 So, welcome to the February community chat, and I'm excited to kind of kick things off with Alan Levine here who's going to be talking about Open Education Week, but real quick before we dig into that and let him introduce himself and everything, I want to always take the opportunity to plug our own event schedule, so I'm going to do that shamelessly. So they're all things people may find interesting, so hopefully this is of any value. If you're unaware, we have an event calendar, it's at events.reclaimhosting.com. This is the community chat today. We tend to do a stream every single Friday, and we haven't missed many Fridays since we kind of made that commitment, so that's been cool. This Friday we're going to be talking about what we're going to be doing in an upcoming OER conference. We've got a workshop next week that you may be interested in. You can check that out if you're a Domain and One Zone administrator or WordPress multi-site administrator. I recommend you check it out. We've got details here and you can sign up. Roundup's coming up at the end of the month. That'll look for that in your inboxes. You can subscribe to get that in your inbox or RSS feed if you are not so emailing client. February 23rd, we've got a kind of recap. We're going to be doing a sort of looking ahead at the future of Domain and One Zone and WordPress multi-site at Reclaim and kind of things we took away from the recent workshop. Even further, we're going to be on March 1st talking with Ann Marie Scott about using open source tools as key infrastructure on our Friday stream. Check all that out. You can look at our event calendar. You can subscribe to it. Do whatever you got to do. That's all upcoming. Thanks everyone for joining and I won't waste any more time with my blabbing. So, Alan, do you want to introduce yourself really quick and get us started? Thank you. Now with all the people in this room here, I'm very proud to be here among old friends and new friends. I'm a big friend of Reclaim. I was early into hippie hosting and it's still like when I log into my account in my shortcut it says hippie. I don't know why I finished. I'm coming to you from my office at home here in central Canada in Saskatchewan. Some people didn't realize I left Arizona in 2018 and moved here but that's not what we're talking about. My current day job, which technically I'm doing right now, I work for open education global which is I can give you the byline thing but basically we just try to do as many things to keep people aware, interested in open education and to me in the broadest sense. I have some people it's like it's open textbooks or creative commons licenses and to me I just like the general openness that much of these things that we're here to talk about really come into play. That's why I was really excited when Taylor sent the invite to come talk to Reclaim because so many things that the Reclaim services offer enable people to do these things and enable them to do things that don't lock them into the big nasty commercial packages that people have to labor under. Anyhow, open education week is the thing that my organization, I've been with them since I think I joined a month before the pandemic which is another story but they've been around since 2012. Really coming out of MIT's first open courseware which kind of got everybody interested in this idea of making open learning resources available to anybody who wanted to use them and bless MIT, they're the big wheelhouse but they really opened a lot of people's eyes to this potential and so this organization came around in 2012 kind of focusing first on open courseware and kind of went broader as the years went by and I got an invite to come in and try to kick start some community stuff which means I spray all these crazy ideas among my colleagues and they all nod their heads and then I don't know what happens. I tried doing some of them but they let me get away with it and so that's what's happening. Open education week, it's a great concept and there's a lot of these that go on, there's open access week and it's just to say like hey during this one week and it's not like hey we only do open education week, second week in March, no of course people engage in that all the time but it's just a chance and it is March 4th to 8th this year just to try to like have and engage people in doing as much that they're doing to promote locally wherever they work or wherever they are in the world about what they're doing so the whole concept is it's an event that we don't organize and we just say like hey everybody run your own stuff and tell to us and we'll put it on this calendar and and I'll show you some of the stuff how it works but the whole idea is to say like during this week and just to say like for the world and thank you Taylor for getting my my links in there he's reading my mind actually as the URLs are streaming out of my my brain and going to the Taylor's guitar room there that we can just say like during this week that people are running and initially like there were a lot of things that were they're not always some people think they're all online things and so the whole idea is like do something locally you know do a workshop and you know they used to have some of the campuses you know were had like students you know going around campus saying like these are why we think these open textbooks are valuable so the thing that happens whatever you want to run during open education week it's up to you we just ask you to sort of share it so we can you know put it on this big calendar and say look at all the stuff that's going on and so I'm hopefully that there'll be people in the reclaimed community here that that might be inclined to do so I've already wrote Jim Luke and into doing some things and I'll talk about that but that's the basic premise is to say like you know how many different things can we sort of