ReconRabbi is a social network for rabbis associated with the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. It is designed to provide ongoing education and networking for far-flung alumni.
It’s a highly customized, member-only site built on the Ning platform. The typical Ning features are here: video, podcasts and member profiles. Expanded areas include extensive training material for members. We recorded and I edited a series of eight screencasts of approximately five minutes each for their Help section using Screenflow for Mac; topics include signing up, adding discussions, using the customized training material.
Member-only Site: http://www.reconrabbi.net/.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ social
The Limits of the Real Time Web
October 19, 2009
Convergent Friends: Content not designed for our market?
April 24, 2009
Henry Jenkins (right) mixes up the names but has good commentary on the Susan Boyle phenomenon in How Sarah [Susan] Spread and What it Means. I’ve been quoting lines over on my Tumblr blog but this is a good one for Quaker readers because I think it says something about the Convergent Friends culture:
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.
Extending customer relationships through social media
April 8, 2009
Over on my O’Reilly Media blog, I’ve written “Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites?,” a look at where I think the third-party social media websites are going. Here’s a taste:
The goal of most websites is to extended the interaction with the visitor beyond this one visit: we seek to sell them a product, join our mailing list, buy tickets to our event or subscribe to us in a news reader. Facebook is quickly becoming the most important email list and news reader. If it continues to innovate (and borrow ideas from innovative competitors) it could quickly become a major commercial portal as well. As its adoption rate climbs within the ranks of our target audiences, it becomes an effective way to extend visitor relationship and build more intimate brand identities.
This will change company’s interactions with customers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time interaction. This can take many forms – status updates, calendars, videos – but the emphasis will be on immediacy. The style will shift from slickly-produced mass marketing to a one-on-one responsive back and forth. Smart marketers will think less in terms of selling and more in terms of relationship building. Analytics and constantly-rolling A/B tests will give us a near real-time gauge with which to measure the success of these relationships. The recession is bringing a new urgency for measurable results and might actually help shift corporate and non-profit budgets away from high-price opinions and toward this new style of social-network-mediated marketing.
It will be interesting to see how organizations adapt to social media’s evolving role.
Friends Council Social Network
November 25, 2008
This is a Ning-based social network for Friends Council on Education, a Quaker organization dedicated to supporting Friends Schools across a very wide geographic area. I set the site up and did initial training. The members-only site now boasts over 700 members and dozens of member-uploaded videos and photos.
Save St Mary’s Malaga
May 6, 2008
On a Friday my wife Julie and older son attended a rally to save a favorite church in Malaga, Gloucester County, New Jersey threatened with closure by the Diocese of Camden. By Sunday we launched Savestmarys.net. It was a weekend where I was already swamped with deadlines, so it’s standard Movable Type but with all the tricks of mashed-up Web 2.0 sites to let Julie pour content in: Flickr, Youtube and Google Calendars.
Visit: Savestmarys.net
We the Church, the People and the Fellowship
November 13, 2007
Liberal Friends today frequently question the meaning of membership. Its necessity and obligations are debated. Does it foster separation? Is it an exclusive club? What cultural norms get in the way of wider fellowship? Why do so many of our meetings have the same limited demographic and why do they look so unlike the larger community. The way we answer these questions affect the way we think of outreach and ministry and what we mean when we think of who “we” are. (Interesting recent discussions from a seeker here and amongst Conservative Friends here.)
Membership is a powerful means of facilitation fellowship, something that most of us need to grow very deep into the Spirit. But the fellowship of our monthly meetings (and of “Quakerism” in general) can easily become a distraction, a means to its own end, a false idol. We need to keep our eyes on the prize and realize that membership in meeting is secondary to membership in the body of Christ and into that Spirit which seeks to build the Kingdom of God in the world.
Here I’ll look at three overlapping ways of defining “we”: the Church, the Fellowship and the People. They’re not mutually exclusive but they’re also not identical and its possible to have one without the others. “We” are out of balance and unable to grow into our full measure as individuals and as a faith community when we don’t keep our eyes on all three together.
