 I'm excited to be here, not just with Lauren from Reclaim, but with John and Shannon who are coming to us from remote locations, with widely varying and different experiences and entirely different institutions. So you won't have just me and my rambling style. I'm going to be asking them questions about everything that they've ever done in life. So with that maybe we'll start with Shannon, since you're not muted. Can you tell us just a little bit about your role, your position, stuff that's going to be pertinent to this WordPress multi-site conversation? Sure. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here in like the space, like you know, like floating around out here, excited to be here. So I'm Shannon Hauser. I'm the Associate Director of the Digital Knowledge Center at the University of Mary Washington. So if you are, you know, at all involved with Domain of One Zone or these things, you may know that it was invented at Mary Washington, you know, your history. But so we have a long legacy of WordPress multi-site. We started up a WordPress multi-site 2007 and it is still running, but it is currently in the process of being replaced by a newer version and we'll probably talk a little bit about some of the reasons why those decisions are made. But we also have that alongside our Domain of One Zone and we'll talk about those things. So I feel like I've run the gamut of like, we've had a legacy system, we're spinning up new systems, we have systems side by side. So there's a lot of stuff going on. And I think I will play the role of common word today in terms of rambling. So feel free at any moment to be like, okay, that was enough, stop rambling. Now, beautiful, beautiful, you encapsulated one thing I will note for the viewers is Shannon actually participated in this as a student. So she has, she has used the blogs in classes and has like her entire undergraduate career online to some degree, for better or worse, right? Yes, exactly. Awesome. Awesome. John, you are also another person with kind of that mixed experience. Can you kind of set the stage for us? Yeah, yeah. So I'm John Stewart. I'm the assistant director of the Office of Digital Learning at the University of Oklahoma. And we've been working with Reclaim since about 2014. And we started up with a Domain of One Zone project back then. And we've added in a WordPress multi site a couple of years ago. And so I've been working on the project basically since it started, I was one of the first users of our Domain of One Zone project. When we started up, I was a graduate student. Actually, I just finished my my PhD at the time. And I was using it for a couple of research projects and then came on board to help run it. And so I've been, I've been playing in the space for about eight years now. And yeah, enjoying it, always learning more. So I think it is it's interesting to see that both of you started from kind of the opposite position. So at UMW, they started with multi site, added Domain of One Zone, and then have reconstituted multi site. And John is coming for a place that started with Domain of One Zone and is now added multi site. There's something about the chocolate in my peanut butter or the peanut butter in my chocolate. I had half a presentation submitted for that. But I haven't quite finished describing what that might look like. But it's an interesting idea. Can you talk to us a little bit? Since we started with Shannon last time, maybe I'll put the pressure on John to start us. Like, what led you to this route? So you had Domain of One Zone going strongly, and you decided to integrate multi site in this way? What's what's some of the drivers behind that? Yeah, a lot of it was just that with our Domain of One Zone instance, we found that maybe 80% of our users were using WordPress within it. And a lot of those were students who were blogging for a class and who just wanted their blog to be up and running sort of as quickly and with as minimal effort as possible. And so we weren't really getting the full Domain of One Zone experience where they were playing around with the domains, installing multiple subdomains, really sort of exploring that space. And so we were looking for ways just to make things easier for them. If they weren't going to be, you know, sort of learning about how to how to run their own domain, then then how could we make it easier for them to focus on the content for their courses where they were working. So all of these are students in journalism classes or philosophy classes or just other classes that aren't really web focused. And so WordPress multi site was a good option for us in that it speeds up the whole startup time and really allows the teachers to just teach and not have to worry about, you know, how do I help support this for my students. And so I'm still there to support students, but we found that multi site just streamlines everything and we it requires a lot less effort both on the student side and on my side from a day to day basis. So that was a big part of the appeal. Shannon, is it similar for you or their differences? I mean, I think the reason we now put them side by side are some of the same exact reasons that John just described is that with the main one zone, it's there was not as much playing like, you know, it's good for some use cases, but could be a barrier for people. And also like we have top level domains at Mary Washington. So just becomes expensive when somebody just needs it for a class to blog. It seemed like that was not the best use of potentially that resource. But of course, this is like being the legacy here, Mary Washington, it's like, well, it started even though he blogs because a domain of one's own did not work. It's like, what's the thing you have to use? It was there was no infrastructure for doing it any other way. And so, you know, playing around with those things has taught us a lot, right? Like there was a big push here to have everybody who was at one point, like every freshman should have a domain. And it was like, oh, why? Like, where are we going with this? That realization that we need to serve people, give them a platform that is the best use for them. And how do we talk about those things? So that's kind of why we ended up back at like, maybe both options would be would be good because both options provide different things for people. Well, I think that's that's that's something maybe worth noting for people starting out and maybe even navigating having started either domain of one's own or with WordPress multi site is that there isn't one right answer for any of this stuff. And it is about understanding your institution, the goals, what you can do support wise, how much does it cost some of the things you don't necessarily like to think about, but are part of this big picture consideration. And you can decide how many things can we really even support that way, because you could have, I don't know, 20 different platforms, probably that do slightly different things. But what's what's going to be a maintainable, supportable, nice path for the community as a whole, and how you kind of guide people into the rights, right, right tools that