Well, here’s something: QuakerQuaker made the “SPA 100” list, Snap.com’s top 100 sites using their preview service (this is the hovering preview you see when you pass over a link). They say their list represents “some of the more interesting, notable and funky sites” using Snap Preview. Hmmm, now if only they told us whether they think fell under “interesting,” “notable” or “funky.” For those keeping track, QuakerQuaker now mashes together over a dozen Web 2.0 services to bring you the Quaker conversation.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ quakerquaker
Opening up the QuakerQuaker listings
January 9, 2007
Everyone can now add posts to the QuakerQuaker category listings. Simply bookmark the post in Del.icio.us, list the QQ categories and it will be added to the page.
For example, say you’ve seen just the coolest post on Convergent Friends. Go to the “Convergent Friends”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/convergent_quakers page to find the right “tag” – in this case “quaker.convergent”. Bookmark the post you like, write a title and description and list “quaker.convergent” as its tag. An hour or so later the post will show up on the Convergent Friends page. How cool is that? Here are “instruction on how to use Del.icio.us and title pages”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/contributors_zone_how_to/.
QuakerQuaker Toolbar
January 9, 2007
A neat little service called Conduit lets users create their own browser toolbars. The new QuakerQuaker Toolbar gives you Google search, the latest QuakerQuaker posts and Guides to the Quaker Internet all from your browser. Try it out and let me know what additional links or features you’d find useful.
Why would a Quaker do a crazy thing like that?
June 10, 2006
Looking back at Friends’ responses to the Christian Peacemaker hostages
When four Christian Peacemakers were taken hostage in Iraq late last November, a lot of Quaker organizations stumbled in their response. With Tom Fox we were confronted by a full-on liberal Quaker Christian witness against war, yet who stepped up to explain this modern-day prophetic witness? AFSC? FCNL? FGC? Nope, nope and nope. There were too many organizations that couldn’t manage anything beyond the boilerplate social justice press release. I held my tongue while the hostages were still in captivity but throughout the ordeal I was mad at the exposed fracture lines between religious witness and social activism.
Whenever a situation involving international issues of peace and witness happens, the Quaker institutions I’m closest to automatically defer to the more political Quaker organizations: for example, the head of Friends General Conference told staff to direct outsiders inquiring about Tom Fox to AFSC even though Fox had been an active leader of FGC-sponsored events and was well known as a committed volunteer. The American Friends Service Committee and Friends Committee on National Legislation have knowledgeable and committed staff, but their institutional culture doesn’t allow them to talk Quakerism except to say we’re a nice bunch of social-justice-loving people. I appreciate that these organizations have a strong, vital identity, and I accept that within those confines they do important work and employ many faithful Friends. It’s just that they lack the language to explain why a grocery store employee with a love of youth religious education would go unarmed to Badgdad in the name of Christian witness.
The wider blogosphere was totally abuzz with news of Christian Peacemaker Team hostages (Google blogsearch lists over 6000 posts on the topic). There were hundreds of posts and comments, including long discussions on the biggest (and most right-leaning) sites. Almost everyone wondered why the CPT workers were there, and while the opinions weren’t always friendly (the hostages were often painted as naive idealists or disingenuous terrorist sympathizers), even the doubters were motivated by a profound curiosity and desire to understand.
The CPT hostages were the talk of the blogosphere, yet where could we find a Quaker response and explanation? The AFSC responded by publicizing the statements of moderate Muslim leaders (calling for the hostages’ release; I emailed back a suggestion about listing Quaker responses but never got a reply). Friends United Meeting put together a nice enough what-you-can-do page that was targeted toward Friends. The CPT site was full of information of course, and there were plenty of stories on the lefty-leaning sites like electroniciraq.net and the UK site Ekklesia. But Friends explaining this to the world?
The Quaker bloggers did their part. On December 2 I quickly re-jiggered the technology behind QuakerQuaker.org to provide a Christian Peacemaker watch on both Nonviolence.org and QuakerQuaker (same listings, merely rebranded for slightly-separate audiences, announced on the post It’s Witness Time). These pages got lots of views over the course of the hostage situation and included many posts from the Quaker blogger community that had recently congealed.
