 I had a chance to get some lunch, stretch your legs, maybe drink of water, whatever you need. Oh. Jim's taking pictures, that's what he needs. Oh, great. Sorry. So this panel is going to be what I wish I knew when I started with domains. It's going to be sort of a discussion panel with me and Taylor and with Anika and M. So in case you weren't aware, Taylor was previously one of the administrators for Domain of One's Own at St. Norbert, and Anika is a current administrator for Domain of One's Own at St. Norbert. Similarly, I was previously an administrator for Domain of One's Own at Carleton, and M is the current administrator for Domain of One's Own at Carleton. So just the format is going to be sort of us talking about our experiences, what Taylor and I maybe wish we'd done differently, what Anika and M wish that Taylor and I had done differently, what challenges we've faced, how we've overcome them, what sort of questions we hope we can answer for other people at the end, we may get into sort of more question and answer, depending on if we have time for that. We can just, I think, start by going around and introducing ourselves. I've already given sort of a little bit of an introduction, but maybe... Let's maybe let Anika and M introduce themselves. Yes. Just because we've been introduced, and then we can probably jump right into sort of what Domain's is for at each institution. So M, do you wanna introduce yourself first? Sure. So I'm M. Like Paila mentioned, I am the newest academic technology person that takes care of Domain One's own. From my perspective, the background that I received was that Domain One's own was used sort of like an emergency case, where a lot of sites were in a different platform called Reason. And that was being demolished, no longer used. And so there was this moment of panic where, okay, what do we do with all of these sites? Specifically, faculty sites where they had a bunch of their research and a bunch of their personal digital references that they wanted to keep public. So a lot of what Paila did was just transfer that information and just get everything situated, make sure there's a lot of redirections so that people who had previously used those links can go into the new links in Domain One's own. And so my eight months in Carlton has just been, okay, what is Domain One's own? What are these three platforms of WHMCS, WHM, and then our WordPress instance. So I think a couple, I think my first three months was just talking to Paila, Jim, and Taylor in the later run about what is Domain One's own, what do I do with it, and where do I go from where Paila left off? And a lot of my projects have just been organizing everything, making sure everyone has access to their own data and their own websites and such, and then creating a more efficient practice about creating a sort of digital presence with sustainability in mind. And a lot of that has been the manual process. But I think it's been good. It's been a great way to learn a lot of different things that Domain One's own can do. Awesome. Anika, do you want to kind of introduce yourself and then a little bit about St. Norbert and how Domain One's own is used there? Yeah, so I am Anna Caravada. I am the instructional technologist at St. Norbert College and the domain admin for our school. How we use it here is any faculty, staff, student can sign up for one. We don't have an approval process, but we do have what's called a tech bar which is staffed of students and you can make a one-on-one appointment with them and they will help you sign up for a website and then show you WordPress and allow you to come back for more appointments if you have more questions while you're building your site. So that has been a big help. And sort of my background with Domain One's own is I started on as that student. So when Taylor brought Domain One's own, I was part of the pilot program which I guess helped me in the sense of transitioning into an admin role. I sort of knew the end user experience so it was more just learning the backend for me which is fun and I still don't have a full grip on it but we're getting there. But yeah, I'd say we have quite a few faculty members using it in their class requiring students to make domains in their class along with it being used for major requirements such as making a portfolio for our majors and stuff like that. Awesome, yeah. And so I think you mentioned like the pilot program and I kind of forgot about that and that you were in the batch of students that had coupon codes for reclaim hosting before we had Domain One's own, right? So you had that and then you got to kind of see what's the difference between that and what is offered on Domain One's own which isn't very different but there's some slight differences. And so that was kind of a unique experience I didn't really think about that. But what I want to kind of get into is sort of the process of administering. So again like the pilot and I have been doing this for a little bit and the both of you are new at this are relatively new. So and the other interesting thing is that like the difference between the sign up process to me that's one kind of crucial thing is S&C does not have a request form and so that's a little bit different. I know one of the things for me that was always on my list and I think is on a lot of admins list honestly is getting a better handle on who is using it and for what? Which is always a complicated question because it sort of depends like there's a lot of different ways to answer that you could be talking about like are these people students or staff or faculty or whatever but you can also mean like is this for research what types of purposes? And I know for me at St. Norbert when I was administering this that was kind of a manual process like I would literally look