kind of meet their needs. So, you know, I certainly think that it's a smart way to do it. I'm sitting here going, you know, having been from a place that just had a multi site, and now being at a place right now where I just have a domain on one's own, I can certainly see like, you know, these are Venn diagrams of overlapping, but it is awfully nice to be able to provide both things on the support side, as well as the authoring side. I'd be curious to know, you know, who is going to what platform primarily, because we're finding, you know, that a lot of our institutions that have both WordPress multi site and domain of one's own WordPress multi site into ends up becoming sort of that starter route or, you know, the route for beginners that are maybe just stepping their toes in the world of web hosting or WordPress, and need a little bit of guidance, you know, some, some recommended themes and plugins already sort of curated for them, you know, and then at the point that they've grown into that space a little bit more and are looking for other features, you know, they might launch into cPanel launch into domain of one's own at the point where they're like, you know what this no longer fits the bill for me. So do you all have, you know, parameters in place for your WordPress multi site to, you know, provide that structure for folks or, you know, are you steering beginners towards one platform over the other? How was that? How are you, I guess, steering traffic, I guess, is maybe the question I'm getting at. I'll just go first. In some ways, too, I've kind of been doing work based off of what John had done on OU or what in commentary as examples of like, let's put these things side by side so that users can know that they both exist and perhaps understand a little bit more. And we went through a whole site redesign for to recreate a landing page. I would kind of put that in front of people to give them the option to know that both things exist. So I mean, we we killed one more press multi site and spot up another. So there's a whole new thing that was that was happening. We wanted to build back that base because actually, essentially, UMW blogs had died, like they had really pushed people in domain of one's own. So people, I had plenty of faculty thought like, didn't we get rid of that? I'm like, no, it's still still there by doing its thing. So to get, you know, the parameters being like, it's very open, anybody can sign up. But that beginner kind of route, if a professor just wants students to blog, that may be the best fit for that class. Or, you know, we luckily, I feel like have a good relationship with our faculty. And like, we do class visits a lot. So it's like, you know, what we could come to the class and talk about both options, actually, we could, if you're fine with students using either platform, we could talk to them about which one they might want to use. Hey, you want to just get started really easily for your class? Maybe sites at UMW is the best fit. Or, you know, if you are thinking, you might want to really dabble and understand to have your own identity, your own URL, maybe do it on one's own, you could use it for this class, but use it beyond. So kind of putting that agency in front of the students. And that just comes with good partnership with a lot of our faculty who are open to those things. And, you know, would love for us to come in to give those options. So. And, John, would you say that you have a similar sign up workflow or anyone can sign up for both? Or are you pushing folks more towards WordPress multi-site? And then, you know, you're maybe requesting a cPanel account. Like, what is that experience for your end users? Yeah, yeah. So we are sort of pushing people towards the WordPress multi-site and then they can request a cPanel. And with the request on cPanel, it's really just, can you articulate the need for cPanel? And so if they can say that I want to use HTML or I need custom JavaScript or I want to work with Omega or Drupal or something other than WordPress, like just being able to articulate that basic point is really all we're looking for. Whereas a lot of our requests still come in and say, I need to set up a blog for this class. And I'll respond to that and say, hey, you know, WordPress multi-site is really streamlined for blogging. It's low maintenance. We take care of it for you. That might be a better option for you. But if you feel like you need the more customized experience or you need something that multi-site doesn't offer, let me know. And I'll go ahead and set up the cPanel for you. And so we try to leave it pretty open-ended. It's a pretty low threshold for getting a cPanel. But really just the expression of here's why I need the cPanel. And we do still have, I'd say maybe 10 or 20% of our users are now going to a cPanel. And those people are generally coming from a more technical background. Maybe they're in a digital humanities class or they're in an MIS class and they need to do database work. Or they maybe have worked with HTML or building a site before. Or maybe they need a really customized WordPress site. And so I ran a workshop last week where we were playing with just all sorts of different kinds of embeds. And one of them was embedding 3D objects. And so you have to get into the file manager system and add some JavaScript. And so it sort of obviously works better in cPanel. So we have a lot of those types of use cases that push people one way or the other. But for most students writing a blog for their class, we push them towards the multi-site. That's, it's interesting that you brought that up just around, you know, the users sort of gravitating towards cPanel are the ones that maybe have that technical background already in place. And that is something that we see, right, as people that are maybe just getting started and they see cPanel for the first time. And it's like, whoa, you know, there's a lot going on here, which is cool, but it can be overwhelming. And so there are those use cases where it's like, okay, they go in on day one, they install WordPress, and then they only ever log into that dashboard and they never touch cPanel ever again. And, you know, if you have a lot of that, you know, maybe the multi-site, you know, would be more beneficial for those folks. I'm curious, and Tom, if I'm stepping over you or anything, just let me know. But I'm curious, you know, since both of you have both WordPress multi-site and domain of one zone, we have a lot of institutions that have both or are considering adding one or the other, how does support work for those, you know, especially if you're marrying the two services with a landing page and you're openly saying here are two options, how do you support users in both of those spaces? Yeah, so for us, we've streamlined it through a ticketing system and it's really just tied to our email. And so for both systems, they get the same email address and then I triage the tickets as they come in. But it's pretty straightforward and most of the requests for support come from from the cPanel users or from people who've either accidentally or purposefully set up accounts in both systems