Zach Beauvais

church 2.0: a sound

// February 12th, 2010 // Comments // emergent, perspective

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:37-40

I have been struck, at various times over the years, that the Church isn’t all it’s cut out to be. I mean this almost literally. I’m thinking of the “church” as a pattern—like a tailor uses—of how to live, just now. It’s not that it can’t be altered, embellished, customised, and stretched—these are right and useful. It’s more that the pattern itself is often distorted, or badly copied.

What we know of Jesus’ life is full of relationships, and the “Kingdom of God” he talks about is built through the interactions of parts of his “body”—the people of the church. There are whole bunches of metaphors around who we are and what we’re called, but the prime message is about getting along and looking after one another. His definition of who’s in, and who’s out isn’t particularly clear—something I’m sure will raise some eyebrows—and included prostitutes, dodgy businessmen, lawyers and murderers. The only group he seems to have no time for are the religious.

Holding a weekly service has been the definition of church for a very long time, especially among protestant Christians and especially in the West.  It seems that often church means attendance at a weekly service. It has become part of our language:

ʻI have church on a Sunday,ʼ
ʼIʼm off to church,ʼ
ʻWeʼll have a big roast after church,ʼ

In the new Testament, the word most commonly used for church is ecclesia, which means: ʻa called-out company’—but for what have we been called out?

A couple years ago, I was thinking of a project our “church” had been involved in: the Noise. The Noise is an annual event which brings together literally scores of villagers to help one another out in practical ways. Over the past years, it’s tackled elderly folks’ gardens, public paths, school buildings, and family’s houses.

As something to look forward to each year, it’s hard to beat. I cannot think of a single place where I’ve seen young people and very old people and everyone in between helping out and simply sharing a common love. Needs are met, relationships forged (and mended) and people of all ages work, and laugh, and eat together. It’s a picture, to me, of what I think I mean by “community”.

But, what struck me was the idea that a noise only lasts for a moment and quickly fades. It also lead me to think that the church wasn’t being church, except at this time of year. Please understand, I don’t mean that nothing good happened all year, but that something of the essence of a love-driven community was only really experienced during these few, summer days.

Eventually, I started thinking that instead of a “project”, perhaps we should think in terms of a framework, or a network, or another platform for experiencing and sharing this love actively. I called the initiative “resound”—a noise that keeps going.

What follows are some of my thoughts, slightly updated, from the time.

Resound’s principles include:

• Worship of God through works of service
• Active Love
• Network of Relationships / Community
• Every-member ministry
• Church outside of church.

Worship often takes the form of singing or declaring love and worth to God. I believe that all our actions can be worship. We have been called to be “living sacrifices” in Romans 12. Hebrews 13:15-16 ties the sacrifice of praise from out mouths with doing good:

ʼ15 Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that confess his name. 16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.ʼ

Active love or ʻlove in actionʼ is a primary facet of Christianity itself. Jesus repeatedly challenged lip-service and religiosity and his teachings are littered with examples of a love so deeply held that it motivates action. We read (1 John 3:17-18):

ʻ17 This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? 18 Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.ʼ

We are also told that if someone needs food and we say: ʻBe blessed with food,ʼ but do not feed him, we are uncharitable. Relationships form the basis of our faith in Jesus.

Christianity is described as a relationship with God through Jesus. Fellowship plays a vital role in humanity. We use language to interact, we are capable of loving without reward, and we are born into families which (ideally) teach us to get along. I do not believe that all of this charity, love, and fellowship is to be a reward for ʻbecoming a Christian,ʼ. It should, rather, be a consequence of the Love God has so freely given us.

I believe that the Church is present and active in the community, and that its ʻneighboursʼ are a huge part of its life. In traditional weekly services, there are several members whose roles are obvious (preacher, singers, musicians, and—unfortunately —the technical team) and those whose role is needed but less obvious (deacons, elders, and those who count offerings). For the most part, however, the church comprises people whose role is not so much unobvious as undefined. There is no precedent in the Bible for people to have no active role in the church. If this means that there is only so much that can be done in a Sunday service, perhaps there may be more outside this which requires their attention. Many people who cannot preach can paint. Many who cannot sing can scrape old paint off an elderly ladyʼs house. Resound offers a framework for more peopleʼs ministry. It should offer support to natural village networkers as well as to handy(wo)men.

As part of being ʻin ministryʼ through doing practical needs and building relationships, Church is taken outside the church. I believe that our acts of worshipful service are as spiritually significant as the songs sung and prayers proclaimed within the walls of a special building. Without discounting the need and importance of worshipping and gathering together, Resound offers a chance to put principles into action and let the Spirit free to minister. If we find our neighbours difficult to love and serve, surely we will not find anyone easier.

