So my questions for Quakers are: How do you ensure that adults are trusted to be adults even if they are under 30? How do you make sure that people are given opportunities to take responsibility without feeling that they must perform especially well because they are representing a whole demographic?

Here in the U.S., the trick to getting on national committees while young (at least when I was trying it in my 20s) was having a well-known mom. As someone who kept knocking and kept getting turned away it blew me away when I heard Quaker-famous offspring complain how they were always being asked to serve on committees. But then I realized it was the same tokenizing phenomenon, just in reverse.

So our work isn’t just looking around a room and ticking off demographic boxes, but really digging deeper and seeing if we’re representative of multi-dimensional diversities. And if we’re not, the problem isn’t just that we aren’t diverse (diversity is a fine value in and of itself but ultimately just a crude tool) but that we have unexamined cultural practices and selection systems that are systematically turning away people from community participation and service.

Keeping cradle Quakers by making room to lean in?

This morning traveled to Mays Landing, which was scheduled to host a street festival today. A few brave merchants like Brownies Squared opened without power and made the best of it, selling refrigerated goods at half-price. But most of the town was dealing with trees across downed power lines. According to NBC40 Weather 162,000 households are without power–considerably more than were out in last year’s hurricane.

Links:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho
* https://twitter.com/nbc40weather/status/219078662530678784

When we talk about pop cosmopolitanism, we are most often talking
about American teens doing cosplay or listening to K‑Pop albums, not
church ladies gathering to pray for the success of a British reality
television contestant, but it is all part of the same process. We are
reaching across borders in search of content, zones which were used to
organize the distribution of content in the Broadcast era, but which
are much more fluid in an age of participatory culture and social
networks.

We live in a world where content can be accessed quickly from any
part of the world assuming it somehow reaches our radar and where the
collective intelligence of the participatory culture can identify
content and spread the word rapidly when needed. Susan Boyle in that
sense is a sign of bigger things to come — content which wasn’t
designed for our market, content which wasn’t timed for such rapid
global circulation, gaining much greater visibility than ever before
and networks and production companies having trouble keeping up with
the rapidly escalating demand.

Susan Boyle’s video was produced for a U.K.-only show but social media has allowed us to share it across that border. In the Convergent Friends movement, we’re discovering “content which wasn’t designed for our market”–Friends of all different stripes having direct access to the work and thoughts of other types of Friends, which we are able to sort through and spread almost immediately. In this context, the “networks and productions companies” would be our yearly meetings and larger Friends bodies.

As a Quaker woman, Jennifer Seif lives a modest and simple life. Breastfeeding is natural to her, and she has nursed her children while in the grocery store, the doctor’s office and during Quaker meetings without a problem. So the Grand Rapids woman was shocked and embarrassed in April when Kent County Clerk Mary Beth Hollinrake approached her while she was breastfeeding her infant son, Micah…“It’s shocking to me that anyone would be offended.” The mother of three said she was wearing a cape dress — a garment designed for discreet nursing…

I learned about this through the blog of Jenn and her husband Scott. Here’s Jenn’s post on the incident. For those wondering about their local protection, the La Leche League has a fabulous state-by-state listing of the nursing laws.

Summer visitations got an early start last month when the Northeast US “Quaker blogroll”:http://www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/Quaker_places.php converged in my back yard with no agenda to follow and no epistle to write.Front row: “James”:http://curiouspenn.blogspot.com/, “Jeffrey”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000588.php and visitation ringleader “Amanda”:http://ofthebest.blogspot.com/. Back: “Ryan”:http://snorkelinglight.blogspot.com/, “Rob”:http://consider-the-lilies.blogspot.com/, “Me”:/martink, “Theo”:/theo and poor blogless Christina.

Well since Kwakersaur is inaugurating the “I don’t have anything to post”:http://kwakersaur.blogspot.com/2005/06/i‑dont-have-anything-to-say.html meme, I’ll chime in that I don’t either. Actually I’ve written two and half essays but realized they’re both really for myself. This is how it happens sometimes. I’ve long noticed this phenomenon in fully-formed verbal ministry that I know I’m not supposed to deliver and it feels as if such restraint is sometimes healthy on the blog. The message will reappear in other forums I’m sure, most likely next month’s “Gathering workshop”:www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/strangers with Zachary Moon.
In the meantime, there’s been fresh talk about plain language and dress this week by “Johan Maurer”:http://maurers.home.mindspring.com/2005/06/plain-language.htm, “Claire Reddy”:http://Quakerspeak.blogspot.com/2005/06/simplicity-unfocused-thought-blurt.html and the “Livejournal Quakers”:http://www.livejournal.com/community/Quakers/105292.html. Russ Nelson’s started a “Planet Quaker”:http://planet.Quaker.org/ blog aggregator (which includes Quaker Ranter: thanks!). LizOpp talked about “field testing”:http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2005/05/after-annual-sessions.html her upcoming “Quaker identity Gathering workshop”:http://www.fgcquaker.org/gathering/workshops/work36.php at Northern Yearly Meeting sessions and Kiara’s talked about “being field tested by Liz at this year’s NYM sessions”:http://wordspinning.blogspot.com/2005/05/northern-yearly-meeting.html (how cool is that?!).
I’ve been geeking out on “Del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/martin_kelley, the “social bookmarking” system and on the esoteric concepts of “tags”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags, the “semantic web”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web and “folksonomies”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy. Two weeks ago I would have laughed at these neologisms but I’m beginning to see that there’s something in all this. The only outward form the regulars will see is a more accurate “Related Entries” selection at the bottom of posts (thanks to “Adam Kalsey”:http://kalsey.com/blog/2003/05/related_entries_revisited/) and better visibility in “selected Technorati entries”:http://www.technorati.com/tag/Quaker (which will get less me-centric as I finish tagging my own back posts).
And of course we’re tilling the field, planting a garden, putting up laundry lines and otherwise thoroughly enjoying the first Spring in our new house. It’s bedtime, off to read the radically folksonomic adventures of Sam and “My Car”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060560452 (it’s pure tags: “My name is Sam.” “This is my car.” “I love my car.” I’d worry that not-so-baby Theo is getting too excited by combusion engines if he weren’t even more excited by “dia-di-calschht” aka the “bicycle” Papa rides off to work on.)

