A Domain of One's Own

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A Domain of One's Own (or DoOO) is a practice/movement (primarily within academia) encouraging people to have their own domain, post their content on their own website, and have greater control over their digital infrastructure.

The movement and philosophy started as a project at University of Mary Washington that allows students, faculty, and staff to register their own domain name and associate it with a hosted web space, free of charge. With their Domain and corresponding web space, users will have the opportunity and flexibility to design and create a meaningful and vibrant digital presence.

The project name is a direct reference to Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) in which she writes:

“A woman must have money, and a room of her own, if she is to write fiction.”

Original Project

First developed at Mary Washington University, DoOO has grown as a movement that supports digital identity creation and data ownership, and allows for the publishing, curating, and sharing of work online.

The original A Domain of One’s Own is managed by the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) at UMW. It was founded by Jim Groom, subsequently the co-founder of Reclaim Hosting.

DTLT works with faculty and departments to meaningfully integrate DoOO into their classroom practices and programs in order to ensure that students are gaining varied and valuable digital experiences during their time at UMW. In addition, DTLT supports members of the UMW community to use DoOO to cultivate a digital profile for their professional work. Their site serves as a source of information about the project as well as a gateway for UMW users to login and manage their accounts.

“Faculty and students must have a domain and web hosting of their own if they are to truly understand and engage the deeper possibilities of the open web.” — Jim Groom (2013)

Technical Capabilities

Within the system, users may install LAMP-compatible Web applications, set up subdomains and email addresses, and install databases. In addition, users may choose to “map” their domain (or a subdomain) to other services, such as a UMW Blogs, Google Sites, or Tumblr.

Tutorials

EduHack Domain Kits - This site includes 18 Kits for you to learn about and practice your domain building skills. Each kit is an activity that will provide you the instructions and materials necessary to put in your domain a blog, a wiki, a stand alone web site, a file dropbox, a photo gallery, and more.

Domains Projects

There are over 100 colleges and universities with Domains projects. Here is a list of some of them:

University of Mary Washington (the original)
Plymouth State University (PlymouthCreate)
Keene State College (KSCopen)
University of Oklahoma
Coventry University
Middlebury College
Georgetown University
Emory University (Documentation)
St. Norbert College (Knight Domains)
University of Texas Arlington
eCampus Ontario
Bryn Mawr
Davidson
BYU
Haverford College (Haverford Sites)
Drew University
Michigan State University
Penn State (started as a pilot of 50 students in Spring 2014)
Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

DoOO as a Service

Reclaim Hosting provides hosting and support as a commercial product and service to schools that would like a DoOO program.

Resources

DoOO Community Forums
Administrative Documentation
Adding Community Documentation Articles
Opening Knowledge Practices collection and collaborative bibliography in Zotero originally based on resources about Domain of One's Own collected by @readywriting at UMW.

Articles

2017-04-27 Audrey Watters Why 'A Domain of One's Own' Matters (For the Future of Knowledge)
2017-06-05 Jesse Stommel If bell hooks Made an LMS: Grades, Radical Openness, and Domain of One's Own
2016-08-23 Audrey Watters A Domain of One's Own in a Post-Ownership Society
2016-08-19 Martha Burtis and Breaking Domain of One’s Own: Rethinking the Web in Higher Ed
2015-08-10 Andrew Rikard for EdSurge Do I Own My Domain If You Grade It?
2015-06-15 Audrey Watters The Web We Need to Give Students (Bright Magazine)

Domain Camps / Conferences

Meetups

In Summer 2020, Chris Aldrich started hosting a recurring (monthly) meetup for the Domain of One's Own space. Others are encouraged to help organize similar versions for their timezones. Chris is happy to help set up details and infrastructure to make this happen. Anyone interested in making a short presentation at a future meetup is welcome to make suggestions.