So I wrote up some quick tips for those who might be thinking of trying it out:

Oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life.

This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure for ever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. The sober realistic novel of to-day discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world.

Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), Orthodoxy

I couldn’t agree more. But does this fit with recent decade of super-hero movies?

And if that didn’t scare you off, here’s another associated word: taxonomy. That’s what the scientific classification system was: a taxonomy—an ordering—of information. About mammals and such. So we knew what skunks were supposed to be.

Of course, this was because someone had seen (smelled?) a skunk in the physical world and now wanted to Sort It. And because skunks didn’t come with a sewn-in label, we had to start by making up something to sort it in TO. Where does it GO?  It’s not like God handed us carnivora is what I’m saying (in other news: I just learned that skunks eat meat. Weird).

Of course information taxonomies can organize just about anything and though we’ve left biology back in the 9th grade, the taxonomies we now all use on a daily basis are website taxonomies:  known to geeks as  ”web information architecture.”  This thing—information architecture—is high on the list of “affects us on a daily basis and we don’t even notice.”

Which, of course, is why I’m excited about it.

Let’s do a quick website example. When I show up to the website of a museum of natural history, I expect to be greeted by a bevy of information and possibly big photos of dinosaur bones. If you’re the museum making your website, suddenly you need to sort not only reptiles you find in the physical world, but also “information chunks” that you only find in our information world. For instance, what time the museum closes on Sundays, and how many curators have PhDs from places other than wikipedia.

So how do you sort information chunks?

Like the biologist, the information architect has to make something up. A mental folder. A category.

For instance, which of these would you look under to find out what time the museum closes tomorrow?

I grabbed the category examples from The Field Museum (Chicago), the American Museum of Natural History (in New York), and Smithsonian’s Natural Museum of Natural History (WashDC).  And it’s pretty easy, right? I’ll assume most of us choose “Plan Your Visit,” which all three museums use as the first header on their current websites.¹

And these seems relatively straight forward to us. But it gets more difficult. For instance, in the above categories, which might have more information about dinosaurs? Research? Exhibitions? Explore?  About Us? (<– assuming the dinosaurs possibly run the website)

It could be under any of the four, couldn’t it?  Less easy.

This is the problem of the web information architect: to name and sort information chunks. From business website perspective, the job is really pragmatic:  People want information as efficiently and fast as possible i.e. in the least amount of “clicks.”  Where will the person on my website expect this information to be? How can I put it there?

So this is a user-oriented approach.

((I’d actually call it a ”persona-action” approach, but user or “bottom-up” is simpler.))
Let’s assume that dinos are actually crazy popular at your museum. So you decide, using the user approach, that Dinosaurs is a perfect category to put at your top level alongside the others. This might even take care of  two different questions users have. Maybe one wants to find out more about dinosaur bones and another wants to find out information about when they can see the dinosaurs bones. You could put both info chunks under Dinosaurs.

This approach simply asks: who is the most common visitor to my website, and what do they most commonly want to do?

But there’s a problem with this, and I’m sure you already see it.  We learned it on Sesame Street. “One of these things are not like the others:”

Dinosaurs  Plan Your Visit  Support the Museum About Us

Dinosaurs is out of place. It doesn’t seem to “fit.”  And this is of course because we all naturally sort things in our heads. Categories are easier to understand if they seem to “make sense” in parallel to each other.

The Logical Big Idea approach

So instead he museum might think: what big categories define us as an institution? Well, we have:  a) Exhibits  b) Visitors c) Donors, and d) our own Researchers. If we create one category for each, most information chunks fill fit neatly somewhere. Dinosaurs winds up under Exhibits, even though the popular user approach might have done it differently. This is more “logical.” But of course, it has its challenges too. it can be a less efficient to get to popular topics. And sometimes we realize that information chunks can still fit in two big categories instead of one.

So how did I get on this trail?

We find that websites we see every day come from the hard work information taxonomy: of sorting ideas and information chunks into little buckets that make sense.  But the buckets can be hard to define:  they can be more user-oriented, or more big-idea oriented or something in-between.

