I missed the 5th birthday for this OEGlobal Connect Community, that with some digging I can see we launched in April 2020 in my first weeks of being part of OEGlobal.
Indeed, at the start of the pandemic and in the run up to hosting the OEGlobal 2020 Conference online in this space, we started that first year with over 600 registered users.
That was five plus years ago, and looking into the near future, very likely in the next month we will see the 1900th person register for a new account here (currently at 1894).
I’m always looking for ways to encourage activity here, and in a new approach am planning to write more regular updates and highlights. Given today is Monday, and borrowing from a practice at the high school where my wife teaches, these will be a series of OEG Connect Monday Memos, tagged… monday-memo
Read on for a few items I hope are of interest on this Monday, July 21, 2025.
Where in the World Are We?
In 2023 we added to our account signup form a required field asking for a person’s city/country, so we have at least representation from the 576 who joined after then - here is my entry
From an export of all users, we have a rather wide array of entries! I took the list of all entries for this field and turned to ChatGPT asking:
I am going to upload a file with each line representing a location name where responders to a poll answered in free text “Where in the World Are You?” A number are misspelled. Please convert each to a consistently named country and then generate a list of all countries, alphabetically sorted with a frequency occurrence of each.
Even with this representing about 30% of all accounts, we find that 65 countries are represented here (see the data in spreadsheet format) country_counts.xlsx (6.3 KB). I ran short on credits toi generate a map, but was able to make one in Mapchart.
Created with mapchart.net shared under CC BY-SA
You can help us complete our map! If you had created an account before we added this profile field, you can update your geographic location in your profile via https://connect.oeglobal.org/my/preferences/profile
In Which I… We… Play the Role of the Forum Cop
I am reluctant to take the role of enforcing rules in OEG Connect. We have been very open in allowing anyone interested in joining this community. New accounts are moderated only to make sure in the signup form there is is some indication of your interest or role in open education.
It has not escaped my attention that on occasion we see a post that reads like a commercial pitch for a product or service, which has happened recently along with a few emails of concern. I am not going to moderate every post, I wish to trust this community to self monitor.
OEG Connect is not a place for trying to sell products and services.
Our likely largely un read terms of services under Acceptable use
- You may not send advertisements, chain letters, or other solicitations through the forum
We ask that you not use OEG Connect only to offer commercial services. We do not mind if you share links to services with a rationale why it is relevant to this community. The difference is clear between a conversational reply or a new topic post and a sales pitch.
If these kinds of posts/replies are repeated and the only contributions you make, we will close your account. We will notify you if this behavior is noticed or flagged to our attention, and I will play the rule maker up to two times and request that you think of other ways to participate here. The third time is a strike and your account will be closed.
That said, I wish to remind everyone here that the Discourse software we use to run OEG Connect is a community platform, meaning we ask everyone here to help us be aware of inappropriate behavior. Have you seen the flag buttons below a post? This is so anyone can alert us.
You can privately indicate that you us by making use of the flag icon below any post or contact us directly via email or private message.
Again, I am reluctant to even write this-- if anyone has suggestions on how to maintain a safe space without being rule heavy, please talk to me.
Community Posts of Interest
I greatly appreciate those thst take the effort to launch a new discussion topic, sharing a resources, casting a call for participating, and posting events. Thanks to these recent examples of community participation.
Stay tuned for more in a future Monday Memo!