and then they sometimes get confused as to why they're not seeing something when they're in one system and intending to be in the other. So a lot of the support just stays on a fairly sort of rudimentary level of you have, you know, you have two accounts, what you're looking for is in this account or it's on the level of, you know, really helping them to dive into cPanel and understand the file management and the customization and some of those higher level concepts. With multi-site, we haven't been getting a ton of requests for support. Maybe that's because we built in some documentation on the front end that answers the questions beforehand, or maybe it's because it's, it is so streamlined and there is sort of little opportunity for, for breaking things. Yeah, we hear Mayor Washington, so we have, you know, we manage a lot of stuff via a ticketing system as well, but the majority of our work, so it happens with students. Students are engaging with this platform more than anybody else because it's open and really we push it for students and their class stuff. Everybody should have a digital knowledge center in my mind, so it's a peer, peer consulting. So most of like that kind of work if people have questions about how to do things, students are helping other students, so we really benefit from that. Like I'll, I'll still get emails and stuff from students, like maybe they're trying to troubleshoot and, you know, whatever it's the weekend when the digital knowledge center is not open, but it's, it's like a mixture of, you know, of things. So sometimes people email and I'm mostly handling the email because it was too much work to figure out how to get students to do that. But the vast majority of students actually seem to prefer to come in and just sit down with somebody to help work through, through things, even things that are just like troubleshooting them. Like, I could resolve that in five minutes via email, but you know what, you handle that. That's great. That's a, an interesting, you know, I really appreciate hearing, you know, how you all approach support requests because of course they will always be there, right? There, anytime you, you have something like this, the questions will always come, you know, but having, you know, do you all have any strategies in place for, you know, limits to your support? So being able to say, look, this is, we offer a ton here, right? C-Panel has a ton of potential. WordPress Multisite has a ton of potential. How do you find a line in the sand for what you can and can't support? I think one of the things that has, we've seen that has maybe worked for some institutions in, in a position like yours is saying, okay, you know, WordPress Multisite, we have parameters in place. These are the, the plugins and themes that we have vetted and we feel comfortable supporting. We can help you get up and running in this space, but if you go into more of like the exploratory zone of C-Panel, you know, we can offer guidance and maybe take a look, but you may be, you know, on your own in some capacity. So I'm curious if you all have to draw lines like that or, you know, have differing support models for WordPress Multisite versus C-Panel? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think it kind of depends. So I would say, like, let me like, kind of split this between like students and faculty because that kind of makes a difference here. So I like, I will honestly say like the number of like students who have like gone into C-Panel to do things that are outside maybe the typical things is like, I can count them on my hands. They're usually computer science majors and are asking around, can it do this? And like, sometimes that's me just like looking up or emailing or claiming like, is this possible? You know, that, that's always good to have that in back pocket. But it's like honestly just, it hasn't happened. I don't know. So it's like, there's just, which is maybe goes to show more of like the need for a WordPress Multisite. Like people are just not exploring C-Panel beyond installing WordPress. So I have not really seen that much on the student side. In terms of faculty support, I would say very similar in terms of C-Panel exploration, but the projects say, you know, if it is WordPress based or something like that could be a little bit more elaborate because right, they, they are trying to sustain something potentially longer term. And that's where like, we talk about partnership around things. So say they want to like buy a plugin and install it on Demated One's own. I'm like, you can do this. But no, like you purchase that plugin, I will do my best to help you troubleshoot. But you've paid for that plugin. So perhaps you can contact their support if something is weird. So really, I mean, we have a small crew, right? So it's always that let's build together. We'll do our best to help sustain, but like let's talk about sustainability plans and stuff like maybe we'll even get to that. But like if you're talking long term, potentially projects, which happens seems seemingly more faculty, right? Students, they build things and then they're gone. But that kind of like, what are you negotiating when you're talking about faculty projects that may need love and care? Yeah, much the same for us. And yeah, with the Multisite, occasionally, if somebody is making a request that seems like it might be used more broadly across the Multisite, then we'll investigate it and look at adding in a new plugin or a new theme. But generally, when somebody's requesting something like that, I'll say like, yeah, just come over to the domain of one's own, and we can help you to customize it. And my support tends to focus more on like design and then that initial stage of wireframing and development. So generally, I've told people that if I can help you out with an hour or two or three of consultation on the front end of your site to really think through what you want to build, how to build it, and then how to sustain it, then I'm happy to do that. But when it gets to the level of actually doing the building, that's where we want the user to do it and to learn from it. And so the support stays pretty light for us. I meet with people almost every day to help them fix little technical issues or think through the design of their site. But it's really just me as the as the sports shop and what I can do in the 40 hours a week. Well, that's interesting because it's kind of, it sounds like John is almost the sole point of support for a certain number of things. And Shannon is maybe the sole in full time employee support, but has a kind of extended staff of students with face to face meeting capabilities, which is kind of nice. Shannon, can you just real quick tell me like, how many students? How many people are they really supporting? Do you have any rough numbers on that? I wish I had looked this up. I definitely have like the it's we like look at the statistics a bunch. So right now we have eight consultants, although we're training, we're going to be up to like 10, I think next year because, you know, so to with the DKC, we support a lot of digital projects. So it's not just Domain