Quaker Gatherings covered by blogs

Just the quickest of posts to announce that Quaker Gatherings are now being covered on QuakerQuaker. Each event page tries to list all blog posts that refer to the event in question.

Past events covered: February's Young Adult Friends Gathering in New Jersey and FUM Board Meeting in Kenya, and the Quaker Heritage Day in Berkeley California last week. Upcoming events are FWCC Americas Meeting in Rhode Island (it includes a panel on Convergent Friends featuring Robin M and C Wess Daniels, May's Britain Yearly Meeting Sessions that will feature an official blog, and this summer's FGC Gathering whose damnably attractive advance program went up today.

I'm pretty excited by this development, which is really just a reflection of the growth of Quaker blogging. Too much of the public news from Quaker events has been barely-conceal boosterism, a publicity fluff piece for the sponsoring organization. In other words: dull and trite. The growing Quaker blog culture is very different from that of mainline Quaker institutions. There's a much greater transparency and openness and less of a sense that we have to identify and defend a particular Quaker tradition. We're much more willing to tell stories and wrestle with controversies.

Quaker events (at least in networked North America) are now being covered online in real time with more depth and opinion that we've previously seen. I think this is a good kick-in-the-pants for the bureaucratic dinosaurs of institutional Quakerism and an exciting opportunity for getting new voices and opinions heard.

As I see events unfolding in the Quakerosphere, I'll add more pages. They won't be limited to U.S. and British events except that we seem to be dominating this realm still. If too many events start being covered (which is only a matter of time) I'll have to figure out some way of breaking them down more.