#143 – Aaron Reimann and Keith Osburn on How WordPress Is Transforming Georgia’s Educational Landscape

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how education and WordPress can work hand in hand.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Aaron Reimann and Keith Osburn.

Keith is the chief information officer and Deputy Superintendent for Tech Services at the Georgia Department of Education. With a rich background in both education and technology, he’s been instrumental in driving tech innovation within the state’s education system.

Aaron runs ClockworkWP, a WordPress agency, and boasts extensive experience in web development dating back to 1996.

Together, they’ve been leveraging WordPress to tackle some of Georgia’s most pressing educational needs.

We start off by discussing the financial advantages of using WordPress to achieve cost efficiencies compared to pricier alternatives. Keith shares his insights into how Georgia has successfully rolled out community focused sites and specialized platforms for the state’s educational staff.

The conversation moves on to their collaboration with other states, advocating for open source solutions to solve enterprise level problems.

We get into the infrastructure choices, including dedicated Azure servers for individual WordPress instances, ensuring better control and scalability.

We also touch on their strategic approach to resource discoverability and user engagement. Highlighting significant traffic and potential for growth through grants and professional learning events.

Aaron and Keith elaborate on the importance of accessibility, GDPR compliance, and the role of collaboration in addressing security and legal concerns.

One standout part of this episode features the culinary sites they created, aimed at helping Georgia schools manage cafeteria recipes and nutritional information. Streamlining a previously manual task, and saving significant time for school staff.

Towards the end, we discuss the cultural shift towards open source platforms, emphasizing the flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and community driven spirit of WordPress in education.

If you’re curious to learn about how technology can enhance educational systems and promote global collaboration, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Aaron Reimann and Keith Osburn.

I am joined on the podcast today by Aaron Reimann and Keith Osburn. How are you both doing?

[00:03:47] Aaron Reimann: I am doing well, thank you.

[00:03:49] Nathan Wrigley: You’re welcome.

[00:03:50] Keith Osburn: Nathan, thank you so much for having us today. Really excited to be with you today. Doing very, very well.

[00:03:55] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. We’re here at WordCamp US. We’re in Portland, Oregon. We’re going to be talking today about education in the state of Georgia in particular, and how WordPress is being used to, well, hopefully make the job of teaching, the profession of teaching, a little bit more straightforward with the benefit of technology.

Before we begin that, I wonder if you would both in turn like to give us your little bio, because I know you have very different roles in life. So maybe if we start with you, Keith, just a short bio about who you are and what you do.

[00:04:22] Keith Osburn: Absolutely. So thank you so much Nathan. So, again, my name is Keith Osburn. I serve as the Chief Information Officer and the Deputy Superintendent for Tech Services for the Georgia Department of Education. And so my team is both responsible for the technology that the department uses, but also helping ensure that educational technology has a purpose, a meaningful purpose, if you will, in the school systems throughout Georgia.

[00:04:45] Nathan Wrigley: Is your background then more in tech, or more in education, or a bit of both?

[00:04:49] Keith Osburn: It’s actually a bit of both. So I was a classroom teacher for a number of years. I taught chemistry and physics at the high school level. Again, I’ve been in education for 35 years, and so I was there long enough to see really the first introductions of technology into the classroom, and just became really fascinated with that, and began to ultimately merge into that, and became a technology specialist, and a Chief Information Technology Director, and then ultimately moved to the State Department.

[00:05:14] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. So I guess we’ll hand the mic to Aaron and, yeah, tell us a little bit about yourself.

[00:05:19] Aaron Reimann: So my name’s Aaron Reimann and I run an agency called ClockworkWP, and we specialise in pretty much anything WordPress. We’ve grown a lot in the past year and a half or so, and we’re about, depending on how you count everybody, we’re about 14, 15 people or so. And I’ve been doing WordPress since 2008, and been doing web development since 96. So I have got a lot of gray hair because I’ve been doing it for a long time.

[00:05:44] Nathan Wrigley: How did you two hook up, if you don’t mind me asking? Do you both have some sort of hobby that crosses, or did you go out looking?

[00:05:51] Keith Osburn: That’s an interesting, love that question, and it’s a great story that we love to tell. So I do have an interest in both the open source community, and certainly WordPress in addition to that. But actually there’s a unique event that happened. We had an event, a WordPress meetup that happened to be virtual, and one Aaron Riemann happened to be speaking that night. And as it turns out, I had a situation that had arisen within Georgia, and it was during the time of the pandemic, where obviously as you well know, we as a society completely socially distanced.

But training needed to happen. And specifically our bus drivers throughout the state of Georgia needed annual security training, safety training. And we were trying to think, how do we train them? But at the same time, we can’t get them together. And so obviously technology became an opportunity for us. And so my team and I, we built a small WordPress instance. We used a plugin called Learn Dash. I’m sure you’re probably familiar with that.

What happened was nothing less than just stellar growth that happened. You know, we had 50 people one day, we had 500 people in the next couple of days. And then it just really became quite asymptotic. As it turns out, you know, I just was in the event just because of my interest there, and as I listened to Aaron talk, and he began to talk about hosting some types of things, it just really formatted my mind that he and I needed to talk. So I said, Aaron, will you remain on the call after you’re done, please. You and I need to talk. And that formed a lasting bond, and a great public private partnership, if you will, of which all the stuff that we’ll probably talk about today has materialised from. So, great event.

[00:07:21] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. That’s really great. Is there anything you want to add?

[00:07:25] Aaron Reimann: I would just say, I lead the Atlanta WordPress meetup, and that to me is just a big plug. If you’re trying to get into a WordPress community, you can get good clients by doing that. So I love the WordPress community. So doing a little plug there.

[00:07:37] Nathan Wrigley: Well that’s great. Thank you so much. Now, in the UK, which is the only educational format, for want of a better word, the only educational locale that I can talk about, I don’t know if it in any way resembles how it is in the US, but my impression of the US is that it’s atomised by state. So the things that you do in Georgia may well be different from how they’re done here in Oregon, and Portland, and all over the place.

But in the UK, I don’t know, probably about 20 years ago, the technological area of education was kind of flooded by proprietary, paid for services. You know, Microsoft stepped in and dominated the kind of desktop space, and a whole bunch of other things. But then there was a move much more recently to free and open source software. I think there was a thought that in the future we want to be educating our children in how to do open sourcey things, and we had this lovely thing called a Raspberry Pi which came along, which really kind of opened the technology of the hardware up to children.

But I just wondered if we could get into the open source nature, and whether or not that’s an important part of the Georgia landscape, free, open source software? Or do you find yourself being compelled by state legislation to use proprietary, paid for software?

[00:08:46] Keith Osburn: Wow, great question. And you’re right, it could very well vary by state. Every state has something that’s probably unique about them, and in regards to education that could be driven by legislation law, or policy procedures, those types of things. In this particular case, and certainly, you know, an enterprise organisation as large as we are, Georgia’s population as a whole is about 10.8 million people. We have 2 million students. 230 plus districts. 2,500 schools. Each one of those, by the way, have some degree of local control. And so, we as a state, our job is to provide service and support.

I think what started this conversation for me as a state chief was really beginning to notice a change in the landscape, especially as it relates to technology. And you’re right, the big enterprise organisations still have a footprint, and a necessary footprint in there. However, I think the conversation gets interesting because, around the time of the pandemic, I think the mentality about the purposes of software and software solutions changed. And I say in yesteryear, oftentimes there were solutions that were built, and then people begin to look for, hey, how do we apply this? Where’s a problem? Let’s find a problem.

Today there are problems already, and so we build towards that. Which means that really what we need to do is look for opportunities to be much more agile and responsive, because we’ve identified a need. This is what’s strong within the open source community, and certainly whenever you think about the culture of WordPress, this is what makes them such a strong, and what I consider to be a viable opportunity and solution for us.

And so I specifically went because I appreciated that that culture was going to give me what I needed. That really agile opportunity for me to be responsive to solutions that were already needed, and thus the community could customise, highly customise, I should say, solutions for exactly what the problem happened to be.

[00:10:35] Nathan Wrigley: It’s interesting, in the UK about 15 years ago, children were being taught how to use Microsoft products. That was the curriculum. How do you create a Word document? How do you use a spreadsheet? Now it’s more, how do you program? How do you learn fundamentals of programming? How can you use Python? How can you use PHP and things like that? So there’s a real shift. And whilst it may not be pointing the finger directly at WordPress, it’s definitely moved in that kind of direction. And obviously the more open source things that you can put into the institutions, the more value for money you’re going to get out because you don’t have to pay these giant software licenses.

But getting to the topic at hand today, and I should just point out that both Aaron and Keith have done a presentation at WordCamp US, and I’ll link to that in the show notes, that kind of will outline the conversation that we’re having. But what was the problem in Georgia that you wanted to solve, that you needed WordPress for? So I’m just going to leave it as open as that. What were you trying to fix with WordPress?

[00:11:28] Keith Osburn: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It goes back to that first story I told that as, you know, education in and of itself is a communication based, people driven thing, right? And so as our teachers, the 300,000 teachers and staff across Georgia became socially distanced, they still had at their primary need to educate children. In order to do that, communication has to happen.

And you can imagine that natural communication between you and I sitting across the table is quite easy. When you put technology, or you need to put technology in there, there need to be some guardrails, there need to be some opportunities to allow for that growth that doesn’t necessarily kind of stymie what needs to happen.

We begin to kind of conceptualise on this idea of saying, hey, we’ve got now 300,000 staff members that are dispersed, socially distanced from one another, but they still need to communicate.

And so we concocted this idea that now has become what we call our community project, where we found a specific WordPress solution, coupled with some plugins that we used, that enabled us to really facilitate both synchronous now, and asynchronous conversations, that were content and topic specific. So that we could link together math teachers, or we could link together science teachers regardless of their location, geography, and enable that conversation to still happen.

So that site, literally again, we had no idea that it would grow the way that it did. We were probably anticipating that we would have literally linear year growth, but it became quite asymptotic. To this day we now have a WordPress instance of a community that has 88,000 viable ongoing conversations inside of that with about 500 people adding to that each week. 240 unique groups that exist inside of this platform. So it is truly this new technical society, if you will, that supports the communication needs of teachers across the totality of the state.

[00:13:18] Nathan Wrigley: Given that this all was promoted by the pandemic, or at least that’s the takeaway that I got, was this a case of suddenly scrambling around for a solution that had to be implemented yesterday, more or less? And I’m curious because in the UK at the moment, and this has nothing to do with education, a lot of those solutions are now beyond their sell by date, if you know what I mean. You know, things were cobbled together ever so quickly, they worked for a period of time, they were sort of hanging together, and then it’s turned out that actually, probably with hindsight, if we’d have had six months lead time on this, we probably would’ve done something different.

But it sounds like what you have has stayed the test of time, has managed to keep going, and it wasn’t a cobbled together solution. It worked exactly as you’d expected, or has it been an iteration and an evolution?

[00:13:59] Keith Osburn: And that’s absolutely where interstates left Aaron, because the initial iterations of that were right. My team at the time didn’t necessarily have say WordPress engineers, or experts in that. I probably was the one, and I already had a day job being a CIO. And so we quickly outgrew what the initial iteration of that was, and began to recognise. That’s that serendipitous event where Aaron just happened to be doing a WordPress meetup, and I happened to be on that, and I recognised, just listening to him, I was like, I need that guy, and I need his team.

And so thus begin that union. And I remember our first conversations were like, listen, we’ve built something and we’ve outgrown it almost overnight. We need some real help, and we really need to begin to kind of strategise and strategically plan on this thing because, again, it’s not growing linear, it’s growing asymptotically, and so we need to plan for that.

And that’s I think really important point to be going back to that first question that we had about this idea of public private partnerships now, are critically important, because you see that expertise in a particular area who can listen to somebody whose expertise happens to be in this case education and saying, here’s where our problems at, here’s our soft spots. And he says, okay, this is what me and my team do, this is the way that we’re going to collaborate to build a solution that will meet the needs today, but ongoing with that in the future as well.

[00:15:15] Nathan Wrigley: So maybe this question is going now to Aaron. We know that it’s got something to do with WordPress, we know it’s got to do with Georgia, and we know it’s got to do with education, but beyond that, what are the specific things that you’ve had to build? Is this like a portal for children? Is it a portal for the teachers to get together and communicate lesson plans? What have you had to build?

[00:15:33] Aaron Reimann: There’s been I think a total of nine projects that we’ve done. The first project was the community project where they basically had a WordPress install on a server that just couldn’t handle the traffic, it grew overnight. We split that up into two different servers where MySQL’s on its own little thing, and nginx is on its own. That was just a quick little fix to split it up. We’ve moved it into the Azure framework since then.

We’ve done some marketing sites to, I guess the PHP list is an application that we are using that we’ve internally converted, basically they have a LISTSERV. There’s an old school LISTSERV that the state was using and has nothing to do with WordPress, but I was like, well, we probably can help in that situation.

I picked this open source project, PHP list, and then realised later that it doesn’t have everything that we needed built in. So my team has built that application out. So that’s not necessarily WordPress, but I mean it’s open source and PHP. But we’ve done marketing sites to the culinary site.

[00:16:36] Nathan Wrigley: That’s interesting, culinary.

[00:16:37] Aaron Reimann: So basically we have built, there was a need for the schools, how many cafeterias are there in Georgia?

[00:16:45] Keith Osburn: Well, there’s 230 districts, there’s about 2,500 schools, so you can imagine. We’ll go with that number because every one of those schools is going to have a cafeteria. And that’s a nutrition program.

[00:16:54] Aaron Reimann: Okay. So they don’t have, up until recently, they didn’t have a way to share recipes. And now there’s an application where anybody in the school can go in and set up a five day schedule with all the recipes that has all of the nutritional information about each vegetable, and meat, and all that. And so they can basically print that out, and say that, and use that for the school. And there was nothing like that out there. It’s not super complex what was built, but I mean, we’re using WordPress with custom post types, and WordPress gives us a lot of flexibility to build those things out.

[00:17:30] Nathan Wrigley: So it sounds like it’s mainly for staff. It’s not forward facing for children to access content. It’s like a CMS for bits and pieces that educators and people, I don’t know, it sounds like people working in the kitchens and things like that might need to use. So it’s not directly forward facing to the children, but it’s all of the minutiae of how to manage a school, and how to get teachers communicating with each other, that kind of thing.

[00:17:54] Keith Osburn: Absolutely. And I think probably a value add is to say that we strongly believe, and I think all of us probably here do that the power is in the teacher. The power is in the school staff. They’re the ones that are doing the work. Our jobs are to provide services and support, certainly at a state agency as well. That’s probably a primary role for us.

And so specifically we were targeting solutions specifically for teachers, for the wraparound staff so that they could do the great work that they do. In this case, one of the things that was mission critical to us was trying to find out that we could use technology as a way to ultimately save them time.

There are a lot of mundane things that happen, a lot of reiterations of things that really technology, if we’re innovative, can take that time, and do that task, and give that back to either the teacher, or the staff member, or whatnot.

Again, here’s an opportunity where nutrition staff we’re probably laboriously sitting down spending countless hours looking at products that says, what are their nutritional values, and how do we pair that with this over here? And now what we’ve done is we’ve implemented a technological solution that literally does what normally would’ve required hours. We’re doing that in now mere minutes and seconds. That’s a win-win. That’s a huge win-win.

[00:19:03] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s reducing the amount of paperwork. It sounds like you’re moving away from a paper-based system into a more technologically, everything is data basically. And WordPress’ motto if you like is democratising publishing, but this feels like democratising information, democratising education. And I can barely think of a better use of WordPress than education. It just ticks every single box, doesn’t it? It’s perfect.

[00:19:28] Keith Osburn: We totally agree in that. And you know, again, that goes back to the very start of our conversation where it’s like, what was it about free and open source software? It was like, again, the opportunity for us to, from my world as a CIO in an education vertical, say, I see this problem, and then say, how do I with experts in this case, Aaron and team say, here’s my problem. I can pretty much verbalise that. And he says, okay, I understand that, I can wrap a solution around that, and we can do this working together in a very responsive fashion. That’s the win-win, I think from this.

And now for us, we’ve seen so many wins immediately, I don’t think that we’ve had any where we’re saying, oh, it was a good try, but no, that’s not going to work. It’s every one has been something that we’ve built on the previous one. And every one of those solutions has been incredibly effective.

You heard Aaron talk about the fact that we’ve got several projects. We’re in the midst now of taking our state website, and we’re going to bifurcate that because there’s information that’s destined for public stakeholders. There’s also information that’s really pertinent to our school districts and whatnot.

And so we’re, one more time we’re using WordPress in this instance to build a website that is unique and able to deliver for our public stakeholders the information that they find viable, and that they need.

It doesn’t have to be all so complex with other information that’s really destined for school leaders, or school district personnel, or teachers in this case instead. Now, through a bifurcated process, we’re able to deliver information that is necessary for the time for that specific individual. So this highly customised solution, suddenly WordPress has helped us achieve.

[00:21:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I know that there’ll be instances where WordPress will not be the best fit because there’ll be proprietary software, which is just superior. And there’ll probably be data protection concerns and things like that for, I don’t know, salaries, and payroll, and all sorts of things that I can imagine.

But would your intention be to get WordPress’s foot in the door for many more things in Georgia, or are you happy with where you’ve got to so far? Or would the idea be to keep going back to Aaron and say, actually, here’s another area where we might be able to squeeze WordPress into the mix.

[00:21:27] Keith Osburn: I’ll answer that by saying, a few years back when we began to kind of realise that, in the world of education, I say that technology changed from a gee whiz bank state to become mission critical. We recognised that that was a pertinent question to ask ourselves.

And so we created a team called Knowledge and Resource Management, and that’s all that they do. Their job is to think about digital and data that’s constructed as a result of these technological processes. And think about, how does this enable us to better understand what we’re doing today, but also begin to think about what’s our innovation schedule as we kind of move forward?

And so that’s what they do is really sit down in advance. We as a leadership team, we sit down and we begin to kind of strategically plan. Obviously the student and the teacher, if you will, is at the center of our planning. Our job is to think about, how do we customise solutions that will help them better.

And at this point in time, it’s not ever that free and open source is just a, I’ve run out of tricks, let me go see if this thing can do it. It’s a vital part of the conversation during the strategic planning process. And if that’s the solution, that’s the solution. And it’s just like, we look at that on the same level and the same ground as we do, various other enterprise solutions.

The one thing that I believe that’s really important to note that we’ve proven here is that there could have been this perception of many that say, WordPress can’t obviously meet up to this enterprise need. Actually, we’ve kind of blown that out the water. We literally have staggering numbers. 88,000 and hundreds of thousands of people that hit the website, and those types of things. And we’re showing WordPress is absolutely capable of working in the enterprise. And so it needs to be considered a viable part of strategic plan if it’s the one that fits that need.

[00:23:05] Nathan Wrigley: One of the best things about WordPress is the fact that somebody’s very often built the very thing that you need. There’s a plugin that fits the bill. And I’m just wondering if that was the case in this scenario Aaron. Were you able to take pre-built things and thereby save the state a bunch of money because actually somebody’s already built the CMS, or the plugin that would handle the recipe side of things, or was this a ton of custom code right from the ground up?

[00:23:28] Aaron Reimann: We used a lot of plugins at the beginning to get, I guess I can promote, we use Gravity Forms all the time. It gives us so much flexibility and it’s so easy to integrate. Hook into filters, and send information out.

So we’ll use a lot of plugins at the beginning, and then we have to, not always, but most of the time we have to tweak it a little bit. We need to add, oh, we need it to do this thing so we might write a plugin to hook in and modify the way Gravity Forms works. Or it might be a totally, this doesn’t exist, and we have to build it. But I mean, we always will vet plugins, make sure that they’re going to be safe, and secure, and give us the stability we need. And if it doesn’t, we’ll write it.

I would say every site that we build, we do use basic, common plugins. I mean, Yoast and things like that. I mean, just plugins that everyone uses. And then most of the time we have to do a little customisation.

[00:24:22] Nathan Wrigley: Have you been talked to by the Georgia authorities in terms of, well, we use the term GDPR because that’s just the one that we’ve got, but it’s this overarching privacy legislation, which really gets its teeth into more or less everything that you do with websites. Is there anything like that that you’ve had to, I don’t know, you’ve had to build something custom because the plugin doesn’t seem to satisfy this privacy thing, or it doesn’t do this particular thing?

So in the UK the GDPR and things like that really do compel you to look really hard, especially when it’s public sector stuff. You’ve got to look really hard at the code and make sure, okay, it definitely isn’t keeping data. It definitely isn’t sending data somewhere else. I can a hundred percent vouch for it. It’s not a case of, yeah, I’ve used Gravity Forms before, that’s fine.

[00:25:05] Aaron Reimann: I’ll just say GDPR. I know all of that stuff is coming, and more and more states are requiring it. I mean, one of the things I think about is accessibility. That’s becoming super important, and we always want to make sure when we build a site, specifically for the state, that we go through and we hit whatever level. There’s multiple levels of accessibility that we try to meet. And that, I would say that’s probably more important for us now than any type of GDPR stuff. But I know that’s coming probably in every state.

[00:25:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so the accessibility piece. Well, you can’t build any of these things unless there is accessibility. And I don’t know what the WCAG standard is that you have to adhere to, but I’m guessing you have to be pretty mindful of the accessibility piece.

[00:25:47] Aaron Reimann: Absolutely.

[00:25:48] Keith Osburn: Yeah, and if I go back to that, it’s so important, and you heard me mention our Knowledge and Resource Management Team. Whenever the project for rebuilding the website happened. I’ll tell you that, we planned for more than a year before we ever even began to kind of think about code, because of that.

One of the things that’s really important for us today is, number one, again, you heard me say earlier, we’re producing digital data far more than we ever have in past. And as a result of that, you’re right, the game’s changed. We have to think about that. Think about where that’s going to reside.

Who were those data generated as a result of? If it’s a student, obviously we take great concerns because we’re considered to be the stewards of their data, right?

All that happened during project planning. And I remember us specifically, part of Aaron’s team sitting down with my team in that respect and saying, okay, we’re going to talk about this, we’re going to talk about the fabric that we’re going to build this on top of. We’re going to talk about any kind of security concerns, accessibility, those things. That’s part of the culture now. And I think that’s really a great question that you ask because I think that is of paramount importance.

Now, to Aaron’s point. Before a project ever starts, we should know all that in advance, right? We’re all going to sit down. And while there are unique needs per state, by and far, I think we’re all moving towards the same area. And that is that accessibility should be always covered. That’s just a non question, it’s got to be done.

The other’s really data privacy, those types of things. It’s going to be taken care of beforehand. And then at that point in time, now Aaron knows that we’ve taken care of that, so now as he begins to kinda look at the various plugins, he now has a little opportunity to begin to kinda look into the T’s and C’s of those plugins and say, hey, if there’s something unique about this, he’ll bring that question back.

I have a data privacy officer and say, hey, what’s going on with this? Is this something that’s in congruence with state law in Georgia, or is this something that we need to look at from that? So prior planning has enabled us to really be able to make sure that whenever we begin to write code, that we’re very aggressive, very responsive, and we’ve kind of already taken care of the hiccups if you will.

[00:27:41] Nathan Wrigley: Financially, does free and open source software like WordPress, does that impress the bean counters, the accountants on your side of things? Is it a fairly compelling argument to go to them and say, look, we could pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for this thing over here, but look, we’ve got this WordPress thing and the software itself is completely free, there’s a bunch of plugins that are a few hundred dollars? I’m guessing there’s some fairly compelling argument.

[00:28:03] Keith Osburn: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’d say that’s probably a growing question. I don’t know that it’s gotten to the point now where like all the accountants come to me and say specifically this versus that. But I will say that, as a state chief, I’m ethically and from an advocacy standpoint, responsible for ensuring the good stewardship of tax dollars because that’s what I’m spending.

That is factored into every conversation that we have to say, is this a good spend, and are we going to get the solution based on the strategic initiative that we needed to address? And so that really is a part of my team. When we begin to sit down and strategically plan, we have identified that there’s a need. And then we begin to say, what’s the best way for us to get there?

It’s just now, as I said earlier, WordPress isn’t one of those things that we consider whenever we’ve run out of options. Now, it’s really a part of the ongoing conversation to say, we’ve proven that this could be a viable solution. If this is the viable solution, this is the path that we’re going to take. And by the way, we found out that this is a very cost efficient way for us to do something and still get efficacy when we’re done with that.

[00:29:05] Nathan Wrigley: And do you speak to people who have the equivalent job to you in the other states?

[00:29:10] Keith Osburn: Absolutely.

[00:29:11] Nathan Wrigley: And they found this conversation to be of interest, and have they looked favorably on what you are doing in Georgia?

[00:29:16] Keith Osburn: Yeah, I will say that there’s a couple of states that we now have really begun to kind of work as a group to really showcase the opportunity for us to kind of expand our own vision and say, don’t think that the big box, aisle seven, row three solution is just the only way to go. But instead, maybe Chief Information Officer should also be considered to be Chief Innovation Officer now.

