Share my offendedness (pleeeaaase)

June 20, 2013

06/20/201311/10/2016 · Martin Kelley

Sometimes I see blog posts that make me really sad at the state of journalism. PhilyMag is the latest but you have the follow the daisy-chain of ramped-up hyperbole back just to make see how ridiculous it is.

The restaurant chain Red Robin recently made a fifteen-second TV ad whose joke is that its veggie-burgers are perfect for customers whose teenage daughters are “going through a phase.” It’s had rather limited airplay (it’s the 450th or so most run ad in the past 30 days) but still, Business Insider ran a piece on it which claimed that “the chain managed to insult all potential vegetarian and vegan customers” with the ad. For evidence, it cited three mild comments on Red Robin’s Facebook page. Fair enough.

But then the page-view-whores at Huffington Post saw the BI piece and wrote that Red Robin is “under fire for dissing vegetarians,” still citing just those Facebook comments. Under fire? For three comments?

Sensing fresh (veggie?) meat, Phillymag links to HuffPost to claim that ”vegetarians and vegans far and wide are freaking out” and that a boycott has been declared. The author tells us that “‘Offended’ gets tossed around so rapidly” and it must be true, right?, as she uses it three more times just in her opening paragraph. It’s a pity that none of the three Facebook commenters were considerate enough to actually use the words “outrage” or “boycott.” One described the ad as “disappointing” (ouch!). Another used the word “dissatisfied” (zing!), though he was speaking not about the ad per se but rather a recent visit to the restaurant.

Seems like if there is an epidemic of offended-ness going on, we might take a look at the desperation of what passes for modern journalism these days. Offended-ness must get page views, so why not be offended at being offended? (I imagine some hack further down the pageview food chain is right now reading the Phillymag piece and typing out a headline about the worldwide vegan army issuing a fatwa on the teenage daughters of Red Roof executives.) Is this really the kind of crap that people like to share on Facebook? Do Internet users just not follow links backward to judge if there’s any truth to outrage posts on outrage? I usually ignore this kind of junk even to read past the ridiculous headline. But the phenomenon is all too ubiquitous on the interwebs these days and is really so unnecessarily divisive and stereotype-perpetuating.

A modern-day Commonplace Book?

May 14, 2013

05/14/201303/12/2018 · Martin Kelley

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.

Plain like Barack

September 17, 2012

09/17/201203/11/2013 · Martin Kelley

As befits a Quaker witness, when I felt the nudge to plainness ten years ago, I didn’t quite know where it would take me. I trusted the spiritual nudges enough to assume there were lessons to learn. I had witnessed a God-centering in others who shared my spiritual conditions and I knew from reading that plainness was a typical first step of “infant ministers.” But all I had been given was the invitation to walk a particular path.

After the initial excitements, I settled into a routine and discovered I had lost the “what to wear?!” angst of getting dressed in the mornings. Gone too was the “who am I?” drama that accompanied catalog browsing. As clothes wore out and were retired, I reduced my closet down to a small set of choices, all variations on one another. Now when I get dressed I don’t worry about who I will see that day, who I should impress, whether one pair of shoes goes with a certain sweater, etc.

Apparently, I share this practice with the forty-fourth president. In “Obama’s Way,” a wide-ranging profile in Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis shares the President’s attitude about clothes:

[He] was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence… You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

A few distracting caveats: we can assume Obama’s grey and blue suits are bespoke and cost upwards of a thousand dollars apiece. He probably has a closet full of them. He has staff that cleans them, stores them, and lays them out for him in the morning. You won’t find Barack wandering the aisles of the Capitol Hill Macy’s or the Langley Hill Men’s Warehouse. Michelle’s never running things to the dry cleaners, and Sasha and Malia aren’t pairing socks from the laundry bin after coming home from school. A President Romney’s closet would also feature gray and blue (though his underwear drawer would be more unconventional). When protocol calls for the commander-in-chief to deviate from suits – to don a tux perhaps – one appears. Presidential plainness is far from simple.

