 at the half-hour mark, we're getting a lot more people coming in after that one. We don't allow people to come in in the midst of it. So you stop them? Like you just sit there, you're on your phone gatekeeping? We will physically stop them because if you're not willing to commit, we don't want you with us. Oh yeah, I know. So we can… Sorry? Do you think it's going to stop? We're at 29, so I'll wait a full minute before we go home. Can I indulge in, since there's so few, can people tell me what institutions they're from and if they have this current setup, we're thinking about it, or can I take over moderation of the panel so far? Yes. Great. Zach? Zach, I learned from the University of Maryland U of W systems, well, it's a complementary system, so I'm continuing to expose these cases for you to those systems, but I've been early adopter and I've been doing everything for a long time. So I'm Andy Rush from the University of North Florida. I used to work at the University of Maryland, Washington, and I explored the idea of the mainstream zone to UNF, and it's faculty domain, so it's faculty domain. So what we're exploring is, okay, let's bring the students into this, and a WordPress multi-site, so that they can just do the kind of quick sign up and do the thing, the thing, as opposed to giving them the spaces, but then also optioning them if they want to have spaces to do more than just WordPress. That's kind of where we are right now when we're figuring out the... What is? I'm Mel Helsall. I'm from Grinnell College. I've been there since 2017 and they've been for our domains. We have several useful files, but we do not have WordPress multi-site. We thought we might have a use case for it this spring because a decision was made for all the students, the whole board's on campus, so we've got a few work set up, but we decided to go ahead and create the domain accounts for them rather than try to create a WordPress multi-site. So we have domains quite often. We have a pretty broad range of users, faculty students, quite a few campus units and offices on additional space beyond what they can do on the domain college websites. We have a lot of them. Yeah, just basically what set up are you having, or are there conversations potentially at your institution, which is why you're maybe here? Yeah, so... Bear? So now we've kind of been in the engineering program. It's hardworking for teaching excellence and the official position we have to support the program is the mandus. So we are... And I hope to support it as well because I have to learn a few things, but yeah, we're still pretty free to all of it. All right, and I have similar pattern of questions for you, 30, so they can know a little bit about maybe a little more granular and let them know a bit of your stats. You got both things. So everyone up here has both domain of one's own and WordPress multi-site. Let them know a little bit about when you started each and maybe some aspects of scale, if you know those sorts of things. Off-hand? Do you want me to start? Yeah, I guess since kind of origin story kind of happens at Mary Washington, so UMW blogs, which is WordPress multi-site, started here in 2007 and there was no domain of one's own. It did not exist. And so Mary Washington really experimented in that space first and UMW blogs still exist. We're in the process of retiring it. Domain of one's own, we have that, it comes online and actually pushes out UMW blogs a lot. There's a big push to get everybody off of UMW blogs. Let's get them on domain of one's own. And so that kind of happened until about 2019. A lot of staff changes kind of pushed lots of things in different ways. And then there's the pandemic. Everybody quit using domain of one's own and UMW blogs entirely. People felt there was too much to deal with anyway. And so we come back around to, okay, what do we do about UMW blogs? That's how old in internet time it's very old. It had a lot of legacy issues going on because it was designed, there was no domain of one's own. So you had to do really, if you were trying to experiment, you had to add all sorts of plugins. They did lots of things to make things happen. So where we are now is we just spun up a new instance of a WordPress multi-site called Site Site UMW, as Zach mentioned. And we put it kind of side by side now as that kind of entry level space that we're hoping people will adopt. And I'll say so, scale-wise, UMW blogs right now is like over 11,000 sites. I don't know how many users. Site Site UMW, very small right now is just started, but we had a similar amount of sign-ups, which was kind of interesting between Site Site UMW and Domain of One's Own in the spring. Spring is a little bit lighter usually for domains, but 1,400 users in Domain of One's Own here, and we're a school about 4,000, maybe a little less than that. And Site Site, the data's not great on that right now because it's so small, but that's great. Do you remember the olds, UMW? Yeah, I just like the numbers. Yeah, it's very large. I mean, there are schools that are much bigger that have lots more than that, but for the size of our school, right, when you're doing something for that long, it gets large. Yeah, so I'm Lee Scaler-Upassette, I'm the Assistant Director for Digital Learning at Georgetown University. Do you want to see your title? Yeah, right, I didn't even mention that right? Yeah, I'm Shannon Hauser. I'm the Associate Director of the Digital Knowledge Center, but I basically am the SIS admin for both Domain of One's Own and Site Site UMW. Yeah. Among my many, many responsibilities at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown, also known as CANDLS, which is both our teaching and learning center, as well as our e-learning center, as well as our academic technology slash center. So we're an all-in-one. CANDLS has been in existence for about 20 years as it's currently done. We were head of the game when we brought together e-learning or online learning and academic technology and a traditional teaching and learning center. And we, Randy Bass, I don't know if people know or hear of Randy Bass, yes, he was the original head of CANDLS, the first head of CANDLS, and followed what Jim was doing down here at UMW very closely. And so we followed very closely behind UMWs. We were one of the first schools to also install WordPress multi-site after UMW did so. We were also one of the first schools to embrace Domain of One's Own after UMW introduced it. Say what you will about what that means. I was not there for any of that. I was, prior to Georgetown, I was actually here at UMW at DTLT. I've been at Georgetown now for about five years. I've been coming up on five years. Yeah, I know, right? I'm still weird. So fun fact, we are, again, just behind where UMW is, again, where we have had a long-standing, we call it the