But here’s the interesting part: I was able to do this only because there was an active Quaker blogging community. We already had gathered together as a group of Friends who were willing to write about spirituality and witness. Our conversations had been small and intimate but now we were ready to speak to the world. I sometimes get painted as some sort of fundamentalist Quaker, but the truth is that I’ve wanted to build a community that would wrestle with these issues, figuring the wrestling was more important than the language of the answers. I had already thought about how to encourage bloggers and knit a blogging community together and was able to use these techniques to quickly build a Quaker CPT response.
Two other Quakers who went out of their way to explain the story of Tom Fox: his personal friends John Stephens and Chuck Fager. Their Freethecaptivesnow.org site was put together impressively fast and contained a lot of good links to news, resources and commentary. But like me, they were over-worked bloggers doing this in their non-existant spare time (Chuck is director of Quaker House but he never said this was part of the work).
After an initial few quiet days, Tom’s meeting Langley Hill put together a great website of links and news. That makes it the only official Quaker organization that pulled together a sustained campaign to support Tom Fox.
Lessons?
So what’s up with all this? Should we be happy that all this good work happened by volunteers? Johan Maurer has a very interesting post, “Are Quakers Marginal?” that points to my earlier comment on the Christian Peacemakers and doubts whether our avoidance of “hireling priests” has given us a more effective voice. Let’s remember that institutional Quakerism began as support of members in jail for their religious witness; among our earliest committee gatherings were meetings for sufferings — business meetings focused on publicizing the plight of the jailed and support the family and meetings left behind.
I never met Tom Fox but it’s clear to me that he was an exceptional Friend. He was able to bridge the all-too-common divide between Quaker faith and social action. Tom was a healer, a witness not just to Iraqis but to Friends. But I wonder if it was this very wholeness that made his work hard to categorize and support. Did he simply fall through the institutional cracks? When you play baseball on a disorganized team you miss a lot of easy catches simply because all the outfielders think the next guy is going to go for the ball. Is that what happened? And is this what would happen again?
What is this QuakerQuaker thing?
March 29, 2006
There’s been some head-scratching going on about QuakerQuaker over the last few weeks. In the service of transparency I’ve posted my contributor guidelines on the “About QuakerQuaker page”. Here they are:
Post should be explicitly Quaker: Any thoughtful posts from any branch of Friends that wrestles in some way with what it means to be a Quaker is fair game. While we all have our own issues that connect deeply with our understanding of our faith, the Blogwatch only seems to work if it keeps focused on Quakerism, on how we our faith and lives interact. Back when this was just a links list on my personal site I would get complaints when I added something that seemed related to my understanding of Quakerism but that wasn’t specifically written from a Quaker standpoint (when we want to make this kind of link we should do so on our personal blogs where we can put it in better context).
Post should be timely: I’ve billed QuakerQuaker as “a guide to the Quaker conversation” and links should go to recently-written articles with strong voices. We’re not trying to create a comprehensive list of Quaker websites, so no linking to organizational homepages. While most links should go to blog posts, it’s fine to include good articles from Quaker publications. A link to something like a press release or new book announcement should only be made if it’s extraordinary. Remember that QuakerQuaker posts will only appear on the main site for a few days (if the initial setup goes well I can start work on some ideas to giave a more timeless element to the site).
Post should be Interesting: Don’t bookmark everything you find. If the post feels predictable or snoozy, just ignore it (even if the writer or topic is important). The Quaker bloggers all have their audiences and we don’t need to highlight every post of every blogger. Only make the link if the post speaks out to you in some way (it’s quite possible that one of the other contributors will pick up, finding something you didn’t and highlighting it in their description). That said, the posts you link to don’t have to be masterpieces; they can have grammatical and logical mistakes. What’s important is that there’s some idea in there that’s interesting. It might be a good discipline for each of us not to add our the posts from our own personal blogs but to let one of the other contributors do it for us.
