Maren Deepwell

Tag: #reclaimOpen25

  • Organising a Conference of Firsts

    Organising a Conference of Firsts

    It’s been a lot of fun to be part of the team behind Reclaim Open last week. I love the buzz that comes with delivering an event months in the planning, especially when there’s so much innovation in the mix. In this post I share some reflections on the process behind the scenes, but first… you might ask why go a different path when it comes to online events? There are plenty of tried and test formats, platforms and services out there, so there’s no real need to re-invent the format yet again. Or is there?

    Tailored format: A first amongst firsts

    Reclaim Open has always been a creative, one of a kind conference, celebrating many firsts in its inspiring history. So it feels only fitting that this year’s format followed in the footsteps of firsts and broke new ground taking the conference online, onto a blog near you, to DS106Radio, to the game table, the quiz, the keynote panel and student showcase. It’s a privilege when you work in a community of digital educators that you *can* push things into a new direction and still take enough people with you to make it work.

    Likewise, working in a small team with lots of competing priorities and limited resources always brings out the best in conference planning to my mind, because you focus on what you really, really want to do for and with your participants, rather that rehashing things just because you’ve done them before.

    Jim and I have a running joke about conferencing firsts, and I feel it’s certainly time to sing it one more time: “We did it again.”

    Blog-A-Thon

    We started the event with twelve hours of blogging, with a post being published on the hour, every hour. It was fabulous, and offered space and time for conversations to develop, for connections to be made.

    As with every format that you invent on the fly, there were some minor practical issues in the first hour or two, but after a little while everyone got into the stride of the Blog-A-Thon and the chat bloomed. It brought back memories of amazing conference formats like PressED, and TAGSExplorer Twitter-hashtag conversations, and reminded me precisely why it can be so much fun to work on the open web. Swapping rss feeds and blog roll links was in full swing by the time the first afternoon rolled around, and the community of practice group was very active alongside new faces and first time participants.

    Digitals virtuosity

    Switching between formats, moving from radio to website, and from webinar to game show takes A LOT of doing. It only works because the team behind the event has the highest level of digital skills, confidence and tech set up.

    Briefing staff in whatever format you use to ensure speakers get the support they need and have a good experience is one of the most crucial things about online conference delivery in my experience, and it’s hard enough when your are using one platform to do everything. It becomes a lot more demanding when you switch between formats, managing dozens of speakers across time zones, from single individuals with slides to group plenaries that host 8 speakers simultaneously.

    Big kudos to everyone involved for upping their game!

    It takes heart

    In this age of AI and digital abundance it’s easy to loose heart, to feel that one’s voice doesn’t really matter, especially if what you are interested in goes against the dominant narrative. It takes a lot of heart to make your voice heard above the noise, and one of my hopes for the conference was that it would deliver a much needed dose of inspiration and encouragement to everyone participating – and wow, it really did!

    Bonnie Stewart’s keynote was simply awesome and helped open up that conversation during the event, and is definitely worth re-watching and is the student showcase that brought together four very different, innovative projects and opened up the keynote stage to emerging voices from the open web.

    … and my session

    If you’d like to take a closer look at my own session, then listen to last week’s podcast episode in which I explain a bit about the back story and share highlights from my session. Thanks to Bryan Mathers for the awesome illustration:

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  • Conference post #ReclaimOpen25

    Conference post #ReclaimOpen25

    I’m taking part in the Reclaim Open Conference this week, and my contribution is for the blog-a-thon. If you’ve landed on my blog for the first time, howdy! Welcome!

    I’ve been blogging here since 2008 and I also send out a free monthly newsletter and host a podcast about hybrid working and leading in distributed organisations. I work as a consultant and coach with non-profits and small organisations, mainly in education and technology.

    If you are a returning visitor, great to see you!

    Here is my conference post in full, and a big THANK YOU to Bryan Mathers who captured the visual thought for the session and created this lovely image that now heads up the post!

    Blogging as a professional practice superpower

    A really common issue for leaders in Higher Ed and elsewhere is worrying about “is it just me who is struggling with this?”. When everyone works from home and all you see is a carefully curated or blurred background with a professional, well-groomed headshot framed by a flattering camera angle, it can be hard to get a sense of how others are coping day to day and easy to feel that you are the only one who is struggling.

    I think this is where blogging can not only help, it can become a professional practice superpower.

    Open practice in a leadership position is different from sharing things like new publications, or blogging about exciting projects. Many professionals in leadership roles maintain public profiles or a web presence like a blog. What I’m interested in is not necessarily about having a blog, but about the practice of blogging in itself.

    The process of getting whatever you want to say in a post and press publish.

    It’s about the joy of blogging, the sheer exuberance of having a space, a domain, to make your own. A vault or a personal archive as I’ve blogged about before.

    It opens up a space to share the practice of leading, of managing people, not just the end results – and the reflective space it opens up can be incredibly powerful.

    There are however some barriers to blogging, especially in a leadership role. When you are everyone’s boss, it’s not always easy to maintain an authentic space on the open web. So I use a couple of strategies to blog about my professional practice, specifically:

    Choose a format that works: I vary how and where I blog, from my main WordPress site to voice recordings.

    Modify how openly to share: from public, to semi-private to fully locked-down depending on topic.

    Keep a list for the long term: I could use a tool to track projects, publications and other activities for me, but there’s great value for me in the act of processing what I have done and reflecting on it as I make and update the list.

    To conclude, I also want to share one more strategy that I have found particularly useful over the years, which is to engage in conversational blogging, or co-leadership conversations. There are a range of conversational approaches that I have used to create the space needed to reflect together and blogging can be a great tool for that, too.

