Reclaim Open: carving out spaces

I feel a bit behind the curve in writing about Reclaim Open, but I suppose it’s better late than never. We’re still technically in June, meaning the in-person event was just earlier this month, and we still have the online recap coming throughout the month of July, so perhaps my tardiness may be forgiven!

Reclaim Open is Reclaim Hosting’s 4th biennial conference following Domains17, Domains19, and OERxDomains21. It can be easy to compare each conference to those preceding it, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned while hosting these through the years, it’s that each event captures a moment in time and creates a space for connection– however it may be needed or defined in that moment by each participant– and they’re all uniquely special. In some ways these conferences snowball and build over time; we take the lessons that we learn from one and embed them into the next one. In other ways, each conference is its own entity where a distinctive group of folks will converge, share ideas and inspire, and then part ways again. The conversations are always different, but the goal (at least for me when planning) is always the same: to create a space where folks feel comfortable to share, challenge, and build alongside each other.

OERxDomains21 came at a time during covid where connection and professional support felt more difficult to come by. That event was collaborative, powerful, and pushed boundaries – all while being completely online. Domains 17 & 19 were equally powerful, and reinforced art & creativity by taking place in various museum hotels (penguins & tv stack installations included).

While there were no penguins this go around, Reclaim Open was no different in how it carved out space for a community to join forces. In many ways, this conference felt like a reunion, celebration, and call to action all in one. The conference themes were perfect for this:

In April 1993, Tim Berners Lee open sourced the World Wide Web, and the ensuing decades of internet technologies bears the mark of that historic moment. Thirty years later, open source still remains central to building and providing an open web. For our 4th biennial conference, Reclaim Hosting plans to not only celebrate the history of the open web, but take stock of the present moment while exploring the future of Open. To this end we established 3 distinct, though always related, tracks wherein we asked folks to share their work around the past, present, and future of the open web. It was so fun to head back where it all began, and we had a blast welcoming web historians, creative tinkerers, digital humanists, instructional technologists, project admins, and open source advocates to Fredericksburg, Virginia on June 5-7, 2023.

Excerpt on reclaimopen.com

The past, the present, the future: going back to where it all began in Fredericksburg, VA and sharing stories with old and new friends; a celebration of how far we’ve come, marking Reclaim’s 10th year in business and the anniversary of the open web; dreaming up where we want to be and how the future of the web will shape that path.

Each time we dream up, plan for, and host an event like this, I always re-learn just how much work goes into hosting a conference and I have so much respect and admiration for folks that do this more regularly. Coordination for the logistics alone are no joke, and we added a bit of complexity this year by recording sessions, live-streaming and experimenting with Hybrid, and producing an on-the-fly documentary. These extra elements would not have been possible without the amazing Dream Team, and it was such an honor to work alongside them these past few weeks/months (years!) to make it happen.

In no particular order, here’s a list of some of my Reclaim Open highlights:

The Reclaim team dinner after the event where we talked about the future of green web hosting, inspired by Bryan Alexander‘s keynote, What might the web become in its next generation?

Unveiling the documentary, and hearing the impromptu, round-robin experiences from conference goers at the end of day 3.

Checking out Reclaim Arcade. Still so in awe with how that space has transformed, and that evening was a blast!

The way that Rajiv Jhangiani used storytelling and visual/audio aids in his keynote, Accept all cookies and continue: The many presents of the web.

I also really enjoyed creating the conference programs, which ended up sitting somewhere between a newspaper and a zine.

The programs were created using Newspaper Club and their provided Canva template for the Digital Mini Magazine. I really love how these came together in the end, along with the other stickers and t-shirts we had on hand to showcase Bryan Mathers‘ fantastic artwork:

And because I’m always curious what folks use for other conferences… the name tags were created and printed using Conference Badge and the lanyards were purchased in bulk on Amazon. Stickers were printed through Sticker Mule, which we’ve used for years, and our collection of Reclaim Open t-shirts were designed and printed through Spreadshop on shop.reclaimhosting.com.

Back to the list of highlights– I loved the casual nature of the Unconference. The slower pace on day 1 felt like a great way to kick off the event.

Hanging in downtown Fredericksburg again and eating all the Benny’s pizza I could manage.

The power of A.I. Levine

And last, but certainly not least, I really loved witnessing other Reclaimers run the show. This was a true team effort and I’m so glad to have been a part of it.

Using Custom Fields and Dynamic Tags in WordPress

Two posts in two days! I’m trying to get in a better rhythm of writing more, and we’ll see if it lasts. Today I wanted to share one of the things I’m doing with the site for our upcoming conference, Reclaim Open, to pull in post metadata. This is by no means groundbreaking stuff, but it was kind of a cool workaround so I wanted to share. I know there are mixed opinions about Elementor, Gutenberg, and other site editors for WordPress, and honestly I’m still trying to work out how I feel about them myself. But in the meantime, I am using Elementor on reclaimopen.com, mostly because I’m familiar with it at this point and it was a fast way to get the look that I wanted for the site.

One of the things I’ve been working through over the last few days (and weeks leading up until now) has been collecting speaker information, building out a 3-day conference agenda, and now working to get it on the website. Displaying simultaneous tracks of conference sessions in an elegant way with quick time changes can quickly look messy and confusing, and then adding in presentation abstracts is a whole other thing entirely. Abstracts vary in length, include links & other resources, and need to be embedded in a way that doesn’t disrupt the larger schedule view. For previous conferences, I’ve added a toggle feature to expand session blocks if someone is interested in learning more about a particular talk, but it still doesn’t look the best on a desktop. For example, here’s a screenshot from the Domains19 Day One Schedule:

For the Reclaim Open schedule, I’ve decided instead to publish each abstract as a blog post that can be linked in session blocks, which will look something like this:

Having a dedicated blog post for each presentation also allows me to share a bit more information about the speaker, session focus, related links, etc. because space is no longer a factor. Lastly, proposal submissions were already sitting in blog post draft form because Gravity Forms is amazing.

Elementor allows you to create a theme template to be applied to all single posts. I designed one to look something like this:

Title at the top, session information (metadata) on the left, abstract (post content) on the right.

The metadata piece is why I’m writing this post– the focus and length of the session are being pulled in by categories and tags, respectively. Elementor doesn’t have a great way to filter categories/tags using the single post widgets, so I needed to come up with an alternate way to pull in speaker info. I didn’t want to create an individual user account in the WordPress dashboard for the post to recognize a different post “author” (i.e. session speaker), but I still wanted a way to pull that information in automatically and dynamically. Enter Custom Fields!

At the bottom of a single blog post, I added the Custom Field called Speaker:

Then at the bottom of each blog post, I added the speaker names in the Value field. Next, I went to configure items on the Single Post theme template with the following settings:

After saving those edits, I tested to make sure that data is changing based on my adjustments to tag & category selections, as well as whatever is listed as the Value for the custom Speaker field.

And (courtesy of hipsum.co) there you have it! Simple and effective. :)