Commons blog. So that is our WordPress multi-site. It hasn't been updated in years. We're still using the outdated version of PHP. We're running outdated versions of WordPress. It is broken. We are, again, just a little behind you guys where we are rebuilding our GU Commons blog and we're calling it course sites. But as of right now, because I had to get all of these statistics, we have 34, over 34,000 users on the Commons blog. Did any one, apparently. Again, before mine. We have domains where we have a little over 3,000. And we're a fairly large school, so it's a fairly small number. And if you actually look at right now the Commons blog, we have a lot of power users. There's a lot of them moved to domains. We have a lot of power users who are using it as a course blog, students for blogging, and starting to use them as e-portfolios as well. We have a really interesting and unique setup. Or a particular, yeah, I know, it's weird. We have a unique setup, which is the exact opposite of what everybody else is doing, where you have to ask permission to get a Commons blog, but anyone can sign up for a domain. Sure, why not? This is something we are going to be talking about as we're moving forward, rethinking sustainability, rethinking all of these things. But we do one of the most popular features of our Commons blog, which would seem counterintuitive, but I just did a faculty panel at our big faculty development event, and they all sang its praises, is we have a plug-in that was designed for us of making a hub and spoke model. And so we have a plug-in that automatically does, that we give it a slug, we input the administrator who is typically the faculty member's name, and then we put in the net IDs of all of the students in the class, and it automatically creates a hub and spoke model, where every student gets their own spoke on the hub, but the hub itself is closed. And so students are an administrator on their own site and a viewer on everybody else's site, right? And so what this creates is this closed, this more closed community, where, and it's been particularly popular in the writing, freshman writing courses, where the students feel a lot more secure and comfortable sharing just among their peers and knowing that it's not out on the open web. There's always an option after the fact that they can switch the permissions, they have that full control, but by default, it's private, which is, again, a kind of unique feature that I asked on the Discord, and I'm like, does anybody else do this? And everybody's like, you're a weirdo, and I'm like, yeah, I know. So we really like the kind of targeted use of the WordPress multi-site, right? People use it as a blog. They don't even care that all of our themes are outdated right now. Whereas domains being a large R1 institution, it's a lot more about research. In a lot of cases, we have a lot of outward-facing projects, tons of Omeka sites. If you go to the Georgetown Slavery Archive, that is, it has an EDU address, but it uses Omeka on the domain of Onesome on reclaimed servers. So we do a lot of work around, particularly around research. We collaborate with our digital librarians. The expertise around Omeka actually lives in the library. So we do a lot of collaborations with them around hosting podcasts, building websites, around the research. But they're also being used as a teaching tool in that sense. So that's basically the history of what we're doing. Okay, hey, that's very helpful. It's easy to go last, because then I can try to fill in blanks, hopefully, to make it a different variation on a similar theme. So my name is Ben Harwood. I'm an instructional designer, learning experience designer, instructional technologist, faculty, students, staff advocate, whatever you want to call me. I'm trying to be helpful. All the things. The glue that kind of, you know, somehow sticks somewhere we hope in the library and rubs off on people in positive ways. So I work at Skidmore College, which is located far upstate New York. So I've been, I'll tell, I'll get more of a kind of a, I think an institutional history of web hosting very quickly at my institution and hopefully explain how we got from where we had, you know, servers in the library garages, right? Self-hosted. And now they're, you know, running somewhere in reclaims of space and we're very happy with them being there. So when I got to Skidmore in, see, 2007, our college, we've got 2,400 students, so pretty small, you know, Resed Liberal Arts, not a grad school. There was a distance learning program called the University Without Walls, which was probably a digital upgrade from what we used to call correspondence courses, which you may have taken in the past. I did one time. Everything by paper sent back and forth. And there was a platform, a blogging platform by the name of Moveable Type. And they're licensing, so we were creating all these things manually, you know, all the accounts, all the associations. And then that program software got very expensive and no longer warranted the costs for the small amount of courses. And eventually that University Without Walls program was phased out. We wanted to find a way though to get, we wanted to preserve the course content and also other research that had been on there for blogs. So it seemed we moved to WordPress. So there was a kind of a conversion migration of stuff over into WordPress, which was a nightmare and kept me busy for a while. So we moved to WordPress probably in 2008 or 2009. And immediately we had WordPress Multisite and we called it Skidmore Blogs. It still has that, goes by that name to this day. And yeah, so one of the neat things about our community WordPress has from really the start, we've tried to really emphasize the word community. In fact, I no longer call it Skidmore Blogs, I call it Skidmore's Community WordPress. In contrast to Domain in One Zone. I'll get to that a little bit later. So in a way, you know, we've had this niche community where people would come to me and say, you know, I don't want to use the learning management system, I understand it, it works great. And we've been through iterations of WebCT, Blackboard, now we're using Desire2Whearn. And there's a really important place for those tools because it's nice to offer our community options. So you can use the LMS or you can use WordPress to make a course website. So we have, and people gravitate to that faculty like to use it, those who use it, because they can customize it and get some outside of the cookie cutter type of experience from these tools that are really meant to scale massively, are they not? So the community member will come and say, hey, I really like this theme, can we get it? And then I would evaluate it and try to determine if it was something worth, you know, we had a, so we have a production and test