Media

An interview with Raye, a member of Ohio Yearly Meeting Conservative who serves on their Electronic Outreach Committee. You can also watch it on QuakerQuaker: Quaker Video and Electronic Outreach.

Raye: Ohio Yearly Meeting holds our yearly meeting in Barnesville Ohio--some people know us as those Barnesville folks. We have an electronic Outreach Committee and that includes the oversight and ministry associated with our website. We spend time thinking about how to open up to people who might be interested in Friends' ways and might want to know more about us whether or not they've ever read the Journal of George Fox. We're trying to expand our witness, if you will.

One of the questions that has come up in this electronic outreach group is: what types of communication or video are useful for someone to get to know us but also respectful of the fact that we do worship and that worship is a spiritually intimate time. We're trying to bridge and deal with respecting the worshippers, the Friends themselves, to not put on a performance and yet to try to communicate what it is that is edifying in practice and worship.

Martin: How do you give newcomers a taste of Quakers without directing it too much? If you just have that silent empty box it's hard for newcomers to know what should be filling that box.

Raye: One of the things Friends have done for hundreds of years is to publish, to keep journals and to share that. But that's not all there is to the Friends experience. There are those quiet times and those moments of ministry that we believe are Spirit-inspired. Many of us wish we could give people a little taste of that because that doesn't show up in a lot of published writings. That spontaneous and timely, and at times prophetic, witness that we see in our Meetings. We have considered digital video as a way to do that.

Martin: I love the video possibilities here. Video can be a way of reaching out to more people.

Raye: It's not just anything that can be written. Certainly the writings that have been published are very helpful in getting some sort of a glimmer of where we have been, or in some cases where we are headed or where we are. But there is nothing like that experience of being with Friends in meeting. It doesn't always happen but there are these moments called a covered meeting or a gathered meeting where everybody seems to be in the same place spiritually and when seems to be messages and gifts coming through people. That's difficult to get across.

We're hoping that with video we can discuss these kinds of things after the fact. We don't want to turn it into a spectator sport or performance.

Martin: Authenticity is a key part of the Quaker message. You're not practicing what you're going to say for First Day or Sunday. You're sitting there and waiting for that immediate spirit to come upon you.

Raye: We don't know when that will happen. There are meetings where everybody is very quiet, where there's a sense of that spirit and unity but it may be an outwardly quiet meeting. I have been in meetings where someone stood up and began to sing their message or a psalm or someone had a wonderful sermon that was perfect for the moment. These things happen but we don't know when they will.

Long in the works, my O'Reilly Media-published "Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators" is available. The title could sort of be boiled down to "hey this QuakerQuaker.org thing has become kind of neat" but it's more than that. I wax lyrical about the different kind of aggregator community sites and I throw a new tongue-twister into the social media arena: "folksonomic density" (Google it now kids and you'll see the only references are mine; a few years from now you can say you knew the guy who coined the phrase that set the technosphere on fire and launched Web 3.0 and ushered in the second phase of the Age of Aquarius, yada yada).

A hundred thank you's to my fine and patient editor S. (don't know if you want to be outed here). I've been an editor myself in one capacity or another for fifteen years (I've sometimes even been paid for it) so it was educational to experience the relationship from the other side. I wrote this while living an insane schedule and it's amazing I found any time at get all this down.

As luck would have it I've just gotten my design site at MartinKelley.com up and running fully again, so I hope to do some posts related to the PDF in the weeks to come. In the meantime, below is the marketing copy for Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators. It is available for $9.99 from the O'Reilly website.

Web aggregators select and present content culled from multiple sources, playing an important taste-making and promotional role. Larger aggregators are starting to compete with mainstream news sources but a new class of niche and do-it-yourself aggregators are organizing around specific interests. Niche aggregators harness the power of the internet to build communities previously separated by geography or institutional inertia. These micro-communities serve a trend-setting role. Understanding their operation is critical for those wanting to understand or predict cultural change and for those who want to harness the power of the long tail by catering to niches.

