GLEN WAVERLEY UNITING CHURCH WIKI PAGE

This page is the Home Page for the Glen Waverley Uniting Church wiki page. It has been copied across from the GrowingGenerousGivers page, in preparation for moving to the new church server.

Quick Links

• OnTheWayTogether and the four Missional Groups

• ChurchRosters

• ChoirPage

• CouncilPage and council committees. (Current provisional: CouncilMinutes17Feb2010 - this is accessible to all church members)

• EldersPage

• CommunicationsCommittee

• MailingLists and GroupContactList: Information about the use of predefined mailing lists

• The ChurchBulletin is on-line. For privacy reasons, this is only available to logged-in church members.

What's a Wiki?

A wiki (from the Hawaiian word for 'quickly') is a web page set up for interactive use. That means that you can edit and add content to it, and even create new pages, without needing to know any technical details of how web pages work.

While this may seem daunting at first, it gives the wiki pages great power as a tool for communicating information and knowledge. Think 'Wikipedia' and you will understand the immense power that comes from making the web pages open to all contributors. There has never been an information tool as powerful as a wiki in the whole history of the human race!

This does come with some caveats. There are people around who will attempt to subvert such a constructive tool, simply because it is constructive. This means we have to go to some effort and inconvenience to manage such attempts. The most obvious one is that we want you to identify yourself, and for this, we use a username/password combination, also known as an account. Such accounts are easy to setup, and once you have one setup, we can authorize you to interact with the wiki pages.

First Time Visitors, Read This!

If you want to create a new account, visit the CreateUserAccount page. That page gives step-by-step instructions to help you create an account for use with this wiki. If this doesn't work, click JohnHurst!

Click the following link to visit the FirstTimeVisitors page. You can also see who has been here before by visiting the PreviousVisitors page. If you want help on how to use the wiki, see the HowToUseTheChurchWiki page.

If you are an Elder or Church Councillor, you need to be aware that the pages for those two groups mentioned below (Council Stuff, Elders Stuff) are restricted to those recorded on the Elders Group and Council Group pages, and you will need a user account and password before you can be added to these pages. Email <ajh AT SPAMFREE internode DOT on DOT net> for help with this.

Other church users can browse most of the pages without using an account, but you will generally need an account if you want to write to the pages in any way. Again, JohnHurst can help with this.

Latest News

2010-02-02 09:41:29 JohnHurst Added the HowToUseTheChurchWiki page.

2010-01-28 21:11:23 JohnHurst Added the CommunicationsCommittee page.

2010-01-21 00:34:19 JohnHurst Moved the wiki home page to ChurchWiki. GrowingGenerousGivers will be revised to reflect its new role.

2010-01-17 10:53:51 JohnHurst added ChoirPage

2009-12-14 09:07:14 JohnHurst The GGG report to the 30 Nov 2009 Congregational Meeting is available at through the GggTimeLine page.

2009-12-10 00:06:44 JohnHurst If you are coming here to visit the OnTheWayTogether information page, then just click this link.

2009-10-21 01:10:22 JohnHurst You can see the budget spreadsheet used by the Treasurer to calculate how the church funds have been allocated across the the four mission areas at the BudgetAnalysis page.

2009-10-15 21:57:06 JohnHurst created a GggTimeLine page. This shows the (reverse) chronological history of the GGG activities.

The Mission Matrix

The MissionMatrix page shows how we plan to divide up mission across our four OnTheWayTogether themes. Within the OnTheWayTogether page, the concepts and mission of each theme is developed. These are meant to be dynamic pages, changing to reflect the current state of these missional themes. The four themes are: GrowingFaith, InclusiveCommunity, CommunityHub, and CommunityOutreach.

Council Stuff

The CouncilPage is for council agendas and minutes. This is protected, so you will have to create yourself a username/passwd to see it. See First Time Visitors above.

Elders Stuff

The EldersPage is for Elders council agendas and minutes. This is protected, so you will have to create yourself a username/passwd to see it. See First Time Visitors above.

Why a Wiki?

To see why I'm keen to see the wider use of a wiki in our church, read this interesting article about some recent Wollongong University research. It is titled "Creating Successful Knowledge Management Systems Using Wikis", and discuss how wikis are useful to the corporate knowledge - all that stuff about the running of the church (in our case) that is locked up in peoples' heads, and seldom committed to paper. As the authors say, it is in the best interest for management to support the Wiki as a knowledge management system because the Wiki will be maintained by corporate knowledge workers, those who acquire and disseminate living knowledge.

One thing that I think constrains people NOT to undertake leadership roles in our church is their fear of what they don't know. As Acting Church Council Chair, I have been overwhelmed by the number of things happening in our church of which I was previously quite unaware. We are a big place - it is difficult for any one person to grasp all the nuances of things happening around the congregation. So what do we do? We "leave it to the experts", which is why the same 'usual suspects' bob up in the leadership roles around the church. I have far more faith in human nature than that - I think we can all take on leadership roles, and it is just the fear of the unknown that prevents us. This article suggest how using a wiki can get a handle on the "corporate knowledge" that lies behind a (relatively) large church organization like ours. JohnHurst