like point to and say are going on during this week and to be honest like it doesn't have to be exactly in this week so if you have something that's going on later in the month or a little bit before we don't care we're not we're not hard I almost said a dirty word we're not going to be difficult about monitoring that so and then I'll get to showing some of these things and we can talk about the the event and the stuff that we're doing we can talk about some of the under the hood things I was I'm already going off track Taylor you know I it's good that Taylor opened with the reclaim events because I looked at it it's like oh that's the events calendar plugin we're using that and so I often start thinking and so and there's a whole backstory to that so the other thing that has always been done and this is one of the things I'm trying to change is like every year they always had this call to say like you know share an open asset so it's like we asked people to sort of like share anything you know a project a program a resource a workshop a blog post and you know they fill out a form and it goes into our database and that's always been the thing that we do with open education we're great at like building these little like databases of things and and it's a valuable and it's a sensible thing to do I've done so many of these I can't even enumerate them but it occurred to me in thinking how to run the event this year that why isn't that distributed why does who cares if it's in our little database you know and so I mean there's a couple hundred old things there most of the links are broken so what I'm proposing this year and I'll try to show you how I'm doing this is to say like okay you have something that you've created that's openly licensed and shared put it in some other existing large or small or regionally appropriate repository there's so many of them out there why do I have to keep creating one more so we're saying like you know there's OER comments there's Molo and then like you know there's state run ones there's like ones that are institutional like I don't care where it is but we just want to encourage as many people as we can to sort of just be adding to the collective world supply of this stuff and it all you know all this began because I started thinking like where are the the like where are the big like repositories like I remember like you know I know the ones you know that are more North American related but you know there used to be one in India and I couldn't find it and there was so a lot of them kind of fizzled out over the years and so even just trying to find these things um what happened was that um as I started searching what I ended up getting list was what I searched for OER repositories I hit all these lib guides and list of other repositories and it just it's like list of links all the way down so all right any questions are am I babbling too much Taylor oh it's all good it's all good someone tell me to stop so and please by all means interrupt me because I'm going to get away so of course there's the website and Taylor's already put the links in there so we have you know it's 18 days away and you know I we have you know there's a few things there's a lot more and my colleagues I keep saying like oh my god really have 50 really have 60 and my colleagues keep saying they come in always at the end of February they just like come in for an avalanche so we're asking people to contribute these things where they go um is not there is uh this version of the um of the calendar and uh honestly I didn't want to do websites like I really like I'm not even good at it really anymore so um Tom is like like I just like every time I see something that Tom Woodward does it's like oh my god I got no skills anymore so I I do some stuff but I really didn't want to do that work for OE global but it's just kind of slipped onto my lap to take it on so um I did have I have someone working with me a little bit on some customizations um to this event plugin uh we wanted people to contribute events uh to it and you know I can show you how that works but the biggest thing is that you know we have things coming in from around the world and I don't know about you but anytime you deal with uh events in different time zones everything goes out the window so the customization we have is that everything that's displayed here is in my time zone all right so I'm in central time zone and that's available up here on the bottom so you know I can change this at any time and if I want my time zone to be Yakutat all the events will be adjusted to my local time zone I have no where idea where Yakutat is but it looks pretty similar so um that is one thing that we wanted and so there were a bunch of little things that had to go into um adding uh the thing so the whole idea is if you actually want to go to add an event and you're not logged in it's going to ask you uh to log in and I just don't have my generic one so you're going to see me come in um as an admin I think we're seeing the wrong tab right now we're seeing the homepage tab there the 20 24 tab I'm sorry I didn't realize I thought Jetsie would follow me okay see that's my own ignorance so thank you very much I will just have to share my I told you things would go bad uh so uh so I'll just uh share the whole uh freaking window of um and you're going to get the uh crypto effect there so um so um now are you seeing different tabs fly by yep okay perfect all right back to the beginning so um when I decide to add an event um it will ask me for a login um if you don't have one you'll be asked to create an account and uh basically um nice thing about uh the event I looked at so many plugins um that um it kind of gives people a role where they never see the inside award press so more or less we have the basic um events uh where it comes in it detects your time zone and if for some reason it's not that