From Woodbrooke in the UK, a 65-page PDF guide to hosting online Quaker worship. Very detailed and useful.
A Quaker’s Guide (PDF)
From Woodbrooke in the UK, a 65-page PDF guide to hosting online Quaker worship. Very detailed and useful.
A Quaker’s Guide (PDF)
I really like Tim Carmody and Kottke.org is one of my favorite blogs. This isn’t Quaker but it feels really relevant for those of us trying to save independent publishing from being subsumed by the Facebook Borg and so maintain countercultural, non-corporate spaces like Quaker communities.
This is a prediction for 2019 and beyond: The most powerful and interesting media model will remain raising money from members who don’t just permit but insist that the product be given away for free. The value comes not just what they’re buying, but who they’re buying it from and who gets to enjoy it.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/unlocking-the-commons/
What we do as we worship and live and do our business together, is we learn those skills and abilities jointly that enable us to model the Kingdom of God to the rest of the world. This is our testimony as a gathered people. And we do so by taking the seeds of that learning out beyond the confines of our monthly meetings and begin to transform the world outside the Religious Society of Friends.
L.A. Kauffman’s critique of consensus decision making in The Theology of Consensus is a rather perennial argument in lefty circles and this article makes a number of logical leaps. Still, it does map out the half-forgotten Quaker roots of activist consensus and she does a good job mapping out some of the pitfalls to using it dogmatically:
Consensus decision-making’s little-known religious origins shed light on why this activist practice has persisted so long despite being unwieldy, off-putting, and ineffective.
All that said, it’s hard for me not to roll my eyes while reading this. Perhaps I just sat in on too many meetings in my twenties where the Trotskyists berated the pacifists for slow process (and tried to take over meetings) and the black bloc anarchists berated pacifists for not being brave enough to overturn dumpsters. As often as not these shenanigans torpedoed any chance of real coalition building but the most boring part were the interminable hours-long meetings about styles. A lot of it was fashion, really, when you come down to it.
This piece just feels so…. 1992 to me. Like: we’re still talking about this? Really? Like: really? Much of evidence Kauffmann cites dates back to the frigging Clamshell Alliance—I’ve put the Wikipedia link to the 99.9% of my readers who have never heard of this 1970s movement. More recently she talks about a Food Not Bombs manual from the 1980s. The language and continued critique over largely forgotten movements from 40 years ago doesn’t quite pass the Muhammad Ali test:
Consensus decision making is a tool, but there’s no magic to it. It can be useful but it can get bogged down. Sometimes we get so enamored of the process that we forget our urgent cause. Clever people can use it to manipulate others, and like any tool those who know how to use it have an advantage over those who don’t. It can be a tribal marker, which gives it a great to pull together people but also introduces a whole set of dynamics that dismisses people who don’t fit the tribal model. These are universal human problems that any system faces.
Consensus is just one model of organizing. When a committed group uses it for common effect, it can pull together and coordinate large groups of strangers more quickly and creatively than any other organizing method I’ve seen.
Just about every successful movement for social change works because it builds a diversity of supporters who will use all sorts of styles toward a common goal: the angry youth, the African American clergy, the pacifist vigilers, the shouting anarchists. But change doesn’t only happen in the streets. It’s also swirling through the newspaper rooms, attorneys general offices, investor boardrooms. We can and should squabble over tactics but the last thing we need is an enforcement of some kind of movement purity that “calls for the demise” of a particular brand of activist culture. Please let’s leave the lefty purity wars in the 20th century.
My life is now such that I don’t have the time to do long-form, thoughtful blogging. When I have time to think about big ideas expressed in well-chosen words, it’s as editor at Friends Journal. I have a rather long commute but it’s broken up with transfers, I often have to stand and I usually don’t have a laptop on me. What I do have is a smart phone, which I use to keep up with Quaker blogs, listen to podcasts and take pictures.
Despite this, I can usually write a few paragraphs at a time. Kept at steadily those could amass into blog posts. But the finishing-up effort is hard. I have a 2/3rds completed post lavishing high praise for +Jon Watts’s new album sitting on my phone but haven’t had the chance to finish, polish and publish. So what if I serialized these? Write a few paragraphs at a time, invite commentary, perhaps even alter things in a bit of crowd-sourcing?
Any feedback I’d get would help keep up my enthusiasm for the topic. This informal post-as-chat was actually the dominant early model for blogs, one that fell away as they became more visible. It’d be nice to get back to that. The medium seems obvious to me: Google+, which allows for extended informal posts. So I’ll try that. These will be beta thoughts-on-electron. If they seem to gell together, I might then polish and publish to QuakerRanter.org, but no promises. This is mostly a way to get some raw ideas out there.
Google+: View post on Google+
Over in the NYTimes columnist David Brooks talks about Two Theories of Change. He’s talking about modern American politics but it seems relevant to Friends. Here’s his summary of a new paper by Yuval Levin of the University of Chicago:
[Thomas] Paine believed that societies exist in an “eternal now.” That something has existed for ages tells us nothing about its value. The past is dead and the living should use their powers of analysis to sweep away existing arrangements when necessary, and begin the world anew. He even suggested that laws should expire after 30 years so each new generation could begin again
[Edmund] Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have.
For Brooks, the Paine folllowers are Tea Party activists who think it’s fine to “sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role.”
This is part of my Beyond SEO series where I look at the myths and realities behind search engine optimization, with practical tips about publicizing your site and building your personal brand. Read all of my Beyond SEO articles.
The Google blog asks for user input into what makes a good SEO and reports that they’ve just rewritten their page that warns against rogue SEO artists and gives recommendations about what to look out for. It starts with their definition
SEO is an acronym for “search engine optimization” or “search engine optimizer.” Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners.
The blog asks “how would you define SEO? What questions would you ask a prospective SEO?” I’ve been doing a lot more optimization for clients lately. What’s particularly fun is running across the work of the SEO scam artists their competition have brought in. I’ve seen many instances where the other SEO firm has stepped over the bounds of fair practice and been penalized by Google.
Google’s job and our job
I’ve always taken the approach that it’s Google’s job to give people
the most useful and relevant return for their search and our job to
make sure we have useful and relevant material and arrange it in such a
way that Google can access it.
SEO is important but only in the
context of smart web design and a coherent and well thought out
internet marketing strategy. Firms that claim to do SEO
without checking the analytics data and consulting with the client
about their business strategy will not help the site in the long run.
What your SEO expert should be doing
I would agree with most of Google’s recommendations of what to look out against. But what to look for? A quick list would include:
Any others suggestions for what to look for in potential SEO consultants?
This weekend we took off for a family trip to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania – Julie and me, the kids and my mother Liz. I won’t have time to do a long blog post, but highlights were the Verdant View farm B&B (link) where we stayed; the Strasburg Railroad (link) whose line runs through the farm’s backyard, the Choo Barn model railway (link); and the amazing Cherry Crest Farm (link) with its corn maze and its simple games for kids of all ages (who knew you could have so much fun with a hill and a piece of burlap?!).
See the See the photo set on Flickr for more pictures and stories. Every shot is mapped, with links.
Large photo: Family at Strasburg RR: Martin, Liz, Theo, Julie, Francis. Below: Julie and the kids walking through fields at farm, Francis playing kung-fu with the farm dog, Theo running in terror from said dog, Engine 90 ready to pull out.