Barriers are breaking down!

Absolutely Gary! One of the effects all online communities have in common is that they end up initiating what I can only describe as a paradigm shift - not just for the enterprise itself (which is used to the old top-down control model), but for individuals as well - this thing is lateral! You're ahead of the curve in realizing that what's going to benefit you, and the community as a whole, is to err on the side of being a joiner.

I say all the time, that the only real difference between a "real" or civic community and an online community is that an online community is online. I say this to underscore your initial (and normal) apprehensions around joining a group you may not currently have any direct or previous affiliation with. Look at it like you're walking into a church or a business club you've never been to before. You don't know anybody there and they don't know you, but of course just because you don't know each other doesn't preclude that there can't be a very mutual and fruitful relationship established - a relationship that started with you walking in, or in this case, "joining" a group. The like examples and scenarios that spin off are endless - and that's just one facet of the magic that will come of our very unique online community.

As folks trickle in, they're a bit shy. That's human. As we come back and see more threads and questions and discussions that are relevant to our lives and experience, we'll start to speak up - that's human too. It takes a little while for folks to realize that this isn't what they're used to. Nothing here is or will be "top-down." This is our place, and it will become what we need it to be. What a gift to be the first to be a part of something so unique and new, and to live in the ELCA Region whose leadership shares the foresight and vision to make such a faithful leap to enable us in this way. Watching an online community come into its own is always something exciting to behold!

My initial questions were the same as yours, Eric.

I presume you ask, "Is there an obvious advantage to this setup over existing social media?" and "How will we avoid Soul Cafe becoming one more silo?" in order to understand the proper way to promote this online community and tool.

My church has a website and Facebook groups. It is not big with Twitter yet, but that could come.  You pointed out difficulties with the personal connections not being here and the challenges of the geographical barriers. What we need to understand is the power that resides in the non-geographic groups and that, for this tool to work, our tendency towards personal connection rather than group postings will hamper the progress of this online community.  Soul Cafe's architecture invites us to non-geographic, group postings.

Individual churchs are logical groups to set up but several already have postings that encourage members to join other groups like this:

http://soulcafe.org/blog/power-soul-cafe-not-groupthink-think-groups

By far, it is in the non-geographic, non-local church groups where I have experienced the power of Soul Cafe. I personally felt it less than two weeks ago. Someone asked for Soul Cafe to post food-related movie ideas and gave a film suggestion. I could share information about an event my church held in 2007.

http://soulcafe.org/discussion/movie-ideas

In this case there is no need to bridge the online community with a face to face community. I learned about a film and was able to give requested information.

Hope this provides some answers to your basic questions. This community is still young and we have yet to see all that is truly unique about Soul Cafe yet but I have more, just-as-powerful examples of what I have listed here.

Hi Eric,

It's great to see you on SC and testing the waters!

I'm not quite sure I wholly understand the first question. Online communities always foster folks getting together in person. It's the inevitable result of people who share a common interest or concern wanting to meet each other, as long as it's geographically and/or logistically feasible - and although it happens consistently, it's really a peripheral result. Tracking or quantifying numbers of F2F meetings is not a success metric of online communities. Yet, even as we're coming out of our humble 8 week alpha release with around 300 members to date (40 new folks in the past 10 days), introductions and meetings (both in-person and virtual) are already happening between folks who didn't know each other before SC provided them a place to share ideas and solutions to common issues and challenges. Online communities in no way remove personal connections. The reality is that they promote, enable, and facilitate personal connections to other people and ideas in ways that most have never before been able to experience.

It's worth mentioning that geographic boundaries are not being “added” (nor could they be) by SC or anything else – these boundaries are already a brutal reality that have existed and encumbered the Church from its inception. Online communities provide for the exact opposite, in that they enable those boundaries to be broken down. As far as accessibility goes, I'm not quite sure what's different about accessing the sites mentioned vs. Soul Cafe – you simply go to the site and log in. Additionally, SC being referred to as a version of a Facebook page or Living Lutheran is a bit odd in that these are so categorically and varyingly different that they're virtually incomparable – way too apples and oranges.