instance, right? So trying to do things somewhat methodically and correctly. So I would test these things out and see if there's a sense of production WordPress multi-site and then figure out is it something that's sustainable? Is it being updated, you know, going on WordPress.org and seeing if it's being actively maintained? You know, is it a free theme? Is it a freemium? All those things. And so if it's well vetted, then we could install it and so one person could use it, then the whole community could use it. This is especially valuable for licensed themes. So if you, rather than having, you know, somebody go out and license for a theme, you know, three or four times over, we install it once and, you know, ideally you can also have other community members benefit from it. So themes, you know, control the appearance of the website. Same is true of plugins. I think on our WordPress multi-site, there are probably way too many themes talking about meeting to update them. There's probably about 57 or 58. And a summer project usually is to go back through and make sure they're all updated. They do have an auto-updates feature. I haven't been burned yet by not disabling auto-updates by those things. Not yet, right? But the licensed themes work well. So, yeah, it's a really, lots of, you know, we, you know, as DS106 people used to say, we're open for business. We try to turn no one away, but within reason, you know, clubs, student clubs come to us. Our website, our radio station, WSPN, runs on our WordPress, and they've, you know, they've got their streaming show. We have lots of clubs. The only time we'll say no is one time I had a business class come in and they were doing something with e-commerce and started selling things on it. And I said, nah, no, because that would really jeopardize your not-for-profit status or your not-for-profit view. So I had to shut those guys down, and then, yeah, students using, wanting to use sites, create a web presence, increasingly, you know, faculty are having them create podcasts or create videos or what I like to call video essays, right, as a way to redesign. Maybe you've got five writing assignments and let's do a video essay instead and try to augment it to see what happens with that. We do have this, there's this, I don't know if it's called the privacy plugin, it's first created. We don't have a self-service turnkey thing, right? You have to come to us first because people don't necessarily know what they want. Do they want a community-work-class site, a blog, or do they want a domain at one's own? And rather than just letting people turn on and activate these sites and have a bunch of empty hello worlds, you know, they come to us first and they request a site, we create it, and then the community privacy thing lets them, you know, have it be public, search-and-vexable or normal public out there. And then behind the log and you get the community aspect so a site can be available just in the community or in the case of faculty teaching courses, similar to our learning management system, you can have it be registered users only or entirely private. So that kind of flexibility on adapting it to your intended audience is something you can't do in bright space in your LMS, because we don't have our setup that way. You know, we... we still have how many users? So I... there's like 6,000 users in there and I'll tell you why I keep them in there because there are still students, normally after two years, I will remove both sites, but honestly, a lot of times I'll just, if they're public-facing, I'll make them private and eventually two to three years out I'll delete them, but I don't take the users out. So to interact with your site, even after graduation, and one of the flexibilities there was you could modify a user account that was created with our login and you could change the password, but unfortunately that has changed because we needed to tighten down security. So even generating... So for example, let's say a student graduates and then they're still part of an internship program, like our Career Development Center has a really active blog and they go out and do internships but they're no longer their login, no longer works for email in those systems, but we could still figure out a way to keep access without having to change their password, but now we do. So there's probably 6,000 users in there and periodic will clean them up. Websites, gosh, off the top of my head in our WordPress multi-site, there's probably 1,200 sites in there. So that's been really successful. It's been really great. It is used for many different purposes and even for the administration uses it as well to control access for private content within offices they'll use it. So we went from hosting the servers on campus. I can't remember which year it was, but we decided it was just... This coincided also, I think it's important, this historic moment. So like you saw at the art exhibit downstairs, there's a picture there running Netscape. There was I think UMW offered faculty or employee web spaces. So we used to offer a lot of universities did this too. Each employee could have their own personal web space. And we called those Tilda sites. So it was triple.skimmer.edu slash Tilda and then the username. So at some point maybe seven or eight years ago an IT security audit came up so you really shouldn't be offering these web spaces because some of those were Apache lamp enabled and so you'd have people writing scripts and then forgetting about them and somehow they hadn't changed the permissions and we never had any major event, but I mean seriously if you're getting an audit that's going to raise a flag for all kinds of reasons. So we had to shut down those employee spaces. So faculty, staff and also I think only faculty could have those faculty and staff so we had to shut down the Tilda spaces to get them essentially off our network to get them off of our servers. So that's when we moved our WordPress multi-site to Reclaim. Maybe that was like five or six years ago. And they've really done a great job hosting it. Some of those websites they were still straight out HTML websites. You know the ones still with the funky little blinking gifts. Those are always great treasures to come across. And we offered people the ability to preserve the HTML because you could run that over especially with those people who wanted to preserve their HTML websites or other computer science faculty we just shipped them right over to Domains because they can have that autonomy and still being able to run that. And then faculty just wanted web pages that built with Dreamweaver or something like that. We offered them a conversion path that we're going to convert over to WordPress and that was we helped rebuild some of those and taught them how to do it. And then otherwise we just