for me because what I was most interested in is what are people doing? So I would literally go through like the pending orders and WHMCS which when an order is new when a new account is created it's pending until you make it active and I would go through them and just click on sites and see if they had anything and kind of would do that from time to time but we have I mean other tools now there's other kinds of things I kind of want to hear from I guess everyone else in the panel like what sort of things were you thinking about in terms of getting a sense of what is this thing used for? What are you looking at? Sure, I might hop in here and say just that as M said my coming into demeanor one's own was during sort of that emergency migration which involves moving a lot of sites over in most cases relatively manually which took a while but what it meant was that I got a very in-depth look at what all of the sites were about and so at the time we moved a lot of faculty project sites and a lot of course sites so faculty particularly in the English department who had wanted their students to have a place to store their freshman writing portfolio often not always the English department the Carlton writing portfolio stretches across several departments but that was the I would say that was the bulk of sites that we ended up moving sites that were being used by faculty for their work either in instruction or in research not sure if that's still majority the case but I assume those sites are still there it is, yeah, I think it started off with a lot of faculty portfolios and class sites but then it has moved into more student use for classes such as digital humanities where students create their own sites and create their own portfolios we also have studio art majors that create their art portfolios online and so I've seen an increase in student usage and I think it's very important to highlight that for students because that's like prime time to create like digital resumes like in a website and their CVs and such and they can take that with them when they're creating that in college and then after they graduate they have something to take with them other than a diploma which I think I find very useful and there's also a bunch of community pages that are created as well I know for the history and music departments they create a lot of research based projects that they want other institutions to be a part of and that's one of my selling points for Domain of One's Own is that they're not limited to just Carlton users that they can invite other non-Carlton members to go in and edit and be a part of that digital community as well. Cool yeah it's not something that we talk about a lot but you know the understanding the difference between this is the stuff that has to be accessed via single sign on or whatever and this is application level so anyone can make an account that's kind of one of the great things about a platform like Domain of One's Own or it's pretty flexible in that way you can give that however you like. Anika in terms of like how you're looking at the night domains is what SNC's Domain of One's Own is called how are you looking at what is night domains being used for what are you looking at to try to get a sense of that? Well at least for the faculty that use it in their classes we have a forum that they fill out so as a tech bar we know how to support them and then that helps me sort of check in with them and then I can also grab the class list and I have a spreadsheet of you know the domains being used in the classes just because I'm curious throughout the semester and then it's kind of cool to see how many domains are being used for classes and I mean grabbing those domains is kind of a manual process but I do it sort of mid-semester around spring break when we kind of have a lull so I just do it in one day and it's fun to see different things but yeah other than that I don't really have a non-manual way yet to sort of check in we do have our community site but submissions to that are sort of encouraged through like what we see of what appointments come through the tech bar so there's that which is super cool and then we've also added when you make an appointment with the tech bar a place to put the URL so not only can we prepare for you know a tech bar appointment that is for a website especially if it's a specific question but when we look at our appointments throughout the semester you know post that semester I can go in and go through the URLs and sort of see what people created because appointments don't have to be for classes they can be for as long as you are making a night domain you can make an appointment for help so that's sort of yeah what we do awesome. I kind of want to get to the main question right the title question of what I wish I knew and I want to start out positive though because so I feel like that question leads to like what would I have done differently and we can talk about that for sure and we will but I kind of want to hear like from folks thoughts on okay what didn't we know that we did that turned out to be great and we would definitely do it the exact same way I kind of want to start there and but I in the despite me posing the question I'm going to just kind of give my answer briefly even though I'm going to awkwardly answer my own question here but in just say I would say from the perspective at St. Orbit the best thing that we did right from the start was definitely work with students early like we had students in like like Annika we had students in C panel even though it wasn't in domain of one's own we had some time to get familiar with like WordPress and the C panel tools before we even had domains and it's not so much from the perspective of that allowed like me to support things better of course it did but that