But here’s what I really want to talk about:  

This information architecture affects us.

But that’s for next time.

See Also:  Good article by David Cohen: The Art of Structuring Information Effectively

1. Actually, all three museums also display the hours on their homepage, which is perfect audience-centered design, but it distracts from my point right now, so I won’t mention it.

Well, lots. I know my friend Ty tells jokes and I know what tends to bother him. I know a couple books he read last year, what he does on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and where he lives.

And not so much. For instance, I could drive to Ty’s house, but I don’t recall the house number, or even the street for that matter. I know Ty’s age, but God help me if I can remember when his birthday is (I have trouble remembering my own family birthdays!) I absolutely don’t know his shoe size, and couldn’t make a list of the schools he went to growing up.

But Facebook can.

Last week I got added toFacebook’s “Graph Search” preview, which gives you a Google-like search box to paw through your friends’ meta-data.  You can search for:

• “Friends who currently live in Minnesota”
• “Music my friends who work at [workplace] like”
• My Buddhist friends who went to Kubasaki High School in 1994

Metadata is, you know, data about data. It’s that part of the Word document (do we use those any more?) that has the Author Name but isn’t our actual (half-finished) Rhetoric homework. It’s the GPS coordinates of the Walgreens that Google doesn’t show you but uses to locate it on the map. Most often it’s sortable and measurable. A number or a list.

People carry tons of meta-data. Even before the facebook-era. We’ve always has small snapshots of it being recorded: like the “M or F” and our height (feet and inches) on our driver’s license. It’s weird:  it’s both impersonal and very personal, isn’t it? Most of us don’t think our driver’s license carries the essence of us. But we also don’t love it when acquaintances grab it to take a look.

This is what I wonder about with Facebook’s new graph search. How personal or impersonal is it?

Facebook can’t categorize much of the knowledge about someone that we associate with being close—say, mood or shared experiences. But the impersonal information, once filtered and arranged, can feel intimate. My closest friends can’t list my three high schools. Do I care? Not particularly. It’s too detailed to expect. But someone who searches the Facebook social graph for the same info—suddenly it’ll feel like something only a good friend might (should!) know. Why?

Initial reactions to the Graph Search will be, like they always are, indiscriminate worries about privacy and Facebook ruining our lives. Many people will close their accounts (only to open them again a week later on a bored Thursday evening). Advocacy groups will file privacy law briefings with the courts.

But the issue will fade. And not because Facebook caves, but because we will start “not caring.” It won’t be because we can’t sustain the fight, but because we will simply grow accustomed to new definitions of personal and impersonal. Our Facebook meta-data—the numbers and lists about us—won’t seem so bad. I might actually remember a few more birthdays.

A few observations. They’re very personal, but maybe you can relate.

I feel tension between familiarity and new. When I arrived, the streets of Champaign had that writers cliche of being both “strange and familiar.” My steering wheel seemed to know the way around, even as I gawked out the window remembering buildings and intersections and how long the left-turn arrow lasts. Now, after six months, I feel emotionally caught between the comfort of being in a place with long personal history and wondering if there are unknown, more exciting things I’m missing. Do we all feel that as often as I do?

When it comes to old friends, stopping-through-town visits are different than re-establishing daily rhythms. It’s been very good to be around old friends again. But past those initial warm meetings and “catch-ups” it’s been a different thing to re-establish the patterns of daily life that overlap. People have changed, or their patterns have. So have mine. Good friendships are not only built on deep history and shared values but also on that sense of “spontaneous unplanned interaction.” While it’s much easier here in Champaign than the other places I’ve been in the last five years, it’s still a challenge to figure that out.

Life stress can vary dramatically. It’s more evident than ever for me: the two years in Orlando were much higher paced and had a significant more level of stress and task than I currently have. These months I feel like I’m just as effective (maybe more?), but the pace is less frenetic and I work much more from the “important” rather than the “urgent” quadrant. This is a welcome change for now. Here’s the thing though: I’m actually not convinced that I want to avoid high stress moments. Some of my most memorable accomplishments have been under pressure. It suggests to me that seasons of slower and then faster and then slower may be a good way to live.

