The Urantia Book Fellowship
2008 IT Oversight Committee

Communiqué 1

February 4, 2008

 

 

Dear Friends;

 

At the January, 2008 meeting of the EC, a motion passed with 12 votes yes, 1 no, and 0 abstaining which specified that the Executive Committee would act as "an IT Oversight Committee for a period of one year while it considers how best to meet our IT needs."  Per the motion, this committee will meet at least four times during the year and will include participation by the Fellowship's IT Consultant. It was agreed that the meetings could take place in person or as conference calls.

 

As a starting point, it may be helpful if I attempt to provide some background on current developmental directions and my perception of where we are in an ongoing developmental process. 

 

Our IT work is a long-term project and given the limited resources with which we are working (mostly in the area of technical staff) I have found it necessary to work steadily on long-term plans, putting new elements in place as possibilities open up. 

 

We are moving toward having three separate but integrated websites.

 

1. A Fellowship Website   There will be a website dedicated to reader activities, conference promotion and support, study groups, access to readership history, readership educational materials, etc.  In other words, a true Fellowship website under the control of the Fellowship's various committees.  Each committee should have at least one web-literate member who can be designated as the committee's web liaison.  These folks (one from each committee) should be a member of an oversight committee charged with management of the website itself, including all technical support work. The General Council should be able to provide ideological oversight and the organization's IT person or staff should provide technical guidance--but the work of web publishing and site maintenance should be done by committee members.  This would provide a vehicle with which committees could engage in their own group-specified dissemination, education, and outreach efforts. 

 

Note:  This plan was approved by the General Council several years ago but never implemented due to the lack of technically qualified committee members. 

 

This next generation Fellowship website (now in development) will actually be a software application which will contain a variety of features making it easy for anyone with a password to publish materials on the website -- documents, video, audio, etc.  The software will take care of all formatting and publishing tasks.  The user need only provide the initial file such as an MS Word document, or a file from a digital digital video camera.

 

There is a great need for the Education Committee to become more involved with the website.  There are many documents on the site which are dated or simply not of the best quality.  They should be culled and put in the historic archive while the website itself presents relevant and well-written study aids and commentaries. 

 

2.  A Uversa Press Website   There will be a separate website dedicated only to the promotion of The Urantia Book and its translations, along with some fundamental study aids and introductory materials.  This website should be integrated with and managed according to Uversa Press marketing and publishing objectives.  This would include the support and sales of translations by other publishers.  Part of the present problem with the website is that the social aspects of dissemination are being somewhat subordinated to the technical  and marketing aspects. 

 

The primary Urantia Book publishing tools might function better under the aegis of Uversa Press -- website, audio editions, book publishing, distribution, marketing, etc.  Our Publications Committee would focus only on internal publications while Uversa Press would manage publications aimed out into the world at large.  This would provide a basis for a unified public relations strategy that would integrate our external dissemination efforts, thus leveraging and focusing resources more effectively. 

 

I urge consideration be given to what functions of the organization are best managed under the aegis of the Fellowship, and which are more appropriate for Uversa Press.  In effect, we are evolving into an organization that successfully executes the tasks originally divided between Urantia Foundation and Urantia Brotherhood. 

 

3. An Administrative Website   A third website will be devoted to Fellowship internal administrative services.  At the core of this site will be the Fellowship's database.  Easy-to-use applications will be available to administrative staff for managing the readership and various organizational administrative tasks.  This site will also contain applications allowing folks with passwords to use administrative software such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.  This will enable us to provide software for Fellowship workers anywhere in the world.  We will be able to take care of licensing and upgrades at one location and keep everyone on the same versions of key software. 

 

This transition to a three website model is well under way and should be complete within a twelve to eighteen month timeframe.

 

Increasingly, IT staff should be taking care of background technical issues while reader groups -- committee website liaisons, Uversa Press folks, and Fellowship administrative staff take care of managing content.  But this must include the technical aspects of web publishing, not simply a committee telling technical staff what to do.  Wise choices here cannot be made by persons not actually involved in the process. 

 

While website users will see three separate web presences, the technical foundation will be integrated with an emphasis on ease of management.  This technical foundation will also provide consistent branding across our web services (important) while leaving plenty of room for varying content.  That is, the overall navigation, visual, and structural layout of website pages will be provided by templates while committee liaisons or other workers can feed content into those templates -- consistent branding, great flexibility in content, ease of use.