really wasn't the issue we were very worried about supporting and I think a lot of people are but what turned out to be the bigger I think win for me as a technologist getting access that early was more so I could start imagining what's possible and what you can create and getting familiar with that kind of stuff so that when we brought on night domains it was like okay it's here and we can do all this stuff with it and so there's kind of an excitement that I think that brought between the students that were already working with it and gonna support it at the tech bar between me and then faculty members and staff and students that were going to use it so that to me was I would do that 100% the same way but yeah, does anyone else have thoughts on what they would do the same way or similar way? The way I started was just I I saw a bunch of Lawrence videos about what is WHMCS and I just I just mind through all of the domain of one's own documentation to figure out what am I doing before I start doing anything and mess anything up my biggest fear was just breaking domain of one's own which is very difficult honestly you can break little things but to break the entire platform is nearly impossible but I mean, I mean I'm not gonna put that to the test I met with Pilot and Jim in a little get-together of just like what is domain of one's own and I really appreciated that because I had that in-person well over Zoom support and I can ask questions something that I can't do over videos or just reading through documentation and just go through the motions with someone there who is a representative so I appreciated that and I throughout the months of working with domain of one's own I got to experience the different kinds of documentation I think I just went to the reference of just the general documentation I forget which one not the community forum I found the community forum very late in the game Sure the stuff at support.reconhosting.com probably Yeah, that's the only place but I didn't know that there was there was a lot more support with others working asynchronously like the community forum and then I set up an account like I said very late in the game but something that I wish I knew is that there was just this plethora of avenues that I can go through and then having also that the email list where I can just email reclaim support and something that I've seen a lot is when I go to email and create a ticket there's all these different types of documents that say hey we like read your title a little bit is this something that you're looking for before you send this ticket and that's something that I want to incorporate in Carlton is that kind of analytics where it reads the title a little bit and saying hey we already have some documentation for this would you rather read this read this article or do you still want support? That's a good point that's and I will say like I'm a little bit familiar with that because of course like I've seen the back end of that stuff and reclaim but at St. Norbert we did a similar thing actually because it's in this case it's Zendesk is holding both the documentation and doing our ticketing so that's a feature as you can kind of tell it but it's not unique to that I think there's a lot of platforms where you can do something similar and worth doing because it's tricky to maintain documentation but I honestly think in a lot of cases especially for supporting domains on a campus you probably don't need like an entire copy of all of the reclaim documentation that's probably overkill it would definitely be overkill I think but having a couple frequently asked questions in there would definitely be good and you can do a lot with that like you can put like support widgets on different web pages and all kinds of stuff I was thinking about things that I think we did well at the start which was we were I think very lucky in some ways we started with domain of one's own properly during the summer of 2020 that was when we were doing the big migration which meant going into fall of 2020 there were a lot of academic technology workshops and programs designed to support and instruct faculty with regards to all of the resources that they had for remote teaching and engaging their students digitally which meant that there were several opportunities that I particularly had to sit down and say, hey, we have this new thing here's what it affords to you here's what you might wanna do with it you may also have other goals and in some cases that ended up being question and answer with the faculty who wanted to know could it be used for this particular purpose? What could I do with this? And sometimes the question was maybe I'll have to look into it but getting to have a really open dialogue with faculty right as we were exploring more ways to connect everyone on campus digitally was I think invaluable. Awesome. I wanted to highlight in the Discord chat that Carla from UVA mentioned having a terms of service posted early on to manage account owners expectations of the service is a big one that can be really great from the start and yeah, I think that is a good one and in a lot of cases, you can sort of lean on some of the stuff that your organization may already have in terms of usage of student data and stuff like that or appropriate, I know SNC has a network and computer usage appropriate. Like acceptable use policy. Acceptable use policy, yeah. And so we were able to kind of look at, we were able to kind of use that and then on top of it layer like, all right, night domains is not for accepting payments for a business. We don't want you doing that. And so that was a really nice kickstart to that process because sometimes it can be a little daunting of like, all right, let's write a terms of service. It's okay. So I think that was a good thing to do