That’s it. While there are some vague assumptions in all this about the role of tradition and community, discipline and individualism, there’s nothing about theology or who gets linked. This is a publication, with something of an editorial voice in that I’ve chosen who gets to add links and asked them to be subjective, but its very mellow and I’ve been happy to see contributors range far afield. Google tells us that this is one of 18.7 million “Quaker” websites and $10/month will get you your own so let’s not do too much navel-gazing about what’s linked or not linked. If you don’t find it interesting, there are plenty of non-subjective Quaker blogs lists out there. I do listen to feedback and am always twiddling with the site so feel free to send email to me at martinkelley.com/contact.
QuakerQuaker.org, new home to the blog watch
January 3, 2006
I’ve moved the Quaker Blog Watch material to a new website, QuakerQuaker.org. It’s more-or-less the same material with more-or-less the same design but the project has become popular enough that it seems like a good time to send it off on its own. I hope to find ways of making it more collaborative in the near-future.
You can subscribe to the QuakerQuaker Watch via Bloglines or to the daily email by following the links. If you’re already following the Watch in a subscription reader, you should change the source of the feed to http://feeds.quakerquaker.org/quaker if you don’t want to miss out on any future innovations. If you have the Watch currently listed in your blog’s sidebar you won’t have to change anything.
At some point when the dust of the move has settled (and I have the new Quakerfinder.org launched as part of my FGC work), I’ll take a moment to wax philosophical about the evolution of this project and will toss out a few ideas about where it might go in the future. In the meantime, let me know if anything is broken, confused or grammatically mangled.
A kind of retrospective history of the project is available on the “quakerquaker thread”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/quakerquaker/ of the Ranter.
Quaker Blog Watch by email
October 18, 2005
It started when I began bookmarking the more interesting Quaker posts I ran across over the course of the day. That turned into the sidebar on the “Quaker Ranter”:/martin homepage, which then turned into the “Quaker Blog Watch”:/quaker page. Now, as an experiment, I’m making it available as a daily email:
More info here: “Quaker Blog Watch by email”:http://www.nonviolence.org/quaker/email/
I do recognize that this site has mutliple fan bases. While I was on paternity leave a colleague emailed me to ask when I would post more pictures of Baby Francis. I looked and saw that it had only been ten hours since I had uploaded the last picture to my Flickr account. Aaayyee!, the danger of increasing expectations! Well, you can now get a daily email containing any new pictures of “Baby Francis”:/francis or “Big Kid Theo”:/theo: go to either of their homepages for the sign-up form (they share one subscription). One small step in self-indulgent parenthood, ain’t technology great?
Add Quaker Blog Watch to your site
August 16, 2005
A few months ago I started keeping a links blog that evolved into the “Quaker Blog Watch” (formally at home at “nonviolence.org/quaker” though included as a column elsewhere). This is my answer to the “aggregation question” that a few of us were tossing around in Sixth Month. I’ve never believed in an uberBlog that would to supercede all of our individual ones and act as gate-keeper to “proper” Quakerism. For all my Quaker Conservativism I’m still a Hicksite and we’re into a certain live-and-let live creative disorder in our religious life.
I also don’t like technical solutions. It helps to have a human doing this. And it helps (I think) if they have some opinions. When I began my list of annotated Quaker links I called it my “Subjective Guide” and these links are also somewhat subjective. I don’t include every post on Quakerism: only the ones that make me think or that challenge me in some way. Mediocrity, good intentions and a famous last name mean less to me than simple faithfulness to one’s call.
There’s no way to keep stats but it looks like the links are being used (hours after I stumble across a previously-unknown site I see comments from regular Quaker Ranter readers!). Here’s the next step: instructions on adding the “last seven entries of the Quaker blog watch to your site.” I imagine some of you might want to try it out on your sidebar. If so, let me know how it works: I’m open to tweaking it. And do remember I’ll be disappearing for a few days “sometime soon” (still waiting, that kid can’t stay in there too long.)