How do we build educational technology that serves liberation rather than surveillance? This session explores “cooperative digital organizing. “Creating community-controlled spaces that prioritize privacy, consent, and collective decision-making over engagement metrics and data extraction.
Drawing on the Initiative for Literacy in a Digital Age’s transition from academic organization to cooperative network, we’ll share what we’re learning about how educational communities can reclaim digital sovereignty. We’ll examine our journey from Google Workspace and social media to privacy-first tools like Nextcloud, Signal, and self-hosted alternatives. Not as technical solutions, but as pedagogical choices.
We’ll explore together:
- Privacy by Design principles for educational communities
- Tool choice as curriculum—how platforms shape learning relationships
- Cooperative governance models for shared decision-making
- Consent-based participation honoring different comfort levels
- Community care infrastructure supporting sustainable organizing
Through case studies from our migration away from extractive platforms. What’s working, what isn’t, what we’re figuring out. We’ll collaborate on creating resilient, trust-centered digital communities. Come ready to share experiments, challenges, and questions about building educational technology serving the community rather than capital.
Session Resources:
Initiative for Literacy in a Digital Age: https://initiativeforliteracy.org/
Privacy by Design Framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_by_design
Nextcloud for Education: https://nextcloud.com/education/
Sian Bayne – Digital sanctuary and anonymity on campus: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/digital-sanctuary-and-anonymity-on-campus/
Amy Collier – Digital Sanctuary: Protection and Refuge on the Web?: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/8/digital-sanctuary-protection-and-refuge-on-the-web
Replacing a live site with a high-fidelity web archive mirror
You have your own web domain (a blog, a course website, etc..) but you (or your institution or your government!) don’t want to keep maintaining or updating the site, but you still want to keep a high-fidelity archived, fixed in time?
Web archiving allow us to create high-fidelity copies of entire websites. Web archive mirroring is a new approach to keep the site, exactly as it was (or as close as possible) on its original domain (or replacement domain), but powered by a web archive!
This presentation will cover new open source tooling from Webrecorder, which allows for creating statically hosted (and low-cost) mirrors entirely from web archives.
We will provide simple examples and also cover more sophisticated examples of multi-site mirrors such as the one hosted on https://govarchive.us/
Session Resources:
https://webrecorder.net/blog/2025-03-25-govarchive-us-and-mirroring-sites-with-web-archives/
https://govarchive.us/
Reclaiming Virtual Reality : A decentralised, user-owned vision for Web VR
Virtual reality In the browser has been around Almost as long as World Wide Web. VR chat-rooms have existed since 1997 or earlier, at that time the virtual reality was very very basic. Avatars were 2d images, only visible from the front and back like card Soldiers in Alice Through the Looking Glass, and 3D landscape was similarly basic, consisting of simple primitives.
However, the history of the VR web has not been smooth. littered with many short lived providers, appearing, providing a state of the art experience for their users, and allowing users to invest a lot of time and effort in creating their personal virtual worlds, before vanishing., and of proprietary locking, such as Metsa’s Horizon worlds.
The underlying technology or the early incarnations of VR on the web was VRML, an XML description of 3D spaces that, like HTML, could be hand written. The modern replacement WebXR is controlled from JavaScript, restricting development to people willing to learn JavaScript programming. However, the opensource A-Frame project provides an easy to use XML interface, and various extensions provide a pathway to create rich interactive VR websites, compatible with both standard browsers and VR headsets.
In this session I will present a vision for the future of self hosted, simple interconnected VR, based on A-FRame.
Session Resources:
https://aframe.io/
Leap into Open Publishing with Docsify-This!
We’ll explore how Docsify-This, an open source tool built with Docsify.js.org (30K+ GitHub stars), significantly lowers barriers by transforming public Markdown files into styled web pages without requiring technical infrastructure.
Great for educators and authors who:
- Want minimal maintenance publishing (set it and forget it, no Webserver needed)
- Value cross-platform content reuse (web, PDF, eBook from the same source)
- Need to embed the same content across multiple platforms
Docsify-This has six core design guidelines: Zero Maintenance Publishing eliminates technical barriers—users paste a Markdown URL to generate styled webpages. Platform Independence supports content portability across systems, while Your Content, Your Control means files remain in original locations.
Separation of Content and Presentation enables the same Markdown to function as standalone websites or embedded content. Support for the 5 Rs of OER provides public access to source content with optional “Edit this Page” links, and Authors Helping Authors manifests through shareable configurations and templates.
What participants will learn:
- Describe the purpose and key usage scenarios of Docsify-This
- Display Markdown files as web pages
- Change the visual appearance of pages
- Share Docsify-This pages and config
Session format: Hands-on demos using https://Docsify-This.net . Participants will explore examples and learn valuable tips and techniques from the project author.
