QuakerRanter.org

Update 7/5: FGC’s Youth Ministries site now seems to be including appropriate credit for the material that QuakerQuaker is providing. I consider the following post mostly moot, an inter-family squabble as we all learn how established organizations and independent networks can learn to work together.

Today Friends General Conference launched a new website for its Quaker youth program that includes a large amount of material stolen from QuakerQuaker’s “quaker.youth” category. I first noticed this two weeks ago when Google picked up the draft website. I immediately contacted Youth Ministries coordinator Emily Stewart who said she didn’t know anything and referred me to their new webmaster. Today he launched the site, Quakeryouth.org, and sent me an email claiming there was attribution. It’s there, buried on a page few will see, with no link.

Shame on FGC. Every page that includes materials compiled by QuakerQuaker should say so and have a link.

I compiled almost every entry on some of these pages: tracking the blogs, selecting the posts, writing the headlines and finding what I hope was the most enticing pullquote for a description. Republishing it without thanks and a link back isn’t cool. FGC is claiming all this work as their own. It isn’t.

I built QuakerQuaker in a spirit of openness, very consciously using services that are publicly accessible. I’ve always known that these feeds could be republished without attribution (stolen feeds is a growing problem for all blogs) but I’ve been relying on the spirit of let’s-build-this-together that’s been at the heart of the Quaker blogosphere and which should be at the heart of the Quaker movement.

I’ve been awfully nice to Friends General Conference over the last nine months. Up until today’s site launch I can all but guarantee that some of the most followed Quaker links to Quakeryouth.org came from my sites. I widely publicized the Burlington youth conference, the Barnesville Quaker Camp, and the currently-in-progress Gathering. One of QuakerQuaker’s explicit missions is supporting the ministry of young adult Friends (YAF’s in FGC parlance). I am glad that FGC seems willing to promote and adopt the QuakerQuaker tagging standard. By its actions, FGC is implicitly recognizing QuakerQuaker’s importance to young Friends. But if an organization isn’t willing to credit the work of others, it shouldn’t include the material. Period.

It doesn’t have to be this way. QuakerQuaker co-editor C. Wess Daniels and I worked with the staff of Britain Yearly Meeting to cover May’s annual sessions and support their official sessions blog (Wess himself wrote for it). BYM helped publicize the QuakerQuaker tagging system (“quaker.britain-ym” in that instance) and we re-wrote the system to pull in their blog.

I’m currently working closely with staff of Friends World Committee for Consultation to cover their upcoming Triennial in Dublin. This has included my programming a custom feed with javascript support so that they can pull the QuakerQuaker material into a special page on the FWCC site itself. I’ve done this publicity work for Britain Yearly Meeting and FWCC for free, in the interest of sharing Friends’ good news with the world.

All this work is more than just whipping up a computer-generated feed. I have a sophisticated series of searches that allows me to scan the internet daily for Quaker posts and I watch what items are being added to the feed (by trouble-makers, spammers or automation) and take out inappropriate links. All of this work takes time out of every day, time that I’m volunteering, time that could be spent with my family or on much-needed paid work. It’s quite discouraging to see this material taken without request or attribution by a Quaker organization.

If you think of the Quaker blogosphere as a garden, I’m nurturing new plants by finding new bloggers, encouraging them with links, attention and a lot of behind-the-scenes friendly emails. I’m also weeding out the latest spam attacks and bringing human intelligence to a semi-automated process so that the material is focused, relevant and interesting. Computers don’t create communities: caring, thoughtful and selfless people do. And it’s not just me, it’s the half dozen QuakerQuaker co-editors and the extended family of Quaker bloggers who routinely gather together from our separate traditions to swap stories, visions and faith around the metaphorical campfire that is QuakerQuaker.

Again: any page that includes material from QuakerQuaker should say so and include a link back to the site. FGC needs to do the right thing and either add attribution or stop pulling from the QuakerQuaker feed.