For any bleeding edge Web 2.0 Quakers out there, there's now a QuakerQuaker FriendFeed account to go along with its Twitter account. Both accounts simply spit out the QuakerQuaker RSS feed but there might be some practical uses. I actually follow QQ primary by Twitter these days and those who don't mind annoying IM pop-ups could get instant alerts.

Web 2.0 everywhere man Robert Scoble recently posted that many of his conversations and comments have moved away from his blog and over to FriendFeed. I don't see that occurring anytime soon with QQ but I'll set the accounts up and see what happens. I've hooked my own Twitter and FriendFeed accounts up with QuakerQuaker, so that's one way I'm cross-linking with this possible overlay of QQ.

For what it's worth I've always assumed that QQ is relatively temporary, an initial meeting ground for a network of online Friends that will continue to expand into different forms. I'm hoping we can pick the best media to use and not just jump on the latest trends. As far as the Religious Society of Friends is concerned, I'd say the two most important tests of a new media is it's ability to outreach to new people and its utility in helping to construct a shared vision of spiritual renewal.

On these test, Facebook has been a complete failure. So many promising bloggers have disappeared and seem to spend their online time swapping suggestive messages on Facebook (find a hotel room folks) or share animated gifs with 257 of their closed "friends." Quaker Friends tend to be a clannish bunch and Facebook has really fed into that (unfortunate) part of our persona. Blogging seemed to be resuscitating the idea of the "Public Friend," someone who was willing to share their Quaker identity with the general public. That's still happening but it seems to have slowed down quite a bit. I'm not ready to close my own Facebook account but I would like to see Friends really think about which social media we spend our time on. Friends have always been adapting--railroads, newspapers, frequently flier miles have all affected how we communicate with each other and the outside world. Computer networking is just the latest wrinkle.

As a personal aside, the worst thing to happen to my Quaker blogging has been the lack of a commute (except for a short hop to do some Haddonfield web design a few times a week). I'm no longer stranded on a train for hours a week with nothing to do but read the journal of Samuel Bownas or throw open my laptop to write about the latest idea that flits through my head. Ah the travails of telecommuting!

We went to family fav-place Longwood Gardens last night for New Year's eve. It was cold but the lights on all the trees were beautiful and the fireworks were loud and fun. Going around I kept thinking about how many cameras were around. I took a few photos of course, but I realized I'm starting to develop a reaction to Obsessive Photography Disorder. How many fuzzy pictures of long-ago fireworks do people need to store on their hard drives?

A few weeks ago I took an eye-opening picture at a wedding. It was a quick photo of the bride and father walking down the "aisle" (it was more a space between tables in a small banquet room). I must have had squirming Francis in one arm, the camera in the other, because it's all blurry. The light's bad, there's red eye, it's totally not something to send up to Flickr. But what's haunting about the picture is the background: behind the bride you can see four people. From left to right, they are: taking a picture, holding camera at neck level ready to take a picture, leaning back from the camera screen setting up a shot, and looking down at a display reviewing the just-taken picture. This is a wedding and it's the dramatic part: the bride's just entered the room and is about to be given away by her father (it's a second wedding so I can't take the symbolism too far, but still this should be a holy moment).

Many Friends Meetings ban cameras in wedding ceremonies and I shouldn't have relaxed my standards to take my own photograph of the wedding-in-progress. There are times where our presence is much more important than any documentation. I dare say that none of the two-dozen or so walking-down-the-aisle photos taken that day are worth developing or printing. I use my picture-taking for memory's sake and love looking at old shots of the family, and a few of the pictures I took that day are definite keepers. But us compulsive shutter bugs need to know when to put the camera down.

Top: The Architect at work. Left: the stitches; monkey Francis au natural in the morning; another view of The Architect.

Over on Eileen Flanagan's Imperfect Serenity, there's an interesting post on blog publicity, "Blogging dilemmas," inspired in part by Robin M"'s recent "How did you get here?" post. Both bring up interesting questions about the role of blogs in community building and the location of that line that separates good blogging from mere self-promotion and pandering.