Talis: We’re Excited

// February 1st, 2010 // Comments // Semantic Web, emergent, interesting, tech

This post was originally published on Nodalities Blog.
The Talis offices, for the past few weeks, have been awash with geeky excitement—that kind of near giddy excitement that comes with eager expectation. We’ve all been waiting for something important.

For some, this was no doubt augmented with the announcement of Steve’s new iPad; but that’s not what’s gotten us all worked up.

For months, we’ve been looking forward to the launch of data.gov.uk; and last week, the wraps finally came off. The official press release put it:

A major new website has been launched to the public which gives anyone who wants to use it unprecedented and free access to government data in one place.

This doesn’t quite capture the coolness of the launch, for me. Yes, it’s a major new website, and it’s point is to publish information. But, the exciting thing is that this information is being published as data: data that can be used, reused, remixed and enriched. Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s perspective was more exciting:

Making public data available for re-use is about increasing accountability and transparency and letting people create new, innovative ways of using it. Government data should be a public resource. By releasing it, we can unlock new ideas for delivering public services, help communities and society work better, and let talented entrepreneurs and engineers create new businesses and services.

The point is that this public resource is finally getting a home on the web, and an infrastructure to make it not just available, but useful.

The exceptional team behind data.gov.uk have striven to adhere to web standards in its production: including Linked Data as a priority, as Professor Nigel Shadbolt explained:

We are also going to increase the use of ‘Linked Data’ standards, which allows people to provide data in a way that is as flexible and easy-to-use as possible.

Back in November, Leigh Dodds wrote a post explaining how we’ve been involved, and there’s an official Talis Platform press release too. Basically, we’ve been working with the data.gov.uk team to help with the Linked Data part of the site—hosting the SPARQL endpoints and providing consultancy and training, for example.

I can confidently say that we’re very proud of data.gov.uk, the team behind it, and our involvement with it. We’re excited by the prospect of this data being used as raw material for clever people to make interesting, useful, even world-changing things with it. We’ve seen the beginnings and proof-of-concept projects already.

Now comes the really exciting stuff. What are you going to build?

Image: “Yay for happy days!” by le vent le cri via flickr (CC: By)

Democracy and the Web: the UK gets it while America tries to control it.

// July 25th, 2009 // Comments // blogging, emergent, interesting, perspective

I read yesterday that twitter has been banned from the White House. In the post, Marshall Kirkpatrick joked that this could be a reason we haven’t seen much from Obama’s twitter stream recently. I must admit however, my initial reaction was sympathetic with the White House for pragmatic reasons, though the attitude of the Press Secretary’s attitude towards “twitterers” did raise the hackles. It makes sense to be secure in the White House, to make sure people aren’t saying things which could be dangerous or cause scandal through carelessness. “Loose lips sink ships”, don’t they?

But I think there is a wider idea here, which I think I’ve glimpsed between the lines.

twitter is used around the world to announce what we eat for breakfast. I use it to pass on little observations, like you might to a room full of mates, when there isn’t anyone there to share with directly. News of Michael Jackson’s death reached me via an off-colour joke on twitter. These are uses for a technology which it would be difficult to commend.

However, I also use twitter to share news. When my grandfather recently passed away, I received dozens of messages of encouragement and sympathy. Several of us here in Shropshire organise a monthly get together to network and discuss tech-trends and the work we do through the @shropgeek. Important announcements at work, and shared interest groups often rely on twitter for their spread and response, and I’ve had customer service reps from big companies personally respond to my feedback. Of far more significance, the government of Iran was unable to stop twitter, allowing its citizens to tell the rest of the world what was going on when all other forms of communication were censored, blocked, or monitored. And citizens from around the rest of the world responded.

twitter is a medium, and suggesting someone is petty and fatuous because they use it is like suggesting everyone on TV is unimportant or vain. There is no connection between the inane talk-show host and the investigative journalist or head of state! The point is in the message, not the vehicle. But, the point this raises in my mind is that twitter, and other forms of web-enabled channels make for a high level of transparency, and I don’t think the US (in particular) is a power who likes transparency at the moment.

This has lead me to question what I think of the use of web-media by politicians and important figures, particularly in the US and UK. It makes me wonder whether the “Loose lips” philosophy is misguided in the modern world. You see, closing channels, blocking communication, and monitoring messages suggests a democracy that doesn’t trust its citizens with the truth. Sure, there are controls and securities which must be in place, and I’m not suggesting for a moment that every clerk should have a constitutional right to twitter state-secrets…

…or am I?