of One's Own and sites at UMW, we're helping with video audio, like so we kind of run the gamut of things. But the vast majority of our console, I can absolutely tell you more than 50% of our consultations are around Domain of One's Own WordPress kind of things. So of the support we do, more than half is around that. And I think that a lot of that is due to the complexity of Domain of One's Own. So I'll be curious how that shifts potentially. So we just relaunch our WordPress multi site. And if more students are in those spaces, I imagine they're more able to navigate, you know, navigate them more fluidly, which is the hope. And right now we have like equal amounts, I've been kind of keeping an eye on it, equal amounts of accounts have been created in both this semester, which is radically different than how it has been previously where it's just like the 95% are in Domain of One's Own and people some people were over here and even though you blog. So I guess we'll see how that does or does not shift going forward. Awesome. And since I ambushed you, Shannon, and this is like if I was a professional host, this is a nice segue into the idea of like where this project maybe lives in your organization and how that impacts how you're trying to determine success and communicate that success. So John, maybe if you could explain, because I think your scenario is maybe interesting because it's kind of shifted a bit. So if you could just talk about where does this project live and how do you communicate success because of that? Yeah, so our project started off, like I said, back in about 2014. And it was when everybody was still talking about e-portfolios a lot and you know, to some extent we are now. But really the Domain of One's Own project started off as a solution or as a potential solution for e-portfolios. And so that was an initiative from our provost at OU and it was implemented for senior level courses and capstone courses to be that that e-portfolio as you end up with program. And so the provost office has maintained the project over the last eight and a half years or something now. But I've actually shifted, me personally, I've shifted from the provost office to the president's office. And so while our system has sort of stayed under the support of the provost, I'm now in the president's office. And so it's a weird sort of split. The main thing that I see from all of that is that our whole, both the Domain of One's Own and the WordPress multi-site are very teaching focused. They're meant to be implemented into classes and most of the users are using it in a class type setting. We do have a lot of faculty who are wanting to, you know, sort of share their research on there as well, which is promoted and supported. But most of our users come from, we're using this in a classroom as part of our teaching and sort of fits under the provost umbrella in that way. And then my support is just that I can and that it fits into the rest of my duties. But we don't have anybody who quite fully supports the idea of building out research sites. It'd be nice to work with somebody from our VP for research office to be able to build out, you know, sort of a mirror side of what I do in terms of helping to support teaching, but maybe someone else to help to support, you know, more elaborate research sites. Yeah, I feel like John and I are in similar situations in terms of like where we are programmatically, like that that support piece, like what John just said, like most of what we do is focused on that teaching and learning side, which is why it's like sometimes tickets will end up at our IT help desk, but most people just come directly to us because it's like, we're the support. Our IT help desk doesn't know how to support this, per se, and we haven't really engaged in those conversations because it just makes sense for us to be doing that. So I guess the short, I'll try to be short, version of like where this kind of sits is at Mary Washington, there was a unit formed Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies early 2000s-ish and it brought together a bunch of IT liaisons, like actually we have these instructional technologists who are in these places, fixing printers, but they also have instructional technology skills. Let's put them together and see what they can do. Eventually, you know, that all the things that come together when you put six people who are very smart in a room and all the projects like the UMW blogs, the demeanor ones all come out, spin out of that kind of work. So luckily a very supportive thing here at Mary Washington for a long time, the strong digital kind of exploration, those things, and it's kind of separate and it fell under the provost, although briefly under the CIO, all these things seem to shift, depending on the politics of the time, but always seemingly separate from our center for teaching, which is kind of weird. Anyway, you know, catch me for a drink sometime, we can talk in details about that, but over time, so 2019, the unit essentially kind of collapses, like everybody complete 100% turnover, start to build it back up, and then you may remember 2020, when everybody's life changed, and so we're at three people when it used to be six and the needs of the institution, right, all these kinds of things. We're still under the provost, but things have kind of changed. Because we have that pure side, you know, that focuses on it, we say that the DKC owns demeanor ones own, but that's practically a function because I'm the associate director of the DKC. It's weird and doesn't make sense and confuses people, too. It's like you have a digital learning support and digital knowledge and what the heck's the difference? We continue to wrestle with what that even means, so we'll see. What sounds like, you know, the one constant you can expect is stuff to move, and this project may live under one group at one time, another group at another time, and that gets into the idea of like, if somebody comes to you and it's like, how do you justify spending this money? What do you tell them? What's your rationale? Do you go with numbers? Do you go qualitative, like with examples? Talk me through how you justify this in a changing dynamic world, and we'll start with John. Yeah, so a combination of numbers and sort of quantitative and qualitative. So we have something like 7,000 users and 8,000 websites, and that's one of the things I always point to, and the users are spread out through every college and every part of our university, and so everybody finds their own use cases, and so then I start pointing them to, you know, as we were saying, during COVID, we couldn't hold, you know, live events like we used to, and so our art college started building up galleries of student art in OU Create, and our engineers share their work through OU Create and can, you know, put three models up, they can do all sorts of research reports, you know, you create, our journalism students learn, you know, to talk to a broader audience by writing for Create, you know, both from when they're freshmen all the way through to when they're seniors, I'm teaching a web design and development class, and