was to kind of start from somewhere like that and would definitely recommend folks, at least consider that before they launch. Okay, so we kind of talked a little bit about this but what would you like, what would you have done differently or what would you spend more time on things like that? And I think, Annika, I'm gonna kick it to you because you haven't jumped in the last question but also feel free to be like, Taylor, I wish you would have done this differently. That would have been easier. I won't be offended. I think something I'm working on now is sort of more targeted at our tech bar members of sort of like now an official onboarding process of training because when I got on, I was part of the pilot program and we had the flexibility to just like work with that and have our own website and not have the, I guess on top of that also supporting people. So sort of creating sort of trainings and sort of like things so they can build up their own site themselves so that they can better support it which I think is great when supporting this to have your own website and sort of your own spot to experiment and stuff because I mean, you have your own domain and then you have, I have a bunch of subdomains. So doing that and being able to experiment yourself helps you better I think support it. So when you have people come to you with those questions of like, can I do this? Sometimes I've already experimented it because I was just curious but you know, not every tech bar member coming in is fresh or is going to dive right in. So sort of having that material of like, okay, here's some training in this and here's some, because we sort of like them to know the very basis of CSS so they can dive deeper a little bit later if they'd like. So I think having that and we are still, we have this domain of one's own program on campus but it's always you gotta promote it and working to promote it and doing more events and because I feel like with COVID it was sort of you know, all of a sudden we're back on campus now and there's a bunch of events and so we didn't do anything this year but moving now into the fall we're gonna hopefully pick that back up and promote it more. So we can get past the just use for classes and portfolios and sort of reach those students that aren't in those classes or majors. Awesome. I have a hard time answering that question of what, what would I have done differently from the start just because there was technically no start for me? It was just, I came in. Well, and feel free to make use of that question however you want, right? You could go with, it would be nice if this existed knowing that in some cases pilot may not have had, you know, like these things are complicated. I wish I had been able to set up for you. I think we started at the same time. I think you started at Reclaim in September and I started at Carlton in September. But your name, you were like an infamous person at Carlton, everyone talked about you. It's like, oh, pilot this, pilot that, pilot did everything. And I was like, oh, that'd be very cool to meet this pilot person and have a conversation and then we eventually did. So that was cool. And I don't think I would have done anything differently. The only thing is I wish I started sooner, like in the summer, just to do a lot of that learning process when faculty weren't there. I think I definitely learned as I went because I had all these incoming questions from faculty and from different staff saying, hey, I have this question about this WordPress site that I have or how do I go to PHP My Admin? And I said, okay, I'll get back to you. Give me one sec. And then in the background, I'm just scaring, like, what is PHP My Admin? I'm just trying to figure out what to do just to mitigate those questions. But some things that I'm planning to do over this summer is create training videos just like Lauren did but for just on the client side. So they have a reference of, I just got a C-Panel or I just got a WordPress site. What do I do with it? What are the ins and outs and ups and downs and all the rounds of this? Cause I know there's different types of learners. There's those who thrive with just reading an article and then there's those who need a visual component and some who need in-person support. So having all those different avenues from the start would have been great but you can't change the past. So it's just things that you can do now or I can do over the summer while everyone's gone on vacation or just taking a break from the school year. Your story's interesting to him because you came in midstream, right? So like it was started, you didn't start with it but you had to kind of, like you said, adjust on the spot to what was needed. So that's a particular challenge and I'm sure other admins also who joined are in that situation. Yeah. I was gonna say that one of the things that I wish I had done differently or been able to do was just part of the migration meant that I was very used to a very hands-on manual workflow which is probably why so many people know who I am was because they would come and ask me to do a thing for them and then I would be in charge of getting it done. But I wish that I had figured out or had time to develop smoother, more automated processes that I could have passed on to you so that you weren't picking up what was essentially a manual process a couple months after I had left which I think was maybe a difficult handoff. I think that there could have been much easier ways for me to leave that. Having manual processes that don't have... Having manual processes that don't have context or anyone to explain the context, I should say is kind of tricky. I remember so like in the situation of St. Norbert like Anika was a student and then was a coworker at St. Norbert for a little while before I