time zone you can pick your time zone and so that was the other thing that we needed was for people creating events is to be able to enter them in locally relevant time zones and for anybody who deals and I know the folks that reclaimed it when you deal with like people around the world it just like time gets very complicated uh so basically you know we have a forum to submit things it goes into there and it ends up on the events calendar eventually what I liked with the events calendar is that you have these different filters that we could apply so I could so everything that just happens on the mondays and I can just show everything that's in french on a monday we don't have any yet um so nice filters we didn't have that before obviously search and tags and all kinds of ways to find the events um the the big thing that I like um that we didn't have before um is like uh I can add this to my own calendar and that that's pretty key for people to have things added to their own calendar so there's a lot of things I really like that the events calendar has and it pretty much has done what we wanted um the other part that we wanted to have people do is this idea that I talked about of um adding the assets and so what I've done for this one is and I kind of went low end you know yeah Tom I should have done gravity forms and done one of your crazy things but um more or less all we say is like um share something somewhere and we have suggested places but it doesn't matter so if you shared it in somewhere else like you know the the gym groom arcade of crazy technology you can put it there it doesn't matter where and so um we're just collecting basically very simple information that you shared something um in this new year and it goes to the you know google form and I'm using this little um I've used it before a couple times it's called awesome table and basically it creates a um sort of a filterable uh table uh where I can just um see things uh that are within the same category and I and I really like the features from able to narrow in on a lot of data and so it's pretty simple and we're just getting started with all this but uh it was one of the things I wanted to change about open education week uh the other stuff if anybody's interested in adding is on the home page we have we have all our graphics and so um we have a really talented graphic artist Mario Bidia and he creates all these things and so you can get your badges you can create a flyer uh there's background images that's why I have green stuff around my hair I don't usually do green screen but I can show you that we've got these virtual backgrounds that people use so that's that's a little bit of side effect all right am I going too fast Taylor you're doing good so like okay a lot of the stuff that comes in are obviously webinars you know that's what people like you know and they're good I mean webinars are great and you can bring in guest experts you can showcase local people webinars work really well and but I'm always trying to have people think about doing um some things that are just like there are other things that you can do online that aren't always webinars so um one of them um one of my favorites uh where did my tab go that's been going on for like the last four years comes from the Delft University of Technology or TU Delft and this is like one of my favorite activities they've done for like the past three years they have a thing called we like sharing and so they ask everybody from their community to share a photo matching the theme of what in the photo describes openness is usually their general prompt and they collect them they they put them onto a a a flicker you know pool and so and people's photos get shared under the creative license that they choose probably I think they use a google form and it's really simple um and so I um Bea DeLis Arcos who runs it every year I've been sort of working as I get to be a judge they run it as a contest but uh I really thought um that uh this could be something that anybody could do it's pretty simple you just ask people to share some photos to a theme uh you put them in a pool somewhere where they can see so I put out there and this is in our community space um I sort of had a conversation with Bea back and forth and say like well what what would it take for other people uh to do this so um actually you know because I just have to do a demo I set one up for our organization we have someone in India who might be running one of these and I just think like this is an easy thing this is replicable that other people can do and they can set this up and do it in this in this way that they describe so um just for clarity uh this is something that's sort of my community building work and this is again something that reclaim uses I use a discourse community platform uh mine's like a sprawling mess of stuff but I think that's kind of interesting because that's what community should be so um we have an area just for open education week so there's information about open education week um I sort of set up and ask people to say like look you can create an asynchronous activity so I think this year I might be asking people to do daily crates or something like that and so just try to stir up some things within this community space um that people do uh one of the other things uh that I do is I do a podcast for our organization and during open education week this is from last year I I set them up during the week and uh we put out a call there if people want to you know be in the podcast studio as we're recording and sometimes they just like to listen but sometimes they want to participate in the discussions and so I do these like live sort of live-ish studio recording sessions and people can be there for you know um and we try to you know we generally go for some high-profile ones this was one last year it was just fascinating um for some librarians