Tag Archives ⇒ movement

Quakers and the ethics of fixed pricing

June 22, 2015
· Martin Kelley

From a 1956 issue of the then-newly rebrand­ed Friends Jour­nal, an expla­na­tion of the ethics behind pro­vid­ing a fixed price for goods:

Whether the ear­ly Quak­ers were con­scious­ly try­ing to start a social move­ment or not is a moot point. Most like­ly they were not. They were mere­ly seek­ing to give con­sis­tent expres­sion to their belief in the equal­i­ty of all men as spir­i­tu­al sons of God. The Quak­er cus­tom of mark­ing a fixed price on mer­chan­dise so that all men would pay the same price is anoth­er case in point. Most prob­a­bly Friends did this sim­ply because they want­ed to be fair to all who fre­quent­ed their shops and give the sharp bar­gain­er no advan­tage at the expense of his less skilled broth­er. It is unlike­ly that many Quak­ers adopt­ed fixed prices in the hope of forc­ing their sys­tem on a busi­ness world inter­est­ed only in prof­it. That part was just coin­ci­dence, the coin­ci­dence being that Friends hit upon it because of their con­vic­tions; the sys­tem itself was a nat­ur­al success.
 — Bruce L Pear­son, Feb 4 1956

 

A reply to The Theology of Consensus

May 29, 2015
· Martin Kelley

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.

Preaching our lives over the interwebs

June 4, 2014
· Martin Kelley

Hel­lo Jon, A.J. and Wess,

So we’ve been asked to write a “syn­chroblog” orga­nized by Quak­er Vol­un­tary Ser­vice. It is a week­day and there are work dead­lines loom­ing for me (there are always dead­lines loom­ing) so my par­tic­i­pa­tion may be spot­ty but I’ll give it a shot.

The top­ic of this par­tic­u­lar syn­chroblog is Friends and social media and in the invite we were asked to riff on com­par­isons with ear­ly Friend­s’s pam­phle­teer­ing and the web as the new print­ing press. I’m spot­ty on the details of the var­i­ous pam­phlet wars of ear­ly Friends but the web-as-printing-press is a famil­iar theme.

I first man­gled the metaphors of web as print­ing press nine­teen years ago. That sum­mer I start­ed my first new media project to get paci­fist writ­ings online. The metaphors I used seem as fun­ny now as they were awk­ward then, but give me a break: Mark Zucker­berg was a fifth grad­er hack­ing Ataris and even the word “weblog” was a cou­ple of years away. I described my project as “web type­set­ting for the move­ment by the move­ment” and one of my sell­ing points is that I had done the same work in the print world.

Frac­tured as my metaphors were, online media was more like pub­lish­ing then that it is now. Putting an essay online required tech­ni­cal skills and com­par­a­tive­ly high equip­ment costs. The con­sis­tent arc of con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy has been to make post­ing ever eas­i­er and cheap­er and that has moved the bar of qual­i­ty (raised or low­ered depend­ing on how you see it)

Back in the mid-1990s I remem­ber jok­ing snark­i­ly with friends that we’d all some­day have blogs devot­ed to pic­tures of our cats and kids – the humor in our barbs came from the ridicu­lous­ness that some­one would go to the time and expense to build a site so ephemer­al and non-serious. You’d have to take a pic­ture, devel­op the film, dig­i­tal­ly scan it in, touch it up with a pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive image soft­ware, use an FTP pro­gram to upload it to a web serv­er and then write raw HTML to make a web page of it. But the joke was on us. In 2014, if my 2yo daugh­ter puts some­thing goofy on her head, I pull out the always-with-me phone, snap a pic­ture, add a fun­ny cap­tion and fil­ter, tag it, and send it to a page which is effec­tive­ly a pho­to­blog of her life.

The ease of post­ing has spawned an inter­net cul­ture that’s cre­ative­ly bizarre and won­der­ful. With the changes the print­ing press metaphor has become less use­ful, or at least more con­strained. There are Friends who’s inten­tion­al­i­ty and effort make them inter­net pub­lish­ers (I myself work for Friends Jour­nal). But most of our online activ­i­ty is more like water cool­er chitchat.

