Communities and their stories March 21, 2008
Posted by Zack in Pennsylvania , trackbackI spent part of this week visiting with a community in Joplin, MO. A few different circles of friends, classmates, neighbors, church members & leaders, professors and students there are up to all kinds of amazing things. I’m hoping to write a big story about how all the pieces fit together.
One of the pieces is a neighborhood project that has students and young couples from a church and Bible college moving into a broken neighborhood and helping out. It’s been a story similar to the one told in Shane Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution about the Simple Way community. Except, the people in Joplin mostly only heard about Shane & his book recently, and most still haven’t read the book. One who read the book remarked it made her realize that she was part of a “movement of the spirit” happening all over the place.
I hope that story telling somehow becomes a new standard part of these Christian communities. Because these Christians are so focused on being humble, and not going for credit, they shy away from telling the world about what they’re doing. Even in the churches that support neighborhood efforts like the one I visited in Joplin, there are usually only brief announcements on occasional Sundays — let alone public blogging and book writing.
Through Shane’s books, as well as blogs, and videos like the ones below (by Jamie Moffett), people have been able to follow the trials and successes of the tiny Simple Way community in Kensington, Philadelphia. Shouldn’t there be a way to follow a whole bunch of similar communities? We need some kind of new RSS feeds that go to whole communities, not just blogs. How would that work?
Tags: Joplin, Shane Claiborne, Simple Way
Comments»
I have a couple ideas of what that could look like….
My initial thought would be to use the tag “simplewaycommunities” or “irresistablecommunities” and ask the 25 influentials to post this new means of staying connected on their blogs in a 35 second blog post.
This could be multiplied by a free blog by the same name on wordpress that received those feeds. (i don’t know the tech there)
A decent model for feed aggregation is Alltop which was launched by Guy Kawasaki. Jeremiah O estimated that the development side of the site would only take about 4 hours. PopURLs is where the inspiration came from fro Alltop.com
A guerrilla alternative to what Alltop is would be to develop free widgets via Clearspring (a DC startup in the blogging and web 2.0 space).
My final idea would be to use technology like Ning to be the platform to distribute or serve as a hub.
Great post and great question. I’m sorry this isn’t a full answer. I think tag aggregation is probably the best solution. I know someone did this for the book UnChristian and Anne Jackson I believe is still doing it for her book….on her Squidoo page.
Nathan’s got some good ideas above.
I do think there are a lot of technological options.
My thought though, would be to think more about how to put the stories of communities into the hands of those in the communities themselves, many of who might not be as tech savvy or available as others.
What ways can we bridge that gap and connect those stories?