Sloan-C here I Come…No, wait, I already came! #et4online

April 9, 2014 by Maha Bali 9 Comments

So… I signed up to attend the Sloan-C #et4online conference – virtually. That’s because I can’t travel too often with a young child in tow, and I really didn’t want to miss out on this amazing lineup! As I said before – first time I attend an international conference where I really know a few of the people. And at least know of quite a few of the others.

So there I was tweeting occasionally using the hashtag to see who else I know who is going – and lo and behold, two #rhizo14ers will be there (well Rebecca is presenting; Ashley attending virtually like me).

So I was signing up for events and I found the keynote and a workshop by the Jim Groom , so I thought I’d follow him on twitter… he followed me back (nice guy) and so I tweeted to him and got this reply:

@Bali_Maha Excellent, if you're doing Reclaim Your Domain workshop virtually, i think it would work well. Let me know and we can pre-plan!

— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) March 31, 2014

The resulting activity yesterday was so much fun. Late night his time and early morning my time he sent me a link to reclaimdemo – a place where I could experiment as if I had my own domain… and I did! I blogged about it right there on my “new” wordpress blog on the reclaim demo thing itself (yes, that’s meta-cognition or meta-something for you) – and then based on responses to some of the questions I blogged about, I managed today to install the plugins for sharing onto my new blog. Cool 🙂

Jim seems to have gotten pretty excited because he wrote this:

.@Bali_Maha worked thru tomorrow's "Reclaim Your Domain" wrkshp while commuting in Egypt-and blogged it! http://t.co/gEZW1XVvBQ #et4online

— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) April 8, 2014

And earlier, he had written this (which got me in touch with a couple of other really interesting folks on twitter  who were “listening in” – I love it when that happens on twitter):

Thanks to the web my Reclaim Your Domain workshop happening tomorrow is happening now in Egypt 😉 I love you internet!

— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) April 8, 2014

@BenjaminHarwood I can, @Bali_Maha is playing around in cPanel right now base don this tutorial I created here: http://t.co/L3P4MX4TTz

— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) April 8, 2014

So… long story short: I started the conference before it started. And that is what is soooo cool about online. Social media empowering the semi-privileged indeed 🙂

What may not be as cool, though, is what will happen given I’m more of an asynchronous person:

1. Time zone difference: 8:30 am Dallas = 3:30 pm Cairo = toddler back from daycare = noise, distraction, etc.

2. Cairo these days gets a lot of electrical cuts, especially later on in the day. I’ve got 3G on m iPad but that’s not too reliable, or fast, and did not work too well y/day while trying to do the reclaim demo thing…

So… fingers crossed I can participate anyway 🙂 otherwise, recordings will have to do. Will wait and see.