Folks are feeling it out. Some are searching the greater community and within specific groups, and are already finding things that are relevant to them – and we're barely off the ground yet. People are finding resources and each other in ways that other social platforms can't facilitate or simply don't allow. Something like Facebook is fine for what it is, but it literally can't work for what we need, and most folks are quickly realizing this after an initial rudimentary “stroll” around SC.

Online communities are about mindshare - they work through scale / numbers. 5 people focused on one issue or subject trying to think up new solutions is hardly mindshare – 500 people doing the same things is mindshare. Enabling the utilization of mindshare is what we're working towards, and that happens in a myriad of special ways unique to every individual online community. Right now, congregations are utilizing SC as a clearinghouse for their leadership and members to come and get info, dates, and have dialogue, and that's awesome, but like all online communities SC is really about the bigger picture. Unlike Facebook, that is "me" centric, online communities are "we" centric. SC isn't structured around the individual. However, it will ultimately benefit the individual through sharing and collaboration within the greater community. Ironically, it's some of today's least populated groups that will be tomorrow's most populated. Higher level, more macro groups (e.g., Outreach, Stewardship, etc.) are the ones that will be buzzing the most as the months and years go by. It's because they're groups of interest that will ultimately be relevant to the largest subsets of individuals within the community. Right now, as with all online community launches, folks are looking at what can be done in a very small, individualistic, “micro” way. Naturally, because we're human, they're thinking of things in terms of themselves and their own immediate experience. The individual and the congregation will ultimately benefit through the more “macro” level of participation and sharing. This is one facet of the paradigm shift that these communities instigate – and it's always incredible to watch unfold as people start to get it (and they do get it).

We can never get rid of every information silo, nor would we want to even if we could. The problem isn't necessarily the silos themselves, but the siloing – we need to silo effectively. Online communities work towards, and are extremely successful in eliminating disparate and disjointed communication and information resource silos. Yet, online communities are themselves silos – but they are really big ones. They pull together what would normally be any infinite number of disconnected micro silos into one place where all community members, groups, and information (regardless of type: discussions, blogs, video, audio, documents, etc.) are all searchable, categorized, and easy to find within one place: the community.

Some congregations are utilizing SC for different things. I'm just as interested as the next guy as to how this will continue to blossom. A congregational group is fairly micro though. Your congregation may choose to stick with their website, maybe used in conjunction with emailing, Facebook, or Twitter or whatever might be working or what people are used to. Just keep in mind that whatever idea resources are shared within your congregation's Facebook page benefits no one but the folks in your congregation who are clued into said info. Other congregations are energized by the potential of Soul Cafe and how this platform enables them to be creative in how they might utilize it to better communicate among congregational leadership, within the congregation, and with the greater Church. It's up to the congregation and the individual – nothing it dictated here. It's very cool to see what folks are doing though. As individuals or congregations, we can choose to focus on or be fearful of prospective negatives or all the reasons why not to do something – or, we can choose to look to the proven positives and what we are capable of when we can prayerfully come together, focused on what needs to be done towards revitalizing and empowering the Church in the new millennium.

The presumption of being right until another proves you wrong is not conducive to real understanding. Someone's not understanding how online communities work isn't “wrong.” They just don't know yet. They're still letting go of preconceived ideas or presumptions, wrestling with control or fear issues, shying away from something new, or whatever – and that takes longer for some than others, and that's ok. Finding out how online communities work and how ours might best serve the individual and the greater Church is simply a matter of being a creative, contributing, and open-minded part of the community – that's where the understanding will come from. That said, attempting to explain the advantage of this “set up” as opposed to Facebook or something akin to it, would indeed be expounding upon the obvious. Soul Cafe will never be all things to all people, nor is it an end-all-be-all. It is what you make it - it is what we make it. Best of all, it ours. Like all large-scale online communities, Soul Cafe will become what it needs to be, and we have every reason to believe we are well on our way to becoming something truly new and amazing through this transformative new tool - the Holy Spirit is at work in this sacred space, and there is grace here!