    Thanks for reading my contribution to Reclaim Open 🙂

    More to read and listen to:

  • #ReclaimOpen25 Here we come!

    #ReclaimOpen25 Here we come!

    It’s nearly time for Reclaim Open, and it’ll be my first time taking part in this special conference. You can read all about the conference on the Reclaim Blog, or take a look at the documentary that premiered at the last Reclaim Open. Taylor Jadin shared this with me recently and I LOVED watching it.

    About the video: As Reclaim Hosting welcomes its 10th year, we’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on the principles that got us here. Namely, the open web. The Reclaim Open conference is all about that concept, and we want to capture it in as many meaningful and lasting ways as possible. We don’t want this documentary to only capture Reclaim’s thoughts on the open web, but to invite and include the amazing community joining us here to document their own perspectives and stories about this topic.

    What I’m most looking forward to (many things)

    There is A LOT to look forward to… so in no particular order:

    • I’m excited to see the student showcase of the winners of the Reclaim Student Competition
    • There’s the opening keynote by Bonnie Stewart, with the theme “Rewilding voice in a time of enclosure”
    • Also on the plenary schedule is a panel hosted by Jim Groom “On Writing” and as an avid listener/viewer of this series I am especially looking forward to that
    • Not to forget is the amazing artwork created by Bryan Mathers (including the images in this post) and seeing those come to live
    • There are a host of social sessions around the DS106 Daily Create, an Open Education board game and the intriguing sounding “An Archivist goes to the Playground – Exploring and Describing Chicago Park Playgrounds” as well as “Improvising the future of digital storytelling”
    • I am excited to read “My website is a junk drawer” and also “Lessons from Rewilding Landscapes… in the Wild”

    In short, there is not much of the three days I am not looking forward to. And of course there’s also the people to connect with, to chat and share inspiration.

    My session (is a blog post)

    As I am mainly working with the team delivering the conference I didn’t want to present live as well. Luckily the first day of the conference is in a new format, a blog-a-thon, and so I made a submission in the form of a blog post for that instead. If you are wondering what’s involved, here is an explainer to get you started – but one of the joys of working with the team and trying out new things is that whilst we do have a plan, we don’t exactly know all the details up front and there’s a certain level of winging it involved 😉

    I decided to submit a blog post about blogging (of course), specifically about blogging as a superpower in professional practice. My session will be on 4 November and you should check out the full schedule to explore keynote speakers, as well as other presenters and bloggers.

    Join in!

    Register now to join in, November 4-6, as this wonderful community comes together on the open web, via federated social networks, on the radio and on a blog near you. This is one event you don’t want to miss.

    Reclaim Open Logo
  • Conferencing at the cutting edge

    Conferencing at the cutting edge

    Organising conferences is my guilty professional pleasure… . I fell into doing it at various times throughout my career and I thoroughly enjoy it. I like the preparations, the run up and the excitement of delivering an event, whether it’s for several hundred people in a hushed auditorium or a buzzy online crowd with run-away chatter and endless DMs.

    Last year I had an absolute blast working on the DS106 Summer Camp with Jim Groom and his team at Reclaim, and we had the MOST fun delivering a radio based conference. So when this year’s plans for Reclaim Open came along, I jumped at the chance to work together again to re-invent the conference yet again.

    What’s in store

    Reclaim Open’s theme this year, brought to life by the one and only Bryan Mathers is Rewilding the Network – Making New Connections and the conference will take place fully online, so there’s no travel required 🙂

    The event covers three days, from 4-6th November, and registration is now open. Register to attend before September 1, 2025 and get a 33% ‘early bird’ discount, making the conference fee a very affordable $99.

    Make a submission and get involved

    For Reclaim Open, every proposal is also a blog post. We will publish all accepted submissions on the conference blog which will also be the conference schedule. Submissions are now open for the following session streams:

    Your Voice: how do educators and students find and amplify their voices on the open web? How do we make ourselves heard and what are the risks and opportunities in Higher Ed and beyond?

    Your World: Maybe it’s a blog or a domain of one’s own that is your home in the digital realm. Whether it’s all business or rather  hobbies, pets, creative projects, parenting or sports. Share what you care about  on the open web.

    The Tech: the technology that makes it all possible, from open source platforms like WordPress and Ghost, to open infrastructure hosted on ReclaimEDU, this theme is for sharing tech know-how and geeky pursuits.

    The Connections: What brings us together in a world of fragmented social networks and how do you stay connected and find new connections? From self-hosted socials to federated networks, we want to hear about how you make connections.

    The Wildcard: Share your inspiration and creativity. Wild is wonderful.

    There will be radio!

    One of the things I am most looking forward to is the Reclaim Open Blog-A-Thon, a wild mix of radio and blogging fun on the first day of the event. If you are curious what this is all about, read on:

    How it all began

    It all started at the beginning of this year when a few brave souls got together to found Bloggers Anonymous, Reclaim’s Community of Practice for Bloggers in Higher Ed. It started small, with a dedicated channel on Discord, and a monthly meeting. A few of us got to together to talk about blogging, and blog about blogging… and before we knew it the RSS feed that folk were adding their blogs to was pinging with the sound of fresh blog posts, hot off the press. If you’d like to find out more about this Community of Practice, check out the story so far over on the Reclaim Blog.

    So what’s the Blog-A-Thon?

    Now, the Blog-A-Thon is on November 4th, the first day of the conference, and the idea is that we’re going to take to our blogs to read, respond and connect. You’ll be able to find  and navigate between the posts via the conference schedule, and post your comments

    We’re also planning for some good old-fashioned radio coming to you live with bloggers chatting about blogging and playing the soundtrack to their stories.

    If that’s made you curious, head over to the conference site to learn more, and make your submission!