The Future of Work - Future of the Church?

I came across an interesting book, The Future of Work, by Thomas Malone, when I was reading Eric Raymond's essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. For those interested in the story of Linux and opensource software Raymond's (developing) essay has become required reading.

Raymond talks about the fact that internet technology made it possible for a hitherto unimagined number of hackers (coding experts - not to be confused with nuisance 'crackers', although in common parlance this mistake is often made,) to address the bugs (problems) that invariably arise when writing computer code. Coding problems in large programmes that would have been almost insurmountable to a small number of people, become relatively manageable with enough people working on the problem. 'Many eyeballs can tame complexity', he says, referring to the fact that modern software is too complex to be written by one person alone. It has to be a collaborative work, and the crossover points of that collaboration are often the cause of the programming problems.

In 'The Future of Work' the impact of technology upon business is explored. Malone argues that increasingly we are moving from a centralised to a decentralised model of organisational structure. The suggestion is that the changes that we have seen in other areas of human organisational groupings, from feudal landlords to democratic governments have been facilitated by various technologies (eg literacy) are going to effect business too, in ways which we have only just begun to imagine.

What is it that enables these changes to happen? Malone argues that it is the cost of communication plummeting that facilitates new modes of working.

I have always been fascinated by means of communication and believe that a communication task is it the heart of the Gospel. These changes in communication mode are one of the things that have inspired me to explore the area from the perspective of Christian theology.

It was as communication improved that larger and larger models of society were able to form, to the extent that kings, emperors etc. could rule vast areas, using written decree as the means of communication. When the printing press brought about the revolution of literacy for the masses, a new form of rule and governance was created in the form of democracies. Along with the ability to communicate, the human desire for autonomy and freedom brought about dramatic change. Now we are in the midst of another revolution, the technological on, and the same human desire for freedom, is already heralding in another era of freedom from the large bureaucracies of business corporations.

Models of Church organisation have not always mirrored the developments that we have seen throughout human history in a concurrent way, but there is little doubt that the different models of leadership, organisation and governance that we have seen in human society can also be detected in the variety of Christian churches that we encounter.

Some churches, to this day, have large centralised hierarchies which operate on a global scale. Power is held centrally; the decision making process filters down the line, with those at grass roots level having little decision making power. Other churches, network and offer association in much looser and more informal ways, with grass roots thinking having an ability to be disseminated through things like websites, facebook groups etc. Cafe church is an example of this perhaps. Interesting to note though that the churches which have not had hierarchical structures as part of their life are not just the new kids on the block, non-conformist congregationalists being an example.

Is it possible that Church decentralisation could have a real impact on Church life in the future? Perhaps it's already happening, but like decentralisation in business, we can't see it whilst we're in the midst of it.

In the Methodist Church of Great Britain a dramatic change has been taking place especially in the last 50 years, namely a rapid contraction of the number of members. Arguably as a result of this Methodism, as an organisation, does not have the power and influence it once had, but in this instance, unlike in the business world, the change was not driven by factors such as 'cheap and plentiful communication'. Many other factors have been part of the picture. Methodism, like many other 'legacy' churches, faces the challenge of how to respond to the situation we find our selves in. Are there proactive responses we can make? Have we in recent years only been reactive to challenging situation we find the Church in? Often that's how it's felt to me.

Malone again:
'When most people think about decentralization (sic), they stop at loose hierarchies. That is, they think of decentralization as the delegation of many decisions to lower levels in hierarchies. But what if power were not delegated to lower levels? What if, instead, it originated there? How much energy and creativity might be unlocked if all the members of an organization felt in control?'

There is a distinctly patronising tone about recent encouragement of 'the laity' in the life of the Church, especially when the initiative comes from 'above' and has the unmistakable appearance of merely being a desperate response to the fact that the old ways are proving unsustainable.

How refreshing if the drive towards new creativity and energy in the life of the Church were not from a reactive response of desperation, but a confirmation of our belief that God is not one 'on high' but one who networks with the people in life transforming ways which bring a whole new meaning to the word power.