You see, the United States is global super-power on par with, and probably only directly comparable with great states of the past called Empires. The notion of an emperor of the US would chill the blood of most of my family, and thinking of the US as anything but a “democracy” is practically heresy. After all, citizens’ rights are ensconced in the very foundation myth and history of the US itself. “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal…” begins a letter to a despotic monarch, sparking off the touch-pad for liberating men from the rule of figureheads, class and social bondage. But part of this very myth* that the Republic, “of the people, by the people and for the people” should be based on citizenship trusted to look after themselves and even take up arms to defend their status as such citizens. There is a deep-running notion in the American psyche that if the government were ever to get too big for it’s boots, it is the right—nay, duty—of her citizens to act to reduce her power.

But I don’t believe the US is a state that can be corrected by its citizens very effectively at all. I think of the complexity, size, presence and byzantine nature of the US Government, and I feel disconnected, small, and powerless to change anything. Over the past decade, in the name of security, Americans put up with reductions in liberty, and I think this principle is bleeding through the cracks in the facade of governance. Blocking channels is saying: “we don’t trust you”.

What would a country look like where the public had access to the vast majority of government information? Where government officially made use of the media its citizens used? Where government officials were held accountable via the various media whenever they were caught being mis-represented?

Oddly, I think it’s the UK.

The “traditional” media here are a powerful force. It is seen as a near human right to have intimate news of public officials and dealings, and watching politicians being interviewed by members of the press is like eaves-dropping on a job interview or witnessing a cautious father’s first meeting of a prospective suitor for his only daughter. The press is a force to be reckoned with here, and it’s not seen as the trustworthy force itself, but is is composed of citizens, not officials.

Does this scandalise the government? Yes… and no. There is a very different attitude toward elected officials here, which doesn’t translate easily to American. A Member of Parliament is legally referred to as “Honourable Member”, but the “honourable” is not taken as read by the average Brit. For decades, for example, Members of Parliament have enjoyed a system of expenses whereby they can claim for nearly every cost of living: from second homes to food and utilities. The true level of this feeding-trough has recently been blown wide by the press (who subsequently have been enjoying their own self-congratulatory feast, but that is another post.)

But, I think the UK get the web, probably because it’s used to dealing with powerful media. I follow Number 10 Downing Street (the metonymic residence of the Prime Minister) on twitter. No 10 doesn’t say much, and I don’t think it’s going to expose any state secrets, but I like the fact that it’s there to be engaged. The Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) hosts an important blog which outlines the government’s plans to expose public data for normal, every-day citizens to have a play with and to see what’s going on.

And, in the last few weeks, the Prime Minister himself has turned himself around almost 180º in my personal opinion. He represents a party for whom I have less time than either of the other major contenders, and I’ve rather lazily accepted him as an incompetent oaf. But, he’s finally earned my pint and invite to dinner, if not my vote (if any of his secretaries are reading this, just tweet your acceptance, and I’ll find some pheasants and Pinotage). A few weeks ago, he appointed Sir Tim Berners-Lee to a Parliamentary advisory role with the explicit intention of opening up and pushing public data online. This is a major point, because it leads to transparency through public accountability. There seems to be a movement for Parliament to see public data as belonging to the people who bought it with their taxes, and this seems to be the most democratic way to see it. His recent TED talk also made me think he’s got a lot more to say than he perhaps has to date; though I think many of his points raise more questions than they answer.

Much has been said in the online world about the new American administration’s use of social media and the web to mobilise supporters during the election. But there hasn’t been much since. President Obama launched data.gov, but there is very little data there. I think the web is seen as a tool for messages, as a part of a bigger campaign, and as a security breach. It’s something to be used with your own agenda, and only under one’s own strict parameters. And, perhaps most non-democratically, it’s been used to broadcast and to cajole—It has not been used to engage. The fact that social media have barely been touched since the election could point to a wider attitude that citizens only matter for the brief time they’re required to vote.

The UK has already exposed much of its public data, and it’s planning to publish more and more as Linked Data (machine-readable, immediately useful resources), and it’s made plans to be more open, grasping the web and the transparency it’s brought through the hard lessons that spin is impossible with a well-informed citizenry, and on the Open Web, there is less room for your own message than there is for humanity.

*mythos is greek for “story”, and it is from that perspective I use the word myth: that it conveys the notion of a commonly-held understanding, not that it is entirely fantastic or without truth.

What we’ve been working on…

// May 1st, 2009 // Comments // Semantic Web, emergent, interesting, perspective

Talis, my employer, has been a big promoter of Linked Data and open-access to information, because we see that new ideas often arise when existing ideas come together. Innovation, if you like, occurs at the join between ideas when they connect. I see this as fundamental to the way ideas and their applications (technology) advance. I tend to believe that anything “novel” is actually affected when other ideas are connected together.

