We’ve got some exciting news to share and wanted to make sure you’ve heard it from us (and some of you have already read about it). We’re going to work with https://www.reddit.com/r/k12sysadmin/ as moderators and take on the vetting/verification process there!
We know. You have questions. Does this change anything about K12TechPro and the K12TechPro Community?
Short, easy answer – No.
Longer, but still easy answer – Nah, but if it does, it only makes the K12TechPro Community better.
To unpack this a little bit better if you so choose, read this.
And then, read the below. After that, I hope you get the idea of what’s going down. As we get started, we’ll post updates on what’s up. I’m hoping we’ll have good stuff in place by early August:
Hey, Geekender and k12sysadmin community! This is Chris with K12TechPro (and the K12TechTalk podcast, and the MidwestTechTalk conferences). I appreciate the mention of us here and thought I’d throw in some thoughts on this. We’d love to help keep this subreddit going and think we could help with the vetting and moderating (and more).
We started the K12TechPro Community several months ago. You can read more about it here: https://k12techpro.com/community-membership/. But the long story short is we vet K12 techs before they are allowed in (must prove actively employed in a K12 tech department), and it’s got message boards, chat, video meetings, and more. It has a subscription cost (which we think equates to legit professional development); it’s hosted by Circle, so we pay for it, but we’ve also gotten enough sponsorships to pick up the tab for anyone who doesn’t want to pay (or can’t pay). You just click on a choice of subscription when going through the vetting process. It’s free if it needs to be, basically. The point of it (like k12sysadmin) is to help K12 techs and develop community among K12 techs. One reason we created it is that open forums and anonymity are not as beneficial anymore in regard to K12 tech department cybersecurity posture and organic community growth.
We literally have a full-time paid position to handle the vetting, keep up with sponsorships, memberships, etc. There’s also three of us who do it part time (myself, Eric, and Jason), as we work full-time in school district tech departments. The K12TechPro Community is currently in over 30 states and three countries and growing.
I also do the K12TechTalk podcast (along with Josh and Mark). Josh is from Missouri. Mark is from Massachusetts. We do the podcast “for fun,” as we also work full time in school district tech depts. Eric, Jason, myself, and some others do the MidwestTechTalk conferences, school district tech department conferences in Missouri that folks around the Midwest attend.
All this to say: we care about K12 tech departments. And we are K12 tech pros, like everyone here.
I am wondering if we might be able to use the K12TechPro Community’s resources, which include a full-time person, to help with vetting, mod, membership, etc., on this subreddit. In addition, wondering if the relationship between k12sysadmin and K12TechPro could look something like this:
K12TechPro pumps out articles for K12 techs in its current existence. (This article on SH1MMER is an example: [https://k12techpro.com/k12-tech-departments-respond-to-sh1mmer/](https://k12techpro.com/k12-tech-departments-respond-to-sh1mmer/).) We’ll continue that. As topics come up on k12sysadmin, we can find inspiration from those, dig deeper as needed, and discuss them in articles for easy reading and a knowledge base.The K12TechTalk podcast is always looking for great guests and topics of conversation. We’d love to talk to more K12 techs and pull in topics from k12sysadmin to discuss — which happens naturally anyway. An actual partnership could help this, of course.The k12sysadmin subreddit will likely be where many conversations begin, and K12TechPro is a natural place where they can be expanded on in articles, Community, etc. We catch ourselves often talking about changing a Windows Server setting or tweaking something in Google Admin Console but not taking time to document it for others to learn from as well. We’d use K12TechPro resources to help elevate conversations for the good of the K12 tech department community. Again the K12TechPro Community is a closed forum and anonymity is gone, so we can dig in differently in that forum.
Ultimately, the goal here is that the k12sysadmin remains (and hopefully grows). I don’t want this to sound like a call to join the K12TechPro Community. Truth is, some use Discord as a tool, cool. Some use K12TechPro as a tool, very cool. The k12sysadmin subreddit has its place, and we want to do what we can to keep it going. I’d love to work with the k12sysadmin community to figure out how to make all these tools work well together for the big-picture good of the cause.