migrated their sites seamless. Nobody really knew. At that point it's interesting we didn't talk about self-hosting versus cloud. We kind of forget that. It makes a lot more sense that way. And that went really well. So the Domains is, let me see, we offer actually faculty, staff and students and I don't have the stats off the top of my head but whatever packaging, reclaim approach just with it made perfect sense so we had pre-purchased so many maybe it was 150, I can't remember how many senior panel accounts we have maybe it was 153 or whatever but those are being used and increasingly adopted. I try to encourage students especially when they want to build a professional web presence to just start using Domains and they don't have to sort through the migration. And I've only had a few requests for people that I really want to take that site off of Skidmore Community WordPress and have it on my own and it's possible to migrate it but there might be some tricks in there. So anyway I'm just kind of trying to riff here off of the different themes that come up. And I'll keep the questions tighter so that they'll feel a little bit more, I don't know contained because this was kind of like what's your origin story? I guess there's no sound? What happened to the sound? The sound is a little annoying because it should be pre-dawn because they work in between the audience and they ask questions if it was we state the question. I get notifications from Discord on the watch. We feel alright, we got a good background an extensive background. So what did we learn? Stuff starts in a lot of different ways has a tendency to spread out in different degrees of complexity. Here's a quick question for you. You just pick between two things. When these rebirth cycles happen like sunsetting UMW blogs are starting a new thing is this a natural disaster or seasonal? Just pick one. Seasonal? Seasonal please. If you're not paying attention to the seasons it can turn into a natural disaster which I'm currently experiencing. It should be seasonal but if it isn't then it becomes a natural disaster. It's like you forget winter happens up here in Virginia. Wait we get snow. If we have advanced warning that there are tornadoes coming next week generally it's seasonal if we can plan ahead. Not the end of the world to have to sunset something and start something new opportunities and a way to kind of get rid of perhaps stuff that got really heavy and think about that when you start your new thing. Lessons learned in the new world is a beautiful way to do this. Some more maybe the Apple style of development rather than Windows which is backwards compatibility to the beginning of time versus occasionally making people a little bit mad and moving on with life. Some of that is dictated by the software though. Our biggest problem challenge right now is we have an updated PHP and there's no backwards compatible secure PHP so we have to we have to move forward in that sort of sense but also the web as we've been talking about when the UMW blog started, when Georgetown Commons started, when the Tildesite started the web was a much different place you know and so there is something to be said about taking this opportunity to revisit what is what do we want this to be even just calling it the Commons blog right everybody now sort of rolls their eyes and be like the Commons like that isn't even a thing anymore for better or worse so again it's not just the you know it's taking a step back and saying what are we trying to do what are we trying to accomplish how is that reflected in how we build it what we name it we talk about domain names and how important those are but even the names of our programs it's a chance to be able to look at that because again the web from 15 years ago is not the web that we're currently working on and so it's essential to revisit and to rethink and refresh that's a beautiful transition to this question alright so you got your elevator pitch right you're trying to tell somebody as succinctly as possible if besides that second one how tall is this building the difference if it's tall it's a very fast elevator alright so you got to tell them the difference between the domain of one's own option and your WordPress multi-site option so high speed give it to me Shannon we think a lot about in marketing so WordPress multi-site is the simple way to start building on the web you can get right in there start making your thing we use the whole apartment and house like analogy WordPress multi-site is like having an apartment you can do things in there but you don't own the infrastructure you can paint some of the walls but you can't move the walls people get upset about that if you do that in apartments domain of one's own is like a house you could do whatever renovation you want there do model that how you want you have a lot more control but also that comes with also responsibility just like houses do I try to frame it as a learning curve right and it kind of cost benefit analysis you can tell I work at Georgetown when I start talking about these sorts of things but I say there's a really low barrier to entry for common's blog very low barrier to entry very low learning curve but highly limited in what you can do domains higher learning curve but way more flexibility right and so what are you looking for maximum flexibility or maximum ease of use and then if they're doing research projects chances are it's a default all the way you're already in domains it's not even a question but that is pretty much the going through faculty with the cost benefit analysis it depends on the person asking so professor comes and says I want to have a course site absolutely WordPress site why because we can get access to all the students very quickly just enrolled in a student comes to us and says I need a core I need us I need a website it's for a course but it's only for me only and I'd say well still yeah let's build it on the WordPress site another student comes to me and says you know I'd really like to put my capstone project here and make a nice website I'm graduating next year so have you thought about domains when it's really all about that particular student then I'm going to encourage them to build it on domains because then we don't have to worry about them having you know to to take it down later they're not they don't have to export it because they've already built it where they're going away from campus well and to mix up the pattern here a little bit let me follow up with you what's the support structure look like between the two services how does it differ for you how do you convey those expectations to the people when you help them make this choice yeah so if it's generally it can be a little more high touch more resource intensive for people using domains because I have to sit down and