Gladwell looks at how social phenomenon act as epidemics. A retro shoe style like Hush Puppies might get picked up by certain trendsetters, then by super-networkers, and from there into the mass media so that soon it seems everyone’s wearing it. The transmission pattern for this popularity looks a lot like the way diseases get passed along and you can analyze it in similar ways.
There are some important lessons in all this. The most important is that we are social beings, and the sucess of any idea (website, organizational flowchart, whatever) is dependent upon social criteria. Gladwell breaks everything down to numbered lists and his main thesis is the “three rules of epidemics.” In the “Law of the Few,” he argues that the best way to market something is to get to the right people (what Gladwell calls the Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen) who will propel it outward. In “The Stickiness Factor” he shows how just a small change in presentation can often cause a big difference in retention. In the “Power of Context” he tells stories of people acting differently than we might think just because of changes in context: we’re all less rigidly defined than we think.
The book simplifies things a lot and Gladwell has an overly-optimistic attitude toward captialism. This book was written before Martha Stewart’s fall from grace, before Enron’s collapse, and before a hundred dot-com failures. It was also written before the Florida presidential recounts and Bush’s manufactured war. We’ve learned that raw power still counts more than a few lower Manhattan hipsters in Hush Puppies.
For all its _New Yorker_ credentials, this book is filed under “Business” and it can trace its genealogy straight from Dale Carnegie’s _How to Make Friends and Influence People_. Gladwell breaks everything down into numbered lists and every rule is called by a buzz-friendly catch-phrase that’s all capitalized. This book is a fleshed out power-point presentation. (I highly recommend reading a used copy that’s had all the key points underlined and the catch-phrases re-written in the margin).
Before you think I’m just dismissing the whole book, I should admit that a year ago I actually sat down and read _How to Make Friends_ (sheepishly, pulling it out unobtrusively every morning on the train). I told myself I was reading it to understand the social phenomenon triggered by this 1937 classic but like most like cheesy pop sensations, I loved every minute of it. It was like eating cotton candy. It’s a vision of America, familiar and flattering, distilled into a can-do formula. Cracking open Carnegie and Gladwell is like settling into your seat for a good Jimmy Stewart flick (“Just remember this, Mr. Potter: that this rabble you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?” _Yea!, you tell ’em George Bailey!_)
So of course I liked _The Tipping Point_. Here are some of the power-point concepts I’ve been thinking about:
bq.. *The Magic Number One Hundred and Fifty.* Although one could probably pick any number out of a hat and find examples of social phenomenon that peak at this limit, Gladwell makes a convincing case that there’s a natural optimization of socialization and information-sharing that happens when groups reach 150 or so members. He finds some examples from biology and business and while he doesn’t really connect this up to his main thesis (“If we are interested in starting an epidemic… what are the most effective kinds of groups,” p. 174), it is still interesting to note that there are a number of Quaker organizations that hover around this level. For example, FGC’s Central Committee has about this many members and I suspect too many more would force the group become unneccessarily more complex and bureaucratic. Most Quaker meetings are incredibly small by church standards and I suspect most of their members wouldn’t want to be part of a thousand-member congregation. What sort of unconscious break does this put on our outreach? What if American Quakers were to increase their numbers by an order of magnitude? Would we establish ten times as many small meetings or increase our current meetings’ membership by ten?
*The role of Connectors. We all know people who seem to know _everyone._* These are people Gladwell calls the “connectors” and they play a key role in transmitting information outside of the insider groups most of us inhabit. I love these sorts of people, I love talking with them and watching them. I’m not naturally one myself but I am curious enough to regularly stretch outside my insider circles and over the years I’ve trained myself to be more of a connector than I think I naturally am.
*The Stickiness Factor.* Small changes in the way we present information can make a big difference in how its received. Gladwell gives examples, all based on extensive test marketing of the intended audience. Boy, how I’d like to see this sort of thing in the peace and Quaker worlds. So many times we present the message we think we would like to hear, without regard as to how it might be received. In my website publishing work, I often try to stress that board members and staff are precisely not the target audience of the website and that we need to think beyond our own preconceptions.
p. I’m sure a whole class of go-getting marketing whiz-kids read this book as soon as it came out, highlighter pens in hand, ready to mine it for buzz phrases and concepts (the term “tipping point” is currently featured in a commercial for IBM). Too many of the stories in the book are broken down into techniques divorced from their message, divorced too from the fundamental integrity of those transmitting it along. There’s a lot calories in the book, but they’re tasty and a fun read going down.Malcolm Gladwell is a wonderful story teller and writer and I would recommend this book.

h4. Related Reading:
bq. Malcolm Gladwell has a great website at “http://www.gladwell.com”:http://www.gladwell.com.