This blogger has no title

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

I’ve spent two years as a District Grand Lecturer, traveling to the different lodges in my district, helping out whenever asked, tactfully making suggestions, always stepping in when a body was needed. Two years of certifying those who would sit in the East, often at only a few days notice. Two years of going to meetings, of discussing issues with Grand Lodge, of offering my helpful suggestions whenever asked.

At the Grand Lodge Annual Session, I was stripped of my title.

Did I have some controversial blog post? Have an argument with my Grand Lodge superiors? Shoot my mouth off after imbibing at a social function?

No.

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Oh, I’m still the District Grand Lecturer, of course; it’s just that Connecticut is doing away with the honorific “Very Worshipful.”

I’m so not the drama, remember ?

Sheesh!

Anyway, it was great to go to the Grand Lodge session again. That is, it was great to go to the socials on the night beforehand. To me, this is the best part of Grand lodge; you get to see people from around the state that you rarely or never get to see otherwise. Even thought Connecticut is a small state, it still sometimes seems impossible for me to get to the odd corners of the state, especially when I spend so much time looking after the lodges in my district. But even if I did get out to the lodges in, say, our New York or Rhode Island districts, there’s still too much lodge business to be conducted to be able to spend any good length of time just talking, getting caught up, passing along gossip, fixing the problems of the fraternity, and admiring the new high tech toys that we love to show off.

I have to admit that I felt a little bit like a rock star for part of the evening, as several people introduced themselves to me and mentioned that they were readers of this blog, bringing my total of Connecticut readers up to, oh, 27 or 28, I think. I got the usual comments about how I look like my Simpsonized Blogger profile picture, some nice compliments on my writing for both this blog and our state publication, and even our new Grand Senior Steward admitted that perhaps I might have a few readers who were of the UGLE persuasion. Lofty praise, indeed!

Adding to the rock star aura was a Past Master from Universal Fraternity 149, who had been to Washington D.C. and met with one of the real rock stars of Masonry, Dr. S. Brent Morris, the noted Masonic scholar, and author of a Dummies book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Freemasonry (I’m told that he has written other things as well, but I can’t imagine they are as good). WB Daniel passed along a greeting to me from Bro. Morris, the honor of which was marred only slightly by my needing to explain to those around us who Bro. Morris is. Apparently the orange books aren’t quite as widely known as the yellow ones.

I especially appreciate Bro. Nick (raised less than two weeks previously) telling anybody that passed him on the way to the bar that The Tao of Masonry was one of the things that convinced him that he should join the fraternity. As the drinks were free, I have to suppose that he really meant it, too.

Speaking of free drinks, a lot of brothers were disappointed in the lack of lodge-sponsored “hospitality rooms” this year. As far as we’ve been able to determine, only Friendship 33 had an open room for the mingling of fellow travelers. There was the regular suite run by the Grotto, and some people crashed the Grand Lodge (quasi) private reception area, but the handful of lodges that typically sponsor such rooms were markedly absent.

I think that Friendship 33 deserves some kind of recognition, don’t you?

And speaking of recognition, I ran into a long-lost friend. Well, actually, he searched me out, and ran into some guys from the Fifth District who grudgingly admitted to knowing me. He found me having dinner in the hotel saloon, and the first thing he said was something to the effect of my hair not being as gray when he’d first met me.

The next day I made sure to scratch the side of his car with my walker.

I’d “met” brother Steve on a Masonic discussion board back in 2000 before I joined the fraternity. The board had a variety of Masons from jurisdictions all over the world, and he was they only one from Connecticut. He was a fairly new Masons himself back then, and it was good to read his perspectives on his own journeys. He wrote an amusing anecdote about his interview which prepared me for the one that I would undergo a year or so later.

