www.EmergentVillage.com is live! [update: the website is supposed to launch on Thursday 8/3; so what's there now is a 'sneak preview' ]
The official announcement and press release hasn’t happened yet, and it won’t be secret for long. An incredible web design and web app by Tim Bednar of Turtle Interactive (you may have heard of him from e-church.com)!
They’re sticking to the story that it’s a friendship, not a network, not a movement. And far as friendships go, some people are friends longer than others, some are closer to one another, some are newbies. The roster of the board members is now revealed, along with coordinating group members.
[update 8/3/06 6:00am -- the official announcement from Emergent/C; also see reactions from Radical Congruency]
EmergentVillage.com
From Tony Jones, National Coordinator, Emergent Village – U.S.
I don’t know what it’s like to give birth, exactly. I mean, I’ve been through labor and delivery three times with Julie, but the husband/father really only experiences the whole thing vicariously. I’ve written a few books, too, and each of those has seemed something like a birth.
But I don’t know that I’ve ever been a part of a birth-by-committee. In fact, my committee experience has more often been life-squelching rather than life-giving. Until now, that is.
Since last Spring, I have been a part of a team of talented folks which has been working in earnest on the new Emergent Village website, and the site has now gone live.
On the team has been John Kutsko of Abingdon Press — Abingdon gave us a generous grant for the website redevelopment. The brains and brilliance behind the site are those of Tim Bednar, a pioneer in what the web is becoming. And we enlisted the support of Kevin Hendricks to make sure the look and feel and wording was just right.
Also on the team are Sarah Notton, Sarah Sayles, Will Samson, Geoff Holsclaws, Jeff Kursonis, Grace McLaren, Paul Soupiset, Tim Conder, and David Robertson.
What we’ve given birth to, I hope, is more than just a classy website that lets people know who EV is and what we’re up to. I hope it also becomes a resource for the many, many individuals, churches, and organizations around the world who have found life and hope in the emerging church movement. For the EV website is not just “our” stuff, but it will be a conduit for the best stuff that’s out there. It’s heavy on RSS feeds and tagging, and we hope it will become a premier resource in the days to come.
So, I invite you to check it out, subscribe to the feeds, and contribute to the site.
Also, if you’re so inclined, you might consider supporting EV financially as we move into the future together.
Peace-
Tony
Thanks for the links and the encouragement.
I will be posting an article on godbit.com soon on the story behind building the Emergent Village site; how we did it and how what “best practices” I learned — with both advice to designers and “owners”.
I gotta say EV was a great client — they got it, wanted me to push technology as far as it could go. We did it all open source–Textpattern, Pligg and LAMP backend.
If you’re asking some cool features of the site are:
1. the google map of all the cohorts
2. the rss feed mash up from all the cohort blogs and the fact that we republish all the cohorts blog rss feeds on their detail page
3. the Remarkable! (digg-clone) for the emergent church conversation is an amazing experiment built on the Pligg platform — FYI: remarkable has a lot of usability work to be done; we are going to fix the bugs but wait till month’s end to do any reworking of the site
4. we managed the entire project with Basecamp with like two dozen voices in the mix
5. we also used 16bugs.com to do the QAT
6. analytics are measuring usage on for the web site and remarkable! (so yes I am watching and the site will be optimized downstream)
7. the weblog and podcast are all under one content management system with the main site — there will be multiple authors of content — with the idea that it will reflect the living conversation happing inside the Village
8. soon we will be using lists from Remarkable! on the main site to recommend books, blogs, churches and events
9. comments are enabled on many of the pages of the site
10. the site (not remarkable!) almost validates XHTML strict — I know about the errors and for now I’m leaving them in — I still got some tweaking on that front (cleaning up the CSS code and XHMLT in Textpattern) — but launching was more important that satisfying my inner geek — should be cross-browser and accessible and should be pretty good at SEO
11. EV kept the language of friendship and I think is doing a great job keeping the tension between grassroots, organic and the necessity to “institutionalize” — as a skeptic, I was very, very pleased to see some real authenticity in this respect
12. we were on time (Remarkable was supposed to beta test in Oct) and came in under budget (thank you Pligg).
That is just some of the stuff we did. The great thing is that all this “web 2.0″ stuff is not just tacked on because it’s cool; we employed this stuff because it really, truely fit with the mission of EV and the vibe of its “user-base”.
That was other cool thing about the EV site; and was proven out in the first days analytics is just how “early adopter”ish the crowd really is — FireFox and Safari browsers made up 52% — that’s like 5x a normal site. Also screen resolutions were huge — and is forcing me to consider an almost immediate redesign to expand the width of the content panel. I was able to get a way with a lot because of how wired the typical visitor is…
It’s 1am — I gotta shut up. Bye.