Community Chat: The State of Reclaim

I’ve got some blogging to catch-up on this week, but I wanted to start with a quick recap of the our second community chat last week, the “State of Reclaim.” In this edition we wanted to invite folks to hear about the various things we are up to, including the imagining edtech at Reclaim, some ideas around professional development, Zero Trust Networks, Reclaim Cloud, the Domains API, and more.

It covered some ground, and one of the things we hear from folks in attendance was that they are interested in more training and better documentation. In fact, documentation for Domain of One’s Own schools has come up a couple of times last week alone, and I do think it is time we think about how we might revisit that, it’s tricky given folks want modular documentation that they can customize, but would still like to pull from a white-label pool provided by us. We’ve thought through that before, and perhaps something using Github with flat files, hell we were even imagining this with Dokuwiki in 2014, but it never fully materialized. Thankfully Oklahoma was generous enough to clone their documentation for other schools, which was a godsend. So, documentation was definitely one theme.

Another topic that seemed to be of interest was more professional development. We floated the idea of focused workshops on “Reclaim Cloud,” and Larry from Stanford was interested in a more advanced, 200-level DoOO admin training on WHM and WHMCS—both of which could be interesting. The other idea floated was pairing two or three schools up for semester-long, focused development driven by specific goals for what they want to achieve, with the idea of sharing this across campuses to reinforce a broader-sense collaborative energy that already exists between numerous schools. Kinda like a protracted workshop over the course of a semester that goes beyond just the ins and outs of the tech and looks at the broader vision of what is trying to be accomplished based on the school’s implicit or explicit mission or the project. It’s been termed “Penpals” internally, and I kinda like the idea of taking more time to think through the actual application of these technologies in classes with faculty and students.

Anyway, the community chats are already working their magic by connecting us with the folks who use Reclaim on the regular, and letting us know what they need to get their job done better.