Change reveals constants. Changing responsibilities and locations—leaving one fish bowl for another—maybe can give us a better clarity on what remains and what goes away. I’m reminded again that the core things I love are authoring, teaching, information, systems, and human communication.

Observations by nature are unsettled, and these certainly are. But as I look ahead to this coming year, they are helpful to me.

Polycentric leadership is neither a flat leadership structure or a centralized leadership structure, says JR. Instead, multiple mature leaders “interrelate and incarnate the purposes of Christ.”

Love that phrase.

This view is high contrast with the CEO-celebrity model of pastoring we see so often. It’s such a common model that it’s easy to forget that the senior pastor on a central stage with huge video screens may be doing something more than simply amplifying the sermon. It’s a cultural structure that gives us the YouTube loop what we think leadership should be. It seems plain normal, that big stage—and our hip, charismatic, blog-if-you-see-them-in-person-getting-coffee leaders.

Okay, but why do we need a change?

Culturally, we’re shifting, says JR.  And it’s not just one thing:  it’s a Media Shift from Print to Broadcast to Digital (yes! I said aloud as reading), a Philosophical Shift to suspicion of power, a Scientific Shift to systems thinking, a Spatial Shift from rural/local to urban/global, and Religious Shift from Christendom to pluralism.

What do we need?

• Instead of leading from over, we lead from among
• Instead of leading from certainty, we lead by exploration, cooperation, and faith
• Instead of leading from a plan, we lead with attention

Okay. But there’s more questions than answers so far.  Is this practical or effective?  And shouldn’t we start with scripture instead of culture?  Sure.  JR does both those things… including an important question:  aren’t there examples of big central leaders in right there in the Bible?

I’ll get to that one next.

I’m sure I’ll need several posts on this one as we go, but I’ll start with the keyword Culture. Easy to skip if it’s just tossed on there, but you don’t make it off the first page of the first chapter without realizing that JR is going to make “culture” a centerpiece of his construction.

How would you characterize the typical person in the congregation you serve? A mature follower of Christ? A consumer of religious goods and services? Or something in-between? …

As a church planter, I have been haunted by these questions. I’ve started churches that continue to thrive, multiplying disciples and churches around the country. I’ve also started churches that have been slow to get off the ground. I’ve celebrated with church planters whose churches have thrived and are a great blessing to their neighborhood. I have also walked with church planters through the agony of having to close church doors. Through much reflection, reading and many sleepless nights, I’ve discovered that effective church planting requires thinking about the culture of the congregation.

Alan Hirsch and others have blurbed this one, so I’m a little lower on the Klout score chart. But having been acquainted with JR’s life and ministry for almost 15 years, I suspect (and hope) this book sticks. I think pastors will not find it to be the marketed book of the week (skim so you can tell people you saw it),  but really a compendium of true experience to absorb and re-read.

I’ll post a little more review or notes as I get time to jump back in.

So, this may be the rant that officially requires apologies later. But I’m watching the Olympics on the couch, and my ipad is right here in my lap.

Here it is: fatalism is not submitting to the sovereignty of God. Speaking as if our action in the world does not matter is not submitting to the sovereignty of God. This is not how the Bible talks about the King of the world and our place.

We live in a created universe where our human actions have had both sinful and redemptive effects. When we do evil, or are even are simply poor at diving, there are consequences. When we do good, even simply choosing a soft answer which turns away anger—there are results.

What we do matters.

So I guess what I mean is, the accomplished David Boudia nearly was eliminated from the 2012 US Olympics because he struggled with his execution. And I don’t think God was Willing the judges down by a couple points.

The fear I sometimes hear from my Reformed friends is that this view is going to somehow heretically destroy a God who is Above All. Who is the rightful King. And who Sovereignly Works All Things Together for those who love the Lord.

It does no such thing.

I am confident in a King who made the foundations of the earth. Who has put himself into the human story to dramatically change the whole course of history. Who is making all things right, and will finish it.