left. And so some of this stuff what we had a chance to talk about and I mean, let's be real you could just ask me a question now, right? Like it's totally fine. Given I work at Reclaim especially but like some of it is kind of tricky to be like, all right, so like here's how I handled account deprovisioning and it's just like, if you write it down, it's like, okay, I see you're generating this report and I see you're doing this, but like why? Why was that the way you chose to do it? It's kind of hard if you don't actually have a chance to sit down with someone because you may be the only one that has that process in your head, you know? So that can be a little bit tricky, especially for these more complicated processes. Something that Anika mentioned. Oh, go for it. I was gonna say, I'm always looking to sort of like what to do differently just like how we can make whether it's trainings for, you know what I was talking about tech bar but even just documentation for everyone in just different ways. The pandemic, I think was a big push for us to start doing video tutorials. So sort of keeping that up and being able to deliver content as many ways as possible. Yeah, that's exactly what I was gonna mention is just the training. I want to get more people involved because right now I'm the only one who actually knows how to go around with Domain of One's Own as an admin. We have another person in our team who's also an admin but isn't too familiar. So one of my goals is to get other people in our academic technology team to know what to do in the case, like right now I'm gone for a week and I was messaged saying there's a bunch of SSL failures. What do I do? And I said, well, leave it be. I'll take care of it when I come back but not only getting professional staff involved but also some student workers because they pick up stuff so quickly and to help me with training videos. And so that way it's not dependent just on one person but we have an actual support team. That's super important. I'll just underline highlight, exclamation, exclamation, exclamation point like distributing the support burden which can be sometimes as we all know and making that a possibility is gigantic. And that's why it's interesting that a lot of some of the really strong Domain of One's Own kind of runs are based and premised on students coming up through the ranks, understanding how this works, having used it but then again having administered it. It can be a virtuous cycle back to Ed Beck's point about him dealing with someone at wordpress.com who actually supported WordPress at their university is a very interesting kind of narrative which also points to me and then I'll promise I'll stop talking because I shouldn't even be on this panel. It points to me the idea that when you're using tools like WordPress or other open source tools that are popular within the ecosystem of higher ed like we're doing, it changes that relationship hopefully for that someone to have learned something that will follow through beyond university. And you had mentioned M already about portfolios and CVs but actually hands-on work that is useful for them to actually understand, conceptualize and demonstrate expertise in a space as they move beyond university. I love that about WordPress in many of these applications. So I really like that but also back to the students being crucial to making this work in a way that can be sustainable. Yeah, thanks for coming to my TED Talk. So I wanted to bring up a few things. I'm always kind of like bouncing in these sessions between like putting things in the Discord and but Ed mentioned some things that he still would like to see and I think a lot of people would share these which is sort of better integration of data that's coming in into one place which is obviously as we know very tricky because of the fact that these are three systems so most of that is right now a manual thing but I just wanna say like hear that totally and I think there's some things working on that will make a lot of that easier. Archiving accounts and de-acquisition of accounts. I just wanted to bring up the fact that we're totally gonna talk a lot more about that over the rest of today and tomorrow we have a lot of stuff focused on that so I don't want that question to feel unanswered but there's a couple sessions related to that specifically so that hopefully some of that will be useful, yeah. And special thanks to people sharing their policies in terms of services, that's great, very useful. Yeah, the policies, I got some reading to do which maybe won't be the most interesting but I find that stuff kind of essential to share and it's sort of hard to find them. We have had, I think I would imagine, I guess maybe Jim and Lauren, you can speak to this but I would imagine we've had customers ask for examples of that kind of thing but that's so great to see people sharing it. Absolutely, I was actually copying and pasting the links into a Discord thread that I will share later on so I'm definitely tracking on those because I do get that question quite frequently. In the last couple of minutes, if anyone, I just put a note in Discord but if anyone has any questions for Em or Annika, Taylor and Pilot, let us know and if we don't get to them in this session I'm sure folks would be happy to answer in Discord directly too. Okay, so Noah mentioned he's got to train five educational technologists take over Domain of One Zone WordPress, multi-site networks and tips for onboarding. I would mention and I'm not exactly sure where this lives or maybe it doesn't live on the Coventry domains side but that the Domain of One Zone admin plot that was mentioned earlier on in the day, it's more than just bookmarks, right? Like the fact that there's a small description of what WHM, WHMCS is, is I think really helpful especially if you're not in there every day, week or month, you're gonna forget especially when you're new what the differences are and what they're even for. If nothing else kind of starting there and explaining that, I also mentioned too like we do have a lot of video resources available that I would definitely always point new admins in and that's always a good resource to point them to as well. Yeah, I was gonna say we have that onboarding video it's about a half hour and it's basically a condensed version of what we went through this morning. So that's a good place to start for a refresher or for new admins just trying to conceptualize domains for the first time. I think though it'd probably be good to have something similar for WordPress Multisite. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, apps and that is something we're working on alongside with the Reclaim MedTech with Tom Woodward who has run a very big WordPress Multisite at Rampages to do some of that kind of in-depth look kind of like we do for Domain of One's Own. He'll be doing that with us over the course of a month. I wanna believe in September or October with WordPress Multisite. So definitely looking forward to that but that would be another good in-depth. Our WordPress Multisite documentation is something we do have to continue to beef up. Totally. Another question we have, were there any outside items or sources you used that you'd recommend in particular for working on things related to Domain of One's Own? And I just talked a bunch. So I don't wanna totally take over the conversation. So yeah, any resources people like to point to or use themselves? I ended up getting more familiar with the OMEGA S and to some degree scale our documentation as a result of working with Domain of One's Own because I ended up having faculty who needed assistance setting up sites using those tools. OMEGA and OMEGA S documentation, I think is quite good. Scale ours documentation is usable sometimes. Is getting better. Yeah, it's tricky to find is the thing was my biggest issue was that their website links to documentation that isn't actually there. So you have to go Google to find documentation that's on an entirely different website that's still official. It's just unrelated somehow. But OMEGA and OMEGA S documentation is really good. WordPress documentation pretty much speaks for itself. WordPress focuses really highly, I think, on making sure that information is accessible. I'm trying to think of if I have any resources. I recommend people to a lot on that WordPress note is that WordPress beginner site. I don't know why, but I just find like it breaks down things to like really small, like you gotta do this. And I say like, we have some WordPress documentation but there's a ton out there and this is a good starting site. So kind of having that in mind. Shout out to Pilot. Pilot made a template, a Carlton basic template for new users, beginners and within that template, there's a blog post that says, welcome. Please look at this link and it links out to a WordPress beginners page where it talks about pages, users and so on. But it's an external resource but it's embedded within the template. So once they install WordPress, they have access to it. And so that was a very cool, very smart way to just needle in the thread, just a thread needle about having your own asynchronous support. One thing that I also looked into was just the C panel knowledge base. I went in there a lot, especially during that transition from paper lantern to Jupiter. I had no idea what was going on. And so I just went, I just Googled a bunch of stuff and I ended up on their knowledge base and I saw their timeline of things when they were being deprovisioned and no longer supported. And another one is YouTube. YouTube is my best friend because I'm such a visual learner and I want to see the process from beginning to end. That's how I learned Omega about the dashboard, their pages, exhibits and collections and so on. So I would definitely recommend YouTube. Just checking the clock, we have one or two minutes left. So I think this should maybe be our last question and I'm gonna toss it to Anika and give you a chance to share any recommendations you have and then we'll wrap up and we'll move on to our next session. Yeah, I think in addition to what you all said, which I totally agree with, questions that have sort of come up more than once or we see frequent questions about we've actually blogged on our tech bar site so that we can send, we can have those resources for ready for faculty that are gonna have that question in class. I, for an example, they were one faculty member needed to embed a video in blog posts. So I just made a blog post on that and sent it over so that she could use it in her class and show her students and now it's there and I can use it in the future. So that has been a big help, especially when we can reuse that and it's the tech bar website. So then they can, once they're there, if they still have questions, they can make an appointment. But other than that, Google has been my best friend too, especially when I'm working in WordPress on a site and wonder if something is possible or looking for a certain plugin, Google has been my best friend. And what Taylor just sent, W3Schools, I have used that nonstop for any additional customization because I like to dive into the code as well. I think we, thank you both for joining us. This has been really, really fun for me. I think we do need to hop off now because we're gonna be transitioning pretty much immediately into a question and answer session. And we don't want the website to basically crash two sessions into each other. This has been really great, thank you. Thanks everyone. Thanks so much. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye.