What does it take to run the fastest-moving open-source agent platform as something you actually depend on, and then adapt it for environments that require stronger isolation, safety, and governance? In this two-part session, an OpenClaw maintainer will share firsthand what dogfooding the project as an always-on agent looks like: keeping pace with a codebase that ships daily, upgrading without losing state, and turning the failures found in a real homelab and family production environment into upstream fixes. Then, we'll explore how OpenShell, organizational policies, and configuration controls can be layered onto upstream OpenClaw for more controlled deployments. Together, the speakers will examine the boundary between the upstream project and deployment-specific requirements. They'll share lessons relevant to anyone bringing open-source software into the enterprise.

Academic courses increasingly depend on complex software environments. Reproducing those environments across student laptops is difficult, fragile, and time-consuming. For some classes, a better model is to move the course environment out of individual laptops and into shared cloud infrastructure, where students can access consistent, preconfigured environments through a browser.

This work started as part of the Open Education Project (OPE), which focuses on using modern open source technologies to help educators create, publish, and operationalize open educational materials. OPE provides tools for authoring course content, including open textbooks and containerized learning environments.

This presentation shifts the focus from authoring course materials to operating courses at scale. We will explore how academic courses can be run on OpenShift, drawing from lessons learned supporting hundreds of students in the Mass Open Cloud (MOC) every semester. The focus will be on the infrastructure and operational patterns needed to support real courses: deploying course environments, provisioning student access, managing shared cluster resources, and supporting browser-based workflows.

We will discuss how OpenShift can reduce student setup friction, improve reproducibility, and give educators a flexible platform for running modern computing courses.