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Element.io is our choice for team chat. It is open source and secure.

Quick Element.io/Matrix.org vocabulary primer: A Space collects Rooms.

Spaces are a way to group rooms and people together, and come in three main flavours:

Spaces: The next frontier

Stimpunks Space is a private, invite only Space for our community where we bring safety to the serendipity.

How do we help our students navigate the world of public, digital scholarship in a world increasingly dominated by harassment, abuse, disinformation, and polarization?

That’s the piece that’s been missing, bringing the safety to the serendipity.

Closing Tabs, Episode 3: Teaching with(out) Social Media – UMW Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies
Screenshot of Element on macOS showing the Rooms in Stimpunks Space and a chat in the Writing room
Screenshot of Element on macOS showing the Rooms in Stimpunks Space and a chat in the Writing room

Our Rooms

Stimpunks Space has over 20 Rooms.

  • General
  • Watercooler
  • Design
  • Systems
  • Writing
  • Reading
  • Music
  • Gardening
  • Coping
  • Foundation
  • Josephmooon
  • Caring with Cayden
  • Irie Smial Preserve
  • Business Papers
  • Directors
  • PunkFlowers
  • Art
  • STEAM
  • Conference to Restore Humanity
  • Events
  • Business & Philanthropy
  • Randimals

The main room, “General”, is for everyone in the Stimpunks Space, no matter what project[s] you’re working on.

Use “General” room to share news about your team. Use this room for mission related chat that you’d like every Stimpunk to see.

Use the “Watercooler” room for random and off topic chat. Share memes and have fun. Watercooler channels are fixtures of distributed work.

The #watercooler channel allows for serendipitous interactions, so “striking up a conversation” never has to be forced or disruptive.

Building Remote Office Culture with a Watercooler Channel

The “Design” room is where we collaborate on design across all Stimpunks projects. All are welcome to join and learn.

The “Systems” room is where we talk IT and offer IT support. Got an IT problem? Drop in the Systems room and we’ll help. Want to learn how all of this technology works together? Hang out in the room as we work.

The “Writing” room is for talk about writing in any modality. This is our busiest room. We use it to collaborate on this website.

The “Gardening” room is for gardening and all things plants.

In the “Coping” room, discuss mental health, physical health, coping, continuous fluid adaption, and living life as bodyminds. Everything said here stays here. Use content warnings. Respect triggers.

The “Josephmooon” room hosts the Josephmooon team and all Stimpunks who want to join.

The “Caring With Cayden” room hosts the Caring with Cayden team and all Stimpunks who want to join.

The “Irie Smial Preserve” room hosts the Irie Smial Preserve team.

Encrypted End-to-End

Every room and chat is end-to-end encrypted.

In choosing end-to-end-encryption, we lose some amenities you’ll be used to on other messaging platforms, like preview of links.

Onboarding

New volunteers are onboarded into the Watercooler room and the team room related to their volunteer work. After a trial period, volunteers have access to all rooms except a few that are limited due legal and ethical reasons.

Before joining our online community, we ask that folks read our volunteer page and agree to our contributor covenant.

When you first join a Room, existing messages will be encrypted and not visible to you. New messages will decrypt and display as they come in.

We encourage folks to sign up for a matrix.org account and use it for Stimpunks and other communities. Get an account.

For those wanting a more private account, we provide accounts on our own Matrix servers for minors and their families. Log in to Stimpunks Space at stimpunks.element.io if you have a stimpunks.ems.host username. To sign in to the Element app, you need to specify the Stimpunks Matrix host: stimpunks.ems.host.

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