again, being able to break and make the web as a student and not worry about sort of the repercussions is a big part of it, and then, you know, most of the deans across our college have both personal and research websites and often teaching websites, and so we've really, we're integrated throughout the university, we provide a service that if you took it away tomorrow, a lot of people would be upset and wouldn't be able to teach their classes in the same way, wouldn't be able to share their research in the same way, and we really support sort of the full university mission, and so I don't know quite what OU would do without us at this point, and I hope I don't have to find out. Yeah, I think much like John just said, we're kind of deeply embedded in like the teaching and learning at this point, like to take away something would, like there would just be, you know, the faculty and students would be, I think, kind of in an uproar about this, but of course, we do have to do, especially here in Mary Washington, because we have top level domains too, like, you know, we want to make sure we are doing our due diligence and staying on top of that maintenance and care of making sure we're paying attention to getting accounts out. So I would say too, like this is maybe where we're press multi so I can slightly advantage you just on the per user cost. You want to pay attention, but it's not the same level of pay attention to what C-Panel add in the top of top level domains, but you know, I think some of that is just sitting down and pulling out the statistics, like I had to do that last year, and I like, you know, gave it to the provost, it's like, you know, nine out of 10 of our users are students, and we really couch this as something that's like, this is something that if a student engages with Domain and One's own, say really well, or just learning web stuff, that makes them marketable. And so, like, right, there's a big focus right now, like, at Mary Washington, we're in the middle of, like, launching a thing that's like, what is after Mary Washington, the desire to make a potentially a liberal arts school or that like a degree from there marketable, like so, and this is, you know, digital people, like this kind of stuff, like feels like an easy win that makes like everybody happy. It's like, yes, that sounds like a good skill people should have and engage in whether or not they do it well is another another matter, but it's, it seems like people think it's important, even if they don't understand why it's important. So we have that going, going for us. I think that's maybe a also a good transition into this idea of, you know, long term plans for these projects, long term sustainability, you know, you mentioned this being a great marketing tool for students after they graduate. So how long do those sites stay online to be that marketing space for them to be that digital space for them after they graduate? Do they take it with them? You know, there are so many, I mean, anytime you get into web hosting in general, there are so many questions around that and there's no perfect answer. But, you know, Shannon, especially UMW coming from a place of having UMW blogs, which was successful for many years. And then one day saying, okay, you know, this is no longer serving us the way that we need, you know, we need to start fresh. So how, and this is a question for both of you all, how do you make decisions to, you know, keep these projects sustainable, especially WordPress multi site, you know, the idea of archiving versus deleting versus, you know, it's talk to me about those plans or thinking, you know, where you all are now. Yeah, I think that we're still developing that I think with Domain of One Zone, it's much easier for us, especially with students like we give them 90 days post graduation to migrate and we do things to try to set them up. Because it does cost us just so much to do that, we just have to and that makes to like, you know, it is the main of one zone, the whole point is that you take this with you go go like, you know, we say that like it's a good thing, like we don't lock you into an e portfolio system or other things that you can't you could take this and you own it, you know, now you can pay for it. But multi site, on the other hand, I think we are still wrestling, which is what happens, you know, you blogs, like there's so much stuff there. But and, you know, they went out with a mindset that's like, we'll have this for forever, let's not worry about managing or keeping this stuff like, you know, sites die, that's that's how that goes, which is maybe not the worst strategy, I don't know, like, you know, the grand scheme of costs over time, I guess, if you were really if you were really precious about like, how much money you have, you maybe you had to really pay attention to those things. It seems like multi site seems a bit more scalable in terms of that that like potential cost factor. Now things dying in multi site because plugins, that's, I don't that's why I think having two platforms kind of helps with that, like complex projects now go live on domain of one zone, they don't live on multi site anymore, which is one of the problems with our old multi site is that there was really complex projects there going on. So I think we're still in the stages and I'd love to hear, you know, maybe what John has to say, like, about this of what we thought we wanted to delete things, and maybe we do, it's like, maybe hello worlds, like, go through a regular kind of deletion where nobody ever, they don't engage in it. But, you know, deleting things becomes complicated because say student has an account, and they've written for themselves, but then they added stuff to a class, like who's to like, if I delete their stuff, like, not just their stuff, their posts are gone from their teacher site. It gets a little bit weird and wonky when you're kind of in the multi site environment. So yeah, similar answer for us and a lot of it's tied into both of our systems are tied into our single sign on. And so it shuts off single sign on for students and faculty who leave the university about six months after they leave OU. And so at that point, users would have a hard time logging into our systems that doesn't automatically delete their WordPress multi site or the domain of one zone projects, but they would have a hard time logging into them. And so generally, I give them the same warning, especially with domain of one zone, that when you leave OU, I'll help you to transition that domain off onto, you know, a separate server or over the reclaim or wherever else you'd like to with multi site. We right now are leaving the sites up, but I am wanting to build out a better strategy for archiving and also for the idea of having sites that are sort of purposely ephemeral. And so I think maybe adding something into the sign up sheet of, I just want to use this multi site for one semester or for one year. And then, you know, automatically deleting those sites or notifying people and saying, Hey, you know, have you changed your mind? But the idea that a lot of students do just want a multi site for a class and then