One of the nicest things, though, was he came up to see my EA degree, a good hour’s drive (he’s from our New York district). I was a new guy at Friendship, and while I had met a few people, I had only really known one guy well, so Steve was the only other person at my degree with whom I was somewhat familiar. It made the experience a little more friendly for me. Thanks, bro! He had taken a few years off – a respite – and last year threw himself back into the labors. It was good to reconnect, and I’m planning a visit to his lodge next month.

Naturally a bunch of us spent some time fixing the fraternity – or at least, explaining how we would fix things, given the opportunity. It’s a lot like when people fix the government, but harder because Masonry is much more entrenched. While naturally such discussions are fueled in part by spirits, the great thing is that they, in turn, fuel the spirits of those who are committed to the improvement of the Craft. In other words, while some people see this as carping or complaining about the fraternity, I tend to see it as expressions of concern; those without a sincere desire for the welfare and growth of the organization do not bother to put much thought into either the kinds of things that they would like to see changed or improved, or the means to which those changes might happen.

Items on the repair list included more ritual seminars, more use of teh intertubez for communication and organizing, more time socializing, and less time reading the minutes. Of course, this sounded a lot like last year’s list, but little by little some things are improving. For example, in Connecticut, we’ve had about 400 new members join in the last year; 90 of them made contact directly through our web site. In other words, fully a quarter of the new members did not come in through friends or relatives. Would they have made any contact if our Grand Lodge site did not exist?

And speaking of new members, I was pleased to see a lot of new – as in, newly joined – Masons over the last couple of days, and I think that it’s a great thing for new members to get involved with the actually workings of the organization itself. I sincerely hope that they can keep up the energy and drive, and I hope to see them – and meet many new brothers – next year.

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Tao of Masonry | Freemasonry | Masonry

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Four Fellowcrafts and an EA

Sounds like the start of a standup joke, doesn’t it?

Four Fellowcrafts and an Entered Apprentice walk into a bar…

…and so the bartender replied “You know, the jokes were a hell of a lot funnier back in my year.”

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve gone to a couple of degree rehearsals, have seen three Fellowcraft degrees in my district, filled in for my counterpart (who came down with something the night he was supposed to recite the Letter G lecture) down south in the 4th District , and finished up by going to a nicely done Entered Apprentice degree in one of my other lodges, the one that’s not quite up in Massachusetts.

Whew!

Don’t get me wrong – I really enjoy degree work. I enjoy watching it, and even more, I enjoy doing it.

But why do we shmush them all into the same time period?

Oh, yeah, I remember; because most lodges in Connecticut start their year in January, so they schedule an EA for February, and then follow up a month later with an FC. Then they give themselves a bit of a breather, and sometime in May, the Master Mason degree season will be upon us. Guaranteed there will be one scheduled on my wife’s birthday, too, so not only will my gas bill and dry cleaning bill be up, I’ll need to put aside something for the florist bill.

Anyway, one of the neat things about seeing so many degrees so close together is that I can really compare little details that I might otherwise have forgotten. Most notable among these is the floorwork of the ceremonies; the positions, the walking paths, the stances, and all those other little things that aren’t found in our ritual book.

Yes, it’s true: As I’ve mentioned before, Connecticut does have an “official” ritual manual, which is occasionally even  used by some of our own lodges. Unfortunately, the ritual is, in places, somewhat unclear (some would say “ambiguous”) in the matter of floorwork. Without boring anybody with the details, we take it for granted that at certain times different people will walk from place to place in the lodge in order to do certain things. How they manage to get there, though, is sometimes open to  interpretation. And that is what makes for the interesting differences from lodge to lodge.

It would be easy to suggest that we simply write a floorwork manual, as they use in some other states. That would, of course, necessitate that we rewrite our actual ritual monitor, which would correct the mistakes in our current monitor, which had already been rewritten to correct that mistakes that the previous rewrite was supposed to have done.

Did you get all of that?

I’ve heard this suggested for several years now, and at one time I agreed with the idea. Now, however, I’m of a different mind. There is an old expression that what passes for a lodge tradition is really  a mistake that somebody made, and then the people behind him continued. I admit to finding that amusing, but when you give it some thought, it’s a very cynical way of looking at the variety of fascinating idiosyncrasies displayed by the various lodges around the state. Yes, no doubt that some lodges have a tradition that actually did originate as a result of a mistake or a careless interpretation of a section. But of those lodges that insist that they do things “because that’s the way we’ve always done them,” I’m sure that you can go back in time – in some cases, less than a decade – to discover when it actually did happen. More likely, when somebody in a lodge claims that “we’ve always done it that way,” what he means is that “that’s the way I always remember it being done,” which is really something quite different.

But as to the idea of traditions or customs always arising from  a mistake in the workings, not only is it cynical, it’s also wrong. Lodges perform the workings differently from  each other simply because our own interpretations of the workings are always going to vary over time and distance, especially when those workings leave room for interpretation.But that doesn’t mean – and some of you may be surprised that I’m writing this – that I’m in favor of codifying our floorwork, or even making our ritual so ironclad that it leaves no room for interpretation. To the contrary, I think that the evolution of ritual is a natural and even necessary process.

I’m aware that some jurisdictions are very strict about passing down their workings “from mouth to ear” and that officers are watched very closely for even the smallest transgressions. While I applaud their determination, I often wonder what’s the point? What are they preserving? Our own ritual in Connecticut is one of the many variations of the Preston-Webb workings that were developed and spread thought out the US after the Civil War in the mid-1800s. Those workings are a compilation of ritual that was performed  in England, where there are several other workings which don’t even resemble what is typically done in the US. Even Canada, our neighbor to the north, has a variation of the Preston workings, plus their version of the Emulation workings (which is seen in other parts of the UK) and at least one other set that isn’t quite either one.

I have a copy of the workings from a jurisdiction in Australia, which is a variation on the Emulation workings. I’m calling it a variation because it’s almost, but not quite like the version of Emulation used in parts of Canada, and again, not quite like what is used in parts of England. But it’s defintiely recognizable as Emulation, just as despite the variations from state to state, anyone from the US will recognize workings in any other state.

My point is that ritual – our workings – have evolved  over time and space. At what point did some committee of ritualists decide to pick and choose which version would be the “official” workings? And after that, when and why was it changed? Because there has to be a reason that while we are all Freemasons, we use so many small and fascinating variations on workings that, in actuality, aren’t even all that old?

Now, there’s no question that I like some of those variations better than others. In fact, after watching one of the degrees last week, I was discussing the small differences between that lodge and my own, and I had to ask myself if I was biased in my preference simply because Friendship does something differently. That question, in fact, is something that I ask myself just about every time I help out a lodge at a rehearsal; I want a lodge to do their own variation in the best way possible, but sometimes I have to stop myself from suggesting that they do something differently, simply because it’s what I learned, and not because it’s inherently better.

In the last few years I’ve been to about twenty  different lodges around the state, and no two of them do things alike. I know that this makes some of the purists absolutely crazy, but lately I’ve begun to appreciate the little differences. And I’ll really try to keep that in mind when I do the next round of degrees in another month.

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Tao of Masonry | Freemasonry | Masonry

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20 Years of mutual recognition: Part 4

The following article by RW Carl Ek is reprinted from the April 2009 issue of The Connecticut Freemasons publication, which is running a series of articles celebrating the 20th anniversary of our mutual recognition.

Reflections on Recognition, 20 Years Later
Timely and Good – a Paper Republished
by Carl G. Ek

(Editor’s note: in the span of several months in mid-1989, the Grand Lodge, A.F. & A.M. of Connecticut and the Grand Lodge, F. & A.M., Prince Hall Affiliates, of Connecticut, Inc. crafted an agreement that changed how Masonry operated, not just in Connecticut, but worldwide. In our first three installments, MWPGM Gail Linnell Smith presented the resolution proposing mutual recognition and we learned that other Grand Lodges had also done so in the past. Would Connecticut Masons support this proposal? A series of stories will appear in Connecticut Freemasons this year to celebrate the 20th anniversary of mutual recognition.)