from the ukraine state university who talked basically about how they were able to offer services as uh their country was being bombed and is still being bombed and so an incredible story and just a privilege to be there and then I'm just going so fast I'll just keep going um the other thing that I did last year as an experiment is uh like I think you guys still use StreamYard yep we do anything yeah yeah so I was inspired by that I started using StreamYard to me like I like doing these live informal events um what's great about doing that is like it gets you know it gets recorded already to YouTube I don't have to edit anything and um the live event is like well it's lively and so I set up a whole schedule these I think I did 14 last year and um some were topical but a lot of them were just inviting like people of various interests who just were willing to come on and talk a little bit about a project they were doing or some work or just engage in open conversations and so um we we had these were really a lot of fun and they were kind of exciting to do we had two in Spanish and one in Portuguese Marin Dupo was there last year we had some people from the uk so I'm going to do these again I'll be putting out a form for anybody basically it's you want to drop in and so I'm trying to convince Jim that he should bring Dr Oblivion on and I would love to have anybody who's in the reclaimed community be part of this or to consider doing something in March as part of the Open Education Week extravaganza and oh I forgot to show this one thing that that you can do and of course like I feel like you know here it is again that we're just copying stuff that that reclaim does yeah Brian Mathers of course the brilliant Brian Mathers has the fabulous remixer machine so I recycle this one all the time it's a digital postcard and you know we create one and you can change the image and the stamp and the you can edit all the things on here so we ask people just to sort of because I'm always interested in seeing where people are in the world so the prompt this year is to show something that demonstrates where you are in the world so of course I have to respond to my own prompts so I've got my open space here on the prairies and look Theresa McKinnon responded and so she's advertising for one of her events so this is a real simple and small thing to do but these are the things I love doing the most are just these kind of goofy small little activities you know I know I'm curious to hear Jason how a splot thing went for his workshop I'm always trying to get people to put things in my little splots and I just think there are lots of small things that we can invite people to be part of that aren't as onerous as trying to figure out how do I publish an open textbook or you know where am I going to put my course this year so open education week March 4th to March 8th I hope folks here will spread it around the places that they work you don't even have to do stuff just go there and participate in things as well and you know blast it out on social media you know we have stuff going out in all the channels I mostly look at mastodon I don't look at the place that much but you have to know that people are everywhere these days which actually is an interesting conversation to hear how others are dealing with that and now I might draw a breath well I'll tell you Ellen one of the things I'm super interested in is and always you've blogged it extensively so I should I could just read the blog that you could say but like how you've used discourse versus discord for community to keep it open and to keep it accessible is a really interesting like that would be a really interesting discussion around your thinking and I was impressed when you know when you started working with OE Global and you made that decision and you blogged extensively how you did it how was that working out for you and what is that because a lot of this is actually housed there right I mean you know a lot of this stuff is ultimately going to discourse yeah and honestly I have been too strategic in the way I've I've created way too many categories and I'm not as deft like there's really good people who are good at theming it but I don't think that matters as much what it looks like so mostly honestly I make a lot of I spend a lot of time making noise there and trying to encourage other people honestly I love it at the same time it's a confusing environment to many people they get lost there so there's that but discourse does a lot of things to sort of nudge you along and notifications are good so what helped in the beginning obviously you know usually what helps is like a lot of these things you can set up and say like yes it'd be a great idea and I'll put this out there I'm going to tell everybody and people are going to like check it out and they'll get engaged and and then you sit back for a while and they're like nothing's happening nothing's happening so if you have it built around something so what happened was you know that first year when I just set it up as an experiment you know we had to do the the pivot so our in-person conference was canceled you know for two years so people we decided to sort of host a lot of the well basically the whole event was basically in discourse so a lot of people ended up signing up to create accounts for a reason that's been happening and so sometimes you know I find that when you want to set up these places like yeah there'll be some traction on what happens on its own but also like if you can weave it into something that people will need to sign up or want to sign up to be doing something specific so that's kind of helped some things I've tried just really haven't gone anywhere and that happens and so I do some things I I sort of like as I'm seeing like interesting websites and tools that I think would worth be sharing um a lot of them come from Tom in his list