But like Aslan aside frozen Narnia, all is not right in this world. Some follow the King, and some don’t. Aslan is not far away—never far away—but betrayal and death and failure happen. And these are because of what we do. Cause and effect are not only real in physics class.¹

Of course, David didn’t miss dives because of moral failure: that’s not at all my thought. Let’s also say that I’m happy for his faith in God and witness to it. But the God who loves him also didn’t guarantee his 18th/18 spot for the final Olympic final. David did that because his entry on dive 3 hit the “red” zone on the Splash-o-Meter.

And God remained King.

1. I’m taking some lightly phrased snipes here, but if you care, I’d more begin a more precise articulation philosophically as a collapse of particular causes into the telic; or theologically as a popular misunderstanding of concurrent sovereignty, which I affirm in its lighter forms

The undersea lines remind me of the first undersea transatlantic telegraph line (a feat that took many tries), and how far things have come.

I know its still somewhat common to hear people talk about the “fake or virtual” world and the “real” world. But there’s something fascinating about these maps that helps illustrate my often-made point that there really isn’t a separation.

• Mashable: Is This the Ultimate Map of the Internet?

Swimming in an ocean of information, the things we were going to notice were quite simply the things that floated to the top. Sure, there was the occasional Deep Google Dive. But as we started realizing that even Google had charted a fraction of the water, the question became: what is influencing what we see on the surface? It’s a crucial question, because in this case, what we See becomes All That Is, regardless of the invisible depths below our feet.

All this metaphor only to say this: goodbye Digg!

Digg was first experience that gave me a window into what was Next. Often called the first “social news reader”—Digg accepted millions of nominations for news articles or cat videos, and the submitted them to voting public. You were permitted to Thumbs Up (“Digg”) or Thumbs Down (bury) any item you chose. The more Diggs an article got, the more visible it became, enabling increasingly more people to make a choice. Lots of Diggs in a short period of time floated it to the Top: the front page of the Digg site.

It became clear that this was the wave of the future. Not keyword searching, but humans choosing in groups what was more or less important together.

It was unique to this age. Because it required an algorithm and tallying a massive number of votes, it couldn’t have happened without the digital processing. But because it required human opinion, it couldn’t have happened without real people.

In any case, this is how we’d determined what came to the surface of the Ocean.  We Dugg it.

Of course, Digg as a company didn’t make it. And it I didn’t think it would. Facebook was the energetic youth at the time, and he was poised to become the change agent that would take this a step further: to naturally mapped groups of friends. Now what we see is not from the floating votes of everyone, but the votes of who are already in our social network. It more closely models how things really work.  (In 2008-09 I started to think about how this worked with the Church)

There are many more questions about what’s next. But for now, hats off to Digg, who helped set our course in the world we now swim in.

• TechCrunch:  Thumbs Up: Digg Wasn’t a Failure, It Was a Beginning
• GigaOm: In Memoriam: Even in losing, how Digg won

The demo included skydiving while being connected to the Internet. So Airplane Wi-Fi is now officially boring.

Honestly, the product (so far) seems underwhelming to me: the demo centered mostly around the ability of the glasses to take hands-free photos and video. We didn’t see any real demonstration of augmented reality with data layers (e.g.  floating 5-star rating as you drive by Steak’nShake) or surreptitious communication (Google Chat in church).

But that will come. And the glasses will get less bulky and even begin to feel normal.

So here’s the thing to ask ourselves.  Isabelle Olsson, the lead designer, said:

We created Glass so that you can interact with the virtual world without distracting you from the real world. … Glass as a whole is designed to be close to your senses, but not blocking them… we don’t want technology to get in the way.

This is interesting. Olsson subtly underlines two worldview statements here.  First, the the real world and the virtual world live separately and in tension.  And secondly, that technology—at least visible technology—makes us less human in some way.

The key interesting question for me as I think about technology and theology is often:  ”Is this technology making us more or less human?”  Commonly I hear that technology is making us less human. People speak of it “invading our lives” or worry about how it is changing us, like an alien race is invading our formerly innocent, terrestrial lives.  I tend to see things on the other side of the spectrum: that our own inventions magnify and accent our own characteristics (flawed though they may be!).

