What is the spark and story that will draw people to this site. What will draw other people like us and those that will need to be around us. Who’s story is important?

This discussion included some thoughts on the roles of publishers and the resistance to the publishing enterprise. We are saying that human knowledge is not, finally, a commodity.

To what degree will this be a site that facilitates a conversation in addition to static content?

Can we signal in the story that we have a community that values this flow and sharing? We will have to start with something. We have some concrete communities that need this, can we pull together the content and embody it in this new space. The effort is already underway.

We intend to create a community in which there is mutual respect, but we won’t eliminate all fears and tensions from the site or the community. We can be a place where all voices can speak up and be heard. We have to understand that we are talking about power, this wide open space may be threatening to some, all may make contributions.

Could we combine the resource we are creating with a series of workshops that help folks (especially in communities like the Latino community) combine the heart with these materials and what we can do with it. This echos the notion of apprenticeship and the accompaniment that model implies.

Brainstorming ideas…

sharing

creativity

border-crossing

common longing for the divine

word of God to the people

work of the people

stewardship of ideas

solidarity, not what those in power can do for, but only happens when the poor ask you to do, power sharing

transfer of power, publishing house cannot do that because they don’t share the power

non-capitalistic

micro-sharing of curricular ideas

adaptation

development of story telling

allowing others to reuse your ideas without asserting control over their expressions of those ideas

mapping the flow of the story, so that as sharing and transformation happens the heritage of ideas can be discerned

it is God’s problem to defend orthodoxy, not ours

allowing stories that would otherwise never be told

everyone’s story is important

open to raw and rough source, no need to be polished and ready to publish, open to ideas in early form

help authors take their own rights seriously in appropriate ways, opening themselves to fostering further creativity while protecting themselves from commercial exploitation

mutuality & responsibility as we lower the gate-keeping threshold

seamless connection between community and media, see the microcinema movement that shows wonderfully raw material shown in church basements and on youtv

begin with a kernel of value that expresses what the site is

we need to do some monitoring of content

we stay poor (may help lawyers stay at bay)

speak the open access message in a christian dialect

an apprenticing community, which implies a governing authority who holds the boundaries on the common story, the apprentice plays and learns, but masters must help enforce the boundaries

we must take a stand in our story about the right to use published work and the responsibility for comments shared (liability issues)

human knowledge is not, finally, a commodity

we are talking about free as in freedom, not free as in beer… free as in freedom does not mean we can’t make money (see the audio versions of Free Culture as example)

this is the start of our story, not the end, we can be ok with the ambiguity of our position, throw out to the world what we have and let the world play with it (and maybe even take it in a surprising direction)

work with programmers so that we do something creative in making connections and sharing, software that is robust enough to really grow with the community and allow for participatory sharing

this is a wide open space, if some are uncomfortable with what can be found here, then they may also contribute to it and draw it into a new direction

provide roles beyond authorship (such as reviewing and mediating) that allow those without freedom to express their voice still have an influence on the site, there are many ways to be the masters shaping this gem

this is theology, faith seeking understanding

this is a real exercise in not knowing in advance what the answer will be, it could even end up to be an indictment of us (liberals!), and this is open to that potential

we help communities use the material that we provide, the excitement of the community of practice that can grow up around this.