Readers will probably be unsurprised to learn that I use Technorati, Google Blog Search, etc., every day to keep track of the Quaker blogosphere. I act as a kind of community organizer and my searches are for interesting posts talking about Quakers (until reading Eileen's post I hadn't check my Technorati "rank" in months). Many people's first introduction to QuakerQuaker.org is getting linked from it, and I suspect I've accidentally outed a few beginning bloggers who hadn't told anyone of their new blog!

I have a professional blog on web design and analytics (with a somewhat off-topic but satisfying post on top at the moment) and separating that out has allowed me to use this personal blog, QuakerRanter, for whatever I like. Most regularly readers would say it focuses on Quakerism and cute kid pictures and while those are the most common posts, the most read posts are the minor fascinations I indulge myself with occasionally. Quaker plain dress is something I practice but don't think about most of the time (806 readers in past month). My wife and I love to bust on bad baby names and unfairly unpopular baby names (627 visits). I've also detailed some outings to semi-legendary South Jersey haunts (317) and score high on searches to them.

The conventional wisdom of the blog-as-publicity tool crowd would probably say these off-topic posts are distracting my core audience. Perhaps, but they're infrequent on the blog and long-lived on Google. Besides, I think it helps people to know I'm not just obsessed with one topic. Being a part of a real community means knowing each other in all of our quirks. I'm more tender and forgiving of other Quaker bloggers when I know more of their story: it puts what they say into a context that makes it sound more lived, less ideological. There's certainly good reasons for tightly-focused professional blogs (I'd drop Techcrunch from my blogroll if they started posting kids pictures!), but as more people read posts through feeds and aggregators I wonder if there's going to be as much pressure for personal, community-oriented blogs to be as single-minded in their focus.

We all have diverse, quirky interests so why not indulge them? I have seen blogs that try too hard to pander to particular audiences and boy, are they boring! A certain degree of idiosyncrasy and subjective orneriness is probably essential. Personality is at least as important as focus.

PS: I'm also interested in making sure I don't loose the core audience with all my side trips, hence the "latest Quaker posts" at the top of the page. I have at least one request for a Quaker-only RSS feed and will eventually get that going.
PPS: As if on queue, the next post in Google Reader after Eileen's is Avinish Kaushik's Blog Metrics: Six recommendations for measuring your success. Parts of it are probably a bit technical for most QR readers but it's useful for thinking about blogs as outreach.

Over on my design blog I've just posted an article, Banking on reputations, which looks at how the websites for high-profile cultural institutions are often built without regard to natural web publicity--there's no focus on net culture or search engine visibility. The sites do get visited, but only because of the reputation of the institution itself. My guess is that people go to them for very specific functions (looking up a phone number, ordering tickets, etc.). I finish by asking the question, "Are the audiences of high brow institutions so full of hip young audiences that they can steer clear of web-centric marketing?"

I won't belabor the point, but I wonder if something similar is happening within Friends. It's kind of weird that only two people have commented on Johan Maurer's blog post about Baltimore Yearly Meeting's report on Friends United Meeting. Johan's post may well be the only place where online discussion about this particular report is available. I gave a plug for it and it was the most popular link from QuakerQuaker, so I know people are seeing it. The larger issue is dealt with elsewhere (Bill Samuel has a particularly useful resource page) but Johan's piece seems to be getting a big yawn.

It's been superseded as the most popular QuakerQuaker link by a lighthearted call for an International Talk Like a Quaker Day put up by a Livejournal blogger. It's fun but it's about as serious as you might expect. It's getting picked up on a number of blogs, has more links than Johan's piece and at current count has thirteen commenters. I think it's a great way to poke a little fun of ourselves and think about outreach and I'm happy to link to it but I have to think there's a lesson in its popularity vis-a-vis Johan's post.