So I don’t agree with Olsson’s starting point that pits the young mom (and her baby, relationships, and desires) vs her device.  But even if I did. Does shrinking the device change the outcome?

I rarely ask for feedback, but I am a little bit curious. Do you think Google Glass is humanizing or de-humanizing?

But the worst is when you’re back in the car manning down I-70 like you’re conquering the Louisiana Purchase, and suddenly you realize that you’re humming a Disco song.

So in honor of my recent travels, and my propensity to start singing embarassing songs without noticing, I give you the

Top Ten Worst Muzak Songs

(Because They Stick Like a Mutha)

10. “Call Me Maybe”—Carly Rae Jepson
9. “I Believe I Can Fly—R Kelly
8. “Roam If You Want To”—B-52s
7. “This is How You Remind Me”—Nickelback
6. “Safety Dance”—Men Without Hats
5. “Mmm-Bop”—Hanson
4. “Dancing Queen”—ABBA
3. “Total Eclipse of the Heart”—Bonnie Tyler
2. “Love Shack”—B-52s

And the worst song ever to be caught singing aloud cause you just heard it on the overhead is:

1. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”—Cyndi Lauper

Honorable mentions to: “YMCA”—Village People and “Baby, Baby” by Amy Grant

With Jesus, it’s easy to be complicated and hard to be simple. Part of the difficulty is that Jesus was and is much, much more than people imagine. Not just people in general, but practicing Christians, the churches themselves.

Faced with the gospels—the four early books that give us most of our information about him—most modern Christians are in the same position I am in when I sit down in front of my computer. My computer will, I am reliably informed, do a large number of complex tasks. I only use it, however for three things: writing, e-mail, and occasional Internet searches. If my computer were a person, it would feel frustrated and grossly undervalued, its full potential nowhere near realized.

We are, I believe, in that position today when we read the stories of Jesus in the gospels. We in the churches use these stories for various obvious things: little moralizing sermons on how to behave in the coming week, aids to prayer and mediation, extra padding for a theological picture largely constructed from elsewhere. The gospels, like my computer, have every right to feel frustrated. Their full potential remains unrealized.

NT Wright, Simply Jesus, page 4

The change has been long in coming. I originally moved to Florida to contribute to the leadership of Great Commission Ministries–helping oversee their staff program for church planters and campus missionaries, with an emphasis on fundraising training. It’s been an amazing 2.5 years in this role. My favorite part has been helping new missionaries learn to tell their stories to donors in a clear, concise, and compelling way. I’ve had the privilege to serve help train truckloads of new missionaries for the kingdom:  59 in 2010, and whopping 72 in 2011. For a missions agency that has focused in the past on family-closeness and high-touch ministry, it’s been very cool to be part of the increasing growth of GCM. In 2011 we trained more people than any time in the history of the ministry.

But with all that, I’m making a change.

After much prayer and discernment (with dear friends across the country), I realized that my future roll is likely not in helping manage a non-profit ministry. I miss some of the “frontline” missionary work I’ve invested over a decade prior in. I have dear friendships up north that this trip down south has distanced me from. And I think there may be further places to explore in study and teaching.

So, at least for a time, I am returning to Champaign, IL.  My movers arrive here on May 10th.

I’m not leaving Great Commission Ministries. Instead, because the increasing pace of our digital and social media world, GCM has created a new role:  Communications Strategist. I’ll be executing that role from Illinois, where I will dive into new ministry projects in web, e-mail, social media, and mobile for GCM and the missionaries she serves. It’s stuff I’m passionate about and believe I can do well.

In transition, I plan on being out at Colorado LT (Leadership Training) program this year for a month (20 May to 20 June), helping engage college students and campus missionaries alike in the continuing work of the gospel.

More soon, but I’m grateful for your prayers.