 

In addition, all content will be stored in a database so that it can be fed out as needed to a variety of display devices -- personal computers, cell phones, e-books, digital assistants, etc.  Software will check to see what sort of device is requesting the information, retrieve the information from the database, format it according to the specifications of the requesting device, and transmit it to the user. 

 

The Changing Nature of the Fellowship 

 

The issues facing us with regard to management of IT resources are part of a larger trend with the work of the Fellowship that we should consider.  It has to do with the growth of the scope of our dissemination work.  Through the years of Urantia Brotherhood and the first decade of the Fellowship's existence, the work of the organization paralleled the annual budgeting cycle.  That is, the work of committees was conceived, planned, and executed on a yearly basis.  The growth of several phases of our work has resulted in the need now to plan in terms of multi-year strategies.  These areas include book publishing and marketing, the work of the International Fellowship Committee, the work of our IT services, and our international conference planning process.  All of this leads to the need for more oversight and long-term supervision on the part of the Executive Committee. 

 

As this work grows, so does the financial cost of pursuing these expanding opportunities.  The Executive Committee, in honoring its assigned task of prudently managing contributed resources, will increasingly need to ask questions about the duplication of effort within its various committees.

 

The nature of the work is changing as well.  If dissemination is to expand into the world, it will need to be done relative to mechanisms, systems, and needs which exist in that world.  Executive Committee members will need to be better informed and increasingly will need to consult professionals outside of the committee itself.  This is already happening with the international work, the IT work, as well as with book publishing and marketing.  In the near future it will likely also be the case with educational work, publications, and outreach.  The Executive Committee increasingly will need to make sure goals and objectives clearly are being pursued; metrics will need to be established to measure success or failure and the Executive Committee will need to be both evaluator and director.  But this evaluation and direction will need to be done on the basis of clearly established objectives and measurable achievements; the Executive Committee can never hope to embody sufficient knowledge to act in any other manner in a domain of increasing complexity and specialization. 

 

It may be helpful to consider the Fellowship as transitioning from simply a fraternal organization whose work was accomplished through committees of volunteers, into a business enterprise in which the various committees have evolved into departmental organizations operating within a larger corporation to achieve objectives established and overseen at the higher levels of the integrating corporation.  This is the direction in which the organization is most likely to evolve if an effort is not made in the near future to more formally and structurally separate the fraternal aspects of our work from the business aspects.   

 

However this situation gets resolved, there are several major issues that need to be appreciated in attempting to navigate this transition productively.

 

1.  The need to weigh new possibilities opened up by advancing technology against pragmatic technical and economic limitations.  For example, does the IT team simply move ahead into video production because of the significant potentials that this represents, or should the Executive Committee be involved in deciding about any new advances?  Each new advance expands the range of maintenance needs as well as incurs new financial commitments, some of which may extend over more than one budget cycle.  One of the problems with this is the sometimes glacial pace of Executive Committee action.  Keeping up with technology and new opportunities requires timely action. If a new department or project is successful, sustaining the success creates a  need for additional resources.

 

2.  Understanding the implications of a philosophy of service -- the degree to which we attempt to serve people's needs vs. promulgate a specific ideological position.  This is fundamental and will impact everything else.  For example, do we not include any reference to or image of Jesus on the website home page because some readers object, or do we use this reference and an image because our website visitor statistics tell us that Jesus is the primary element attracting people to the website?  I am hopeful that creating a website which is under the control of Fellowship committees and another one which is under control of marketing and business objectives will help eliminate this issue.  The marketing site can be developed in accord with good market research while the committee-controlled site can be developed according to the ideological preferences of its committees and committee liaison contributors.

 

3.  Some understanding of the difference between promulgating a religion and managing a business and the establishment of clear corporate operating procedures with regard to this.  The Fellowship constitution primarily calls us to a social task and it specifies that we will pursue its purpose "through the medium of fraternal association." The development of our website as well as our book publishing and marketing efforts, the implementation of a web store, and the emergence of independent translations which may be distributed by the Fellowship have added a commercial dimension to our work which demands astute business organization and management.  This is very different from the wise management of emerging social infrastructure.  The present constitution of the Fellowship makes little provision for the integration of business undertakings with the tasks of social development.  This process needs to be managed in a thoughtful way and not simply left to evolve haphazardly.   

 

I hope this background information is helpful in terms of creating some degree of orientation to the task at hand. 

 

Since there are so many issues involved it would be helpful to have the objectives of this present IT Oversight Committee clearly defined.  What do we want to accomplish during the four meetings we are to have this year?

 

Let me know what I can do to make our task as efficient and productive as possible.

 

Respectfully submitted,

 

David Kantor