um I this is my duct tape I I bookmarked them in pinboard and I have something an RSS feed from for our category that blips them out the mastodon and also post them in our discourse and for that one I had to use Zapier I don't know much about Zapier but I found it can talk to discourse IFTT can't so I've been playing around with a couple of those little like bridging services and there's a new one I found out it's make.com and it kind of blows the doors off of IFTT yeah it's edgy glue it's almost like yahoo pipes in a way and it's really I've done a couple I've moved from IFTT because they keep changing the terms like I did this thing I found you can post to mastodon from an RSS feed and you have to go through these little bit of steps as to get to create a webhook as they call it to post the mastodon and one of mine stopped working and I just realized they changed the terms so you know first of all used to be able to do four for free and then I think because of Twitter's the way they you know torpedo their API for IFTT I don't know if to offer it as a service they had to make it a pay for thing so they've been chipping away at the free things and so you know and that happens with all of them this make.com you know there is a limited free service but for the stuff I'm doing once per day I think I can slide under the hood and besides that I just create multiple accounts you know I have you know thanks to my reclaim hosting you know set up I have multiple I have like 50 aliases for my my main mail account so I use them all the time but I still like this kind of you know little things to hook one website service to another and I think because you know mastodon you know I I actually quite love it and like I don't really want to bother anywhere else but like there's not going to be that single place anymore I've accepted that and that's okay like actually I think the fact that we feel like Twitter was was an illusion it never it never really was but it felt like it but those are the old days they're gone um and so now you know we're all over the place and actually that's okay yeah look at that n8n yeah and so um a lot of times you find you know there are many multiple services to do these things um you'll find if you're willing to sort of you know scrape your knuckles and do you know I love it you find these things you can host your own and you go to github and it's like the instructions are like you know install this package and npm this and I'm like I'm out of here but some of the stuff is is doable um and so you know my my I'm going off on tangents here Jim like my latest gripe is is I mean the web is like we know a kory doctor kory doctor says it's unshitified like you can't go to a web link hardly anymore and read anything without scraping away you know subscription dot boxes and ads and and and except if you're going to someone's blog or self-hosted site like you know so why can people do that stuff and and not necessarily so um you know there there are you know and mastodon you know there is no algorithm like I get things in the order that I want from people that I want and I like that and so I I don't necessarily want to subject um but we always have this tradeoff of um how easy it is and people's reluctance and so uh you know and honestly yeah mastodon is bewildering like I still don't know what it does like I I really am not confident that I've really sent a private message to anyone because it looks like a public message you know I said what I'm like did I really say that in public yeah I can't can you imagine designing the feature of we need private messaging and mastodon they're like cool what we'll do is we'll make it a message and mark it so that only the two you know the two people involved can see it but we'll put it right in the middle of your public timeline that's good right that's how that should work yeah and try to find anything like you know if you know if if I don't bookmark something you know it's gone like fly by and and now I'm thinking like well how the heck am I going to search my bookmark so I like download them and search so um but I don't know in a way I kind of like messy things but again I'm not most people and um you know the things that we ask people or hope people are willing to take on in addition to you know being at work where they're like you know well you have to use this platform or you have to use this kind of learning system and then figure out like how what are the other things I'm going to use for my own um connection building the old you know personal learning network if those are still the acronym of the day um it's just it's a load of stuff and you know I I was going to say in the beginning when Taylor said like oh we get an rss people like you know what's rss you know it's the technology that of course has you know been dead a thousand times um but like works for me every day and uh I you know until that doesn't happen um I'm not getting off that soapbox yeah I've I've recently taken the attitude of just um I just keep talking about rss and I assume everyone's using it I know that not everyone's using it but but I just keep every time I mention a newsletter or email I'm like or rss and I that's what I'm just gonna do from now on because I and not everyone needs to like it but um but uh I people people declare it dead and I'm like I think people think it's dead because it's not visible when I use it right like you don't you don't know what that I'm you know if you're if I'm reading your site on rss it's kind of hard to to know so yeah and you don't see ads like usually um hey Tim we're getting a lot of keyboard noise uh right now sorry uh the other speaking of this and this is wild I I try and remember I came across this because you're not supposed to share the link for this and I saw it in someone's like button down or whatever whatever newsletter it was um it's kind of funny Jim will