Blog o’ Gnosis

I’m blogging today from WordCamp, a free one-day conference in San Francisco for WordPress bloggers and developers. It takes a powerful force to pry me away from the coast these days. I am in hyper-hermit mode, plus who would ever want to leave a beautiful house on the California coast if they don’t have to? But the idea of learning more about my blogging software, plugging into the open source community, and getting a free lunch and t-shirt overcame my considerable resistance, so here I am.

Vince is in the car parked in the shade. I had to start praying for a parking place in the shade all the way back in Novato, but it paid off and even in the busy Castro neighborhood I found a spot reasonably close in where he can rest comfortably. Maybe someday I’ll know a neighbor who he can stay with when I leave for the day, but being a pound puppy his abandonment issues are so big that he is happier spending the day in my car than alone in the house.

It’s a wonderful thing to be sitting here with so many other introverts. Half the people in the room are tapping on their laptops while the main discussion goes on. There are some über-geeks here but most are regular people, some who know a lot about a little, and most who know a little about a lot. I find myself comfortably in the middle range, and have had a couple interesting conversations with other bloggers. Another plus is that there are relatively few women here, so lines at the (minuscule) bathroom are not an issue.

I’m not interested in making use of every feature of my blogging software, but I have picked up a couple tips that I will experiment with when I get home. Mostly I find it interesting to watch the open source community in action. It is a relational paradigm that I find very familiar. There is a core belief that if we all cooperated the world would be a much better place. People understand the need to be media savvy, creating cash flow from different projects, but there is active concern that this not endanger the democratic nature of running things on non-proprietary software. At the same time, these folks understand that there has to be some sort of hierarchy in the organization, in order to preserve the quality of the product. Not just anyone can mess around with wordpress and have it be adopted as part of the core software. You have to actually know what you’re doing.

There was a good New Yorker article recently about wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit or add to. Stephen Colbert, my favorite non-Jon-Stewart TV personality, recently did a real-time test of just how stupid wikipedia can be by suggesting that people adjust the number of elephants now found in the wild. Predictably, the number of people zooming over to wikipedia.org and putting bogus edits into the “elephant” entry overwhelmed the system, and they had to “lock” that and other entries. The problem with wikipedia is that in choosing universal accessibility over some sort of hierarchy based on knowledge and experience, the accuracy and usability of the entire project is threatened.

Listening to people here talk about development and use of wordpress software has made me realize that Reclaiming at its best could best be described as an open-source spirituality. Realistically, though, it is more like a wiki-spirituality, in that anyone can add to or edit it. If you’re in an area where there’s not an active Reclaiming community, there is very little that you need to do before becoming the center of your own new Reclaiming community.

This functionality has been its greatest strength: Reclaiming as a tradition has benefitted from the input of many brilliant people over the years, some who know a lot about a little, and others who know a little about a lot. But there becomes a breaking point, when the network of communities and individuals becomes too large to run on the infrastructure we have traditionally used to support it. In my opinion, Reclaiming as a whole has been slipping into irrelevance over the past couple years because the wiki-phenomenon of garbage-in/garbage-out begins to overwhelm the basic core of intelligent, usable spirituality.

I realize that is an incredibly provocative statement to make, and I will get back to it in later posts. In my experience, when I say things like that in public forums I get reams of private posts thanking me for saying it. But generally this sort of discussion doesn’t go very far on Reclaiming’s public email lists before it ends in a deafening silence. This disparity of response itself is a good indication that the publicly-held ideals of Reclaiming spirituality have only a shallow buy-in by those who actually self-identify as Reclaiming witches. What an interesting phenomenon! I’m so glad I came here today, if only to connect a few more dots in my ongoing struggle to identify what the hell I feel and think about being part of Reclaiming.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 5th, 2006 at 3:31 pm and is filed under General, Spirit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.