In the closing moments of the March 29, 1989 Grand Lodge session Past Grand Master Gail Linnell Smith presented the resolution calling for the mutual recognition of Prince Hall Masonry immediately after installing his son, Gail Nelson Smith, as the new Grand Master. The craft would come to learn that this proposal had been made in at least three states previously, and that two had already passed – and then rescinded – recognition.

In the 1870’s, the question came before the Grand Lodge of Ohio, where it was ‘narrowly defeated.’ In 1897, the Grand Lodge of Washington was presented with the request of two transplanted Prince Hall Masons for the opportunity for fraternal interaction. The appointed committee, led by Deputy Grand Master William H. Upton, chose to examine “the large(r) question of… legitimacy” of lodges that were the ‘offspring’ of African Lodge No. 459 and the Prince Hall Grand Lodge that coalesced in 1808.

The result Bro. Upton’s committee’s work was simple: a ‘white’ Grand Lodge had legitimized Prince Hall Freemasons for the first time. Their report discussed the possible reaction from other Grand Lodges, but did not expect there to be significant problems. In that they were sadly surprised, and by the next Grand Lodge communication, it was necessary to rescind recognition of Prince Hall Masonry.

Now Past Grand Master Upton made his feelings clear: there was to be no monument, marker, or other identification on his grave that he was even a Mason until the Washington Grand Lodge again recognized their Prince Hall brothers.

A span of fifty years passed before another Grand Lodge would essay recognition. Much had changed in the world. Most Worshipful Past Grand Master of Missouri Harry S Truman had succeeded Bro. Franklin D. Roosevelt as President, and one of his executive orders provided for the desegregation of the United States military at all levels. Enlightened people questioned issues of race, and the civil rights movement was stirring.

In Massachusetts, the home of African Lodge No. 459, the Grand Lodge agreed with the conclusions reached a half-century earlier by a Grand Lodge a continent away. Grand Master Melvin M. Johnson was a strong proponent for recognition, which was passed in March 1947. Again, sadly, this was short-lived as Grand Lodges around the nation brought fraternal pressure to bear. Two years later, recognition was rescinded.

These activities at Connecticut’s northern border caught the attention of Bro. Raymond H. Dragat, a member of Level Lodge No. 137 and Philosophic Lodge of Research (PLR). Bro. Ray had been raised in Cosmopolitan Lodge No. 125 in New Haven while attending Yale Law School. Returning to his native Hartford, he changed his affiliation to a lodge that was initially built on the premise of alternating Christian and Jewish Worshipful Masters year by year.

The secretary of Level Lodge and PLR for more than 50 years aggregated, Ray ascended to the Oriental Chair in Philosophic Lodge in 1959. In that year he presented his paper, Prince Hall Masonry in the United States of America. This well-researched paper earned Ray the lifelong respect and numerous honors from Prince Hall Masonry.

Then Grand Lecturer and eventual Prince Hall Grand Master John E. Rogers ¬– and friend of Gail L. Smith at the Masonic Home – wrote to Bro. Dragat, “I cannot find the proper words to type my appreciation of your interest and inspiration. But I will give you this promise in return; I will ever in my lectures and future instructions to my younger brothers stress love and tolerance so that the spirit of Dragat, Upton and Melvin Johnson will always be reflected by those Prince Hall men with whom I come in contact.”

Bro. Dragat’s paper caused a stir at the time of its publication, especially when it noted that “the procedure of forming African Grand Lodge in 1791 was more properly accomplished than was the formation of white Grand Lodges in Massachusetts and other states.” He concluded, as had many before him, that there was no Masonic reason not to recognize Prince Hall Masonry.