appreciate it it's called rss club and you know the first rule is of course you know I know I'm breaking the rule but I'm not in public but get this what they're doing is people are if I get it right it's just rss they're writing in just rss feeds but the site is not public I don't know how people are doing this but it's basically all you can do is like download the rss feeds into your reader and read them and so but there is no on the web and it's just wacky and I'll send the link privately but I'm not supposed to talk about it but you know those are the things you know which you know I don't know about you but like I kind of find those things and I know Tom does and I know every well a lot of people who dear like there's quirky things that people are doing um you know either you know get hub or these little like standalone sites um that um just kind of say like people are still out there cooking up these crazy independent things on their own um they're just lost in the wash of everything that most people are looking at um so that's kind of what you know warms my heart when it just seems like everything's going to crap I uh related to that I've been fascinated recently with um if with a new web alternative protocol called Gemini and it's an extension of Gopher I came across that I couldn't make heads or tails of it but I love yeah I don't really I don't I don't say I get it yet but I I'm I'm like okay well I'm gonna keep this bookmarked and yeah it's fascinating and now I'm kind of like it's it's mostly just like a a kind of pushback on the type of thing you're talking about of like you know sometimes the experience of the modern web is not great the problem I have with that is like okay but like we're complaining about these big like loaded up corporate websites typically we're not usually seeing that kind of thing on blogs which is I mean though you know Google's not going to make a Gemini website soon right or a website on that protocol or whatever but but uh yeah I I don't know it's it's cool to see that technology get pushed from an independent place you know yeah and there is I remember there is some like um Gopher emulator through the web I can't remember what it was it and it has another you know it's got a another Gopher mascot or something and and um I can't remember but um yeah that's it Tom Dave Rupert that's where I saw the RSS club um and um yeah a lot of things like who's gonna like you know your average person who's gonna figure out this Gemini thing but again like the fact that people are spinning out these ideas and whether they stick or not doesn't matter but it's it's the um it's the refreshing from you know the blendness of you know chat GPT output yeah absolutely um yeah so you know one of the one of the things that um I'm kind of curious about with um and you did you did share some some examples um of kind of non-webinar type uh content I mean is there any is there any other kind of weird stuff that you're seeing people try for open education week or maybe things you'd like to see people try uh well you know there are some of the you know there's a lot of you know the lightning talks is is actually a pretty good format um I'm trying to um I'm working with um Catherine Cronin and Laura Turner which you know they had this higher ed for good you know book came out which was a fantastic project and um I love it and Jim's in it right and so you know of course they've been like more or less you know they have to do this like you know people are talking about it you know you'll go into webinar and like you know you'll you'll sort of like feel the goodness of how good the project is and so um I've approached them and they've taken on is to have like convene more more like a real and I don't even know how to run a book discussion group but I said I would try to do it but um I'm you know we want people to read Jim's chapter or at least skim it the first time and come in with some like you know print out on paper and highlight it with a yellow pen or actually I my dream is they would do it in hypothesis and and and like um I was inspired by um the mystery hype uh 3000 podcast um with Emily Bender and sort of like they do the the criticism of these like you know AI papers that are just full of BS and they basically go through the paper and they they pull up pictures or they say like look at figure one this is a meaningless figure and so I don't want to criticize Jim's work like that but like what if you had people who had at least you know looked at what Jim wrote about the commons and came in and said like well let's talk about it and what do you think the commons is and well Jim can you explain you know the economic theory here and you know that's what I dream for some events and um I think there are some I do like um one active group is uh from the state of Oregon um open Oregon resources um and um brilliant um Amy Hulfer who runs a lot of their activities um so they just submitted a series of them and I can dig out the link because tribe events let's me do that I can pull out a link for all the ones done by one organization um that they of course they have some webinars going on but um they have um uh they have they're doing one um and I tried this one too is they're having a keynote rewatch party so they're gonna get people together in like a zoom and they're gonna watch um Rajiv Jung Yangi's keynote uh from the open ed conference and they they'll talk about it while they're watching it so you know a movie rewatch party what why not do um a webinar rewatch party well I don't know I never rewatch webinars anyhow myself that much uh but um that's that's like a different idea and they also have at the end of the week um they're asking some of their faculty who have authored um OERs within the state of Oregon to come on as sort of like a happy hour thing and just to do a reading like a short reading from their book and sort of