The Quaker movement started as an invitation to common sense. Everyone could join. Early Friends were minimalists on fire, fearless in abandoning anything that got in the way of spiritual truth. In a few short years they methodically worked their way to the same conclusions as a twenty-first century U.S. president: human decision-making resources are finite; our attention is at a premium. If we have a job to do (run a country, witness God’s Kingdom), then we should clear ourselves of unnecessary distractions to focus on the essentials. Those core experiential truths have lasting value. As Jefferson might say, they are self-evident, even if they still seem radically peculiar to the wider world.

Unfortunately the kind of plainness that Barack and I are talking about is a kind of mind-hack, its power largely strategic. I’d love to see a president take up the challenge of some hardcore Quaker values. How about the testimony against war? Eliza Gurney got pretty far in correspondence with Obama’s hero, honest Abe, but even he punted responsibility to divine will. The witness continues.

Were Friends part of Obama’s Evolution?

May 10, 2012

05/10/201205/12/2016 · Martin Kelley

President Obama’s been attributing some of his so-called “evolution” on same-sex marriage to his daughters. As he told ABC’s Robin Roberts:

You know, Malia and Sasha, they have friends whose parents are same-sex couples. There have been times where Michelle and I have been sitting around the dinner table, and we’re talking about their friends and their parents and Malia and Sasha, it wouldn’t dawn on them that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently. It doesn’t make sense to them and, frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.

So where do Obama’s daughter’s independent friends come from? Like most tweens the likeliest answer is school – in their case, Sidwell Friends. It’s not unlikely that the “evolution” owed something to the Quaker environment there.

Most elite Quaker schools have only a token base of Quaker students and teachers, so we can’t assume that Malia and Sasha’s friends are Friends. Like many outward-facing Quaker institutions, modern Friends schools’ strongest claim to Quakerism is the values and discernment techniques they share with the wider world. They consciously transmit a style and pedagogy and create an environment of openness and diversity. Of course the Obama kids are going to rub up against non-traditional marriages at a East Coast Quaker school. And no one should be surprised if they bring a little of that back home when the school bus drops them off at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

NYTimes: Obama Girls Influence the President — Again
President Obama often uses his daughters, Malia and Sasha, as object lessons in explaining his reasoning behind important policy positions.

Spiritual Biodiversity and Religious Inevitability

August 2, 2011

08/02/201107/30/2015 · Martin Kelley

Emigrants from the Irish potato famine, via Wikipedia

People sometimes get pretty worked up about convincing each other of an matter of pressing importance. We think we have The Answer about The Issue and that if we just repeat ourselves loud enough and often enough the obviousness of our position will win out. It becomes our duty, in fact, to repeat it loud and often. If we happen to wear down the opposition so much that they withdraw from our companionship or fellowship, all the better, as we’ve achieved a patina of unity. Religious liberals are just as prone to this as the conservatives.

These are not the values we hold when talking about the natural world. There we talk about biodiversity. We don’t cheer when a species maladapted to the human-driven Anthropocene disappears into extinction. Just because a plant or animal from the other side of the world has no natural predators doesn’t mean our local species should be superseded.

Scientists tell us that biodiversity is not just a kind of do-unto-others value that satisfies our sense of nostalgia; having wide gene pools comes in handy when near-instant adaptation is needed in response to massive habitat stress. Monocrops are good for the annual harvest but leave us especially vulnerable when phytophthora infestans comes ashore.

It’s a good thing for different religious groups to have different values, both from us us and from one another. There are pressures in today’s culture to level all of our distinctives down so that we have no unique identity. Some cheer this monocropping of spirituality, but I’m not sure it’s healthy for human race. If our religious values are somehow truer or more valuable than those of other people, then they will eventually spread themselves – not by pushing other bodies to be like us, but by attracting the members of the other bodies to join with us.

