I feel very lucky to continue my work with the awesome team at Reclaim into summer, and this month I have bagged myself one of the best pieces of work going: a conversation with Bryan Mathers all about that unique vinyl aesthetic and the brand new venture that is ReclaimPress.
Over the last 10-12 years I have had the privilege of collaborating on many projects with Bryan, and I deeply appreciate his listening skills, his creativity and his grit. He recently ran the London Marathon and showed once again that once you put your mind to something, a lot indeed can be achieved.
Every one of our conversations helps me reflect and leaves me inspired. So, yes, when there’s an opportunity to talk about how Reclaim’s aesthetic has developed from the early days of record stores and vinyl covers to the newly minted ReclaimPress, I jumped at the chance.
I’ve already blogged about it on the Reclaim Blog, but I didn’t want to miss the chance to also shout here about our upcoming Reclaim TV session:
Join us on Friday, May 17th at 3pm GMT / 10am ET for a very special conversation, a peek behind the scenes of the creative process behind the stunning visuals… and a chance to join the beta programme for ReclaimPress, too. Watch the stream over at Reclaim TV, or catch the recording later on archive.reclaim.tv or our YouTube channel as we go from passion project to web empire… . See you there!
I’ve previously blogged about how much I enjoy compiling my monthly newsletter, and how useful the process in itself is for me as it ensures I keep logging what I am up to, sharing updates and resources for those who wish to keep in touch away from social media.
So if you are wondering what is actually inside and how do you get it.. then this post is for you. Here’s a peek inside this month’s edition:
Hi there!
This week a new digital skills micro-credential for emerging leaders I developed together with Dr Lynne Taylerson for the Digital Learning Institute is launching, and I am really excited to see this project to its conclusion.
It’s been very rewarding to build on the research I did for my book on leading virtual teams and focus specifically on the skills we need in hybrid organisations.
Alongside this project, I am thrilled to welcome new coaching clients on board for the summer as I expand my blended coaching practice to include coaching by post and walk’n’coach sessions. Later this month I am also running the highly successful Digital Wellbeing: Healthy Habits for Hybrid Working course again with the amazing team at the University of Oxford and speaking at the ASCILITE’s Women in Academic Leadership Initiative webinar about my journey as a leader.
Last year’s experiment in the fediverse, Mission Mastodon, helped me onto a new path to reclaim my social media presence. At the time, I was contemplating what best to do in the face of the demise of Twitter and the fragmentation of my networks. Add a career transition into the mix, and a couple of new professional communities, too, and you will understand why I spent more time than before trying to find a way of connecting and sharing that works for me.
This week I am joining my Reclaim colleagues Amanda Schmidt and Taylor Jadin for a workshop focused on precisely these issues at the 2024 SUNY Digital Learning Conference. The format of the session is very interactive, and should leave plenty of time for discussion with delegates. I am really curious to learn what approaches other’s find helpful when navigating the social media landscape of today.
The theme of the conference this year is Educating for Digital Citizenship and I am super excited to be taking part and learn more about all the topics on the agenda. I am particularly looking forward to the featured speakers: Data, Discrimination, and Democracy: A Conversation with Chris Gilliard and Kathleen Fitzpatrick on Open Matters.
Our workshop at a glance
Title: Reclaiming our Socials… and how you can too!
Subtitle: Reclaim Hosting’s journey to demonstrate digital agency
Track: Digital Activism
Format: Presentation
Presenters: Amanda Schmidt, Maren Deepwell & Taylor Jadin, Reclaim Hosting
Abstract: Given the fall from grace we’ve seen various social media platforms experience recently— from Twitter’s transition to X, to Substack’s implosion— now is the time to think critically about how to be informed, and autonomous, digital citizens.
We’re seeing more and more social media users finding themselves immersed in platforms they’ve spent many hours cultivating community and content on, only to feel the rug pulled out from under them when that platform does or supports something that doesn’t align with those users’ values.
At Reclaim Hosting, we’ve always been more comfortable working in spaces that are as open as possible so that we have as much control over our content and communications as possible. Our socials, however, were always stuck with the big-box providers. With the rise of the fediverse, we’re taking our autonomy back. Join us as we discuss the Reclaim Hosting team’s transition to Mastodon, a self-hostable, decentralized social networking platform, and Ghost, an open source blogging platform.
We’ll discuss our perspectives on the current state of social media affairs, walk participants through our open setup, and demonstrate how to reclaim your socials!
‘Digital Skills for Emerging Leaders’ is a new micro-credential course from the Digital Learning Institute that I am working on together with the amazing Lynne Taylerson. It’s a super project to be involved in, and it’s extra special for me as I get a change to collaborate with Lynne outside of our other favourite project: AmplifyFE.
Usually we work on this kind of project at a distance, using the kind of digital skills we talk about in the course to collaborate and communicate. That said, there are also some precious hours of working together in person in the mix and so Lynne and I recently spent a day together recording videos and fine-tuning the course:
It was so fun to be able to do this together, a rarity for this kind of project, at least in my experience, and I am sure that will be reflected in the quality of the final product as well.
The recent launch of ReclaimEDU has got me blogging… always a good sign.
Now, working with the team at Reclaim has many perks, one of which was to learn more about this new offering before it was even launched. Jim talked us through it in the way only he can, and although I am learning more about the technology that makes this all possible what really did grab my attention immediately was the artwork.
