May 14

A modern-day Commonplace Book?

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From a post by Jamie Todd Rubin, “Going Paper­less: How Penul­ti­mate and Ever­note Have Replaced My Pocket Note­book,” I’ve learned the con­cept of the “Com­mon­place Book,” which he attrib­utes it to Jefferson:

The notion for the “com­mon­place book” comes from Thomas Jef­fer­son, who used just such a book to cap­ture pretty much any­thing: pas­sages from books he was read­ing, notes, sketches, you name it.

Wikipedia takes it fur­ther back in its entry on Com­mon­place books. The name comes from the latin locus com­mu­nis and the form got its start in a new form of fifteen-century bound journal:

Such books were essen­tially scrap­books filled with items of every kind: med­ical recipes, quotes, let­ters, poems, tables of weights and mea­sures, proverbs, prayers, legal for­mu­las. Com­mon­places were used by read­ers, writ­ers, stu­dents, and schol­ars as an aid for remem­ber­ing use­ful con­cepts or facts they had learned. Each com­mon­place book was unique to its creator’s par­tic­u­lar interests.

I really like this idea. I’ve been think­ing a lot about work­flows recently (and lis­ten­ing to way too many geek pod­casts on my com­mute). I’ve been mud­dling my way toward some­thing like this. I’m cur­rently using Ever­note to log a lot of my life but there’s scraps of inter­est­ing tid­bits that have no home. An exam­ple from half an hour ago: I was lis­ten­ing to Pan­dora the train when along came an unfa­mil­iar song I wanted to remem­ber for later. A Com­mon­place book would be a nat­ural place to record this infor­ma­tion (First Aid Kit’s Lion’s Roar if you must know, think Bon­nie Raitt steps out with Townes van Zandt for a secret assig­na­tion at a Stock­holm open mic night.)

Of course, being a twenty-first cen­tury dig­i­tal native, my work­flow would be elec­tronic. What I imag­ine is a sin­gle Ever­note page that holds a month’s worth of the bits that come along. I have some­thing sim­i­lar with a log, a sin­gle file with one line entries (lots of Ifttt automa­tions like logged Foursquare check-ins, along with notes-to-self of mile­stones like issues sent to press, etc.). I’ll start set­ting this up.

May 13

Bits and pieces, remembering blogging

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I really should blog here more. I really should. I spend a lot of my time these days shar­ing other people’s ideas. Most recently, on Friends Jour­nal you can see my inter­view with Jon Watts (co-conducted with Megan Kietzman-Nicklin). The three of us talked on and on for quite some time; it was only an inflex­i­ble train sched­ule that ended my participation.

The favorite part of talk­ing with Jon is his enthu­si­asm and his tal­ent for keep­ing his sights set on the long pic­ture (my favorite ques­tion was ask­ing why he started with a Quaker fig­ure so obscure even I had to look him up). It’s easy to get caught up in the bus­tle of dead­lines and to-do lists and to start to for­get why we’re doing this work as pro­fes­sional Quak­ers. There is a real­ity behind the word counts. As Friends, we are shar­ing the good news of 350+ years of spir­i­tual adven­tur­ing: obser­va­tions, strug­gles, and imperfect-but-genuine attempts to fol­low Inward Light of the Gospels.

Theo writing for his class blog (seriously)My nine year old son Theo is blog­ging as a class assign­ment. I think they’ve been sup­posed to be writ­ing there for awhile but he’s really only got­ten the bug in the last few weeks. It’s a full-on Word­Press site, but with cer­tain restric­tions (most notably, posts only become pub­lic after the class­room teacher has had a chance to review and vet them). It’s cer­tain ironic to see one of my kids blog­ging more than me!

Enough blog­ging for today. Time to put the rest of the awake kids to bed. I’m going to try to have more reg­u­lar small posts so as to get back into the blog­ging habit. In the mean­time, I’m always active on my Tum­blr site (which shows up as the side­bar to the right). It’s the bucket for my inter­net curations–videos and links I find inter­est­ing, and my own pic­tures and miscellanea.

Mar 23

Outreach gets people to your meetinghouse / Hospitality keeps people returning.

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Over on Twit­ter feed came a tweet (h/t revrevwine):

seo - Google SearchTo trans­late, SEO is “search engine opti­miza­tion,” the often-huckersterish art of trick­ing Google to dis­play your web­site higher than your com­peti­tors in search results. “Usabil­ity” is the catch-all term for mak­ing your web­site easy to nav­i­gate and invit­ing to vis­i­tors. Com­pa­nies with deep pock­ets often want to spend a lot of money on SEO, when most of the time the most viable long-term solu­tion to rank­ing high with search engines is to pro­vide vis­i­tors with good rea­sons to visit your site. What if we applied these prin­ci­ples to our churches and meet­ing­houses and swapped the terms?