God may have purpose in fellowships that act differently that ours. Let us not get too smug about our own inevitability that we forget to share ourselves with those with whom we differ.

Places like St Mary’s

February 23, 2011

02/23/201110/08/2015 · Martin Kelley

I’m writing this from the back of St Mary’s Roman Catholic Church, a small church built in the 1920s in the small crossroads town of Malaga New Jersey. It was closed this past November, supposedly because of a broken boiler but really because the Diocese of Camden is trying to sell off its smaller churches – or any church with prime real estate along a highway. It was reopened without permission by parishioners in early January, while we were still in the hospital with baby number three, a.k.a. Gregory.

We’ve spent a lot of time here since then. It’s a 24 hour vigil and has been and will continue to be. In Boston there are vigils that have been going seven years. I try to imagine Gregory as a seven year old, having spent his childhood growing up here in this little church. It’s not an impossible scenario.

I also spend a lot of time talking with the faithful Catholics who have come here to protect the church. It’s a cacophony of voices right now – conversations about the church, sure, but that’s only one of the many topics that come up. People are sharing their lives – stories about growing up, about people that are know, about current events… It’s a real community. We’ve been attending this church for years but it’s now that I’m really getting to know everyone.

I sometimes ponder how I, the self-dubbed “Quaker Ranter,” got involved in all of this. Through my wife, of course – she grew up Catholic, became a Friend for eleven years and then “returned to the Church” a few years after our marriage. But there’s more than that, reasons why I spend my own time here. Part is my love of the small and quirky. St Mary’s parishioners are standing up for the kind of churches where people know each other. In an era where menial tasks are hired out, the actual members of St. Marys tend the church’s rosary garden and clean its basement and toilets. They spend time in the church beyond the hour of mass, doing things like praying the rosary or adoration.

The powers-that-be that want St Mary’s closed so badly want a large inpersonal church with lots of professionalized services and a least-common-denominator faith where people come, go and donate their money to a diocese that’s run like a business. But that’s not St. Mary’s. There’s history here. This is a hub of a town, an ancient crossroads, but the bishop wants big churches in the splurge of suburban sprawl. Even we Friends need places like St Mary’s in the world.

Gladwell and strong tie social media networks

September 28, 2010

09/28/201003/23/2013 · Martin Kelley

A lot of people, include Jeanne Burns over on Quakerquaker, are talking about Malcolm Gladwell’s latest New Yorker article, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted”.

Malcolm Gladwell’s modus operandi is to make outrageously counter-intuitive claims that people will talk about enough that they’ll buy his boss’s magazine, books and bobble-head likenesses. I find him likable and diverting but don’t take his claims very seriously. He’s a lot like Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson, his sometimes sparring partner, which isn’t surprising as they work for the same magazine empire, Conde Nast Publications.

In his article, Gladwell takes a lot of potshots at social media. It’s easy to do. He picks Clay Shirky, another New York “Big Idea” guy as his rhetorical strawman now, claiming Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody” is the “bible of social-media movement.” Reading Gladwell, you kind of wish he’d get out of the echo box of circle-jerk New York Big Talkers (just getting out of the Conde Nast building’s cafeteria would be a good start).

Gladwell’s certainly right in that most of what passes for activism on Twitter and Facebook is ridiculous. Clicking a “Like” button or changing your profile image green doesn’t do much. He makes an important distinction between “weak ties” (Facebook “friends” who aren’t friends; Twitter campaigns that are risk-free) and “strong ties.” He cites the Civil Rights movement as a strong-tie phenomenon: the people who put themselves on the line tended to be those with close friends also putting themselves on the line.

What Gladwell misses is strong-tie organizing going on in social media. A lot of what’s happening over on QuakerQuaker is pretty strong-tie – it’s translating to workshops, articles, and is just one of a number of important networks that are forming. People are finding each other and making real connections that spill out into the real world. It’s not that online organizes creates real world changes, or even the reverse. Instead, under the right circumstances they can feed into each other, with each component magnifying the other’s reach.