In the technological world, this seems like a strong analogy for Linked Data: information which can be connected by a web-like network of links. These Linked Data have become the foundation for what has come to be known as the “Semantic Web”, a web of connected information which breaks out of information silos and enables the discovery of new ideas from old, and innovation from existing information. We use the phrase “serendipitous reuse” for the idea that once an idea (or a piece of data) is published, it can be used and reused in novel ways and in context of other data to produce unexpected, and unforeseeable possibilities. These ideas (data, again) become increasingly useful when published in a format which allows them to be linked freely to ANY other piece of information. We’ve had the distribution method for this network for years (the good, ol WWW itself) and it’s been about a year since RDF was launched by the WWW Consortium to handle the data itself. The idea is basically to give every bit of data an address (a universal address, not one subjective to a database like a cell reference), and to predicate that bit of information very much like language does. If you think of it like a language, RDF lets bits of data (nouns) to be acted upon or act upon (verbs) others (other nouns). This triple-format enables a near infinite recombination (theoretically) of any data, anywhere with an address.

So, what’s the problem? Well, most of the world’s data are locked away in silos (prisoners of the cells their databases confine them to). Many organisations may wish to make use of their data in a semantic environment, and many might even embrace the Open-source nature of their data, and make it freely available to the world to recombine and use: there are always more innovations outside an organisation than within! In order to lower barriers to enter this linked data world, Talis has built a Platform with resources to host and utilise these connections, making use of semantic web standards (RDF and SPARQL, the query language of the semantic web) and a developer-friendly environment (a RESTFul API, for example).

However, this innovation is only possible when data are accessible. In order to further lower the barriers, Talis is now offering free access to the Platform to host public domain data. We are calling this initiative the Talis Connected Commons, and the offer is not limited to free hosting: the data access services, including access to a public SPARQL endpoint, are also freely available. To keep this data open, you will need to use either the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License or the recently launched Creative Commons CC0 license to publish data. Anyone will then be able to freely access the stored data using the Platform services, without API keys and without usage limits.

There is more information available at www.talis.com/cc, where you can find detailed technical information, FAQ’s and other resources.

Image: “Eggistentialism 1.5 or Three of a Perfect Pair” by bitzcelt (via flickr), CC Licensed

Twitter metadata—metaphor?

// February 10th, 2009 // Comments // Semantic Web, emergent, interesting, perspective

This post featured originally in Nodalities Magazine.

I’m sure I’m introducing old friends; but Twitter is a “microbloggiing” platform, to give it its proper description. it gives users 140 characters to publish status updates, comments, gripes, complaints, praises, news and whatever comes to mind. It’s burst out of its original answer to the simple question: “What are you doing?” and users often tweet just about everything.

One interesting innovation is the integration of the hashtag. Simply a hash symbol (#) and a tag descriptor for the comment. This gives people the ability to follow particular threads of updates or participate in conversations around an interest. They’re often used, for example, to update the goings on from conferences (#FOWA for example). People give their own content this little bit of information, and a search engine can find them. People can add additional information and follow conventions which allow for distributed trends that anyone can follow and interact with.

The recent snowfall in Britain gave rise to a flurry of tweets about road closures, amounts of snow falling, schools closing down and all the other chaos unleashed. When users followed a simple convention, however, this information got organised. People quickly adopted the #uksnow hashtag to track the topic; and eventually someone worked out a way to capture all the info needed to follow these geographically. By tweeting the first half of a UK post code plus a rating out of ten snowfall, anyone following the thread knows exactly where it’s snowing. It’s like an instant weather polling station, distributed across the country. It can go a step further, however, when services can actually mashup these tweets when users turn their simple status updates into a mini line of code.

This little bit of information allows for people to write software to track and automate the twitter information. This interactive map from benmarsh.co.uk, for example, actually plots a visual graph of snowfall across Britain. Bigger snowflakes indicate larger numbers out of ten in the poll. It’s simple, really. Ingenious, possibly. But the fundamental distinction between this tracking ability and the noise of thousands of Twits shouting about the snow is that little bit of metadata.

So, is this use of twitter a metaphor for the Semantic Web? It’s certainly a picture of automating information flow using metadata via software. Sounds Semanticcy to me.

 

Update on Kiva.org

// January 25th, 2009 // Comments // Web 2.0, emergent, perspective

I’ve blogged about Kiva before, and my impression of them and their work keeps growing. Instead of talking more about how great they are, and how they make a huge difference, I’d like to simply host a very short documentary-promotion video about them. If you’d like more information, obviously, you can go to http://www.kiva.org. If you’d like my personal experience, please feel free to tweet me(@zbeauvais) or email me (zach at zachbeauvais.com).