As I put the list of resources together earlier today and then followed the progress of the Church of Scotland GA on the webcast and on twitter (#ga2009) it struck me that different Presbyterian branches seem to follow very different paths in putting together their web presence.
While the Church of Scotland has been delivering the GA materials over the web for a number of years, has had their audio updates available on-line, and was an early adopter of webcasting the assembly, the official presence is still very much web 1.0. There is one web site, and although they have a great extranet area with a lot of publicly available documents, everything is in a fairly typical web format. And while the Moderator’s “blog” is nice, from a technical standpoint it is still one-dimensional being just a web page without RSS feed or comments. Got to give them credit for the new twitter feed this year though, but at last fall’s National Youth Assembly the twitter feed was one of the top trending feeds.
The Presbyterian branch that really thought this through is the Presbyterian Church in Canada. They have “branded” the denomination with PCConnect which contains various blogs, podcast, and PCConnect-TV weekly segment, all with a unified look and feel.
You have to give the PC(USA) credit for trying Web 2.0 out. There are multiple official blogs from various leaders in the denomination, great on-line video segments about important issues, and Facebook pages. But while all of this is great I have trouble finding a unified strategy, message, or feel in it.
Having said that it is only fair to say that the Church of Scotland and the PC(USA) are revising their web sites. It will be interesting to see how much they integrate, unify, or at least brand the content, and introduce new Web 2.0 content.
(I probably should define Web 2.0. There is not a completely agreed upon definition that I am aware of, but it is a web presence that is interactive in the sense that there are RSS feeds, comment sections, and individual publishing like blogs, twitter or Facebook. The traditional static, or at least slowly changing, web pages are thought of as Web 1.0.)
But while following the CofS GA today I was reading an older post by Chris Hoskins on his blog “What is Freedom?” In that post, Church of Scotland and Social Media, he muses about what more the CofS could be doing on-line. There is a nice comment on the post from CofS leader and techie Stewart Cutler who says:
At present the CofS doesn’t allow Councils to have their own sites. No
‘brands’ allowed. NYA isn’t allowed its own site. COSY isn’t allowed
it’s own site. That limits the ways in which people can interact
because the CofS doesn’t understand that people don’t want to interact
with static, out of date websites. They want to discuss, share, link,
download, upload and all that web2.0 stuff.
So how do you solve the tension between central oversight to maintain uniformity in appearance, presentation and message, versus a more independent approach where lots of stuff gets out there and you need to figure out what is official and what is individual. The PC Canada does the former well, the PC(USA) does the latter well. It seems the CofS is trying to figure it out.
Great post. I especially like the way you explore the very real tension between a coherent corporate message and allowing different flavours and voices to emerge.
I wonder if mini-sites are the answer for the denominations. Sites within a site where different feels and areas of work can be promoted and interacted with but still remain part of the whole.
My main concern is the need for control that some denominations have over what appears on their site, especially with regard to criticism and debate. People need to understand that people want to interact. Perhaps a static and unchanging website is a fair reflection of the Kirk… but I’m not so sure.