One example of non-hierarchical involved social media is how Quaker bloggers came together to explain Tom Fox’s motives after his kidnapping. It didn’t have any effect on the kidnappers, obviously, but we did reach a lot of people who were curious why a Friend might choose such a personally dangerous form of Christian witness. This was all done by inter-related groups of people with no budget and no organizational chart. But these things don’t have to be quite so life-and-death.

A more recent example I’ve been able to see up close is the way my wife’s church has organized against diocesan attempts to shut it down: a core group of leaders have emerged; they share power, divide up roles and have been waging an organized campaign for about 2.5 years now. One element of this work has been the Savestmarys.org blog. The website’s only important because it’s been part of a real-world social network but it’s had an influence that’s gone far beyond the handful of people who write for it. One of the more surprising audiences have been the many staff at the Diocesan headquarters who visit every day – a small group has taken over quite a bit of mental space over there!

It’s been interesting for me to compare QuakerQuaker with an earlier peace project of mine, Nonviolence.org, which ran for thirteen years starting in 1995. In many ways it was the bigger site: a larger audience, with a wider base of interest. It was a popular site, with many visits and a fairly active bulletin board for much of it’s life. But it didn’t spawn workshop or conferences. There’s no “movement” associated with it. Donations were minimal and I never felt the support structure that I have now with my Quaker work.

Nonviolence.org was a good idea, but it was a “weak tie” network. QuakerQuaker’s network is stronger for two reasons that I can identify. The obvious one is that it’s built atop the organizing identity of a social group (Friends). But it also speaks more directly to its participants, asking them to share their lives and offering real-world opportunities for interaction. So much of my blogging on Nonviolence.org was Big Idea thoughts pieces about the situation in Bosnia – that just doesn’t provide the same kind of immediate personal entre.

Malcolm Gladwell minimizes the leadership structure of activist organizations, where leadership and power is in constant flux. He likewise minimizes the leadership of social media networks. Yes, anyone can publish but we all have different levels of visibility and influence and there is a filtering effect. I have twenty-five years of organized activism under my belt and fifteen years of online organizing and while the technology is very different, a lot of the social dynamics are remarkably similar.

Gladwell is an hired employee in one of the largest media companies in the world. It’s a very structured life: he’s got editors, publishers, copyeditors, proofreaders. He’s a cog in a company with $5 billion in annual revenue. It’s not really surprising that he doesn’t have much direct experience with effective social networks. It’s hard to see how social media is complementing real world grassroots networks from the 40th floor of a mid-town Manhattan skyscraper.

Related Reading:

What Malcolm Gladwell Doesn’t Understand About Activism and Social Networks over on StudentActivism.net, via @public_historian.
Friends and Hierarchy and Social Change. Jeanne Burns on QuakerQuaker.
Make the Revolution from Anil Dash: “People who want to see marches in the streets are often unwilling to admit that those marches just don’t produce much in the way of results in America in 2010.”
Social Media for Good and Evil, Strong and Weak Ties, Online/Offline,and Orgs and Networks from Beth Kantor

Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Interim Meeting: Getting a horse to drink

September 15, 2010

09/15/201002/19/2012 · Martin Kelley

This past weekend I gave a talk at the Arch Street Meetinghouse after the Interim Meeting sessions of Philadlephia Yearly Meeting. Interim Meeting is the group that meets sort-of monthly between yearly meeting business sesssions. In an earlier blog post I called it “the establishment” and I looked forward to sharing the new life of the blogging world and Convergent Friends with this group. I had been asked by the most excellent Stephen Dotson to talk about “Finding Fellowship Between Friends Thru The Internet.”

I was curious to return to Interim Meeting, a group I served on about half a decade ago. As I sat in the meeting, I kept seeing glimpses of issues that I planned to address afterwards in my talk: how to talk afresh about faith; how to publicize our activity and communicate both among ourselves and with the outside world; how to engage new and younger members in our work.