So the ques­tion I have is this: are there ways Friends should behave online. If we are to “let our lives preach,” as the much-quoted George Fox snip­pet says, what’s our online style? Do we have any­thing to learn from ear­li­er times of pam­phle­teer­ing? And what about the media we’re using, espe­cial­ly as we learn more about elec­tron­ic sur­veil­lance and its wide­spread use both here at home and in total­i­tar­i­an regimes?

Visual storytelling through animated gifs and Vine

June 27, 2013
· Martin Kelley

NPR’s Plan­et Mon­ey recent­ly ran an arti­cle on glass recy­cling, How A Used Bot­tle Becomes A New Bot­tle, In 6 Gifs. The Gif part is what intrigued me. A “gif” is a tightly-compressed image for­mat file that web design­ers leaned on a lot back in the days of low band­width. It’s espe­cial­ly good for designs with a few dis­creet col­ors, such as cor­po­rate logos or sim­ple car­toons. It also sup­ports a kind of prim­i­tive ani­ma­tion that was com­plete­ly overused in the late 90s to give web­pages fly­ing uni­corns and spin­ning globes.

Ani­mat­ed gifs have grown up. They make up half the posts on Tum­blr. They are often derived from fun­ny scenes in movies and come with humor­ous cap­tions. The Plan­et Mon­ey piece uses them for sto­ry­telling: text is illus­trat­ed by six gifs show­ing dif­fer­ent parts of the recy­cling process. The move­ment helps tell the sto­ry – indeed most of the shots would be visu­al­ly unin­ter­est­ing if they were static.

The short loops reminds me of Vine, the six-second video ser­vice from Twit­ter which I’ve used a lot for sil­ly kid antics. They can also tell a sim­ple sto­ry (they’re par­tic­u­lar­ly well suit­ed to repet­i­tive kid antics: up the steps, down the slide, up the steps, down the slide, up…).

In my work with Friends Jour­nal I’ve done some 7 – 12 minute video inter­views with off-site authors using Google Hang­outs, which essen­tial­ly just records the video con­ver­sa­tion. It’s fine for what we use it for, but the qual­i­ty depends a lot on the equip­ment on the oth­er end. If the band­width is low or the web­cam poor qual­i­ty, it will show, and there are few options for post-production edit­ing. But hon­est­ly, this is why I use Hang­outs: a short web-only inter­view won’t turn into a week­long project.

Pro­duc­ing high-quality video requires con­trol­ling all of the equip­ment, shoot­ing ten times more footage than you think you’ll need, and then hours of work con­dens­ing and edit­ing it down to a sto­ry. And after all this it’s pos­si­ble you’ll end up with some­thing that does­n’t get many views. Few Youtube users actu­al­ly watch videos all the way through to the end, drift­ing away to oth­er inter­net dis­trac­tions in the first few minutes.

I like the com­bi­na­tion of the sim­ple short video clips (whether Vine or ani­mat­ed gif) wed­ded to words. My last post here was the very light-weight sto­ry about a sum­mer after­noon project. Yes­ter­day, I tried again, shoot­ing a short ani­mat­ed gif of Tibetan monks vis­it­ing a local meet­ing­house. I don’t think it real­ly worked. They’re con­struct­ing a sand man­dala grain-by-grain. The small move­ments of their fun­nel sticks as sand drops is so small that a reg­u­lar sta­t­ic pho­to would suf­fice. But I’ll keep exper­i­ment­ing with the form.

Religion in the mainstream press

July 10, 2012
· Martin Kelley

They default to the same bor­ing tropes, says Amy Levin at TheRevealer:

Reli­gious wars, reli­gious dress, reli­gious mon­ey – these are the real and yet superbly com­plex ele­ments of our cul­tur­al exis­tence. Scout any crack or cran­ny of pop­u­lar cul­ture and you find reli­gion cre­at­ing a glo­ri­ous maze of top­ics for writ­ers to dis­cov­er and sift and sing to the masses.