Out­reach gets peo­ple to your meet­ing­house /
Hos­pi­tal­ity keeps peo­ple returning.

A lot of Quaker meet­ing­houses have pretty good “nat­ural SEO.” Here in the U.S. East Coast, they’re often near a major road in the mid­dle of town. If they’re lucky there are a few his­tor­i­cal mark­ers of notable Quak­ers and if they are really lucky there’s a highly-respected Friends school nearby. All these meet­ings really have to do is put a nice sign out front and table a few town events every year. The rest is cov­ered. Although we do get the occa­sional “aren’t you all Amish?” com­ments, we have a much wider rep­u­ta­tion that our num­bers would nec­es­sar­ily war­rant. We rank pretty high.

But what are the lessons of hos­pi­tal­ity we could work on? Do we pro­vide places where spir­i­tual seek­ers can both grow per­son­ally and engage in the impor­tant ques­tions of the faith in the mod­ern world? Are we invi­ta­tional, bring­ing peo­ple into our homes and into our lives for shared meals and conversations?

In my free­lance days when I was hired to work on SEO I ran through a series of sta­tis­ti­cal reports and redesigned some under­per­form­ing pages, but then turned my atten­tion to the client’s con­tent. It was in this realm that my great­est quan­tifi­able suc­cesses occurred. At the heart of the con­tent work was ask­ing how could the site could more fully engage with first-time vis­i­tors. The “usabil­ity con­sid­er­a­tions” on the Wikipedia page on usabil­ity could be eas­ily adapted as queries:

Who are the users, what do they know, what can they learn? What do users want or need to do? What is the users’ gen­eral back­ground? What is the users’ con­text for work­ing? What must be left to the machine? Can users eas­ily accom­plish intended tasks at their desired speed? How much train­ing do users need? What doc­u­men­ta­tion or other sup­port­ing mate­ri­als are avail­able to help the user?

I’d love to see Friends con­sider this more. FGC’s “New Meet­ings Tool­box” has a sec­tion on wel­com­ing new­com­ers. But I’d love to hear more sto­ries about how we’re work­ing on the “usabil­ity” of our spir­i­tual communities.

Mar 23

Why I’m fasting with @eqat against mountaintop mining

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On March 22nd, I joined the fast against moun­tain­top coal min­ing called by the Earth Quaker Action Team.

“Old Zinc Fac­tory; Palmer­ton” by road_less_trvled on Flickr (cre­ative com­mons license)

When I was grow­ing up we’d make the trip from Philadel­phia to my grandmother’s house a cou­ple of times a year. As we headed north, the high­way threaded across farm fields and through rock cuts in the hills. About an hour in, we’d start notic­ing the thin blue band on the hori­zon. It would slowly get larger and larger until Blue Moun­tain loomed in front of us and we whooshed into Lehigh Tunnel.

My Nana lived on the other side of that moun­tain. On this side the moun­tain­side was red. The forests that car­peted the rest of the thousand-mile ridge had been ripped up by the decades of chem­i­cals pour­ing out if the smoke­stacks of the giant zinc pro­cess­ing fac­to­ries that book­ended the town of Palmerton.

When con­ver­sa­tion turned to adult mat­ters, I’d wan­der to the back porch and count the dirt bike trails going up the bar­ren moun­tain. When I tired of that I’d play in the stones of my grandmother’s back­yard. Even grass didn’t grow in this town. Ambi­tious home­own­ers would some­times make rock gar­dens for the space in front of each house that had been designed for marigolds, but most of the town had got­ten used to the absence of green. When the EPA finally got around to declar­ing the moun­tain a super­fund site we all snorted dis­mis­sively. My grand­mother was actu­ally offended, hav­ing long ago con­vinced her­self that the fac­tory effu­sions must be healthy.

The Palmer­ton fac­to­ries were funded by New York bankers. Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity got mul­ti­ple multimillion-dollar bequests in the wills of the founders of the zinc com­pany. I’m sure there are still a few resid­ual trust funds pay­ing out dividends.

Today we have Philadel­phia and Pitts­burgh bankers orches­trat­ing the removal of the moun­tain­tops in West Vir­ginia. As our tech­nol­ogy has improved so has our capac­ity for ill-considered mass destruc­tion of our nat­ural surroundings.

All liv­ing crea­tures have an impact on their sur­round­ings. My com­forts rely on the coal, oil, and nat­ural gas that are brought into our cities and towns. But I do know we can do bet­ter. I’m opti­mistic enough to can find ways to live together on this Earth that don’t break our moun­tains or poi­son our neighbors.

Photo: “Old Zinc Fac­tory; Palmer­ton” by road_less_trvled on Flickr (cre­ative com­mons license)