like having someone read out loud the work that they've published as an OER in a group environment like that's kind of different I like that so um you know there are things that that people do um you know there are people that are doing more like um trying to do like online workshoppy stuff so there's some people doing some h5p stuff that instead of like showing you how great h5p is like sit along with me and do it as as we as we go so I think those sessions are good where people can actually do something hands-on um which as many times as I tried it and believe it can do it's so hard to do over the screen thing because you can't see what people are doing and and so um but doing it at the same time or giving people um the ability to sort of go back and do it and and then um you know I do try to get people to sort of like set these things up in something like you know discourse to sort of like continue the conversations um it happens a small amount of time but the thing I found Taylor like or Jim going back to discourse is like I think like I post all this stuff and people don't like a few people reply but some and sometimes other people post things and the conversations take off and you can't really say why um but I find that people say privately that they read more than they reply and so I think you have to sort of take that that that people are engaging with it and not everybody really um sort of wants to sort of like jump in because what happens is in discourse a lot of times the rooms get dominated by people who write a lot and and that is that's still intimidating for a lot of people and you know I try to keep that in mind um which is why mainly I just try to be a goofball and and have things with typos and you know pictures of my dog um just to not be serious all the time it's interesting to hear like so last last week uh Friday we did a stream um with uh Martin Hoxie on Building Community and this very same thing came up of um and of like we even with the stuff we're doing here at Reclaim with our little you know informal streams and community chats and things like that will um or or stuff in Discord as we will hear from folks in whatever venue sometimes in tickets like sometimes I'll help someone with like a permissions issue and they'll say thanks also saw that thing last week thank you for that too and you know it'll come from anywhere and to me it's um it's it kind of reinforces that thing you just said and I I I'm like that myself like so much of this stuff I read you know and and I'll I don't I don't comment on say all of you know your blog posts for instance because what I would say is like that's cool thanks and it's like okay well that's not really worth saying I guess um so and I I think there are a lot of people like that right that hurt just like yeah I appreciate this is out there um and maybe I don't have anything to specifically add at this moment and that's you know we're even kind of taught not to to do that right like in and in college right I wouldn't have like uh in a in a classroom context raised my hand and been like yep you know so um I think I don't know I guess Jamien just reinforces the idea that like doing this stuff in different venues and mediums and whatever that means it's text it's a forum it's discord or some something like that that's a little bit shorter form or maybe it's video I think it I think it's important because it lets people kind of engage where they're comfortable yeah and well first of all I came out and I missed something with Martin Hoxie I haven't talked I missed that recording much so well me and webinars but uh first of all Martin is one of the most brilliant and also kind and generous people in this field so shout out to Martin and uh yeah like I agree with what you're saying Taylor it's like we always have this think that um thanks pilot uh that um we can get it under one hood and like that's not how the internet operates either like it is all over the place and we are all over the place and so I just you know I I reply you know I rely on you know other people informing me and most of the things that I turn around and share I don't find them they they come from somebody else and um you know and I'm okay with that but like I think what also you're saying Taylor is important is that people can choose where and how they want to participate and the thing with the blogging is like every time I get caught up in sort of the thing like you know that was a great post why didn't anybody comment where's my where's my readers I need to do a newsletter I can shove it in their email boxes that's my other rant is why is everybody going to email newsletters instead of just putting it out there um and that's not the reason I write and so you have to say like am I writing to to share to say something or do I need to get feedback to be validated or or um you know that sort of thing and you know and that's an ego thing like believe me like I feel better when I get a comment from someone um but we can't be tied to that and and I think there's a bit of a like a performance layer going on out there which which kind of bothers me and that's not new right like like that's that's a thing since sense blogging and you know it's something you hear people say some version of that related to social media related to youtube videos or instagram like doesn't matter what it is and it's like that's not new like we're we're humans we we do seek that validation I don't think we have to be ashamed of that but it is important to think of yeah what what is the purpose like right like um you know jim jim always says like we're getting you know blog like no one's reading like yeah you know I think that's that's important the part of the reason we do um some of the stuff here at reclaim is simply because we want to do it or it's helpful for us to document that um in some way um and hope maybe people find it useful so