Reclaim Hosting’s new Community page which aggregates all our various community spaces online
It’s been live for a bit now, but I am finally getting around to writing a bit about Reclaim Hosting’s new micro-site that essentially aggregates all the different channels that we use to communicate the work we do more broadly. Lauren Hanks spear-headed this project, and worked with Taylor Jadin and Tom Woodward to build out the site using Bryan Mathers’ TV set art to communicate those channels with pizzazz!
There isn’t an individual thing that automatically makes a ‘Capital C’ Community, but rather a bunch of small, intentional moments that, when combined, is rather special.
The above quote from Lauren Hanks’s post about her work designing the community site really captures the spirit of how Reclaim Hosting has been community building over the last decade. Small, intentional interactions across our various platforms to connect with others in authentic ways. So this project was an attempt to take stock of the various places we do this, not only so we have a clearer sense of our community but also as an opportunity to clean up our namespaces a bit. Since almost the beginning the community.reclaimhosting.com subdomain has been home to our Discourse forum, but as we’ve added additional elements like our Reclaim Roundup newsletter, Discord server, more consistent video production as part of the Reclaim EdTech push (much of which came to be as recently as last year). We quickly realized the forums were just one slice of the broader Reclaim community, so to that end we created a broader umbrella to try and capture the various channels we’ve been using to communicate and interact.
Reclaim EdTech’s Watch site, inspired by the YouTube/Discord mashup that drove OERxDOmains21
The fine-tuning of those channels is still a work-in-progress. Reclaim EdTech’s Watch site, based on the YouTube/Discord mashup that drove OERxDomains21, is a thing of beauty for the way it integrates those two technologies so seamlessly, but I would like for us to do more with PeerTube in the coming months to make that an equally viable alternative to YouTube. Building out these environments is not simply marketing, although it is that, it’s also us doing the work of edtech’s to experiment with spaces that bring people together to connect and encourage them to share the work they’re doing. It’s not easy work, and if you are lucky you’ll have as many wins as losses. But it’s the work I enjoy most, playing with these environments to see what sticks, and sharing how we did it along the way. It’s the best kind of open, iterative practice, and it fits well with my penchant to try and blog everything 🙂
I love this. I want to steal it. All of it!
It’s all Lauren doing, but it is a neat way to map all the spaces we live online at Reclaim, with the understanding it is a work in progress. Something Tom Woodward suggested, and we will have to see if it is possible, would be a way to go to this page and see little notifications next to each icon to suggest any new items you might have missed, like a mailbox. It may requite so cookie storing and other work that might be too much overhead for what it is, but a way to subscribe to an aggregated feed might be enough. Who knows, there is more to do here, but I like the starting point, so thanks for the kind comment.