Here's the inevitable question: do most Quakers just not care about Friends United Meeting or Baltimore Yearly Meeting, about a modern day culture clash that is but a few degrees from boiling over into full-scale institutional schism? For all my bravado I'm as much an institutional Quaker as anyone else. I care about our denominational politics but do others, and do they really?

Yearly meeting sessions and more entertainment-focused Quaker gatherings are lucky if they get three to five percent attendance. The governing body of my yearly meeting is made up of about one percent of its membership; add a percent or two or three and you have how many people actually pay any kind of attention to it or to yearly meeting politics. A few years ago a Quaker publisher commissioned a prominent Friend to write an update to liberal Friends' most widely read introductory book and she mangled the whole thing (down to a totally made-up acronym for FWCC) and no one noticed till after publication--even insiders don't care about most of this!

Are the bulk of most contemporary Friends post-institutional? The percentage of Friends involved in the work of our religious bodies has perhaps always been small, but the divide seems more striking now that the internet is providing competition. The big Quaker institutions skate on being recognized as official bodies but if their participation rate is low, their recognition factor small, and their ability to influence the Quaker culture therefore minimal, then are they really so important? After six years of marriage I can hear my wife's question as a Quaker-turned-Catholic: where does the religious authority of these bodies come from? As someone who sees the world through a sociological/historical perspective, my question is complementary but somewhat different: if so few people care, then is there authority? The only time I see Friends close to tears over any of this is when a schism might mean the loss of control over a beloved school or campground--factor out the sentimental factor and what's left?

I don't think a diminishing influence is a positive trend, but it won't go away if we bury our heads in the sand (or in committees). How are today's generation of Friends going to deal with changing cultural forces that are threatening to undermine our current practices? And how might we use the new opportunities to advance the Quaker message and Christ's agenda?

This morning I'm working on the Pete Seeger section of Quakersong.org, the website of Annie Paterson and Peter Blood (I'm their webmaster). Parts of their site are amazing--the Quakers and Music page has become a directory of sorts for all the many Quaker musicians out there (who knew there were so many!). But the Pete Seeger is still mostly a collection of CDs that Peter & Annie have for sale.

So I was wondering what a good Pete Seeger page might look like and starting surfing around. There's a great fan page which is regularly updated but has bravely decided to maintain its original design since it was founded eleven years ago. And Wikipedia does its usual fine job at a biography. But the gold mine is YouTube.

A year ago a user uploaded three clips from Rainbow Quest, a short-lived TV program Pete put together for a low-wattage UHF station out of Newark in the mid-60s (it's now a Telemundo affiliate broadcasting recycled Mexican soaps for its prime time schedule). I don't know what kind of copyright issues there are on something like this but it's great fun to see these old clips. Making this material widely available is one of the joys of YouTube (well, that and watching recapturing the innocence of our over-commercialized youth). I'll leave you with this, a clip of Pete singing with June Carter and Johnny "I'm soooo stoooned" Cash a few years before they married.

Everyone can now add posts to the QuakerQuaker category listings. Simply bookmark the post in Del.icio.us, list the QQ categories and it will be added to the page.

For example, say you've seen just the coolest post on Convergent Friends. Go to the Convergent Friends page to find the right "tag"--in this case "quaker.convergent". Bookmark the post you like, write a title and description and list "quaker.convergent" as its tag. An hour or so later the post will show up on the Convergent Friends page. How cool is that? Here are instruction on how to use Del.icio.us and title pages.

I'm pleased to announce that my latest freelance project has just launched: BetsyCazden.com. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about the technology behind the site or its design, but the Quaker geek in me is so happy to see it. Long-term readers will remember my excited post Fellowship Model of Liberal Quakers, written after reading Betsy's Beacon Hill Friends pamphlet Fellowships, Conferences, and Associations. Betsy is one of the small number of Quaker historians willing to take on contemporary history and her observations can be quite insightful. I hope she'll find an even wider audience with this site and the blog that she plans to add soon.