I spend some of my time these days giving sage advice; us thought leaders do that from time to time—consider it a fringe benefit of staying my ass in school 🙂 Anyway, I was asked how I would approach framing a Domain of One’s Own initiative to convince admin this is valuable, and my take is fairly simple: it’s cheap as hell and can actually conform to and be driven by the needs of your community. So below is a quick copy and paste of my advice column email because I can:
…I think the points I might focus on in practical terms is that this can be a small pilot to experiment and also quite affordable. The DoOO package is in increments of 500 users and includes single sign-on, backups, etc. This allows you to see if it makes sense for your community, while at the same time not being an enterprise cost structure. That package is $500/month, and no hidden costs. That’s it, so that would be one important point.
The other is that such a project would be best accomplished in conjunction with faculty and departments who want to explore alternative visions of portfolios, digital literacy, etc. Building a learning community during the pilot year would be optimal. It gives the project direction and community ownership, and it allows folks to explore it for their own research, scholarship, and teaching. I would also encourage including staff in such a cohort from the library, student services, etc.
In my mind those are two crucial point[s]: affordable and community driven. After that, you can assess growth and scale if it proves useful/successful.