explain to them how the C panel works right and I take them through that installation I mean to the point where the installatron asks them to create an administrator username and password no that is not your university credential in fact I would probably create one of your own personal and let's not use the university email address use a personal email address right so we're setting this up so there's a little bit more high touch a lot of times they're asking just for word press but I also introduced very quickly the C panel right because you've got a whole lot of things going on here so that's a little bit more it takes a little bit more time I train I'm really lucky to have some generally well like Alex some high performing student assistance Alex Carney came with me and so I train them so a little bit train the trainer model that can work pretty well with good students but certainly the community word press ones generally easier I've got most times they are more workflow familiar requests and I've got documentation I can send people to as well how about you? for the past six months it's been me and only me we've had staff turnover I do have some GAs who help troubleshoot but one of them was study abroad another one graduated so anyway so for a while it was me we do class visits so we will go in and we will introduce depending on what what level it's at particular on the commons blog most of the commons blog users are power users so they've been using it for years and years and years and they're familiar enough with it but still want somebody to kind of come in and talk about it we're going to have to revisit that model as we upgrade to Gutenberg because nobody will know what they're doing in it we do have that process that you talk about around C panel we actually have some video and some documentation around that let's have access to LinkedIn learning and so when it comes to word press I'm just like login through the library to LinkedIn learning here's the introduction of word press that I recommend you take it's the most recent one and you know I can show you the basics but other than that I'll also do for like specific classes that have kind of more niche uses I will I'll produce a kind of how to screen grab video that they can share with their students partly just because of the staffing staffing issues we're rebuilding the team and so a lot of the tech troubleshooting recently has been I've reclaimed help people who know me really well right now but we're going to get some of that expertise back in the house to be able to do that yeah I think support isn't the interesting can leave teased on it there at the end the support is an interesting question around these things because there's the kind of the technical support of these systems like this thing needs to be upgraded or this really weird thing is happening and then like you updated and everything broke Domain Ones Own moves to PHP 8.0 and people panic and the support of how to use this stuff in the classroom, how to use it critically all those kinds of things and I'm sure if you have Domain Ones Own at your institution you kind of wrestle with this like you're trying to help people think about it but also then you feel like you need to maybe know some stuff about it and where that balance is I think Reclaim does a really great job but now they offer options you can like pay them to be that support which is great Mary Washington because of the legacy between Cartland who's in the back, he's the director of the D.K.C. over there we basically kind of split the technical tickets like if things like weird happen but the upside of having a D.K.C. this is the digital knowledge center, this is our student support so we can really in thinking about like how do you get users in there and comfortable students get to talk to students about that like they have an assignment they can come into the center and they can get that help and support meanwhile, Cartland and I can do that faculty side like how do you think about using those things so we're extremely fortunate because I can imagine if we had to help all students it would be overwhelming to do and we try like mentioned here like hab documentation all those things get class visits, get people started but yeah having students do a lot of that those repeat questions that you will never really see again and again because you keep getting new students who still you know don't know how WordPress works so how do you continuously think about that onboarding experience and make that better how do they get find the help themselves potentially I would just add real quick we put a TV monitor outside our office we're in the library and so we started offering you know open office hours right where it's like you know come at this time where you can work and so it's usually a staff person or student who can student worker who can help and those have been successful too. One of the biggest challenges at least at our institution really has been around setting expectations particularly for faculty in that they have this research project they want to make a website and they're like great we have this great program called domains and they're like great so you're going to do it for me and you're like no that's not how this works um partnership yeah well and but even even partnership given the staffing challenges that we have um because you know a lot of you may have all experienced this but sometimes faculty think that the web is magic right and I want this really slick looking website that is like the New York Times with it's like scrolling video over text and interactivity and you know you kind of have to reset expectations that like even in-house we don't even even with the people we had who were experienced and left we couldn't have done that and so it's trying to manage expectations manage um their own vision of what they want their site to be this is particularly on the research side not so much on the teaching side but that's I mean the thing about domain one's own is supposed to be for any purpose and so a lot of the times it is for research digital humanities projects forward-facing projects community outreach projects which are all wonderful um we're currently working on a site um for the Pope uh thing about working at a Jesuit institution apparently the Pope knows who we are um but but again it's sort of like I can help them in a system but it's like they have external funding to pay a developer because we don't have that kind of expertise in-house and to be able to say that I am here to empower you to build this site um and I can help your students and I can help you do a teaching site but like for all of these other bells and whistles you know it's just I don't have I have 47 other responsibilities in my job so that can be- that's probably the hardest conversation to have with faculty is that setting of expectations in terms of the support we provide and can provide I can give you really quickly an example of um how we'd like to provide more support we also were learning experience design and also digital scholarship support so we're trying to wear a lot of different hats and you know we try to use as many of the tools in the C panel besides WordPress so one time we had a project involving Omeca and I love Omeca but I mean we just there's only two of us right and it just cannot support that it's just incredible we tried we had some external consultants help and eventually what we did because it was such a great project and it still lives on is we did a conversion um um from Omeca to WordPress and so we tried to get really try to standardize on WordPress as much as possible there's still a reputation that well it can't scale it's not strong enough you can't do this you can't do that and you know I would say I don't think that's true um but you have to be realistic about you know what you can take on as far as resources um and the other thing that I would say is where I struggle with is you know sometimes projects you know how do you say you had a lot of passion and enthusiasm that went into building a website that's now five six years old but it doesn't really I mean nobody asked the question about well what's the life cycle of this site when's it going to go away and um especially if you know you've helped out with customizations or if you've licensed additional you know things like a fancy plug in like a map me plug in great plug in by the way but it costs money and so having that conversation can be talked to you know how do you talk to somebody and say you know you know do you would you like to keep this site and yes if so you know are you willing to contribute some resources to it or you know it's it's sometimes not easy to support over the long haul especially with upgrades like PHP yeah so I'm gonna let y'all ask questions at the end too but we've kind of got some broad strokes of things does anything come up that you want to dig deeper into or did I ambush you by asking one of the things that I see I'd love to see the boxes filled in but I'd also like to see like our boxes added to that and kind of build it could be cool right yeah profiles for people who use this stuff I know you're old so the funny thing is actually I created when I was here at UMW I created a resource that documented all of this so there is still a spreadsheet of kind of the history and the writing around a main of one's own for all the early schools so it goes up till pretty much when I left which was five years ago and probably even a little before that because it was kind of that flurry at the very beginning I can I'll find it and get the link it's still up it's like it's like DTLT is it the blog is it DTLT.UMW.EDU I don't remember anyway there is a there is a kind of spreadsheet that I asked the community to contribute to of kind of that so a lot from Oklahoma a lot from UMW a lot from you know those early adopters so there was there's a bit of a timeline I'd have to probably fill in some stuff for Georgetown but again there is that spreadsheet that has a lot of the early the early stuff that you can kind of trace and see like this is when they piloted it and this is when they did all of these kinds of things so it's somebody wants to make that chart out of all of the data I collected then please do so it's something that's come up before a couple times like what would like institutional profiles of people who use these services in different ways look like how would you kind of connect like people like what it is they started out with yeah there's two great examples you mentioned Oklahoma State University that's where John Stewart's from I'm not the A.I. John Stewart I'm the real not the state part it's OU oh sorry but the other one is Coventry Coventry they've got a really nice presentation that tells you or interface website that says you want domains, you multi-site very very very nicely presented that was the other question I mean I've got we've used the Oklahoma Document Manager and still use that same here I've been relying really heavily on getting people started within the Georgetown environment specifically and then much like Canvas going in here is the reclaimed posting documentation and here are the greatest hits in the same way we kind of do with Canvas where it's like here's what the Georgetown instance looks like and here are the FAQs directly to Canvas' documentation on it so we're not reinventing the wheel and like I said some just very niche bespoke videos for certain specific audiences like they're trying to do this one thing in this class and they do it every semester and there's no point in asking Reclaim to document that so it's like okay I'll make a little video for you here you go this is for your class reuse it every year Middlebury also has pretty good content Middlebury College check out their website as well I think it would be a question when you're thinking about documentation it kind of gets at this too sustainability wise but like what are your end users actually using that for like it's I've talked about my students and I love them sometimes they don't even remember we have documentation and they're the students that work for us like yeah we had this so it ends up being useful for us sometimes as a link sender like here's the thing I wrote up about it so like in some ways I think a lot of people do not function in that way unless you are the value of if there's something hyper specific that somebody couldn't Google and actually find the answer to maybe you should have a documentation on that versus like I will not recreate how WordPress like how to use WordPress there's no point in doing that you point people to those places I find they take care of those things and will update their screenshots and usually the people are doing things super niche are doing it on their own and I don't even see them right it's the comp side people the you know people in business who are data crunchers and they're just like oh I can have my own web server thank you so much I'm on my own now and they're doing things that I you know we checked you know you can get stats on your installatron right and I look and I'm like who's house installing these things right but and they've never come to us for more help on it so I'm like I guess it's a platform they're familiar with and they feel pretty good about it so you know awesome for them yeah that's success right there yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah because you said some things that I think are interesting like when you when you look at WordPress multi site do we still call it that or do we call it something else WPMS when you look at that and when you look at domain on one zone what do you look for in terms of success because I heard Lee say like hey who's installing these things that's interesting like do you try and get that score to go up over time does it matter do you convey it to people like talk to me a little about what success looks like in these two different platforms Ben you want to lead us off sure I mean I guess from I mean philosophically I mean from an IT evolutionary perspective I would say one marker of success is when IT assists people and they can get out of the way right and then faculty students staff can go about installing their own applications and when they need help or they're looking for inspiration they reach out you know we always assume no news is good news right usually we hear from them when things break yeah I mean nice thing about WordPress site is you know how many sites are in you know your instance of multi-site I mean periodically when I create new sites I'll go back and see peak on them and see how they're doing throughout the semester but I mean these are both these have been they've been long ago piloted they're well established initiatives and I know because I'm manually creating the community WordPress sites I keep tabs keep dibs on you know how people are doing so real quick though like you say no news is good news yes do you look at like help desk tickets over time and look for them to decline versus the number of things or is this just more like your heart your gut type of vibe you know what I mean now that either is right I'm just like trying to think how people systematize this to some degree or don't like yeah but that's not no not for no not not not if people if people trust you and they come to you and they want to especially if it's for course related stuff they're not just gonna yeah before I'd say shout out to Cartland for finding the blog post faster in the spreadsheet faster than I could and putting it in the discord I very smartly exported all of my blog posts thanks to with Cartland's help from the original from our not the original but our DTLT blog and put it up on my own domain yeah I know they're accessible and it links to the spreadsheet I wish I could find the infographic that Chris made up to that kind of showed a bit of a history but I mean I I don't know what metrics of success are to be honest like I know it's recording and streaming but like we keep getting funded right we show that there is there are use cases we show that people are using it we come right up against our ceiling every year of how many c panels we've bought you know I still think it's an underutilized resource right we just we just did a collaboration with the library called the digital research initiative where the digital the digital librarians and the digital scholarship side collaborated with the digital learning side of candles and put out a call for proposals for projects for digital projects that would also be incorporated into teaching and the answer to every single one of their problems was domains right and half of them knew about it and the other half were like oh my gosh we have hosting service and we've had this for you know since the inception pretty much but there is also this question of sustainability right this is at a large place like Georgetown this is one tool in a gigantic suite of tools you know so we we have users there's a there's a desire for it you know this is the stuff that ends up that working any use and as long as people are using it then they'll keep paying for it right and can show use case I mean I guess the advantage is even having the slavery archive on domains will probably mean it lives on for a while because it's a huge initiative that the university is taking but yeah I mean I don't feel the pressure to grow our numbers because we do have to balance that with the sustainability of the project but I mean we you know faculty the faculty who use it love it and that's and you know the provost doesn't hear about it and my executive director doesn't hear about it and so they're like they're pretty happy with that right we can give them stats and numbers that show consistent use and maybe a little bit of growth and yeah yeah success I'll also say it's hard to define like one thing I didn't mention is that we like for both our multi-site and Domino One Zone it's wide open to anybody can just sign up and so like there's not that maybe intermediary where like you're having that conversation so you kind of are vaguely aware what's going on so I just expect people will just sign up and never touch it again so metrics wise I just I can't think about it in that way because right how many services have I ever like signed up for that I never went back to that site right so like because it's open somebody can symbol cross it they sign up for the wrong thing for their class whatever how many people went to set up domain instead of going to the wall that is a thing and like that's also you know glad to talk about that more in detail by like that the level of openness right we come from a history of Mary Washington of being wanting to be that open but it comes with its cost literally people sign up with bad domains because we offer also offer top level domains for free which is yeah yeah so that's yeah right it's we're all maybe there's like four other schools that do it like there's not really that many schools do this anymore so yeah so then this is where like we actually another problem we lose lots of interesting student projects because we once the student graduates we have a whole we remove them from the system so like lots of interesting things have gotten lost because of that because we can't afford to continue to pay for students who are not here right we hope they migrate in the directory that started with yeah I yeah yeah we should talk about that yeah because I just had like the three minute yeah but one thing I do but I wanted to I feel like there's underlying I've almost said it several times it's like the tension between is this infrastructure or is this an experimental space yeah that is constantly because you know I you know encounter many you like some people sit on the IT side of the house some people sit on the academic side that's where kind of we are which I think helps situate our argument often that this is an academic pursuit not the institutional like you know can't expect something to live forever there's more yeah that that that kind of central tension of like so what a success when it's an academic experimental space I think it looks different than if you were up top your infrastructure and you're worried about up time and those kinds of how many tickets those things matter right because you have to deal with them day to day but the success is wow this student like made this really cool thing like let's let's show it like this student