wao.something/anything…

At the end of our most recent coop day, we reflected that we hadn’t got around to making anything. Again.

We are usually pretty good at making sure we squeeze some creative time into our coop days but the last few have been much more all work and no play.

To try and remedy this, as one of our weekly calls drew to a close, Doug suggested we all undertake a bit of a challenge.

Buy a wao domain and then build something to show off to each other on a weekly call. Bonus points for things that were fun/educational/actually useful!

We gave ourselves a generous 2 week deadline as we had work and holidays to account for. We also capped the amount of time we thought was reasonable to spend at 5 hours total because even scrolling through the list of available domains would take a while…

We’d agreed not to give away any details of what we were up to before we reconvened so it was actually quite exciting when the time came for the big reveal.

wao.coffee

I went first and gave a quick tour of wao.coffee (saved for posterity). Ever wondered what I do when I say I’m off to make a coffee during a break or between calls? Well wonder no more as this site outlines the (yes slightly fiddly) but satisfying process of pulling an espresso shot with a manual machine.

Ideas to develop the site further…

• expand to show the okay but not really ever great ways of frothing milk without a steam wand?
• add a catalogue/tasting notes for all the fabulous coop produced coffee I try out?
• repurpose as a site to book a “fancy a coffee?” type call with us?
• repurpose as a “buy us a coffee?” tip jar sort of thing (we already have one so could just redirect)?

wao.lol

Laura went a different direction and purchased wao.lol for a bit of lighthearted tom foolery. As she couldn’t decide which domain would be the most enjoyable, she made a list of potentials and then used wao.lol to tell us the ideas she had for each of them.

• wao.exposed — Laura dug up an old picture of all our feet and used Affinity (a photo editing software) to superimpose Anne’s feet in.
• wao.fail — Laura ‘shopped in more than just Anne’s foot this time and used the .fail domain to show how quick and dirty photo editing can look absolutely ridiculous
• wao.bike — Everyone at the co-op is relatively sporty, so Laura posted a picture of her and Anne’s gravel bikes along with the tagline “This is a truly useless URL, but some of us have pretty bikes”.
• wao.blue — Another silly URL! Laura put the two WAO blues up from our Brand Guide.
• wao.irish — Our only Irish member received special treatment with a delightful photo of Bryan.
• wao.catering — Leaning in to some ongoing inside jokes about British cuisine, Laura found a photo of Scotch Eggs and put it together with the wao.catering URL.
• wao.fish — A recent addition to our Learnwith library is a beautiful graphic you can use to run a Sailboat Retrospective (https://learnwith.weareopen.coop/sailboat-retro/ ). Doug’s delightful illustration style had us all in stitches with his perfectly triangular “shark” graphic.
• wao.gift — Last year Laura (with Anne’s help!) had our first WAO swag made. We all received winter hats with the WAO logo as a holiday gift.

The inside jokes might not be funny to anyone else, but we certainly enjoyed delving into the depths of Laura’s random ideas.

wao.land

Anne choose one of the same ideas as Laura (totally by accident!) and also remixed the image for our Sailboat Retrospective.

She brought the picture to life and turned it into a gif with a swimming triangle.

Anne used the opportunity of this little side project to teach herself how to set up a page with Github Pages and how to alter the DNS record to redirect the URL to the page.

As this was a secret project, Anne had to search for articles and videos to guide her through some of the process rather than asking in our slack channel which may have been her usual first port of call.

Right now the page is just a gif that links to the Learn with page with the Sailboat retro. In the future wao.land could develop into a pretty landing page of all the places that people can find WAO on the web.

wao.wtf

After spending way too long and overthinking things, Doug ended up installing Nextcloud as an experiment. We’ve often talked at WAO about being pragmatic users of Open Source software and perhaps the time has come for us to switch several services we use (e.g. Trello, Toggl) over to a place that’s fully under our control?

We’re still thinking through whether this is a good idea, but in the meantime, we’ve had fun exploring the features and functionality of Nextcloud, as well as rebooting the server when we got a bit too carried away…

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