Turns out I didn’t get the chance. Only half a dozen or so members of Interim Meeting stuck around for my presentation. No announcement was made at the end of sessions. None of the senior staff were there and no one from the long table full of clerks, alternate clerks and alternate alternate clerks came. Eleven people were at the talk (including some who hadn’t been at Interim Meeting). The intimacy was nice but it was hardly the “take it to the estabishment” kind of event I had imagined.

The talk itself went well, despite or maybe because of its intimacy. I had asked Seth H (aka Chronicler) along for spiritual support and he wrote a nice review on QuakerQuaker. Steve T, an old friend of mine from Central Philly days, took some pictures which I’ve included here. I videoed the event, though it will need some work to tighten it down to something anyone would want to watch online. The people who attended wanted to attend and asked great questions. It was good working with Stephen Dotson again in the planning. I would wish that more Philadelphia Friends had more interest in these issues but as individuals, all we can do is lead a horse to water. In the end, the yearly meeting is in God’s hands.

Below are observations from Interim Meeting and how the Convergent Friends movement might address some of the issues raised. Let me stress that I offer these in love and in the hope that some honest talk might help. I’ve served on Interim Meeting and have given a lot of time toward PYM over the last twenty years. This list was forwarded by email to senior staff and I present them here for others who might be concerned about these dynamics.

GENERATIONAL FAIL:

There were about seventy-five people in the room for Interim Meeting sessions. I was probably the third or fourth youngest. By U.S. census definitions I’m in my eighth year of middle age, so that’s really sad. That’s two whole generations that are largely missing from PYM leadership. I know I shouldn’t be surprised; it’s not a new phenomenon. But if you had told me twenty years ago that I’d be able to walk into Interim Meeting in 2010 and still be among the youngest, well… Well, frankly I would have uttered a choice epithet and kicked the Quaker dust from my shoes (most of my friends did). I know many Friends bodies struggle with age diversity but this is particularly extreme.

WHAT I WANTED TO TELL INTERIM MEETING: About 33% of QuakerQuaker’s audience is GenX and 22% are Millenials. If Interim Meeting were as diverse as QuakerQuaker there would have been 16 YAFs (18 – 35 year olds) and 25 Friends 35 and 49 years of age. I would have been about the 29th youngest in the room – middle aged, just where I should be! QuakerQuaker has an age diversity that most East Coast Friends Meetings would die for. If you want to know the interests and passions of younger Friends, Quaker blogs are an excellent place to learn. There are some very different organizational and style differences at play (my post seven years ago, a post from Micah Bales this past week).

DECISION-MAKING

The first part of the sessions was run with what’s called a “Consent Agenda,” a legislative measure where multiple agenda items are approved en masse. It rests on the idealistic notion that all seventy-five attendees has come to sessions having read everything in the quarter-inch packet mailed to them (I’ll wait till you stop laughing). Interim Meeting lumped thirteen items together in this manner. I suspect most Friends left the meeting having forgotten what they had approved. Most educators would say you have to reinforce reading with live interaction but we bypassed all of that in the name of efficiency.

WHAT I WANTED TO TELL INTERIM MEETING: Quaker blogs are wonderfully rich sources of discussion. Comments are often more interesting than the original posts. Many of us have written first drafts of published articles on our blogs and then polished them with feedback received in the comments. This kind of communication feedback is powerful and doesn’t take away from live meeting-time. There’s a ton of possibilities for sharing information in a meaningful way outside of meetings.

