Programme ECIC 19

Open Internet, Open Church, Open Source

2-5 June 2014

"Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have." This call for accountability by the apostle Peter gains new relevance today, as internet culture makes our convictions – and to some extent also our institutions – more transparent to acquaintances and strangers alike.

At the same time the internet has become a space for people to live out that basic human "impulse to share what we like or have created ourselves or even things we think are good for us as well as for others" (quoted from the foreword to the 2005 publication Love to Share - Intellectual Property Rights, Copyright, and Christian Churches).
 
At ECIC 19, we will look at the different aspects of openness in today's internet culture:

• the transparency that is created sometimes intentionally (for example in Wiki projects) sometimes unwittingly (as users hand over their personal data to companies and online behaviour is analysed by states and commercial players)
• the collaborative potential and the emphasis on community and resource sharing of the open source movement and projects like Wikipedia
• the exchange with people from other cultures and countries, which puts Christians into direct contact with brothers and sisters from other traditions and makes the diversity among Christians (as well as the need to work together and find common ground) more visible.

Details are subject to change.

Workshops

For this session you will be able to choose between three workshops that will look at one aspect of the conference theme in a more concrete way:

- How to conceptualize a virtual seminar (Salon Jaune) , led by Roger Schmidt, Digital Encounters:
The internet is increasingly becoming a space for training, encounter and joint learning. The workshop explores basic principles for using the Internet programmatically and works on concrete examples - ideally cases from participants. 

- Church web sites for parishioners (Hexagone): user-centered design in software development and content strategy, led by Titti Kallio and Marjukka Laiho, Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland:

Titti Kallio and Marjukka Laiho will describe the steps how the Finnish parish site (to be used by all the Finnish 430 parishes eventually) was designed and developed. We'll talk about e.g. parishioner segmentation, user-centered design, usability testing and the creating of user personas. The group work part will focus on user personas.

- Open Source software in a church context (Salon Vert) , led by Julien Mabillard, World Council of Churches:
Based on the experience of the full website refactoring of the WCC, Julien will explain why and how the WCC moved to a new technology and a new partner that follow the opensource development model. A real-world usage case study that shows the benefits of the open source model, including an overview of the design and features of the Plone project. Time reserved for questions and experience-sharing. 

Tell-your-story sessions

These sessions comprise a series of presentations from ECIC members detailing innovations, developments and web strategies. This year there will be 30 minutes for each presentation including discussion. 

Evenings

The evenings will allow opportunities to continue networking – Swiss style!