And we should just begin to kind of look and say, our job is to figure out the best way to solve that problem, or provide that solution, not look for an opportunity to buy something that maybe fits that. Maybe, or maybe not, or maybe 70%. But instead say, no, let’s figure out the way to solve that problem over there. Open source, free open source solutions could very well be a very viable, and we’ve proven that it could solve enterprise level problems.

[00:30:05] Nathan Wrigley: I’m just going to a quote something from the blurb of the presentation that you’ve both been involved in at WordCamp US, and it says the following. In the past three years, Georgia established a community focused site for statewide education staff using a strategic set of plugins and custom modifications within WordPress to produce the functionality needed. And I think we’ve covered that.

Once that site was launched, it opened the door for multiple additional WordPress sites under the GADOE, which I’m presuming is the Georgia Department of Education umbrella. Including continuing education events for staff across the state, a better menu builder with state approved recipes for cafeteria staff, and rebuilding the main GADOE site using a headless WordPress setup with Next.js.

So the bit that I want to focus on there is the words multiple additional WordPress sites. And this is probably squarely aimed at Aaron. How are you tying these multiple sites together? Is this like a, we’ve got a WordPress site over here, and another one over here, and another one over here. Or are we dealing with multi-site? Is it all connected in some way? Have you got single sign on so that the teachers can get in with one set of user credentials? How’s it all hanging together?

[00:31:11] Aaron Reimann: So right now we have multiple websites that are WordPress, they’re not multi-site. It’s not multi-tenancy or anything like that. We have individual WordPress instances on individual virtual servers on Azure.

That gives us a little control to be able to scale it up and down. I’ve had environments before where we’ve had multiple WordPress sites, and the way the infrastructure is built, it is, if you only need to scale up one, it has to scale up everything. And I like the fact that we have it split up individually, allows us to scale up and down.

There isn’t anything that is unique, except for the headless WordPress site. That infrastructure is going to be different than all of the kind of more like marketing WordPress sites.

[00:31:59] Keith Osburn: Maybe the one thing I’ll add is that, one of the things that we’re certainly, we don’t expect anybody to understand the technology behind that. What we were looking for early days, and again, what Aaron’s team have been helping us build is this idea to purposely, if you will, almost bottleneck the way that people get access to resources that we find.

We could probably all agree on is that if you build the best resource on planet Earth, it’s still valueless if nobody can find it. And that’s been a challenge for us in the past is that we’re a large organisation, you can tell we have these siloed teams within the department, and they all produce resources. But unless you know, you didn’t necessarily know where to find those. You didn’t know how to go about that.

We began to say, this is an opportunity again for technology to help us save time of that individual. So we begin to say, we’ve got a very successful event, the community project. We have 80,000 people that are visiting that. That’s slightly more than 50% of our teachers, but we still got some room to grow.

And, hey, there’s these other things like strategic grants that we provide, or maybe policy and guidance. Maybe there’s some professional learning events, and if people don’t know that we do all these things, they’re for nought.

So we said, why don’t we figure out ways to hone that together and we begin to use, for instance, the communities, dare I say storefront, as a way to provision those, so that those are immediately visible. So now somebody that could be a public stakeholder, or a practitioner, educational practitioner comes to the site to log in, but they say, oh, I see that there are new things up here, let me click on those. And now it’s just simply the convenience of us reusing something that they’re vastly familiar with already, as a way for us to share more resources with them.

So the technology behind the scenes, obviously we’re working to make sure that those work tandem. And you talk about SSO and those types of things, those are strategically part of what we’re doing. But ultimately, right now, the whole idea continues to be, how do we get critically important information rapidly to that stakeholder that needs that? And that’s the reason why they came to visit that site, right? And so that’s, again, what we’re driving towards.

[00:33:58] Nathan Wrigley: I know that I said this earlier, but I can barely think of a better example where technology, WordPress, meets humanity, education. It’s just this perfect, perfect relationship. And it just encapsulates everything which is wonderful about, well, open source software, but in this case, we’re at a WordPress event and we nerd out on WordPress. So it just seems like the perfect way to use that technology.

