Excerpts from an Email sent to the EC regarding
a proposed Website Content Committee
March 2007

The present "Website Content Committee" was created by uninformed individuals acting in a relatively unilateral manner and assigned a task for which it was completely unprepared.  It is a recipe for disaster and should be eliminated as soon as possible.  

The present "IT Committee" headed by Steve Dreier is important and the Executive Committee should foster its further development.  It is important because the Executive Committee needs a trusted consulting group so that it can wisely make the financial, legal, and technical decisions it increasingly will be called upon to make.  An internal consulting group consisting of professionals working in various IT related fields is extremely valuable.  This group should also be able to certify to the Executive Committee that all organizational information is being adequately backed up, archived, and that all organizational IT functions could be easily and quickly restored in case of disaster.  The staff responsible for the actual backing up, archiving, etc. should not be the ones providing assurance to the Executive Committee that the task is adequately being done.  This will become increasingly important over time.   

As issues emerge related to major equipment purchases, major changes such as a change in hosting services, new directions in software development, new IT services to be provided to readers and Fellowship administrators, these should be submitted to the EC for approval and the EC should in turn be asking its internal IT consulting group for advice.  None of this can be done by a committee of relatively uninformed individuals. 

The General Council needs to be involved at the ideological level.  That is, the Council should be determining the nature of our Web objectives--what is it specifically that we want to accomplish with this resource?  This needs to be specific and measurable, not a diffuse philosophic abstraction.  It needs to consist of statements that describe measurable actions such as:

Get people interested in reading The Urantia Book

Increase organizational membership

Increase interest in deeper study of The Urantia Book

Increase the number of study groups

etc.

The objectives need to be set by the Council. But the Council should also be able to monitor progress toward the achievement of these objectives or change them accordingly.  The actual implementation of website design, architecture, navigation, and content must then be undertaken by technical staff with the experience and knowledge necessary to apply these resources for the purposes described.  This same technical staff should be in communication with the Executive Committee which in turn should be seeking advice from its consulting group, or "IT Committee" when major decisions need to be made. 

8.  Technology is changing rapidly as are the administrative approaches to its implementation and management.  For this reason I feel it would be very foolish for the organization to codify any significant IT related functions or management procedures into the form of a constitutional amendment.  Such documents as "The Rules of the Executive Committee," "The Rules of the General Council," and various ad-hoc committees much more readily lend themselves to the flexibility and adaptability that will be required over at least the next decade of organizational IT services development.

9.  What is most desperately needed is expansion of our IT technical staff.  I am doing triage.  I cannot bring individual tasks to a refined level of completion because of the need to constantly be shifting my attention from one need to another.  We continue to add more software, features, and services while not increasing technical staff.  Creating yet another uninformed blah-blah-blah committee whose members are impotent to help with pressing technical issues and with whom technical staff is forced to interact further retards our progress. 

Rather than creating an IT committee of uninformed individuals supposedly providing oversight of IT work, it would be much more productive to have a committee of informed individuals to which the paid staff could assign tasks as needed to reduce the cost of employing outside consultants.  

A good example of such tasks are those which I outlined in my February 2007 report.  In this report I submitted a whole section of issues that need to be resolved before we can move much farther ahead with our IT services.  When technical staff is required by circumstances to deal with such issues, implementation of services is retarded by months and years.  These are non-technical tasks which require only a commitment of time and effort.

Over the past five years, the Executive Committee has been provided with detailed information outlining emerging needs.  Not only has there been a complete failure to plan accordingly, there were not even any questions asked to enable an objective evaluation of the situation.  This is irresponsible.

If you had your own business and a supervisor came to you over a period of years with reports about machinery on the verge of breaking down, would you ignore it?  Would you fail to ask questions so that you could evaluate the seriousness of the matter?  Would you respond by setting up a committee charged with making sure this deteriorating machinery was polished and looked good to visitors?     

If my IT reports are too technical for Executive Committee members to understand, members should ask for clarification or seek the advice of their "IT Committee."  To ignore advice provided by knowledgeable and experienced technical staff and instead unilaterally implement naive and simplistic approaches such as the recent "Website Content Committee" where the President arbitrarily appoints one of his friends, who has absolutely no experience in the matters involved, to manage a committee charged with directing a highly technical activity is dysfunctional and an abdication of the responsibilities entrusted to the Executive Committee by the Constitution.

Likewise, if the Executive Committee charges an individual with a certain task and then accepts that work by valuing psychological reinforcement of the individual over an informed critique of work potentially having a far-reaching effect on the organization--this too is dysfunctional.  But this is exactly how we responded to Peter's presentation.  His presentation was not even evaluated relative to what he was actually asked to do--which did not include submitting a new design for the home page.  We were far more concerned about creating the illusion that he was making a meaningful contribution to the organization than we were about the viability of his proposed solution to whatever problem it was he was supposed to be addressing.  (I never heard a description of the problem.) 

I will repeat once again -- the critical need is for additional technical staff to apply to the growing challenges of day-to-day operations, not for more committees of uninformed individuals discussing things in the abstract.  I have been repeating this for five years now as the workload has continued to expand. 

If you continue to ignore the information I'm providing, you risk catastrophic failure of processes upon which the organization is increasingly dependent and a concomitant organizational crisis  greater than you can possible imagine.  You must do much more than simply set up yet another uninformed, irrelevant, and ultimately useless committee. 

The Fellowship's data services will continue to evolve into becoming the administrative heart of the organization.  It would be best if any IT committee was structured to function in an advisory capacity to the Executive Committee with the Executive Committee maintaining responsibility for making related decisions and hiring necessary staff.  Giving a standing committee the power to hire employees for the organization (as is specified in this proposed amendment) should not be granted lightly; there are significant legal and financial issues involved.

The ship is steaming out of the harbor and the ways of navigating the open ocean are not the same as those required for protecting the ship in the pre-voyage sheltered bays and lagoons.  Can you rise to the challenge of guiding our ship in the direction of the unknown, rising above what The Urantia Book refers to as ". . . the dangers of the dullness of over-conservative mediocrity"?

In friendship,

David