The TARDIS

This page is the Home Page for the Glen Waverley Uniting Church wiki page, known as TheTardis.

Latest News

Old news is archived on the PreviousNewsItems page.

Note that many of the pages linked from these quick links may have access control on them. You will need to visit the CreateUserAccount if you do not have an account on this wiki.

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!

If you want help on how to use the wiki, see the HowToUseTheChurchWiki page. You might prefer to use the week-by-week introduction used in the ChurchBulletin at BulletinWikiArticles.

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.

From time to time, it is planned to run workshops on the use of the wiki. Please contact JohnHurst or DavidMorgan if you want to attend one of these. You can see the list of people who have attended a previous workshop at the TrainedPeopleGroup page.

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: FaithCommunity, InclusiveCommunity, CommunityHub, and CommunityOutreach.

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 Church Council Chair, I have been gobsmacked 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