Within a few years, though, it was generally forgotten. Ray updated the work in 1978 to reflect several court cases where ‘white’ Grand Lodges had supported Prince Hall Masons’ efforts to suppress clandestine black groups claiming the name of ‘Masons.’ One court expressed amazement that there was no record ever of any adversarial court action between Prince Hall Grand Lodges and their AF & AM counterparts!

Ray’s paper may have remained ‘forgotten’ had not Philosophic Lodge of Research begun a program to bring more Masonic light to the craft. Under the leadership of WM Frank H. Icaza in 1984, the lodge began selling 10 different papers from its archives. Bro. Dragat’s Prince Hall paper, the most expensive simply due to reproduction costs, was by far the best seller of the group.

Papers were available at Committee on Masonic Information officer seminars through the late 1980’s, and many brothers who owned the paper were voting delegates at the 1989 Grand Lodge session. Craft leadership was thus aware that Prince Hall Masonry was Masonically legitimate. They had every reason to support recognition.

A strong case can be made that when Gail Linnell Smith “… request(ed) fraternal recognition from the Grand Lodge, Free and Accepted Masons of Connecticut, Prince Hall Affiliation;” and those hundreds of brothers rose as one to enthusiastically, urgently “Second!” this motion, they were expressing their understanding of a paper written 30 years earlier by a brother who would receive his 80-year pin at the age of 102. Fortunately, Brother Ray Dragat lived to see the premise of his paper accepted and recognition accomplished, the greatest honor he could have ever received.

“To be continued…”

Tao of Masonry | Freemasonry | Masonry

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Lily work, Social Networks, and Pomegranates

 

Here’s an interesting question: Are our modern Grand Lodge websites already obsolete?

At a committee meeting that I attended recently, the subject came up that some of our brothers were posting notices of lodge events on Facebook, which causes a problem for those brothers who aren’t connected to any of the dozens of social networking, blog-friending, or instant messaging hosts. The bigger concern, though, was that these events were not being published on the regular lodge web calendars.

This struck me as strange, because Grand Lodge of Connecticut has a fantastic web site, with hosting space for each lodge (each with their own domain), plus a web forum , and (and this is the important part) an easily updatable calendar that can be used as an event search tool. For example, as  District Grand Lecturer, I like to visit lodges that are having degree work. Going to the Grand Lodge calendar allows me to search on, say, EA degrees, only in District 5. This presents me with a list of the lodges doing an EA degree anytime in the next few months.

At least, that’s what I would see, if the lodge bothered to update their calendar.

I’ve written before that the reason I started blogging was that when I was Master back in 2006 I wanted an easy way to announce events, and at the time the then-new GL web site was pretty much hosed. Events were lost, half the people didn’t know how to use the controls, and the few lodges that cared enough to dress up their site a bit from the cookie-cutter template were constantly frustrated by frequent updates which would wipe out their changes or enhancements.

Fortunately that aggravation is long past; the website is much easier to use, and good features and enhancements have been added over the last few years. Changing your lodge home page is painless, and you can add lodge forums, photos, newsletters, etc. You know, just like a real organization should have.

Which brings me back to the subject at hand: Why would lodges – that is, lodge officers – with their own website and calendar functions turn to Facebook (or any of the other social networking sites) in order to pass along information?

I wouldn’t bring this up if I didn’t already have an opinion, of course.

I think it’s simply a matter of convenience and available technology. Web sites are so last century.

Yes, Joomla and Drupal and their various plug-ins have made large sites much easier to set up and maintain. The problem, though, is that you still have to actually make a point to go visit them.  While you might forget to visit a website to check for updates, there’s almost no danger of missing information on a social network, unless you overlooked it because of the sheer number of other updates you might be getting.

Facebook (for example) – especially with the Twitter application – allows you to customize the flow of information so that what you’re interested in comes to you, via your cell phone. Or your Crackberry. Or your email inbox. I can well understand the appeal, especially to those who pretty much live in front of their PCs; it’s definitely easy to send off an email or event notice to your named group, mention a few key details, and follow up with a little bit of chatter; the notices will have links to the events, and anyone getting automatic updates can immediately click the link (should they so desire) or forward the event to their online calendar.