But late­ly, I find that a repul­sive plague of rep­e­ti­tion and banal­i­ty has swept over the dis­en­chant­ed cyber­sphere. Each day I begin my reli­gion news search with hope­ful eager­ness, sift­ing close­ly through main­stream and fringe out­lets, hun­gry for signs of a new trend, move­ment, argu­ment, study – any­thing oth­er than what I con­sumed the day before. But I search in vain, and my dol­drums have led me to take action.

(H/T to David Watt on Facebook)

“The drafters of the statement included Quaker Symon Hill who has written of…

November 1, 2011
· Martin Kelley

“The drafters of the state­ment includ­ed Quak­er Symon Hill who has writ­ten of the state­ment: “As one of the drafters of the state­ment, I want to make clear that we want to act in sol­i­dar­i­ty with peo­ple of oth­er reli­gions and of none, not impose our reli­gion on them or claim to be a more impor­tant part of the move­ment than they are. This point is made in the open­ing line of the statement.”

Embed­ded Link

A Quak­er pres­ence at Occu­py London
Almost 100 Quak­ers attend­ed a Meet­ing for Wor­ship on the steps of saint Paul’s cathe­dral in Lon­don on Sun­day after­noon. The Meet­ing for Wor­ship took place in sup­port of the Occu­py Lon­don move­ment that… 

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Steve Jobs on his major mistake during Apple’s troubled years: “Letting…

October 23, 2011
· Martin Kelley

Reshared post from +Tim O’Reil­ly

Steve Jobs on his major mis­take dur­ing Apple’s trou­bled years: “Let­ting prof­itabil­i­ty out­weigh pas­sion” http://​huff​.to/​n​N​H​jGY #dit­to (a tweet by @stevecase) struck home for me, because in the after­math of Jobs’ death I’ve been think­ing a lot about O’Reil­ly, want­i­ng to make sure that we stream­line and focus on the stuff that mat­ters most.

Here’s the mon­ey quote from the article:

“My pas­sion has been to build an endur­ing com­pa­ny where peo­ple were moti­vat­ed to make great prod­ucts,” Jobs told Isaac­son. “[T]he prod­ucts, not the prof­its, were the moti­va­tion. Scul­ley flipped these pri­or­i­ties to where the goal was to make mon­ey. It’s a sub­tle dif­fer­ence, but it ends up mean­ing everything.”

Jobs went on to describe the lega­cy he hoped he would leave behind, “a com­pa­ny that will still stand for some­thing a gen­er­a­tion or two from now.”

“That’s what Walt Dis­ney did,” said Jobs, “and Hewlett and Packard, and the peo­ple who built Intel. They cre­at­ed a com­pa­ny to last, not just to make mon­ey. That’s what I want Apple to be.“
All of our great­est work at O’Reil­ly has been dri­ven by pas­sion and ide­al­ism. That includes our ear­ly for­ays into pub­lish­ing, when we were a doc­u­men­ta­tion con­sult­ing com­pa­ny to pay the bills but wrote doc­u­men­ta­tion on the side for pro­grams we used that did­n’t have any good man­u­als. It was those man­u­als, on top­ics that no exist­ing tech pub­lish­er thought were impor­tant, that turned us into a tech pub­lish­er “who came out of nowhere.”

In the ear­ly days of the web, we were so excit­ed about it that +Dale Dougher­ty want­ed to cre­ate an online mag­a­zine to cel­e­brate the peo­ple behind it. That mor­phed into GNN, the Glob­al Net­work Nav­i­ga­tor, the web’s first por­tal and first com­mer­cial ad-supported site.

In the mid-90s, real­iz­ing that no one was talk­ing about the pro­grams that were behind all our most suc­cess­ful books, I brought togeth­er a col­lec­tion of free soft­ware lead­ers (many of whom had nev­er met each oth­er) to brain­storm a com­mon sto­ry. That sto­ry rede­fined free soft­ware as open source, and the world has­n’t been the same since. It also led to a new busi­ness for O’Reil­ly, as we launched our con­fer­ence busi­ness to help bring vis­i­bil­i­ty to these projects, which had no com­pa­ny mar­ket­ing behind them.