And think that’s all of the questions that I’ve got. I just applaud you for what you’ve been doing. And obviously the fact that you’re here talking about it at an enormous WordPress event means that you must both be pretty proud of what you’ve done as well. So congratulations.

[00:34:35] Keith Osburn: Well, thank you. Aaron and I both will tell you that I think one of the other attributes, one of the strong features of the open source community is that we recognise that we’re a culture and we need to share. And if you have successes, you’re right, there are a lot of children outside of Georgia that need to be educated. And if we found a solution and it works, we should talk about that. And here’s an opportunity to say to another state, or another organisation that’s in this business to say, here’s a great opportunity that has been very successful for us. Look and study the partnership that’s happened from private to public from that instance.

And we don’t mind talking about that. We’re certainly proud that we’ve done something that is a viable solution. But at the same time, I think we also have that responsibility to share what’s been working. And if there have been pitfalls that we hit along the way, or soft spots that we needed to iterate around, we should be willing to talk about that.

[00:35:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I know we’ve talked about the technology a lot in this podcast episode, but underlying the whole thing feels like there’s morals. There’s just like a real moral basis to what you’re doing. That just feels really nice.

And also you mentioned state boundaries, and it feels like this conversation goes beyond that even. You know, there’s no reason why what you are doing couldn’t be applicable in Canada, or the UK, or Poland, or Australia, or any other place you mentioned. So it’s a big conversation for sure.

[00:35:48] Keith Osburn: I would love to see this conversation become global because, again, I think that any educator is in the business. They trained to do that thing of educate children, not educate children in this specific spot, but just say to educate children.

We as technologists have had a responsibility to figure out ways, in this case, for me, because of that’s my vertical, to figure out technological solutions that will support them.

Well, my technologist peers, irregardless of location, I know that they desire to do the same thing. So I want to share with them. And I know that they’ll do the same thing with me, and we do. We have a very collaborative, non-competitive partnership that exists. And you’re right, it’s not bound by state, it’s not bound by nation, but instead, it’s like all of us saying, let’s link together, let’s figure out how we solve this problem if one exists, because we all desire to do the same thing. Ensure that every kid, irregardless of location, gets an opportunity to be successful.

[00:36:42] Nathan Wrigley: Technologically important stuff that kind of gets out of the teacher’s way. Yeah, that’s perfect. Thank you Aaron, and thank you Keith for chatting to me today.

[00:36:50] Keith Osburn: Absolutely. Thank you, Nathan.

[00:36:51] Nathan Wrigley: Appreciate it.

[00:36:51] Aaron Reimann: Yeah, thank you very much.

On the podcast today we have Aaron Reimann & Keith Osburn.

Keith is the Chief Information Officer and Deputy Superintendent for Tech Services at the Georgia Department of Education. With a rich background in both education and technology, he’s been instrumental in driving tech innovation within the state’s education system. Aaron runs Clockwork WP, a WordPress agency, and boasts extensive experience in web development dating back to 1996. Together, they’ve been leveraging WordPress to tackle some of Georgia’s most pressing educational needs.

We start off by discussing the financial advantages of using WordPress to achieve cost efficiencies compared to pricier alternatives. Keith shares his insights into how Georgia has successfully rolled out community-focused sites and specialised platforms for the state’s educational staff.

The conversation moves on to their collaboration with other states, advocating for open-source solutions to solve enterprise-level problems. We get into the infrastructure choices, including dedicated Azure servers for individual WordPress instances, ensuring better control and scalability.

We also touch on their strategic approach to resource discoverability and user engagement, highlighting significant traffic and potential for growth through grants and professional learning events. Aaron and Keith elaborate on the importance of accessibility, GDPR compliance, and the role of collaboration in addressing security and legal concerns.

One standout part of this episode features the culinary site they created, aimed at helping Georgia schools manage cafeteria recipes and nutritional information, streamlining a previously manual task and saving significant time for school staff.

Towards the end we discuss the cultural shift towards open-source platforms, emphasising the flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and community-driven spirit of WordPress in education.

If you’re curious to learn more about how technology can enhance educational systems and promote global collaboration, this episode is for you.

Useful links

ClockworkWP

LearnDash

‘Custom WordPress Solutions for Educational Initiatives‘ – WordCamp US presentation

LISTSERV

Gravity Forms

Yoast

WCAG