Introducing the Quaker Cloud

FGC staff have been in dialog with Friends accross the US and Canada building an understanding of the day-to-day challenges facing Quaker meetings.  

We heard from meetings that understand the importance of having a presence on the web but are lost in the complexities of trying to build a website, and from meetings with websites that they are unable update after the Friend who built them moves away.  

We heard about meetings with hundreds of years of archived minutes unable to find the minutes from 2005 that were stored on someone's hard drive and from recording clerks worried that years of meeting history can be lost in one hard-drive failure.

We heard from Friends dutifully spending hours of time and energy building and printing their meeting's directory, only to find out someone's address changed 6-months ago.  

These are challenges that, at their worst, sap energy that could be invested in the spiritual health and life of the meeting.

We also talked with Friends that share a vision of the deep value that can be cultivated by meetings sharing information and resources with each other.

The Quaker Cloud

A web toolkit supporting Quaker community and process

FGC is in the process of building an integrated solution that will help solve all these problems, a platform that supports meetings accomplishing these common but complex tasks so that they can focus on building strong faithful spiritual community.  

The quaker cloud has three basic components:

1. A website for your meeting that is easy to build and maintain.
2. A minute manager that allows you to archive, search and share minutes with your meeting, and if you want, with Friends and the world.
3. A meeting directory, where meeting members maintain their own information and where you can print a current directory in a few clicks.  (Coming spring 2013)

The new FGC website and new Quakerfinder are providing the basic framework for this service.  We are working closely with a small group of meetings to build and test each of the components of this servce.  At this point we expect to launch this service to the all meetings in the fall.  

Read the frequently asked questions

Review the slides from our 2012 Gathering interest group

Check-back soon for more details or,