Think­ing deeply about open source and the inter­net got me think­ing big ideas about the inter­net as oper­at­ing sys­tem, and the shift of influ­ence from soft­ware to net­work effects in data as the key to future appli­ca­tions. I was fol­low­ing peo­ple who at the time seemed “crazy” — but they were just liv­ing in a future that had­n’t arrived for the rest of the world yet. It was around this time that I for­mu­lat­ed our com­pa­ny mis­sion of “chang­ing the world by spread­ing the knowl­edge of innovators.”

In 2003, in the dark days after the dot com bust, our com­pa­ny goal for the year was to reignite enthu­si­asm in the com­put­er busi­ness. Two out­comes of that effort did just that: +Sara Winge ‘s cre­ation of Foo Camp spawned a world­wide, grass­roots move­ment of self-organizing “uncon­fer­ences,” and our Web 2.0 Con­fer­ence told a big sto­ry about where the net was going and what dis­tin­guished the com­pa­nies that sur­vived the dot­com bust from those that pre­ced­ed it. 

In 2005, see­ing the pas­sion that was dri­ving garage inven­tors to a new kind of hard­ware inno­va­tion, Dale once again want­ed to launch a mag­a­zine to cel­e­brate the pas­sion­ate peo­ple behind the move­ment. This time, it was a mag­a­zine: Make: (http://​makezine​.com), and a year lat­er, we launched Mak­er Faire (http://​mak​er​faire​.com) as a com­pan­ion event. 150,000 peo­ple attend­ed Mak­er Faires last year, and the next gen­er­a­tion of star­tups is emerg­ing from the fer­ment of the move­ment that Dale named.

Mean­while, through those dark years after the dot­com bust, we also did a lot of pub­lish­ing just to keep the com­pa­ny afloat. (With a small data sci­ence team at O’Reil­ly, we built a set of ana­lyt­i­cal tools that helped us under­stand the untapped oppor­tu­ni­ties in com­put­er book pub­lish­ing. We real­ized that we were play­ing in only about 2/5 of the mar­ket; mov­ing into oth­er areas that we had nev­er been drawn to helped pay the bills, but nev­er sparked the kind of cre­ativ­i­ty as the areas that we’d found by fol­low­ing our passion.)

It was at this time that I for­mu­lat­ed an image that I’ve used many times since: prof­it in a busi­ness is like gas in a car. You don’t want to run out of gas, but nei­ther do you want to think that your road trip is a tour of gas stations.

When I think about the great per­sis­tence of Steve Jobs, there’s a les­son for all of us in it.

What’s so great about the Apple sto­ry is that Steve end­ed up mak­ing enor­mous amounts of mon­ey with­out mak­ing it a pri­ma­ry goal of the com­pa­ny. (Dit­to Lar­ry and Sergey at Google.) Con­trast that with the folks who brought us the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis, who were focused only on mak­ing mon­ey for them­selves, while tak­ing advan­tage of oth­ers in the process.

Mak­ing mon­ey through true val­ue cre­ation dri­ven by the desire to make great things that last, and make the world a bet­ter place — that’s the heart of what is best in cap­i­tal­ism. (See also the won­der­ful HBR blog post, Steve Jobs and the Pur­pose of the Cor­po­ra­tion. http://​blogs​.hbr​.org/​c​s​/​2​0​1​1​/​1​0​/​s​t​e​v​e​_​j​o​b​s​_​a​n​d​_​t​h​e​_​p​u​r​p​o​s​e​_​o​f​.​h​tml I also got a lot of per­spec­tive on this top­ic from +Lean­der Kah­ney’s book, Inside Steve’s Brain http://​www​.ama​zon​.com/​I​n​s​i​d​e​-​S​t​e​v​e​s​-​B​r​a​i​n​-​L​e​a​n​d​e​r​-​K​a​h​n​e​y​/​d​p​/​1​5​9​1​8​4​1​984 )