On the PBS Newshour last night they showed scenes from Good Friday celebrations all around the world. In the Philippines, young men traversed the streets, flagellating their backs with bamboo whips, coating their chest and back in vividly red blood.

Yesterday at the Good Friday service at my church, we recounted the wounds of Jesus: the crown of thorns, the whipping, the heavy cross, the nails.

This is the stuff of Good Friday: the real and painful and violent accounts of what Jesus endured. It’s painful to watch.

But I’ve been reflecting on this, and, I hope I am not too shocking here, but:

I don’t feel sorry for Jesus.

To be sure, I would meditate on his wounds. But as my mind’s eye walks through the story, from the washed feet to the courtyard fires and clamoring crowds…

I feel sorry for us.

These aren’t the ones bleeding on the outside. Their clothing is not torn. They don’t appear to be crushed or bruised. These are the very people who are overstuffed with hubris: The high priest as he arranges lying witnesses. The Roman guards who spit on Jesus’ face. Herod who hopes for something entertaining, and is bored.

Bored in the presence of the King.
Spitting in the face of God.
Lying within earshot of the Truth.

My sympathies are with these sinners, these transgressors unware, who in their unfettered pride and rage, literally “do not know what they do.”

This is not to excuse them, but to condemn them, and identity with them in that condemnation. They are dying under the lacerations of their own tragic sin. And I benefit from the distance of narration where I know that they are scoffing at the God who, by his resolute Choice, has become the very picture of Power Restrained. Of Forgiveness Defined.

His blood is real and difficult. But their—our—deceit and apathy and self-righteousness?

It’s painful to watch.

Media historians and media ecologists often point to the telegraph as a threshold technology: the first time that communications technology became un-fused from transportation technology. That is, messages could move faster than a human.

James Gleick tells the story of the telegraph and electric telegraph in Chapter 5 of The Information. What’s fascinating to me is how quickly analyists of the mid-1800s started to draw organic and macro-cohesive analogies for what electricity could do.

The time is close at hand,” declared Scientific American in 1880, “when the scattered members of civilized communites will be as closely united, so far as instant telephonic communication is concerned, as the various members of the body now are by the nervous system.

And Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851:

Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!

The comments sound incredibly apt to a Facebook world, yes? What’s curious is in the raging modernist world of the mid-19th century, the organic analogies of nerves and brain and body were top of mind. They placing the new inventions in the context of the whole.

For such an inter-connected world, questions like “how does this Brain make decisions?” are real questions. Especially if we turn the corner into US politics, primary elections, health care legislation, and 100% gridlocked Congress. We are concomitantly united and divided. What does it mean that individuals have votes in the Brain? What if we are “no longer the substance we thought we were?”

And after 150 years having the ability to think about it, why do I still hear more voices on individualistic analysis of Facebook instead of communal?  Particularly theologians: I still hear laments about how much time people spend on Facebook rather than with their family, or worries about privacy, rather than the massive implications of a Church who lives as a Body in a technology atmosphere that breathes this.¹

Come on pastor-theologians. We should be able to do this.

1. Okay, to be fair, I think of Dwight Friesen’s Thy Kingdom Connected, but I was disappointed with its weak missional ecclesiology

I hit that error 17 in times in a row during one 30 minute episode (that’s determination!).

Of course, you just assume it’s network speed or something. But my laptop and iPad streamed Netflix perfectly. And my network speeds were consistently 10mbps down using www.speedtest.net.

Samsung customer support:  awful. Live chatted with a tech who had me reset and reinstall the app (expected), but then told me that it was my firewall, and that I should disable it, leaving my network exposed to the internet. Good plan.  So, end of road there.

Netflix customer support: much more helpful. First of all: friendly and quick.  And all he wanted to do was deactivate the blue-ray player and reactivate it from his end.

That’s when he told me to pick up my Samsung remote, point it at my blu-ray player and press:

up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, up, up, up, up

I just about laughed aloud. You know what this is?

No A, B or “Select” keys… but this is a solid Nintendo throw-back.

The tech told me it works for most Netflix devices, including Samsung blu-ray and X-Box. Gotta love nerds about my age.