I love the work Bryan has created with Reclaim Hosting for nearly ten years now and this ReclaimEDU launch is a great example of why it is so powerful. You don’t really need the words to get the idea. ReclaimEDU feels like a long way down the road from the origins of Hippie Hosting more than a decade ago… but many things remain constant. And one of those is that it continues to be is meticulously informal. That’s the bit I am particularly interested in.
Meticulous informality is a phrase that Martin Weller coined in 2019, in relation to the ALT Annual Conference. In the years since, and as our professional relationship turned into a personal one, we have often come back to the concept in our conversations and found it helpful in describing something we both value about a certain way of working, particularly since a lot of our interactions are happening online nowadays.
So what does it mean to be meticulously informal, and why do I think it matters? Let me try to explain what it means to me:
In the context of event planning, for example, I would describe it as a result of planning ahead so well that on the day you can lean back and enjoy it, knowing that you have most eventualities covered and can deal with any impromptu things that come up. It also means treating the individuals whom you work with not as generic actors in the event (the keynote, a panel speaker) but take into account their context: someone coming from far away who’s not been in the country before, someone who’s never given a keynote before, someone who’s nervous… and so on. It’s also about being present. Walking the walk. And that takes a lot of emotional energy.
I’ve been lucky enough to be at some events that really encapsulated that balance perfectly (yes, I am looking at you, wonderful OER Conference) and yet events aren’t the only place where meticulous informality matters.
When it comes to hybrid working, it really makes a difference, and it’s not something you can fake. When it comes to meticulous informality, people can tell whether you are going through the motions or truly making an effort. Effort is the operative word here as a meticulously informal workplace takes a lot of it. It’s no accident that one of the flex courses Reclaim’s Edtech team ran was all about hybrid working. I came on board to work on this course because we were interested in exploring all the different ways in which we can foster those interactions and habits that create a sense of meticulous informality in a team.
Which brings us back to Reclaim Hosting itself, where this kind of thing is not only valued but also shaping force that is reflected in everything the company does. After all, how many hosting companies do you know who get their team to sit around a drawing pad with Bryan Mathers as a first step to launching a new service (a service, incidentally, that as far as I can tell is needed because clients want to put more and more high level sites onto infrastructure they trust working with people who get it – people who are meticulously informal not only when they answer support tickets or chat about blogging on Discord, but also when it comes to designing new flagship services).
Incidentally, Visual Thinkery, where the process is in many ways more important than the eventual (amazing!) output, is another example of meticulous informality at work. What makes it work in both cases is a mixture of incredibly hard work (and a good measure of genius), as well as that all important understanding of why the informal bit matters. When I saw the ‘We get it!’ image above that Bryan created with the team, I immediately thought ‘Yes! They do get it!’. Yes, they are really good at what they do and they work very, very hard to constantly improve the infrastructure and support, and they also treat you like a human being, they care, they get it. (And, as an afterthought, they are human beings, too, which nowadays probably isn’t a given when it comes to supporting you with your hosting.)
It matters to me that I get to work with people who share that sense of what I think of as meticulous informality. It matters because I am more than a metric. Being more than a metric, more than a data point was the focus of my keynote for the ETUG Conference in Kamloops, Canada, in 2019 and it’s been a theme I have come back to again and again since. I see meticulous informality as a way to create that all important space needed to relate to each other as human beings, be that at events or at work or hosting your domain, and not give in to technologically determined transactional behaviours.
It’s been great fun this week to head up to Edinburgh to facilitate an away day for a senior leadership team at the university, and I wanted to share a few snippets of what made the day really memorable for me. The focus for the day was all about hybrid working and leading people and projects in a continually changing context, managing the enduring impact of lockdown working alongside emerging policies and priorities. Here are some reflections:
First of all, there’s the venue! The photo of this post shows the building where we spent our day with a beautiful view of Arthur’s Seat. It was great to have a venue which had such scenery on the doorstep, particularly as we could see the hill from the meeting room where we were based for the day. Lots of natural light and air always helps, I find. The venue was a good fit for some of the activities I had built into the day, designed to encourage everyone to step away from their screens and do some thinking together whilst getting some movement in.
The walk and talk reflection after lunch was a really popular part of the day, giving everyone time and space to talk about things in a less formal setting than sitting around a meeting table. This activity also offered those who needed some quiet time to reflect on their own a way to do that between a busy morning of group working and the afternoon brainstorming session.
One of the sessions on the agenda explored fresh ideas for fostering a sense of community and encouraging engagement in hybrid workplaces. For example, we discussed how working radio or shared playlists could work, even scope to have a silent disco… 🙂 . I loved that idea in particular. We also tried out office origami as a communal activity.
Now, for most of the day we worked on hybrid working leadership skills, exploring areas like communication and collaboration as well as building trust and keeping oversight of progress. Most importantly we talked about fostering loyalty and engagement, considering how the experiences of new and established staff could differ and how the role of leaders changes over time as hybrid working becomes more established.
What was really inspiring for me throughout the day was to see all the experience and expertise a team like this can bring to bear on the challenges of hybrid working. Working in learning technology builds a lot of capacity for the challenges ahead, especially as there are a lot of things we know about blended learning that can now be applied to hybrid working.
I had quite a few requests from folk elsewhere who are interested in hosting a day like this at their institution or take part in an online version. If you’d like to be added to the waiting list for that, get in touch.
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