Session Resources:
Building connections and open ed tech with the CBOX OpenLab community
Is your ed tech free, open, and connected? Do you wish it was? Commons In A Box OpenLab is free and open source software that enables you to launch a commons space for open learning and customize it to meet the needs of your community. Built using WordPress and BuddyPress via a multi-institution partnership, it supports open education, connection, and collaboration. Members create and configure their own learning spaces, reaching across disciplinary and institutional boundaries to share their work with one another and, if they wish, openly on the web.
Our session brings together representatives from OpenLabs large and small, long-established and brand new, at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY School of Professional Studies, Macaulay Honors College, SUNY Oneonta, the University of New Haven, and the original OpenLab at City Tech.
Our focus will be on the connections CBOX OpenLab makes possible: through its technical architecture, among members at our individual institutions, and between our institutions. We’ll hear lightning talks from the teams about their OpenLabs, followed by group discussion of how we work together, successes and challenges, and audience Q&A.
Come to our session and learn how CBOX OpenLab provides a launchpad for vibrant learning communities and how we’re building a growing network outside ed tech’s walled gardens, sharing ideas and providing mutual support. We’d love you to join the conversation and spark new collaborations.
The Fediverse Six Months From Now
This discussion will reflect on the state of the fediverse some six months after this abstract was written. Probably, it will depict the fediverse as a response to the abuse of centralized networks such as Facebook and Twitter. It will most likely outline and highlight major differences between ActivityPub-based networks (eg., Mastodon, Lemmy) and AT Protocol networks (Bluesky), and maybe mention things like Nostr and Diaspora, if they’re still around. If anything new comes up, we’ll discuss that too. But of more significance, we’ll look at some of the core issues underlying the fediverse, pointing to solutions if any have been found by then: identification and identity persistence, data and scale issues, and connection and consensus. If Blockchain has risen from the dead we’ll discuss the role it pays in decentralized networks. Also how artificial intelligence can play a role in content creation, selection and filtration. Finally, assuming we still have any, we will look at the key ideas of agency and community underlying the desire to have networks that are not controlled by Elon Musk (or his robot successor) and the role these play in learning and development. Failing any of that, we will discuss why decentralized social networks are illegal and how it’s harmful to the state to have forums where people can discuss the discredited concepts of diversity, equity and illusion, as though the nonsense about diversity making is stronger and more resilient could possibly be true.
Session Resources:
https://fediverse.party/ – introduction to a numb er of popular federated social networks
https://jointhefediverse.net/?lang=en – introduction to the fediverse
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/25/welcome-to-the-fediverse-your-guide-to-mastodon-threads-bluesky-and-more/ – from TechCrunch
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/fediverse-could-be-awesome-if-we-dont-screw-it – EFF on how the Fediverse could make things better
https://www.downes.ca/post/78050 – Bluesky is more open than you think
Media Empire of One’s Own: A Federated Approach with PeerTube and Beyond
What would it take to build a media empire of your own? Where you have complete control of the origin and destinations of your content? This session explores how creators can use federated tools to host, distribute, and connect media content outside the limits of corporate platforms.
We’ll begin with PeerTube, a decentralized platform that can serve as the foundation of a personal media network. Participants will learn what’s involved in setting up PeerTube, who can provide hosting, and what to consider when managing scalability and distribution. From there, we’ll expand the conversation to how WordPress, using the ActivityPub plugin, can serve as a publishing and distribution hub, raising the question: should you build your own DIY federated media site, and what are the trade-offs?
The session also looks at the role of RSS in the Fediverse—bridging the gap between traditional syndication and newer ActivityPub-based distribution. We’ll discuss how video publishing might integrate with federated servers like Mastodon and speculate on where ActivityPub will be by late 2025 and beyond. Finally, we’ll consider some hosting solutions, like Reclaim Hosting or Fedihost, in combination with content delivery networks (CDN), that would allow you to take ultimate control of your media and distribution.
Attendees will leave with both practical workflows and a broader vision for building their own federated media empires—small yet scalable, and entirely their own.
Session Resources:
Resources
- Andy’s Video Pub
- https://digitalmediacookbook.com
- Andy Social
- Andy’s Photo Pub
- More ideas here – Give the People What They Want
- Escaping Life Under An Algorithm – video from Paige Saunders (Fedihost) – https://video.fedihost.co/w/dNejd9xR3ncRkaawCf7E6D?start=7m17s
Small Pieces Still Loosely Joined, Integrated, Federated
The web gray heads will remember the rallying cries of SPLJ from David Weinberger’s book championing a unified theory of the web being a shift away from enterprise platforms and tools made for us to ones we all stitched together ourselves. How far as edtech strayed from this ideal?