would be happy for it to go away. I think would be one strategy for, you know, sort of minimizing or cleaning both multi site and domains over time. I do like the idea also of pulling some of this down and making it flat files. So switching over from multi site or domains to, you know, just flat HTML, and we could archive things a little bit that way. And they'd be a little bit more sustainable and that we wouldn't have to worry about PHP changes and JavaScript changes and the rest. But yeah, still a work in progress as to how we maintain all of that. I do, to Shannon's point, I do go through occasionally though and delete, you know, the Hello World. But that's sort of a laborious process in that I check each of those users and make sure it's not just a Hello World. Maybe there's a Hello World WordPress site in a domain of one zone, but maybe there's also a custom HTML or Python or some other kind of site sort of sitting next to it. I don't want to accidentally delete somebody's, you know, actual project, just because I'm deleting a unused WordPress at the same time. And Tom, I know you might have another question here, but I did want to just comment on that similar to kind of some of the scripting that we can do to, you know, deep provision, cPanel accounts in bulk. I think, you know, our infrastructure team has been working on scripts to be able to say, okay, how many Hello Worlds do we have in this multi site and getting a list of those users to say, okay, here's at least a starting point to say, like you were saying, John, you know, to reach out to those folks and say, is this something you're still using? You know, do you have you changed your mind? Do you want to keep this, you know, and at least put folks on, you know, on two sides of the coin essentially to say, okay, these are the ones that we can deep provision safely and not really have to worry about removing, you know, history of work. So yeah, I agree, though, it's kind of like hitting a moving target. There's no, you know, perfect way to archive or, you know, clean up these sites. I think it just, you know, it's kind of up to each community to decide, you know, at what point is this useful and at what point is this no longer useful? Yeah, I want to chime in real quick. I think one thing that makes us very fortunate in terms of Domain in One's Own here is that at some point in the past, somebody worked with our enterprise people to put together a report that pulls in stuff coming out of Domain in One's Own and student information so I can like hit a report that's like shows me all active students if they've graduated. Like this is, I couldn't do what I do with graduation every year without this like super important report that somebody decided it should be done probably because of management reasons. So make, if you are doing those things, like work with the people, find the people at your institution that can help you do that work because that saves me so much time because it gives me a place to start from knowing those things, you know. So I would love actually something like that for the multi-site. It exists for me for Domain in One's Own but it's like, yeah, I don't know how I would be hours. It's already hours work for me to coal and go through those things. I can imagine doing it, trying to do it manually. I don't know. That'd be, I'd really like it if we had that. I do get reports from our IT of accounts that have been deprovisioned each month and then I manually check those against our systems but it'd be nice if that was a bit more integrated and we for whatever reason my reports of those deprovisioned accounts miss accounts sometimes and so occasionally I'll find out several years after somebody's left OU that they're not at OU anymore and then I need to figure out what to do with their account. Well this does get into the bigger picture stuff, like who are your key partners, what's the key data and it's a bit on, we probably have a number of people who are either early in this stage with their WordPress multi-site or trying to figure out what they want to do and I know it can be like trying to like figure out like what car to buy. You could spend probably hours on like thinking about upholstery and stuff like that but you having done this, lived through a couple different cycles and with great depth and experience where would you suggest people spend the most energy and time when they start to think through this project? For me the the part that I enjoy doing the most and the part that I think merits the most time is working with the faculty and thinking about how you're going to work with faculty to be able to support them as users and their students as users and so that's where you know whether it's it's the people who are running the multi-site or you know partners in the library or in the Center for Teaching Excellence or you know Center for Teaching Knowledge you know wherever those people are you know working through those processes to be able to support faculty and rolling these things out and you just don't want to get into the normal ed tech trap of you know giving everybody an iPad but with no ideas to what to do with it and you know same thing applies for a WordPress site so that's the I think the more fun and the part that is more interesting as somebody in educational technology to me the the other partners are more on the IT side and some of those administrative sites of just how do we how do we keep this clean how do we keep it you know keep track of our users how do we integrate this into the rest of the university systems those are you know a bit more technical and less exciting but necessary just to prevent the sort of floating and degradation of the system over time. Yeah I think my answer is similar similar to John's but it's just so I think contingent about the context of where where you are um like I've had I've had kind of people reach out to to me about like they're like thinking about starting to make one's own and uh like what should they do and then they tell me it's like well this is being started in our small digital humanities center how do we I'm like you're like your goals like you know sound different than our goals so I can like advise you on some things but you are maybe you're a faculty member who is part-time doing this maybe you should be partnership partnering more fully with your IT department to have to manage the support to you can do you have good relationships with them so that they can maybe handle like very baseline things uh you know coming in uh do you know maybe that's essential here it is because we already had a unit that does like has that level expertise that's that wasn't important to us I mean we have a relationship with our help desk like they know how to forward those things they deal with a single sign-on problems because that's that's not us but you know for us our partnerships with faculty um and students are are the most important what are what are our faculty's interests around these things um and okay they our faculty are really they're not as interested in building elaborate projects they want their students to do it oh that means we need to have