Whilst attending the ecampaigning forum I frequently had to dash off and find a quiet corner to make final tweaks to a site that was about to launch. Thankfully the wifi coverage at the conference was pretty good.

Late last night we pushed the button and that project—a total redesign of the Greenbelt website—was launched. We’ve been working on it for several months, and I’m very pleased with the result. You can see a few words Paul wrote about it on the site.

I don’t talk much about my work here, saving the more in depth stuff for the other place, but every now and again it seems worth mentioning some new project that has launched.

In spare moments over the past few weeks I’ve been setting up Future Music Talk. It’s a site that pulls together blog entries from a group of people talking about the future of the music industry, music promotion, etc. There’s a lot of good discussion taking place, but it’s all so widely spread out that it seemed helpful to bring some of it together for easy discovery and maybe some more cross-fertilisation.

There are a few more features I’d like to add, but it seemed high time I got this out in the open and started gathering feedback and ideas for more blogs to include. You can find it all at http://www.futuremusictalk.com

This weekend saw me making my first proper foray into Canada, having previously not been further across the border than Windsor, Ontario, and that only for lunch after having my green card approved. This time we headed to Cameron, Ontario on the far side of Toronto for Culture Is Not Optional’s Practicing Resurrection conference.

The conference seemed to go extremely well and was a great time away with friends and meeting new people. It took place on a farm owned and operated by Brian Walsh, Sylvia Keesmaat and Henry and Sarah Bakker. Their experiment in sustainable farming provided a great location that was also appropriate for the conference which, whether purposefully or not, ended up adopting an agrarian theme.

That theme was largely implicit as talks focussed on design, fashion, food, fair trade, place, and more, but emerged consistently as discussion raised questions about how to maintain awareness of our impact on and interconnectedness with others as we go about our daily lives. Much of that came back to maintaining a commitment to a physical space, not only through the now familiar refrain of purchasing locally but also through a commitment to understanding your place’s history and nature.

That discussion became (al)most heated after the second keynote address by Norman Wirzba. Whilst I’m assured that Wirzba is most definitely not anti-city or anti-technology, it was possible to hear his keynotes as such, and that revealed a tension that runs right through the ’sustainability movement’ between agrarianism and urbanism.

As most attendees seemed to agree, true rural and urban settlements are usually complementary and it is the sub- and ex-urban spaces that tend to have an abrasive effect on their surroundings, but coming to an understanding of what it means to appreciate the beauty of urban spaces and commit to environments that are so often transient is difficult, and hopefully future events will be able to address that more directly. With Wendell Berry being so frequently quoted, I found myself wishing for a similarly wise and articulate writer to speak into the conversation from an urban life.

The key question I was left with was what it means to commit to place in the context of an innately displaced lifestyle, such as that of a transatlantic marriage. While ideals of young people returning to their place of origin after studying are noble, I’m not sure I’m willing to accept that they’re the only way or even necessarily more good than alternatives. Even if they were, it’s too late for us! We will always have one eye on another place, and I wonder what, given that, commitment to the one place means.

Tags: culture is not optional, practicing resurrection, cameron, ontario, norman wirzba, agrarianism, urbanism, wendell berry

For seven or eight years, I ran a website called Britlinks. Over that time, it grew from a simple list of links gleaned from altavista, usenet, and greenbelt programmes into a pretty hefty database of information about bands based in the UK and Ireland with some form of affiliation with the Christian faith.

I tried to use the site to tread and promote the thin path of asserting some value in community between Christian musicians, but avoiding most of the trappings that plague ‘Contemporary Christian Music.’ That attempt met with mixed success, and its results are still difficult to judge, but it certainly drew quite a number of visitors and built up sizable mailing lists.

A few years ago, I began trying to pass the site on, hoping that someone of like mind but more free time might pick it up and run with it. That’s not happened, and yesterday, after a little polishing of the code, I officially put the site into an ‘archive’ mode. It’s now complete with warnings on each page not to expect up to date information, and a brief history.

Running britlinks was quite a ride, and if it weren’t for that site my life would look quite different. But it feels good to have put it to rest in a more official manner.

For now, this entry is only likely to be of interest to those who will be at Greenbelt (eleven days to go…). This year we’re going to be making use of flickr (photo sharing), del.icio.us (shared bookmarks) and technorati (blog search) to try and build an online collage of the festival.

The story went up on the website today, with instructions on how to participate. Please tell your friends and spread the word, while I get to work on the necessary software to bring it all together…

Tags: greenbelt2005 | collage | flickr | del.icio.us | technorati

I’ve referred in the past to the wonderful websites They Work For You and Write To Them. Built by a group of volunteers, these sites provide search tools for Hansard (the British parliamentary record) that allow users to keep track of the activities of members of parliament, monitor the occurrence of topics in parliament, share comments on sections of the transcript, and then contact any of their elected representatives (at local, national, or european level) to initiate or continue discussions with them.