By those standards, I feel like a moss-backed old turtle when I use my cell phone to send an SMS to my update my Google calendar, or to make a blog post via sending a multi-media message to my blogger address.

I understand the concern about lodge members – and not to be stereotypical, but it’s generally the younger members – Tweeting and Facebooking event details and updates. It inadvertently bypasses those who don’t live or work in front of a PC all day, or those who don’t care to immerse themselves in the Web 2.0 media stream. Entire events can be brainstormed and planned online in a matter of a couple of days without any need to meet in person. While it’s great for moving things along, the movers and shakers need to make sure that they aren’t neglecting the older members who have barely managed those wireless telephone thingies that all the kids have nowadays.

Interestingly, I’ve had exactly this conversation in the past, but in the context of static websites and emails being too “high tech” for the older members. Tempus fugit, eh?

Another concern that arose about the social networking sites seems to be the idea that it decentralizes the information, so that a) pretty much anybody (Masons or not) can see it, and b) the people who need to be informed – or at least, who think they need to be informed – might not get the information.

The validity of the first point seems a bit over-stressed, what with Dummies books, Idiots guides, dozens of personal blogs, and an almost weekly mention of the secret inner workings on the cable tv channels. Most Masons hip enough to be using Facebook are probably savvy enough to know what they should or should not be writing for public consumption anyway.

But the second point illustrates the constant tug of war between those who understand the need for some kind of central repository for information, and those who tend to adopt new tools,  techniques, and strategies when the need arises.

Obviously, having some central facility for knowledge and information is important to the success of an organization. In fact, I’d say it was inherent in the term itself. People who are in positions in which they are responsible for organizing and overseeing other people or projects really do need some way to get the information easily.

The problem with the “keep it in the house” attitude is that the structure itself often becomes more important than the contents and accessibility. Everybody involved in some way wants to have input on what kinds of and how much data should be stored, who can access the data, and how it should be managed. Then, add in those people who can’t or won’t figure out how to use the existing tools, and you have a situation in which only a few people will actually be using the tools on a regular basis. Eventually, the tools sit unused because they have limited usefulness.

There will always be pioneers and early adopters, people who will use new tools, or perhaps invent new uses for old ones. Such people drive the forces of innovation that allow us to progress as a society, whether it be to profit from more productivity with the same amount of work, or to have more leisure time, allowing us more opportunity for rest and refreshment. The early adopters also help to weed out those tools that aren’t useful, thereby saving the rest of us from wasting large amounts of time and energy.

Early adopters, however, often forget that not only are some people lagging behind a little bit, but that there a lot of people who aren’t even in the same race. Our lodge has at least one Past Master who insists that we send out postcards for major events so that people can hang them on the refrigerator as a reminder, and he is not amused to hear that newer appliances are connected to the internet so that one’s Google calendar can push the reminders to the door at the appropriate time.

I once told him the joke about Java once being something you’d find in your coffee mug instead of your cell phone.

He didn’t get it.

I’m not suggesting that the more static websites are no longer relevant, of course. We will always have a need for safe repositories for the archives of our Craft, and that includes a place to keep handy and useful information. I know that more US states over the last few years have taken the time and resources to create very impressive websites, although from what I can see, most of them are still merely online pamphlets explaining a bit about Freemasonry, and giving a few phone numbers and contact details. A good example is the site of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts: they have a beautiful Flash-driven website that offers some announcements and contact information, along with information about the fraternity; but there is no way to find anything about the lodges themselves, let alone a local calendar, unless that lodge (or a well-meaning member) bothered to put up their own web page. 