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What Steve Jobs Learned From His Biggest Failure
Wal­ter Isaac­son’s autho­rized biog­ra­phy of Steve Jobs traces the Apple co-founder’s career in Sil­i­con Val­ley – from its soar­ing highs to its crush­ing lows. Jobs has been hailed as a tech vision­ary, but … 

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Predictions on the ‘new evangelical’ movement

March 24, 2011
· Martin Kelley

Read­ers over on Quak​erQuak​er​.org will know I’ve been inter­est­ed in the tem­pest sur­round­ing evan­gel­i­cal pas­tor Rob Bell. A pop­u­lar min­is­ter for the Youtube gen­er­a­tion, con­tro­ver­sy over his new book has revealed some deep fis­sures among younger Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians. I’ve been fas­ci­nat­ed by this since 2003, when I start­ed real­iz­ing I had a lot of com­mon­al­i­ties with main­stream Chris­t­ian blog­gers who I would have nat­u­ral­ly dis­missed out of hand. When they wrote about the authen­tic­i­ty of wor­ship, decision-making in the church and the need to walk the talk and also to walk the line between truth and com­pas­sion, they spoke to my con­cerns (most of my read­ing since then has been blogs, pre-twentieth cen­tu­ry Quak­er writ­ings and the Bible).

blankToday Jaime John­son tweet­ed out a link to a new piece by Rachel Held Evans called “The Future of Evan­gel­i­cal­ism.” She does a nice job pars­ing out the dif­fer­ences between the two camps squar­ing off over Rob Bell. On the one side is a cen­tral­ized move­ment of neo-Calvinists she calls Young, Rest­less, Reformed after a 2006 Chris­tian­i­ty Today arti­cle. I have lit­tle to no inter­est in this crowd except for mild aca­d­e­m­ic curios­i­ty. But the oth­er side is what she’s dub­bing “the new evangelicals”:

The sec­ond group — some­times referred to as “the new evan­gel­i­cals” or “emerg­ing evan­gel­i­cals” or “the evan­gel­i­cal left” is sig­nif­i­cant­ly less orga­nized than the first, but con­tin­ues to grow at a grass­roots lev­el. As Paul Markhan wrote in an excel­lent essay about the phe­nom­e­non, young peo­ple who iden­ti­fy with this move­ment have grown weary of evangelicalism’s alle­giance to Repub­li­can pol­i­tics, are inter­est­ed in pur­su­ing social reform and social jus­tice, believe that the gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and are eager to be a part of inclu­sive, diverse, and authen­tic Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties. “Their broad­en­ing sense of social respon­si­bil­i­ty is push­ing them to rethink many of the fun­da­men­tal the­o­log­i­cal pre­sup­po­si­tions char­ac­ter­is­tic of their evan­gel­i­cal tra­di­tions,” Markham noted.

This is the group that intrigues me. There’s a lot of cross-over here with some of what I’m see­ing with Quak­ers. In an ide­al world, the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends would open its arms to this new wave of seek­ers, espe­cial­ly as they hit the lim­its of denom­i­na­tion­al tol­er­ance. But in real­i­ty, many of the East Coast meet­ings I’m most famil­iar with would­n’t know what to do with this crowd. In Philly if you’re inter­est­ed in this con­ver­sa­tion you go to Cir­cle of Hope (pre­vi­ous posts), not any of the estab­lished Quak­er meetings.

Evans makes some edu­cat­ed guess­es about the future of the “new evan­gel­i­cal” move­ment. She thinks there will be more dis­cus­sion about the role of the Bible, though I would say it’s more dis­cus­sion fo the var­i­ous Chris­t­ian inter­pre­ta­tions of it. She also fore­sees a loos­en­ing of labels and denom­i­na­tion­al affil­i­a­tions. I’m see­ing some of this hap­pen­ing among Friends, though it’s almost com­plete­ly on the indi­vid­ual lev­el, at least here on the East Coast. It will be inter­est­ing to see how this shakes out over the next few years and whether it will bypass, engage with or siphon off the Soci­ety of Friends. In the mean­time, Evans’ post and the links she embeds in it are well worth exploring.