MINUTES OF WITNESS

Two “minutes” (a kind of Quaker statement/press release) were brought to sessions. Both were vetted through a lengthy process where they were approved first by monthly and then quarterly meetings before coming before Interim Meeting. A minute on Afghanistan was nine months old, a response to a troop level announcement made last December; one against Marcellus Shale drilling in Pennsylvania was undated but it’s a topic that peaked in mainstream media five months ago. I would have more appreciation of this cumbersome process if the minutes were more “seasoned” (well-written, with care taken in the discernment behind them) but there was little in either that explained how the issue connected with Quaker faith and why we were lifting it up now as concern. A senior staffer in a small group I was part of lamented how the minutes didn’t give him much guidance as to how he might explain our concern with the news media. So here we were, approving two out-of-date, hard-to-communicate statements that many IM reps probably never read.

WHAT I WANTED TO TELL INTERIM MEETING: Blogging gives us practice in talking about spirituality. Commenters challenge us when we take rhetorical shortcuts or make assumptions or trade on stereotypes. Most Quaker bloggers would tell you they’re better writers now than when they started their blog. Spiritual writing is like a muscle which needs to be exercised. To be bluntly honest, two or three bloggers could have gotten onto Skype, opened a shared Google Doc and hammered out better statements in less than an hour. If we’re going to be approving these kinds of thing we need to practice and increase our spiritual literacy.

THE ROLE OF COMMITTEES

The second part was Interim Meeting looking at itself. We broke into small groups and asking three questions: “What is the work of Interim Meeting,” “Are we satisfied with how we do this now?” and “If we were to make changes, what would they be?.” I thought to myself that the reason I ever go to events like this is to see dear Friends and to see what sparks of life are happening in the yearly meeting. As our small group went around, and as small groups shared afterwards, I realized that many of the people in the room seemed to agree: we were hungry for the all-to-brief moments where the Spirit broke into the regimented Quaker process.

One startling testimonial came from a member of the outreach committee. She explained that her committee, like many in PYM, is an administrative one that’s not supposed to do any outreach itself – it’s all supposed to stay very “meta.” They recently decided to have a picnic with no business scheduled and there found themselves “going rogue” and talking about outreach. Her spirit rose and voice quickened as she told us how they spent hours dreaming up outreach projects. Of course the outreach committee wants to do outreach! And with state PYM is in, can we really have a dozen people sequestered away talking about talking about outreach. Shouldn’t we declare “All hands on deck!” and start doing work? It would have been time well spent to let her share their ideas for the next thirty minutes but of course we had to keep moving. She finished quickly and the excitement leaked back out of the room.

FOLLOW-UP THOUGHTS AND THE FUTURE OF THE YEARLY MEETING

Now I need to stress some things. I had some great one-on-one conversations in the breaks. A lot of people were very nice to me and gave me hugs and asked about family. These are a committed, hopeful group of people. There was a lot of faith in that room! People work hard and serve faithfully. But it feels like we’re trapped by the system we ourselves created. I wanted to share the excitement and directness of the Quaker blogging world. I wanted to share the robustness of communication techniques we’re using and the power of distributed publishing. I wanted to share the new spirit of ecumenticalism and cross-branch work that’s happening.

I’ve been visiting local Friends Meetings that have half the attendance they did ten years ago. Some have trouble breaking into the double-digits for Sunday morning worship and I’m often the youngest in the room, bringing the only small kids. I know there are a handful of thriving meetings, but I’m worried that most are going to have close their doors in the next ten to twenty years.

I had hoped to show how new communication structures, the rise of Convergent Friends and the seekers of the Emerging Church movement could signal new possibilities for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Toward the end of Interim Meeting, some Friends bemoaned our lack of resources and clerk Thomas Swain reminded them that with God there is no limitation and nothing is impossible. Some of the things I’m seeing online are the impossible come to life. Look at QuakerQuaker: an unstaffed online magazine running off of a $50/month budget and getting 10,000 visits a month. It’s not anything I’ve done, but this community that God has brought together and the technological infrastructure that has allowed us to coordinate so easily. It’s far from the only neat project out there and there are a lot more on the drawing boad. Some yearly meetings are engaging with these new possibilites. But mine apparently can’t even stay around for a talk.

Quaker Ranter

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