Indeed, a few minutes of searching on the GL Massachusetts site shows that most of the lodges themselves don’t even have their own web pages, and those that do are a mishmash of 1990s style Geocities pages to more modern, media-laden websites. A perusal of the web sites of other Grand Lodges around the US shows that this is rather typical; I’ve seen a lot of Geocities and AOL personal pages hosting lodge websites, and while I admit that it seems I’m bit of a cyber-elitist, the more distressing part is that if my random surfing is any indication, the vast majority of lodges in the US don’t even have a website. In contrast, GL Connecticut gives web space to each lodge with a hosted dot org domain name, and the calendar for each lodge is tied in to the Grand Master’s calendar, so that once an event is entered, it can be searched from any other lodge calendar. Each lodge website is built on a Joomla template, allowing (if the lodge can find somebody to help them) plug-ins for picture albums, forums, and other little applications. 

I can imagine some brothers from a few of the less tech-blessed jurisdictions wondering why anybody would resort to some outside service, considering what we have for web tools. We’re probably just spoiled up here. 

With two-thirds of our population using broadband internet connections, and the merging of SMS/text messages into most of the social networking and micro-blogging services, it’s probably unreasonable to expect connected and tech-savvy Masons not to use them for communication, especially since they are probably already using these features for communicating with family, non-Mason friends, and work mates. As one of those aforementioned connected Masons, myself, I readily admit that I like the idea of being able to jump in and out of a conversation that might take place over several days. I find that the more I use Facebook, the more I enjoy the variety of features, and over the last six months or so, I’ve been using it more and often, to where I’m checking it several times a day. At least half of my contacts are Masons from around the globe, most of whom I know from the various web groups to which I subscribe, but I’m discovering more family members and old friends every month. 

Ironically, despite the subject of this article, very few of my own lodge brothers use Facebook. They’re probably too busy with their personal WoW and Counterstrike servers.

As to the issue of some brothers using Facebook instead of their lodge websites, I think that first of all, any brothers that are taking advantage of new technologies to keep in touch should be applauded for their ingenuity. That said, perhaps those same brothers, being more tech savvy, should actually be the ones in charge of keeping the lodge websites updated, since they are already spending at least some time passing around event details; five minutes to access the calendar really shouldn’t be much of a stretch. 

And that said, despite the fact that we probably have one of the best Grand Lodge websites in the US, maybe we need to look at some enhancements to make it even more accessible and usable for the technorati, and eventually for everyone else in the future. For example, RSS readers are now ubiquitous – not only are there a dozen popular readers for your browser, you can find them built into some email clients and Firefox browser extensions. Perhaps web calendar updates could be aggregated and syndicated for subscribers. Better, could the calendar updates be emailed to a subscriber list? Masons interested in the events in particular lodges could subscribe to the calendar updates, which could (perhaps) be filtered for event type. 

But what about information flow in the other direction? The answer might be already available in the form of microblogging : There are a dozen well-known microblogging platforms (such as Twitter or Jaiku ), most of which will accept input from PCs, IM clients, or cell phones/SMS. Installing a Twitter application on a lodge website would allow any of the members to post not only event details, but comments about the event, and even pictures. It might be difficult to figure out how to capture a Tweet and put it into usable for in order to make a direct calendar update, but it might not be a good idea anyway, as you would need to control access to prevent adverts and spam. 

Certainly there are a lot of options here, and there’s much to think about. I’m sure that our GrandLodge IT guys will enjoy having a word with me at our upcoming Grand Lodge Annual Communication at the end of the month. If any readers have something to add, please feel free to leave a comment so I can pass it along to them. 

 

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Tao of Masonry | Freemasonry | Masonry

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Points of Fellowship

2:30 pm

Live blogging the annual Friendship 33 vs Sequin-Level 140 Dart Tournament.

So far it’s not looking very good for Friendship. 

3:45 pm

Good times, good food, good fellowship.

Good thing, too, because we stink at actually playing darts.

4:30 pm
After several sets of games (301, Cricket, 501, and more Cricket), the score is
Sequin-Level:14
Friendship: 8

2006: The last time we won the trophy.

Dang.