shared something and that author came in and popped it in the comments something that came up you know yesterday like wow what happens when students are doing I mean faculty and staff do but mainly that's how we focus here like what students get to engage in that and so it's a lot more qualitative than I think quantitative on that measure well let me ask you based on that so if one end of the spectrum is enterprise and the other is like spaceship experimentation we got two different things going on here right the multi-site and domain of one's own so where do you start to place them in terms of expectations and support in that continue I feel like we are lucky that it is far more on that act that experimental side because the university website is actually also based on WordPress so like when things when people need that thing to be the infrastructure like it ends up being a different conversation and we have way less I think this gets way more complicated with faculty research and like initiatives where there's like this is an external facing thing we tend to be a little bit more internally focused at Mary Washington which means student work has a different kind of space there versus a faculty member has an expectation that the site that they built it's now millions of people come to visit or whatever like that that exists and is up that I know that he spoke to a lot about this like how do you have those conversations it's tricky so UMW multi-site and domain one's own stay towards the experimental and now you just mentioned the slavery archive and some other stuff talk to me about where so we I mean again this is this is where my experience at UMW comes up against the expectations of a place like Georgetown where it has to work right that for me I do not get to play in the experimental spaces as much as the it just has to work now the WordPress multi-site hasn't been an experimental place in a while basically because it's broken and you can't really do anything with it except type text so again that's a conversation we're going to be having as we rebuild the multi-site is how much leeway how much freedom how much room for experimentation and play are we going to build into this new multi-site when it comes to domains I would say that the experimentation that's taking place is that it's more around I'm not aware of it because it is people who do not need my help or help to be able to do it that they're doing it with their students because they're in computer science because they're doing their MBA and this is part of what they're trying to do they're doing these cool digital projects largely on their own but then you do have that expectation that we have a lot of and we're still seeing this issue with PHP that there are a lot of cool very forward facing things done on domains because they couldn't do it on the Georgetown.edu site that it needs to work this is their hub now we have a couple of those on the comments blog it's a whole other problem I'm going to have to deal with this year but again there isn't as much experimentation I would say there are opportunities with faculty where they're incorporating digital projects but again we get back to that discussion about innovation it's innovative to them but it's like yes we're doing videos and podcasting and that's really cool and we have the library I should have mentioned this too I'm sorry we have the library offers trainings much like the DKC does on a lot of platforms and digital tools that are used and so we're lucky that we are largely WordPress and that a lot of other things are available on the library but yeah we're less in the experimental space and more in the infrastructure space even though I would like to be more in the experimental space. And is the multi-site more institutional enterprise and the domains a little bit less or you just see them as basically the same? I just see them as I mean I'm so focused on the multi-site not breaking and hanging on for two more months that it's just like hard to think other than infrastructure right now because it's like literally spit and duck tape at the moment and you're trying to figure out how to make it work for two more months yeah I would just say okay here's a perfect example so our WordPress multi-site is definitely infrastructure somebody comes to me and says I really want to build a custom theme and I really like this you know Elementor theme or whatever different kind of theme divi theme whatever could be and I'd like to I hear you can actually get in there and code and break an experiment I say absolutely we're going to put you over on domain you'll have your own sandbox where you can grab things and learn we do not allow child themes on our production of WordPress multi-site because that would just be a nightmare to try to support we don't have the resources or knowledge on the fly to figure that out so definitely domains experimental I can spin up you know a WordPress instance really quickly separately on our main domains without having to assign a c-panel so just for a really quick experimental stuff that works great great yeah yeah we're right at the edge here and I lied and you don't have many times for questions but it's also on lunch yeah I mean you can find us at lunch we'll be eating but what are we seeing no right answers different paths likely you'll change and course correct throughout the whole thing don't think that you'll have assumed all possibilities going into it but if you can help guide people to things that make sense as individual conversations that's a beautiful opportunity if because of other things you can't try and think through how you make that more of a procedural process to help like I love UMW's apartment house option and then it leads you to two different places there's good ways you can kind of help point people to the right sort of tool with the right sort of overhead right and that's part of the conversation we got three examples of lots of different things in very different places and there are more out there what we need is a dating site so that you can find your perfect match to talk to you I would say find the institutions that are there are things that you're doing pick their brains because that really is influential and that's exactly what I did as soon as I found out that UMW had just redone their multi-site and that we were going to be doing it I pinged you right away and was like can we meet and talk about this please because I don't know what I'm doing right now is this court a place to have these conversations and keep this going? I'm there that's good to know that you're there alright we're at time you cannot speak anymore you have to leave this room immediately thank you very much thank you our panelists thank you our lovely audience yeah but I think actually just to follow it up I think that the