Alas, I am not here to wax nostalgic, but to look forward, and remind you that all remains possible and even more now in 2025. The basic glue of RSS still not only works, but works fantastically, reliably– the next time someone quips that “Google killed RSS” or “RSS is dead” ask them how they automatically get new podcast episodes. The feed reader that so many have tossed for the drip feed of social media remains the one technology that is not lying about saving time.
I will show you how a mixture of old school social bookmarking drives automated cross connecting separate spaces, using the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress to federate to Mastodon (e.g. for the DS106 Daily Create as well as the OEGlobal Voices podcast), posting to and from Discourse forums. I will show how I make use of Integrator services, just the simple IFTTT, but also Make and Zapier as a no-code route for joining small web pieces.
Raise your rally flag for small pieces loosely joined.
Session Resources:
- Small pieces loosely joined : a unified theory of the Web https://archive.org/details/smallpiecesloose0000wein
- Gizmo-ing Stuff to Mastodon https://cogdogblog.com/2022/11/gizmo-to-mastodon/
- The Indispensable Digital Research Tool I can Say, Without Lying, Saves Time https://cogdogblog.com/2017/09/indispensable-tool/
- WordPress Serving Posts at the Activity Pub https://cogdogblog.com/2025/04/wordpress-serving-activity-pub/
This one goes to 11(ty)
A lot of the web doesn’t need a database, server-side scripting, or a framework – good old HTML, CSS, and a smattering of JavaScript will do the job. A static site can work for the long haul without the admin overhead and the constant worry of getting hacked or spammed. Yet we don’t want to go back to the days of Stonehenge and manipulating code across pages and FTPing files to servers. Having the efficiencies and workflows that modern web platforms offer is ideal, but in a form that we can control and customise is where modern static site generators come in.
But why settle for a static site generator that only goes up to 10 when you can have one that goes to 11? In this session, we’ll explore how 11ty (Eleventy) cranks up the volume on modern web development by delivering maximum flexibility without the noise. This isn’t just one louder; it’s fundamentally different.
11ty lets you rock’n’roll without getting lost on your way to the stage, while its extensive customisation options ensure you can fine-tune every aspect of your design and build process. From simple blogs to complex enterprise sites, 11ty adapts to your needs rather than forcing you to adapt to its constraints.
By session’s end, you’ll understand why 11ty isn’t just another static site generator – it’s the one that goes to 11.
Federating Your Second Brain: Rewilding Notes into Gardens, Newsletters, and Networks
Personal knowledge management (PKM) tools like Obsidian, Zotero, and Hypothesis often become private archives, second brains locked away. But what if we treat them as starting points for connection rather than endpoints of storage? This session explores federating as a metaphor: moving from private notes → to public contributions → to connected spaces across the open web.
I’ll share my workflow for moving ideas through different stages of growth (seeds → plants → evergreens) and how these notes branch outward into digital gardens, newsletters, and blogs. In this sense, a PKM system becomes not just a personal archive but a node in a larger ecosystem. Feeding many-to-many connections instead of staying siloed.
Participants will see practical examples of:
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Designing PKM workflows that move ideas from private notes into public, open formats.
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Building digital gardens and newsletters as “rewilded” spaces for knowledge-sharing.
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Extending the spirit of Domain of One’s Own into personal publishing pipelines.
This won’t just be a show-and-tell. I want to hear from participants about their own workflows, questions, and whether they’d want to learn how to build this kind of system themselves. Together we’ll think about what it means to treat our second brains not just as vaults but as living, federated habitats for voice, creativity, and connection.
Session Resources:
PKM & Digital Gardens
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Maggie Appleton’s “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden” – https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
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Joel Hooks’ Digital Garden – https://joelhooks.com/
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Andy Matuschak’s Garden – https://andymatuschak.org/
Tools & Open Infrastructure
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Zotero – https://www.zotero.org/
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Hypothesis – https://web.hypothes.is/
- Obsidian Digital Garden – https://dg-docs.ole.dev/
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Quartz – https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/
Rewilding Knowledge
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Jim Groom & Brian Lamb, Reclaiming Innovation – https://www.educause.edu/visuals/shared/er/extras/2014/ReclaimingInnovation/default.html
- Anne-Laure Le Cunff, How to set up your own digital garden – https://nesslabs.com/digital-garden-set-up
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Craig Mod, Oh God, It’s Raining Newsletters – https://craigmod.com/essays/newsletters/
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Robin Sloan, A Year of New Avenues – https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/new-avenues/
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Ink & Switch, Local-First Software – https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/