#ELTChat – The Loss of ELTChat – Plan B

I read this post on Vicky Loras’ blog this morning and am reblogging it as requested.  My additional thoughts appear below.

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For the last – well, almost two years now, since September 15 2010, #ELTchat has kept us on our toes and forged hundreds of professional and personal relationships amongst its followers who turn up on Twitter every Wednesday to talk about topics they have suggested and voted on – a community of peers which was created by a small group of colleagues – which grew and grew some more and became something that counts as an important part of our continuous professional development.

Like many great ideas, it didn’t hit just one person but several.

And that is how #ELTchat was created.

The website to keep up the communication of its members, a base and repository of our ideas was one of the first things we all thought of creating – the wiki came later.

XXX was keen to join the moderation team and help with podcasts and technical stuff; he was quick to buy eltchat.com and announced the good news to us after the fact.

A few months later, right after TESOL France 2011,  he suddenly disappeared – some say for reasons of health.

We never found out for sure.

We never received a single word of response to our emails.

eltchat.com was and still is registered in his name.

And yesterday we lost it.

On August 8 the domain expired and we have no way of taking over unless it goes up for sale again; it was very sad that XXX did not find it appropriate to renew.

The news is really upsetting.

The work we have put in on this website cannot be told in a few simple words – but it has been a labour of love and we have got so much out of it that we have never regretted one single moment

We are pretty upset at the behaviour of this individual – disappointment is one big understatement.

But we trust that our community of #ELTchatters, our PLN for short, will again gather round the new domain which we have purchased – eltchat.org

It will take us a few days to put the website back on its feet.

And all will be as it was before – all the posts in place all your thoughts and comments, all the polls and great summaries which got us on the shortlist of the ELTon Awards nominations.

We will be back with a vengeance.

We are not just a website – we did not get on the ELTon awards shortlist as just another website!!!

We are a great community of teachers and we have a Plan B!

See you all in September!!!

Marisa Constantinides – Shaun Wilden

Vicky Loras

P.S. We would greatly appreciate it if any of you belonging to this great community of teachers,  teacher educators, bloggers, #ELTchat followers,  reposted this on your blog.

If you decide to do this, please add your name to the post under ours.

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It’s disconcerting to read a blog post like the above.  My sincerest support goes out to the folks who have come to rely on the resource.  The original post had a name associated with it that I have XXXed out because I don’t know the entire details.

I was going to use the Wayback Machine to give an example of what they’re missing only to find the following message:

So sad.

There are a couple of things that leap out to me about this.

The Web is so Fragile

An empire can be here one minute and gone the next.  For all the wires and routers and switches and servers, anyone who has ever made a mistake typing a web address and got a 404 error knows that close doesn’t count.  We rely on accuracy for results and even one thing gone wrong can make resources inaccessible.

The Web is so Strong

But not necessarily by the nuts and bolts, but by the quality of the individuals who are involved.  I’m not an active part of this community but I do interact regularly with a number of its members.  These are good people and I like that they’re banding together over this issue and already are talking about a Plan B.Even if the .com domain remains unavailable, there are lots of others available.  .org .net …

I wish a successful resolution to this issue for all those affected.