Questionnaire for those interested in ICT in the Church

The survey is here

imap googlemail with egroupware

The main reasons for thinking about setting up a google apps account for our domain (thecrossing.co.uk) URL are:

1. plenty of email address available (200 booked)
2. email aliases can be setup
3. email groups (including non domain email addresses) can be created; eg cafeboard@thecrossing.co.uk
4. 8gb/user inbox! Eliminates archive issues?
5. sluggish egoupware interface can be used alongside google's fast gmail web app
6. Search in gmail is very fast
   

Notes for setting up gmail with egroupware:

• every person should have a firstname.surname@thecrossing.co.uk email address

nb. addresses like admin@ and sedm@ can be aliases

• Hopefully domain wide email settings can be inserted so that each individual (and new) eGw accountdoesn't have to both with email.

• By default local IMAP folders for drafts, junk, sent,trash templates should not be created.
• Google versions of the above should be specified instead, eg [Google Mail]/Sent Mail

nb. for some (kookie?) reason all the google folders are described as [Google Mail]/Sent Mail etc EXCEPT the google Drafts folder, it is just called Drafts, but is in the list between [Google Mail]/Bin and [Google Mail]/Sent Mail entries. Don't confuse it with the default (local) Drafts folder of the same name!

• That same drafts folder needs to be ticked in the which folders (additional to the Sent Folder) should be displayed using the Sent Folder View Schema list. Though to me that seems to be asking the opposite?! ie the sent folder view doesn't offer an active 'to:' box, like the compose email windows does. I'm sure they mean 'should not be displayed...'. Ticking this makes the emails in the drafts folder show an active 'to:' section when re-opended for sending anyway.

the challenge of email

There are many challenges to the business of email and in particular how it is used as a tool for working together.

Just for a moment I want to go back a stage though and think about how we setup an email service.

My main assumptions - which you can challenge by all means - are:

1. It's good to have an email address that looks professional:
eg joe.bloggs@townvillemethodist.org.uk

2. Everyone working in the organsiation, including volunteers, group could have such an email address if they wanted.
(this could involve email forwarding to a personal (or main) email address as well)

3. It's good to be able to store old email as an archive of conversations (both sent and received)

4. Emails should be accessible from any PC that's online, (and perhaps sometimes from an offline PC).

5. Most people don't want to think about how it works, they just want it to do so in the above way, so it needs to be simple to administer/setup


Many people simply use MS Outlook Express to access an email account that is provided by the internet service provider (ISP). By default this is done using the Post Office Protocol (POP), the key thing to note about POP is that (usually) it downloads each email off the server and doesn't leave a copy there, that means the copies reside on your local PC. Such a solution has been OK for m,any in the past, but with an increasing number of people using more than one PC it has been problematic, eg keeping foolders of 'sent mail' synchronised on different computers.

Using Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an alternative to POP, the main difference is that the email is viewed from the server online, typically a local caopie is not downloaded. Also the folders reside on the (distant) email server as well, so things like the sent items folder only exist in one place, not on each local machine. IMAP has become possible since broadband. When dial-up was the norm, and connecting was very expensive, 'sending/receiving' email and then disconnecting was the best way to do it.

When I started to use eGroupware, an opensource web-based groupware working tool, we soon realised that email was a key part of of the programme, not least because many of the notifictions from different elements of the software used emails as the means of alerting you to new events etc.

At present our email server is the one provided by the company that hosts our URL and webspace. One problem with it is that, by default, it only offers 10 email addresses, also the size of the email server is limited to 400mb across the 10 accounts.

These limitations are one of things that makes googlemail worth looking into. A google apps account can have 100s of email address, including alias email addresses which can be forwarded to a main account(s), and the size of the mailboxes is massive, no problem archiving here.

I intend to explore this more...

some research

One of the things I've said I'll do as a piece of research is some survey work. perhpas a neat way of doing this is to use google apps. Google apps is one of the possible tools that could be used by Church communities to work togther as teams, although there are some notes of caution about committing to Google as a solution, more of which later.

Anyone can have a google apps account, but one neat feature is that the URL you've spent good money on renting can be used as the URL google uses. This is particularly important for email, whereby you (obviously?) want to use the URL name in your email addresses.

Once you've migrated your URL to google and google apps is setup (and that takes a little bit of effort learning about MX records etc. I'll try and retrun to that subject as well), you can start using another part of google apps - google docs.

below is a simple webform that can be easily created. The neat bit is that the replies to the form get inserted into a (ms compatible) spreadsheet, which is not a bad way to start manipulating the information:

You can also embedd the forms into any webpage.

Here's my embedded form:


What do you think?

Mark