i mentioned a couple of weeks back that the grace web site had been revamped. on the surface it may not look that different but the big shift is one of participation. a year and a half ago at a grace weekend away we  came up with three words that capture our ethos – create, participate, engage. we subsequently added a fourth – risk. this ethos has really shaped what we have done since, much more than i imagined.

so that the web site carries our ethos it has been changed so that any members of the community can create/participate and add content to the site – either new pages or editing existing pages. on the one hand this saves the current web master from being a bottle neck/controller but more importantly it just opens the whole thing up and captures what grace is about. none of us quite know how we will use it or what exactly we’ll add but that is half the fun. some of us had an initial play around with it on friday and liked the shift in approach. a good example of the way we can work with it is the new archive section. this has dates of grace over the years. any of us that have bits and pieces of liturgy/titles/outlines from those services can add them in to develop a collective memory/archive/resource. that should evolve. clearly the site could remain static if none of us do anything but i expect it will grow organically to reflect who grace is. one of the outcomes is also that it will end up looking less slick and be more messy. 

one of the phrases that stuck in my mind about web 2.0 was that they were applications/sites where ‘community is the content‘. for grace or any other similar group community really is the content so it makes sense that the technologies and communications we use work with that notion.

co-incidentally i got an e-mail from pete today letting me know that ikon have shifted their web site to a wiki based site. this is even more open than ours – anyone can edit any page on it.