Tag Archives: jon watts

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.

Apr 12

Quakermaps: DIY Friends FTW!

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A few weeks ago Micah Bales IM’ed me, as he often does, and asked for my feed­back on a project he and Jon Watts were work­ing on. They were build­ing a map of all the Friends meet­ing­houses and churches in the coun­try, sub-divided by geog­ra­phy, wor­ship style, etc.

My first reac­tion was “huh?” I war­ily responded: “you do know about FGC’s Quak​erfinder​.org and FWCC’s Meet­ing Map, right?” I had helped to build both sites and attested to the amount of work they rep­re­sent. I was think­ing of a kind way of dis­cour­ag­ing Micah from this her­culean task when he told me he and Jon were half done. He sent me the link: a beau­ti­ful web­site, full of cool maps, which they’ve now pub­licly announced at Quak​ermaps​.com. I tried to find more prob­lems but he kept answer­ing them: “well, you need to have each meet­ing have it’s own page,” “it does,” “well but to be really cool you’d have to let meet­ings update infor­ma­tion directly” (an idea I sug­gested to FGC last month), “they will.” There’s still a lot of inputting to be done, but it’s already fabulous.
Two peo­ple work­ing a series of long days inputting infor­ma­tion and embed­ding it on Word­Press have cre­ated the coolest Meet­ing direc­tory going. There’s no six-figure grants from Quaker foun­da­tions, no cer­ti­fied pro­gram­mers, no series of orga­niz­ing con­sul­ta­tions. No Sales­force account, Dru­pal instal­la­tions, Ver­ti­cal Response signups. No high paid con­sul­tants yakking in what­ever consultant-speak is trendy this year.
Just two guys using open source and free, with the cost being time spent together shar­ing this project–time well spent build­ing their friend­ship, I suspect.
I hope everyone’s notic­ing just how cool this is–and not just the maps, but the way it’s come together. Micah and Jon grew up in two dif­fer­ent branches of Friends. As I under­stand they got to know each other larg­erly through Jon’s now-famous and much-debated video Dance Party Erupts dur­ing Quaker Meet­ing for Wor­ship. They built a friend­ship (which you can hear in Micah’s recent inter­view of Jon) and then started a cool project to share with the world.
Con­ver­gent Friends isn’t a the­ol­ogy or a spe­cific group of peo­ple, but a dif­fer­ent way of relat­ing and work­ing together. The way I see it, Quak​ermaps​.com proves that Quak​erQuaker​.org is not a fluke. The inter­net exposes us to peo­ple out­side our nat­ural com­fort zones and pro­vides us ways to meet, work together and pub­lish col­lab­o­ra­tions with min­i­mal invest­ment. The quick response, flex­i­bil­ity and off-the-clock ethos can come up with truly inno­vated work. I think the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends is enter­ing a new era of DIY orga­niz­ing and I’m very excited. Micah and Jon FTW!
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