and it's it's hard for people to understand that and and you know you can't help them understand it by telling it they have to get some experience and so you know that's that's what I try to do to let people experience that but I was just thinking I this goes back even to um when oh here's old man internet coming um in the day when I started like the place we hung out with email listservs and I was learning macramedia director date myself and I joined the direct L listserv and um there was this guy from Virginia Tech G Gordon Lee like he answered everything he knew everything and finally I got the nerve to sort of share something I was doing and ask a question and he cut me to pieces he he told me how stupid my idea was and um I I didn't post again for six months um you know and um that still goes on and and like you know and I try to keep a lot of that in mind um the listservs you know and honestly like there's some great listservs out there and and you know it's not the platform or that that tool it's what we do in them that matters and um and again the whole thing you know that you know again I'll do I'll do my my sales talk but you know reclaim gives you the potential to do anything like it can be you know and you know sure people mostly get on they create a wordpress blog but people get in there and they tinker with stuff or they they they you know actually poke around the the control panel and c-panel and um I think like it's a lot to give people at least that potential um you know and it's it's the water and you get them there um and and they at least have um that freedom uh to try something and fail quietly or just um or just share it and um you know just thank you so much for for keeping that going because there's not as many spaces left where people can do that like most people they want to sign up you know with something and create an account and and have them you know manage everything for them there's my sales pitch and those are the mother truckers who keep us up at night those people who plan around experimenting the ones where we don't sleep when we come in with our early morning like uh oh here we go again you're awesome thank you Alan for that so if I thanks for letting me blab uh everybody Taylor and pilot and Amanda and the crew there um just you know the the stuff that you guys do just if you don't get enough of the positives um that you know I I just wish more people you know and I don't know for like you know Tom and Jim and others like and Tim like is it uphill now to convince people um to take this on um because you know now people people like oh my god wordpress like the block editor on point at you Jim is like it is more complicated um and um well and it's you know it's something that like um uh Amanda and I have been actually talking a lot about recently of like it it might be in some senses it can be uphill to convince people to take this work on but in some senses we've got a lot of really good recent examples of why it's important to to be thinking considering open tools open infrastructure where that fits in right like because because it's it's not I mean it never was hypothetical to be clear none of this is new but but most people know about what's happening with twitter most people know about what's happening with name of service right and and so I think it's almost in some ways easier than ever to say like why would you why would you tie your fate or the fate of your project to one company or one person or whatever uh why would you do that just doesn't make sense um and yeah it's not an easy thing to do most of the time um and you do have to make compromises sometimes in terms of like well you know this may cost more in the short term probably not in the long term but in the short term you know so it's it's not it's and it definitely requires sitting down and thinking through and sometimes mapping it out right even just looking at what your alternatives are but um I think in some ways it's easier to make that that argument than ever so thanks twitter for that um just adding adding to that um side of it the other thing that I say to students who sometimes look at me and ask you know why do this extra um thing and I think of ed beck for instance I and I'll tell them you know wordpress in particular but many of the things nearly all of the things in a the c-panel you know there's a community of people that you can approach and that you can voice your opinion and on the accessibility side for wordpress you know we have someone that we that we know who is very involved in that process and is participating with those developers to try and make things better try doing that with facebook or instagram or a platform like that you know and I show them in the user interface of wordpress the history it tells its own story you know posts are first media is second after people had seen its potential not as a blog but as a website pages are next it shows the evolution and the and the input of the community um every step of the way in the software and you're just not going to get that from any other platform and yeah I think I'm also confirming all of the uh uh age stereotypes today by having my microphone up and type we can hear yeah okay good I apologize for all of that but anyway that's what I say is like yeah it's it's maybe not as frictionless as some of the other things that you've encountered but the upside of that is it's built exactly the way the members of the community want it to be and you can be a member of that community yourself well your your mic is perfect Tim and it's it's great to see you in here yeah I miss you well I mean we're we're just about time and honestly that was a that was a really nice sentiment to end on but um I I think um I think I'm going to stop the recording in a second here but I'll I'll be hanging out for a few minutes and as people trickle out yeah thanks everyone for coming yeah