Ongoing Investigations

Tag: Reclaim Open 2025

  • The Power of Games in Virtual Events

    I recently got to do something really cool: be a guest on a podcast! Maren Deepwell and I have worked together for several years in various capacities, including on a couple of virtual conferences, most recently Reclaim Open 2025 back in November. I was part of the blog-a-thon, but I also hosted a session, and Maren invited me onto her show, “Leading Virtual Teams with Dr Maren Deepwell” to talk about it!

    You should listen to the episode for the full details (it’s coming out soon, and I’ll update this post with a link when it does), but the general gist is that I ran the role-playing game Brand Actualization as a one-hour community event. I had a ton of fun and people’s responses were wonderful. This wasn’t the first time I’ve hosted a role-playing game for a conference, either. I ran Long Time Listener, Last Time Caller for the DS106 Radio Summer Camp in 2024, which was also a big success.

    I run games for conferences because I want to give people a chance to let down their hair. Conferences are great, but they also create pressure. Everyone attending needs to be on, to stay collected and professional and locked in for two or three or four days in a row. In the middle of all of that, my games are like Halloween: everyone can put on a costume and play pretend for a little while. If I can give them an hour to relax and bond and have a little fun, I consider that a win.

    The virtual format was an interesting challenge. Playing games in person makes it easy to engage with players and get a sense of how they’re doing, but online, people can mute themselves and go camera-off. I think that can be useful, because people often feel shy at first, and letting them lurk can help them relax enough to start engaging as the session goes on.

    Accepting that people will want to take part at different levels is also important for creating buy-in. Trying to force one person to do more than they’re comfortable with shows everyone they might be put on the spot at any moment, which makes all the pressure rush back in.

    At the same time, you don’t have a game if no one will play. The chat and online polling tools ended up being really helpful low-stakes tools to start people talking, and the platform’s name customization tools meant I could respond to people individually in-character. That was important to me, since the game was supposed to be a conversation. Staying in-character and addressing players directly settled them into the game while acknowledging and encouraging their contributions.

    To me, these games give people the chance to open up. Conferences are a time to meet people, but it’s easy to stress out over how you come off, or whether people will remember you the wrong way. But when everyone has chosen to spend an hour playing pretend as a group, when everyone feels comfortable getting a little silly together, you get a level of fun and trust that results in unforgettable connections.

    Maren and I go into more depth on all of this in the episode, so be sure to check it out next week. And honestly, there’s even more I could say, but that’s probably for future blog posts.

    The response to these games has been amazing, way beyond what I expected. When I caught up with some people from Reclaim Open in December, they mentioned my session as a highlight. A couple of people have even asked whether I would host games for other events in the future — not just other conferences, but team-building activities or professional development workshops.

    And I’m excited to say… YES! I’m collaborating with Taylor Jadin, another longtime friend and colleague, create Fireside Game Events and offer more of these bespoke game sessions. More formal details on this soon, but if you’re interested in having us at one of your events in the meantime, get in touch.

  • Thoughts on Reclaim Open 2025

    Thoughts on Reclaim Open 2025

    It’s taken me a minute, but I wanted to sit down and write about Reclaim Open last week. It was a great conference, and since blogging was one of the key topics, I figured a blog post would be the best way to cap it off.

    The whole experience was really fantastic, but I’ll start with the format. Since the whole thing was online, Tuesday was a blog-a-thon, where each presenter submitted a blog post, and those posts were published each hour on the hour. There was a live chat, where people could comment and talk about the post once they’d read through. I liked this a lot — it was a good way to get familiar with the site interface and the names in the chat, and it was also good as a way of doing discussion sessions without requiring everyone to spend all day on camera.

    Wednesday and Thursday were more classic, with streamed video sessions and a livechat where attendees could comment or ask questions. Since Tuesday had acted as a warm-up, it was really natural to get into things and there was no first-day awkwardness.

    I was also working during the conference, so I couldn’t be as present during all the sessions as I would have liked. But even the ones I only caught part of were excellent. Just to shout out a couple:

    Day 1: The Blog-a-Thon

    And for more great work, you can actually check out the full list of posts for the Blog-a-thon here: https://reclaimopen.com/category/day1/

    After the blog-a-thon, Bryan Mathers also wrote up his reflections on it in “Blog-a-thon Sensemaking“, including some incredible artwork inspired by each post. (The one for mine looks amazing — thank you, Bryan!)

    An Ancient Egyptian cat watches a mummy fold a zine.

    Day 2

    More sessions (there were so many awesome ones) here! https://reclaimopen.com/category/day2/

    Day 3

    And day 3 was also full of tons of hits, so there’s more sessions here as well: https://reclaimopen.com/category/day3/

    In the coming days I’m hoping to try out more of the tools that people highlighted and catch up on the sessions I didn’t get to/the ones I couldn’t fully participate in because of work. In particular I want to check out Ian O’Bryne’s digital garden resources, explore 11ty more fully after Tim Klapdor’s introduction, and revisit the Docsify-This session. I’m also sorry to have missed a chunk of Mark Corbett Wilson’s digital storytelling session, so I’m definitely going to be revisiting that one.

    I also presented, too! I had a post in the blog-a-thon about the zine project I did (more on that here: Making Zines for Reclaim Open 2025) and I got to host a social session, playing the game Brand Actualization. I’ll write up Brand Actualization in a separate post, but we had a ton of fun. I got to host a different game for the DS106 Summer Camp in 2024 and I was hooked, so it was great to revisit that concept — I’d really like to do more sessions like those in the future when I get the chance.

  • Making Zines for Reclaim Open 2025

    When I was invited to be a part of Reclaim Open 2025, I decided I would use the opportunity as a challenge to do something I’d been mulling over for a long time: creating a zine.