The Church
This is the collective body of all those who have experienced the power of the Inward Christ and turned toward Him. Liberal Friend that I am I’m not going to insist on what name people give to the other side of this encounter (especially at first). The experience of visitation comes in various manifestations and we will be alternately judged, comforted, etc. God loves us and doesn’t hide Himself from us and reaches us wherever we are. This is not to say that all religious traditions are equally useful guides to that path, just that God is merciful.
The visitation is not a one-time affair but ongoing. As we respond we will change and we will find ourselves voluntarily re-aligning our lives in ways that let us hear the Spirit more clearly. It is quite possible to be a respectable member of a religious body and stop listening (the root of Friends nervousness about professional ministry). As we mature spiritually and fine-tune the instrument of our discernment, we will be presented with ever more subtle and ingenious temptations and snares to further progress. It becomes almost impossible to progress without the active fellowship of others committed to this journey, who will confirm and challenge us as needed and amplify our praise.
The Fellowship
We organize ourselves into frail human institutions to provide that fellowship. This is fine and necessary at times but comes with its own snares. It is all too easy to raise up ourselves and begin to exalt ourselves. It is easy to think that our purpose is to serve ourselves. We must never forget that the Body of Christ is our first membership and that its boundaries will never match up with our printed directories or membership roles. The primary role of the monthly meeting and lower-case “c” churches is to spread the good news of the spiritual resurrection of Christ and the life and power that exists when we serve God. “The Membership” is always a temporarily illusion, a pale imitation of The Church and a temporary stop-gap as the Kingdom of God aligns itself on the world.
The People
“Christ has come to teach The People Himself,” one of George Fox’s most important insights. We’re all in this together, spiritual salvation is for us all. Those of us who have felt the workings of the Inward Spirit in our hearts must sing that out to everyone we meet. We must hum the song of God and so let others hear it in their hearts.
In the Bible “the people” are the Jews, a specific social group whose spiritual devotion fades in and out through the centuries. The Old Testament is story after story of the Jewish people falling down and getting back up, usually with the help of a prophet whose role was to remind them of God and show them how far they had fallen out of alignment with His will.
Jesus was prophet extraordinaire. When lawyers asked him to define neighbor – who is it that our religious institutions exist to serve – he gave the story of a despised Samaritan who did the right thing by helping a fellow human in need. A point of this story was to show that the Jewish God works among non-Jews and that faithfulness doesn’t depend on one’s social station in life.
The People are everywhere. We all have access to the Spirit. And if we are to be the building blocks to God’s Kingdom here on Earth we must serve one another across the superficialities that seek to divide us: lines of class, race, ethnicity and yes even sexual orientation. These are snares. We must seek to rise up together, focusing less on perceived failings of those around us than on our own inward call to a greater perfection (communion) with God.
What does this all mean to Friends?
Most Quaker meetings I’ve visited are good at one or two of these models of we-ness. But without balance they become self-serving.
The Church without Fellowship becomes a “ranterism” where everyone is tempted by the snares of self-delusion. Church without the People becomes a elite spiritualism that detaches itself from the pain of the world and the need to witness and serve our neighbors.
Fellowship without the People becomes a social club uninterested in sharing this good thing we’ve got going. Fellowship without the Church becomes the shell of an empty form worshiping itself.
The People without the Church give us a consumer culture which exists for the next fashion, for the next sale at the Mall. The People without Fellowship becomes a flock of sheep dispersed, easy targets for the wolves of temptation whispering in our ears.
Human fellowships like a Quaker monthly meeting exist solely to bridge the Church and the People. Some of that work involves learning our ministry and service, facilitated by monthly meetings and helped along by the tools of our Friends tradition. But most of the work of the Church is its daily witness to the world of the transformative power of the Spirit in our lives. If we’re doing our job right our meetings should constantly buckle and break under the weight of new members and our worship will spill out into our lives. We will care more about our neighbors than our fellowship. “Outreach,” “Inreach,” “Ministry” and “Witness” will all be the same work.