really good student support which is why the digital knowledge center was created DTLT was like we are helping faculty so much do interesting so many interesting things with their students um our faculty are overwhelmed and it's preventing them from engaging maybe we need something that and then those students were then reaching out to DTLT and they're like we don't we don't have time in our day for this we're faculty development maybe we need something that students can help students right so that that was an evolving thing um so it's really who who is going to be using it how do you serve them and that just really contextual one grows over time right the DKC didn't exist um you know it took years for that to the idea to to come fully around because they saw if we're going to get people to faculty more faculty to engage in this they we want to help them go hey you don't need to be experts in this you know you can point your students to us um so uh it's contextual based on uh need well I really like it's it's you know it's it's the same thing we do in so many other ways right it's backwards design what are our goals what's it going to take to support that like the idea that you get faculty engagement by supporting students may not be intuitive initially but it is a thing that you can start to see when you kind of dive down into why aren't more faculty using it because they feel they have to be experts you know so how do we take that off their plate um you know I think that those conversations are interesting they're unique in each individual organization I think that's one of the things people struggle with is often you know you want the answers you want some concrete stuff but it does vary so differently depending on the goals and who you have to support it and just between the two of you I mean it's just radically different places but still with a lot of overlaps conceptually in terms of what's happening and how it's being done which I I think I find interesting so another thing that usually comes up with people considering this or even in the throes of it is like the fear uncertainty doubt level right so like before we get to like what's the most amazing thing you've seen maybe like what's the worst thing that has happened to you and and how did you deal with it john you want to start us off let's try to think of the worst thing that's happened on the multi-site side and just because we'd already had the experience with domains we learned a lot and so with the multi-site side the hard part was just just the initial setup just deciding sort of what plugins and what themes to support and how we would do that then rolling it out we'd already built the networks of faculty that knew to talk to us the the classes that we're using the course and so it was a pretty easy rollout just because of the angle that we were coming from we tend to have more sort of exciting and interesting like failures on the domain side where people delete accounts by accident I've deleted accounts thinking that a user wasn't there anymore wasn't using it anymore and then having to go you know restore that figure out how to back it up so yeah the absolute deletion of something is I guess my big fear but normally there are backups of everything and and I always think that you know breaking things is an opportunity for learning and I don't remember having broken anything or even our users haven't broken anything so badly that we couldn't repair it or couldn't couldn't recover it in some way so yeah I don't remember any real horror experiences I just remember yeah various learning opportunities of well we broke that in an interesting way how do we how do we not do that again but I like what you're saying though John because I think it kind of gets to that idea of taking this scary factor out of it you know it's like we can't break it like even if you think the worst happens you delete it we can we can get it back you know and so that was one of the really empowering things for me when I was first starting out in these spaces is just like okay even if I press the wrong button you know it's all okay um anybody didn't mean to cut you off Shannon but I like that approach as just in that moment of thinking also I guess the worst and not the worst experiences but some of the worst were when I agreed to things without really thinking it through and so the biggest challenges have been where I said like oh yeah I'll help you build that site and then it ended up being you know a site with like 2000 items in it and I had to like manually do data cleanup for it and it took me you know three weeks instead of the two hours that I thought it would take so yeah agreeing to the scope on things before you get started on it is uh is the main thing I've learned uh yeah I echo what John just said all that all those kinds of things one layer I think I'll add onto this which could be the consideration sustainability but no one can predict the future right who would have seen unit six going down to three pandemic all these kinds of things one thing is because we were early on and did a lot experimenting I've had to I encountered a lot of bespoke things that were done here experimental things that we didn't know were happening right like not long after like the unit reformed itself two three of us are out of the office and the front page of Domino one's own just goes down and we're like what is going on I mean it's because like that existed on digital ocean and not with reclaimed hosting because they were right like there was all these like little precious things that were interesting like it was interesting but it there was we didn't know about them and so therefore we kept them kind of uncovering this stuff so we've tried to lean into being standardized as much as possible just for that sustainability aspect what I get run over by a bus it'd be much easier for somebody else to kind of take stuff over if if they need to reach out to reclaimed hosting they reclaimed most and can easily look and understand what's going on because it's a standard setup not like um yeah there are some weird custom stuff that is happening so um we'll try to help you but uh yeah just that's hard we want to experiment and do cool things but also like who who might have to carry that on uh and and do things uh that that would that would be another layer of big complexity in terms of like doing interesting things uh not to say you shouldn't but also you know weigh that with like who else will have to manage this project well I think that that that idea of putting the the little custom precious things not in your main standardized system is is a key learning learning object for for everybody I think you know like when I look back at like what I left the poor people at VCU with I'm like oh dear that that that that's really bad because we we did everything and customized all sorts of crazy things uh even the login system there is custom because Garner Campbell didn't like Buddy Press's login system so we wrote a custom one on top of Buddy Press um so you know you get into some interesting things but that idea let's keep this system clear and understood and structured and