    I tried my hand at zine making while I was at Reclaim, for a project that unfortunately had to be put on the backburner. Since then, I’ve been curious about revisiting it, and seeing what would be possible. I’ve had a couple of ideas bouncing around. This seemed like a good time to try.

    The challenge I set for myself was to make two open-source zines, print-ready, and blog about it in time for the conference. And, well, here’s the writeup!

    Results

    CTRL+S: Preserving Your Work for the Long Haul is a short primer on planning resilient digital projects and preserving and archiving them, so that when the time comes for them to be sunsetted, it’s easy for you to preserve their core attributes and archive them as best as possible.

    Web-Native Cryptids & Creatures: A Spotter’s Guide is a little trifold fun-facts style starter guide to various web safety and digital literacy topics, in the style of an Audubon birdwatcher’s pamphlet.

    Both of them are available as a for-print PDF and a more web-readable PDF (no need to download if you don’t want, you should be able to click through and view online). I’m not going to embed them here so that this post doesn’t become unreadably long.

    CTRL-S (print)Download
    CTRL-S (web)Download
    Web-Native Cryptids (print)Download
    Web-Native Cryptids (web)Download

    Process

    Before I started, I had the idea that I would actually try and make three zines. Then I sat down, tried to think of concepts, and blocked out a project plan for each zine. And then I changed my mind. Two would be plenty, actually.

    Of the concepts I picked, I went with one serious one and one fun one. CTRL+S is based on work I did at both Carleton College and Reclaim Hosting, on how to create and preserve resilient digital projects. Web Native Cryptids & Creatures is based on the fact that when I was little I had a trifold birdwatcher pamphlet that was basically the coolest thing ever.

    Naturally, the fun zine turned out to be a lot more stressful than the serious one.

    Planning

    The first thing I did was to decide on the structure. That would inform any outlining and writing, so even if I wasn’t actually doing layout right away, planning it still had to come first.

    I wanted each zine to fit on a double-sided sheet of printer paper. The cryptid zine was going to be a trifold “spotter’s guide” style thing, so it could have six pages (three front, three back). There was no particular style in mind for the preservation zine, so I decided to go with eight pages (four front, four back). I figured if I had to divide each topic onto its own page, sixteen was way too many and four might not be enough.

    The thing with laying stuff out for print is that stuff ends up in a weird order, upside-down, or both. I have several index cards that I folded and numbered in order to figure out what layout would end up having to look like.

    Photo of an index card that's been folded in half twice, to create four sections. In clockwise order, the numbers are 5, 4, 1, and 8. 5 and 4 are upside down.

    Drafting

    When in doubt, start with outlines.

    Since the preservation zine was based on work I’d already done, I reviewed the original handout, identified the two main topics, and made a list of other topics that I’d learned more about since then. There was nothing that strictly followed anything else, but I organized it into an order that seemed like it would flow well for people new to the topic, and then started making bullet points.

    The cryptid zine was meant to be a silly piece. I only needed five actual profiles, since one page would be for the title/credits, so I made a list of monster puns and then tried to narrow it down to the most plausible. But the actual writing was a balancing challenge: how do I make sure this is at least semi-useful… while also keeping it fun… and not too long… and also, what even is this strange thing called “humor”?

    It turns out that writing about topics you’ve presented on countless times is significantly simpler than trying to be funny on purpose. Go figure.

    Layout

    Layout was my shining star amidst the trenches of writing. I spent more time doing it than I expected, but that’s because it felt like such a breeze that I would look at the clock and be surprised by how quickly the time had passed.

    I had a genuinely great time playing with where the words would go, and how big, and what font, and what size margins. The slowest it ever got was when I spent an hour or two trying to manually set up a guideline grid that would match the cryptid zine’s trifold structure. Then I googled “affinity publisher column layout” and figured it out immediately.

    This also served as an extra editing pass. Moving the words into Affinity Publisher meant looking for ways to trim the bits that were too long, and rearrange anything that didn’t make sense.

    Illustration

    I checked my notes from while I was doing illustrating and all I found was screaming. The illustrations were all for the cryptid zine, and they were part of what was so stressful about it. I used to draw more, but I’m very rusty, and the first day I tried it was dispiriting. All my ideas seemed terrible, and nothing I drew looked at all like I wanted it to.

    I hit a point where I was just relieved that the preservation zine didn’t have space for illustrations, because the cryptid zine was freaking me out so much. It didn’t help that I hadn’t thought about the time I would need to draw, so it was getting very close to the deadline I had set for myself.

    In the end I took a step back. I came back the next day, did some extra warm ups, found more reference images, and went, “This is the fun zine. What matters is that illustrating it is also fun.” I could be silly with it, I told myself.

    And then I drew the Loch Ness Monster in sunglasses and a trenchcoat and had a great time.

    Reflections

    I’m glad I did this. For all my grumping, I had a great time with this project. Every time I hit a point of frustration, I would pause, take a break, come back, and almost immediately get in a groove. Giving myself two zines to switch between also helped a lot — when I was well and truly stuck on one, there was always something to do on the other, so I could just change gears.

    There’s a bunch of stuff I was hoping to have done in time for the conference that, in the end, I don’t. I wanted to put together web-page versions and get them archived on the WayBack Machine, and I’m going to do that. I wanted to try interviewing other zine makers and blog about those conversations, and I didn’t get to it. But the goal for the conference was to have two print-ready PDFs, and I did manage that.

    So if you’re thinking about making a zine, let this be your sign!

    And these zines are openly-licensed, so if they’re helpful to you, please go ahead and use them! I’d love to hear about it if you do.

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