#ReclaimOpen25 Rewind: Conference Highlights

As part of our #ReclaimOpen25 Rewind series we are bringing you highlights from our recent conference. Instead of the usual live stream, we invite you to watch the recordings below. If you missed it live, this is your chance to experience the magic of the event, find inspiration and explore resources. For this Friday’s instalment we bring you the most watched session from each of the three days:

Remix is #4Life: Why we all love the Daily Create and you should too

The Daily Create (TDC) is a creative challenge that is published every day at 5am EST, free and open to all.  For many years the link to the day’s challenge was tweeted to the #DS106 hashtag, nowadays it toots to the same hashtag on Mastodon, where we Daily Creators still participate and riff off each other. Some of us complete the TDC every day, others dip in and out from time to time. There are no prizes, and no sanctions. The only rule is to MAKE ART, DAMMIT!

Join us, a group of regular and irregular Daily Creators, as we chat about all things TDC. In this session we’ll talk about many things. Likely topics will be:

• Motivations for participation in the daily create
• The echoes involved when one person riffs on someone else or a previous response
• The theory of remix and bricolage that underpins these types of practices
• What an affinity group is, and how this might explain the connections that are built in remix activities
• How the TDC is a gateway into digital literacy, with free and open resources

We will also each introduce some of our favourite challenges from past daily creates to give a flavour of why we keep returning to participate in the TDC.

Finally, we would like to take the opportunity to issue an open invitation to everyone to join us in the open and participate in future daily creative activities. But beware – #DS106 is #4Life!

WonderCat: An Alternative to Recommendation Algorithms

WonderCat is a relational database of human experiences with narrative. The project is designed as an experimental alternative to reading lists (in courses) and recommendation algorithms (in the real world). It is intended primarily as a discovery tool, helping users find creative works that have been valuable to real readers. It does not deliver personalized recommendations.

The tool is built around three taxonomies: Experiences, Narrative Technologies, and Impacts. The terms in these taxonomies and their definitions are published as glossaries, and we have designed a review process for glossary terms that allows any user of WonderCat to contribute to our ever-expanding understanding of narrative in the world.

The site is built with WordPress, which has been customized with ACF. Visualizations of this data are built with the R package Shiny, which pulls in Wikidata to provide dynamic visualizations of the experiences in our database.

Our presentation will focus on two goals we tackled in Summer 2025, presenting our solutions (so far) and inviting ideas from the Reclaim community. Our first goal was to make Shiny WonderCat load more quickly (we’ll share our experiments with cron jobs) and our second was to develop an editorial workflow that encourages the general public to engage with our editorial board (we’ll share our experiments with Gravity Flow).

We hope participants will leave the session inspired to develop their own alternatives to recommendation algorithms.

Replacing a live site with a high-fidelity web archive mirror

You have your own web domain (a blog, a course website, etc..) but you (or your institution or your government!) don’t want to keep maintaining or updating the site, but you still want to keep a high-fidelity archived, fixed in time?

Web archiving allow us to create high-fidelity copies of entire websites. Web archive mirroring is a new approach to keep the site, exactly as it was (or as close as possible) on its original domain (or replacement domain), but powered by a web archive!

This presentation will cover new open source tooling from Webrecorder, which allows for creating statically hosted (and low-cost) mirrors entirely from web archives.

We will provide simple examples and also cover more sophisticated examples of multi-site mirrors such as the one hosted on https://govarchive.us/