For the past few weeks I’ve been beginning to consider the possibility of similar tools for the United States. There are plenty of people working on tools to increase political engagement, and to begin to transform politics into a more participatory process. Particpatory Politics are a prime example, and so is the fantastic GovTrack. There are new tools such as Civic Space that are building tools for organising and managing campaigns (whether electoral or issue-based), and many 527s provide ways for their supporters to contact representatives. But so far as I can find, there isn’t anything that matches the facilities of the UK sites, or that places the tools in the hands of the general populace.

This post should be considered a call for participants. I’m beginning to pull together ideas on what might be involved in developing that US equivalent on this wiki. Ideas, feedback, participants, they’re all welcome…

Tags: participation | govtrack | theyworkforyou | writetothem

I’m well aware that I’ve been quiet here of late. In part that’s due to a desire to step back, spend a little more time reading and to pay a bit more attention to detail when I do post, but I had intended to intersperse that with more short posts.

One of those short posts was to have included links to two recently launched websites: The Image Shoppe and Bazzani Associates.

The Image Shoppe is a Grand Rapids-based design and communications agency with whom I’m working a lot at the moment. Last week we launched an initial version of their site, with further developments to come as the work schedule allows.

Bazzani Associates are leading the way in sustainable building in the US and their construction sights will be familiar to anyone who spends much time around Grand Rapids. This site is also a first-phase launch and we’re working with their team to develop a lot more content exploring their diverse range of projects, their ‘triple-bottom line’ approach, and the great results they’re achieving.

I write a lot more about such things on my other blog.

Three posts in one day. Whatever next? (I make no promises to keep it up)

We’re headed to Nashville on Sunday to partake in this. If you’re in the area, please come along and join us.

“Up From The Ryman”

At The Downtown Presbyterian Church,

On the corner of 5th Ave. North and Church St.

154 5th Ave. North 254 - 7584

Monday, April 11th

6:00 Pentecost Is For The People: An Evening Of Conversation with Will Campbell and David Dark in the chapel

7:00 Reception for Will Campbell

9:00 Concert in the sanctuary featuring Jars of Clay, Ashley Cleveland, and John Davis.

Tuesday, April 11th

4:45 Taize Tuesday meditation service in the chapel

7:00 Concert in the chapel, featuring Sarah Masen (Dark), Kendall Payne and Ginny Owens

Karl posted a comment on my previous entry asking for highlights and surprises from the festival. I’d intended to post something to that effect at some stage, but there’s no time like the present…

Musically there was plenty to enjoy. With the presence of Brother Danielson and Half-Handed Cloud (and, to a lesser extent, Sufjan Stevens) there was a definite avant garde stream running through the event, and it was great to see the warm response to those artists. Among festival-goers there was a clear appreciation of what they were trying to achieve and many of us really enjoyed their sets. Seeing John Ringhofer (Half-Handed Cloud) perform was great after listening to his latest album so much of late.

I really enjoyed David Dark’s keynotes. There were some interesting comments on Andy Whitman’s blog (both in the entry and in the comments on it) about the talks, but for me David’s anecdotal style is very appealing. I also really enjoyed the discussion after Adam’s workshop about collage, electronic music, and how we responded to Matmos‘ “A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure.” The last-minute addition of Dave Bazan to the Saturday night lineup, and the fabulous performance Sarah Masen pulled out of the hat, were great!

As I’ve found with Greenbelt over the years, the main reason for attending an event like this is the community. The real highlight was definitely catching up with old friends and rekindling relationships started at the inaugural event. I was pleasantly surprised by how strong some of those relationships have quickly become, and how inclusive the event felt. Naturally, speaking at and helping organise the event, my perspective was somewhat skewed, but it really felt like there was no chasm between contributors and attendees.

On a slightly different note, if anyone has any photos of the event that they could upload to flickr and tag ‘ffm2005′ it would certainly make this ffm2005 page more enticing.

Tags: ffm2005

This entry would have been sooner coming, but a few details leapt in the way and this week has been no calmer than the last. It’s definitely good news that the Festival of Faith and Music went so well as it did.

This festival was always going to be a different experience for me than the last: not having a 28-hour journey and the associated jetlag was a big bonus, and it was never going to be quite so life-changing as my first visit to Grand Rapids. But while none of those who were at the inaugural event could claim quite such an impact as it had on Kari and I, it was clear that there had been some repercussions, as evidenced by the warm friendships between people who had first met two years ago, and Daniel Smith’s statement from the stage that he had felt freed up to “try some new things.”

In our first feedback meeting there seemed a concensus that the depth of engagement had increased by this year. Albert Pedulla’s worship session was fantastic and very much in keeping with the tone of the event, and alongside the number of conversations in the corridors was clear evidence that the content of the workshops was spilling out of the classrooms. Whether it was stories from the road, or links between Dada-ist collage and electronic music, the interaction was great to watch and partake in.

If you’re looking for details on the talk I did at the festival, you can find them here, and I’m gathering links to FFM-related blog entries at del.icio.us. Of course, you can always try one of these two technorati searches too.

Tags: ffm2005