The Gorillas and Chimps of the Social Networking Scene
September 18, 2006
Over on the New York Times, an article about a new Nickolodeon-created website for parents
now in the final stages of beta testing.
In a nonpublic test of the site over the summer by about
1,000 recruited participants, executives learned that these users
wanted to blog; now, every user with a profile can, Ms. Reppen said.
Through the beta test, which is now open to new members, Nick is
learning that parents want spaces to sell their crafts, a separate
Christian home-schooling discussion and bigger type on the Web site.
Local discussion boards will also be added, as will user-generated
video.
They also quote a Nissan marketing executive, who says that
“community sites are one of the big phenomenon happening on line this
year.”
There is a big shift going on.
It’s startling to realize that my three year toddler is almost the same age as Myspace and older than Facebook.
In just a few short years they’ve come to dominate much of the online
world, especially with under-25 users. The kind of independent blogs
that dominate a sites like Livejournal and Blogspot don’t have the web
of cross-connections – what I called the “folksonomic density” – of the new
social networking sites. It seems appropriate that Myspace was founded by spammers: who knows more about sucking people in?
The question: will the net have room for independent niche sites?
Myspace is changing its architecture to disable key linking features of
third-party embedded plug-ins like the from the popular video site Youtube. The big search sites also want a piece of this market – new features on Yahoo local and the geotagged maps
on Yahoo’s Flickr are impressive). It all reminds me some of the
debates about local food co-ops versus enlightened supermarkets: is it
a good thing that organic produce and soymilk can be purchased at the
local Acme, even if that cuts into the independent co-op’s business?
Don’t we want everyone to have access to everything? In the end,
philosophy won’t settle this argument.
Beth Kantor’s nonprofit blog has an good article asking about the possibilities for real-time web interaction and asks whether it’s possible for the web to let someone be in two places at the same time:
For
me, the eye-opening moment of real-time collaboration came last winter when I was planning a conference with two friends. The three of us knew each other pretty well and we had all
met each other one-on-one but we had never been in the same room together (this wouldn’t happen until the first evening of the conference we were co-leading!). A month to go we scheduled a conference call to hash out details.
I got on Skype from my New Jersey home and called Robin on her Bay Area landline and Wess on his cellphone in Los Angeles. The mixed telephony was fun enough, but the
amazing part came when we brought our computers into the conversation. Within minutes we had opened up a shared Google Doc file and started
cutting and pasting agenda items. Someone made a
reference to a video, found it on Youtube and sent it to the other two
by Twitter. Wess had a secondary wiki going, we were bookmarking resources on Delicious and sending links by instant messenger.
This is qualitatively different from the two-places-at-once scenario
that Beth Kantor was imagining because we were using real-time web tools to be more present with one
another. Our attention was more focused on the work at hand.
I’m more skeptical about nonprofits engaging in the live tweeting phenomenon – fast-pace, real-time updates on Twitter and other “micro-blogging” services. These tend to be so
much useless noise. How useful can we be if our attention is so divided?
Last week a nonprofit I follow used Twitter to cover a press
conference. I’m sorry to say that the flood of tweets amounted to a lot of useless trivia. So what that the
politician you invited actually showed up in the room? That he actually
walked to the podium? That he actually started talking? That he ticked
through your talking points? These are all things we knew would happen
when the press conference was announced. There was no NEWs in this and no take-away that could get me more involved.
What would have been useful
were links to background issues, a five-things-you-do list, and a five
minute wrap-up video released within an hour of the event’s end. They
could have been coordinated in such a way to ramp up the real time buzz: if they had posted an Twitter update every half
hour or so w/one selected highlight and a link to a live Ustream.tv link I
probably would have checked it out. The difference is that I would have
chosen to have my workday interrupted by all of this extra activity. In the online
economy, attention is the currency and any unusual activity is
a kind of mugging.
When I talk to clients, I invariably tell that “social media” is inherently social, which is to say that it’s about people communicating. The excitement we bring to our everyday communication and the judgment we show in shaping the message is much more important than the Web 2.0 tool de jour.