we'll put the special things in these places where they're at least contained and don't spread you know to the other stuff and I think that that maybe that's maybe that's the only thing I need to to to reference for the rest of my life um but yeah well well put you all right we're oh go ahead go ahead I was gonna say well I'm talking about the best things uh like you know I mean you know uh yeah I I kind of um want to just talk I think like the best things are obviously and I'm guessing John will like this are not like the technological successes it's like oh like I successfully do provision to a bunch of people whatever I don't know it's about like the cool stuff people do with your platform right like that is always the most exciting part um and there was one uh I mean there's I mean with the history we have here at Barry Washington there's like hundreds of projects I could um you know refer to but one that I've kind of recently you know I that I show a lot is this um class called the Geographies at Children taught by one of our professors so like it's this is multifaceted so like and she's taught this multiple times this is like a camera which iteration of it might be 2018 so like what she does it's a small it's like a class where students 8 to 12 of them are in this class they're they're doing field research about the geographies of children so not only are they learning how to be human geographers and do this research she's like okay it's also important for us to we're gonna do this research and then we're gonna put it up online so people could see this research add on to that the complexities you're doing with children so you've got to be you're publishing things about children online like the privacy import like it's basically like teaching these students to wrestle with all the things real human geographers have to deal with um and I heard the way she goes about building a site it's like a code but she doesn't she's like we're gonna build the site let's go like she's like it is like she just tells them that that's what they're gonna do and like I I think it's blown the minds of several faculty that it's let's just like you don't like scaffold them into doing it she so she owns this domain right like it's on her like that that piece of it she's just like no go let's figure out what's the best way let's just do it and she they manage a ball up a site every every time and she's told me several students have gotten jobs because they can point to this work I did this like look at it it's just I it's one of my favorite things so that just like it's the full I fit it I know it must be a really intense and like impactful you know experience for the students that go through all all of this in a class so I I do just love it awesome John you want to you want to share this because we're closing in on time and I want to make sure we in strong on positive thoughts yeah yeah it was just a lot of great experiences and like I said I've been working on it for like eight years one of my favorite was working with the school of art on this gallery that they put together during COVID and like I said we couldn't have the normal normally the students would use our museum of art and build out their own like actual physical gallery but we couldn't do that and so I got to work with the art students and they came up with all of these crazy designs and all of these things that they wanted to do and I was like yeah I think we can do that and so you know just working with them from the design angle and then helping them to sort of produce it was a lot of fun working with the architects on some of the weird stuff they want to do sometimes just I enjoy the strange projects and when people are asking for things that I hadn't thought of before or for like really beautiful things that I just don't have that level of of I but I can help them to to make it real online is always the most fun for me and then the other side of that is when I discovered things that people have built totally without me and without me knowing about it as they were doing it and I'm like oh this is brilliant I wish I'd known when they were building this but I'm glad they were able to do it on their own without me at all and so both participating in these things and then discovering the pieces that people do you know totally on their own is is fantastic well it really is it's it's amazing and you look pedagogically even your you know the two examples that were showing are coming from very different spaces with very different disciplines and very different intents and one of my own personal favorites still is like a field botany site that is still in use like after I think eight or nine years there's I just looked to see if they were still throwing things in there and they are which I find amazing am I embarrassed visually about how it works now yes I am could I make it much more amazing and awesome now I could but it keeps doing the thing it was intended to do which is bring field experiences into the digital thing in a simple way for people and you know just for the fun of it there you go Taylor you know and it's it's it's like that I think like when you can meet that person in the right space or have that person just take something totally and do it you know so there are thousands and thousands of field botany images up there now and it just cracks me up that it continues to churn on without any sort of support because I know nobody has touched it in years which is you know it's just kind of cool and I think like this this kind of paints hopefully a spectrum of different institutions different people different origins different futures but they kind of weave back and forth in exciting ways that that that I think inform one another so you know if you get nothing else out of this conversation you now know John Stewart's name you know now Shannan's name I'm going to leave out her last name in case she doesn't want to be identified further and you know my name so these are people I think that are interested and eager to talk about this stuff and and to help people when they can um I don't want to commit anyone but like it's part of it it's like this is cool stuff we care about it we like to share what we're able to do Shannan you don't give your last name yeah it's how's her I mean all my handle is Shouser so one could probably easily for if you find me on the discord or any other social media it's usually that well thank you all so much because we're one minute from the end time which I think is is pretty amazing right um and so you know it will be uh I know a number of us are in the discord um so if you have questions you want to see additional examples I know I love to share I'm gonna probably pop a bunch of other sites like there's just so many I like you know this that's the exciting thing about these kinds of projects they can just range so wildly and I think showing people examples is like can be the most inspiring thing oh I can I can do this like you know that's how I can apply my class or absolutely and the key element so thank you again really appreciate it and you know maybe we'll see you at the reclaimed open conference right all right