationally i would like to see some of that happen from wordpress if we're talking like domains api right and say like yeah you know what we can use our own api that to suspend an account or something like that potentially that would be i think really cool but also from like reclaims perspective we have to look at like are we writing our own whmcs is that what we're doing you know and at what point does that make sense but um but um yeah i will say um the the um you definitely could you know use that report to send us a ticket and say hey i want a contact list in whmcs of this 50 people and we can do that i would like to long term again i don't know how easy this would be yet but i would like to put that in admin's hands of saying like you have a way to just feed this into whmcs instantly um not because we get a lot of requests actually i mean i'm we don't but i just i know as an admin it's always nice when i can just click the button and see it happen right um so um when when i was at s and c i had a script that i wrote against the whmcs api that did just that but it was not something i would put in anyone else's hands with any confidence because it was i'm a really bad programmer basically so um so but i think there's maybe a path for that right of saying like hey you can get data out of this tool and it will be picked up by this script and make a contact group for you and and and there you go um i think that's possible i think that would be super helpful because you know once you have that in whmcs as a contact group or their customer group it's a client group right now we do have a script that our infrastructure team can run to bulk add folks to that so you can say email everyone in this client group and then you can go back and say okay this client group from september 2022 you know let's communicate with them in december and let them know that okay now we're going to terminate accounts or something like that but i agree with you ed i think you know um it's another place to to check and it's another place to do stuff and um whmcs is by no means glamorous and being able to do some of that in wordpress would certainly be cool yeah and even if it's not in wordpress if it's just the ability to mark them as part of that client group from wordpress and then i can log out and go into whcms and write the email like sure it there could be half measures there that do exactly what i'm asking for right yeah that would be that that would be something i'd be really interested in too um the other thing stale accounts um and this is probably my own it's partially my own hang up but i get very weird about i don't know i'm pretty sure again this is my opinion maybe and maybe only mine but i don't think there is a single metric that you can determine a stale account um but it of course is personal and depends on your project too like if you look at um there's a whole class of people using um domain of one's own who have no install atron installs and maybe like 10 to 20 megabytes of disk usage because they're writing things static html and it's a really fast website and guess what a really fast website that's a small website probably doesn't have much more than maybe 50 megabytes of stuff for for a particular thing um so that gets tricky and then you can look at bandwidth but like is a low bandwidth site an abandon site not necessarily you know so i think i like i think there's maybe a combination of metrics that could reach you to to like hey this is a stale site and i i will say the way um i had done it one time that i was pretty happy with and this is super uh it was pretty manual is i like got a report i went to like the subdomains area in whm and said like tell me about every subdomain and then i got screenshots of everything uh using an automated tool uh to take all the screenshots and i looked at him and i was like oh this these sites are only hello worlds so okay and these sites are only you know white blank pages essentially um but obviously that was a visual look on my part so that wasn't perfect either at all but i think there is some combination that could be really cool um yeah if it gives me a list of 50 sites and 47 of them are correct i think that's a pretty good ratio yeah because you can learn those oh this is a bad member makes static sites now i know that i'm really glad i know that and i can keep track of that in my head yeah i do i and so maybe it's really just about how that's labeled right um maybe it's it's hey you know a label or a badge or something that says this is a low bandwidth low storage usage no install site might want to look or uh account might want to look at it you know cool awesome well we're over time so um i'm going to kind of cut it off there but thank you all so much i think this was such a great conversation um and really appreciate your time and you will be hearing from us again soon with some more on this stay tuned thank you all for coming good to see you yeah bye bye everyone