When I say the word “domain”, what does it conjure in your mind? Most likely if you are in the tech space, or adjacent to it, you think of a Internet domain like "apievangelist.com". A virtual address you can use to point to different resources on the Internet, like websites, applications and APIs.
If you rely on the dictionary for your answers, you will get:
an area of territory owned or controlled by a ruler or government
a specified sphere of activity or knowledge
a discrete region of magnetism in ferromagnetic material
With synonyms being realm, kingdom, empire, dominion, province, territory, and land. We have thousands of years of history to help define what a physical domain is, something that is still being defined as time marches forward. However we are just getting started when it comes to defining what a domain means in a virtual world.
I spent Friday and Saturday last week at Emory University in Atlanta, at the Domain Incubator, where I spent two days with some seriously smart academics, exploring the wide, and expanding universe of our physical and virtual domains, from the perspective of an educator and student.
There were a number of amazing talks, and keynotes from Audrey Watters(@audreywatters) and Jim Groom(@jimgroom), all of which Jim sums up nicely on his blog. This conversation is born out of the Domain of One’s Own Program out of University of Mary Washington, Reclaim Hosting—something Emory, and other universities are adopting, and following UMW's lead.
In the coming years, I’m looking to define my own online and offline domain, but shifting my focus from pure API Evangelism to a more reclaim your domain approach, helping individuals, businesses and organizations define and reclaim their domain, in this rapidly expanding online world.
My head is still swimming from all the events I participated in over the last week, so I’m sure I’ll have many more thoughts as I decompress, and go through my Evernote. I'm really excited about the potential of reclaim your domain, and programs like domain of ones own, but what really gets me going is that this is coming out of leading higher education institutions, led by some seriously smart, and passionate education professionals.
