Rethinking Jewish Boston's web presence

These days organizations always seem to be relaunching and revamping their web sites -- today, in fact, my own employer is unveiling a modest redesign of the Boston.com homepage -- and in the local religion world the Archdiocese of Boston recently overhauled its site, even changing its URL from the bureaucratic (and, for many, mysterious) rcab.org (which stands for Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston) to an address that requires no explanation, BostonCatholic.org. (The archdiocese has also dumped the word “chancery” when referring to its administrative offices, replacing it with the phrase “pastoral center.”)

Now comes the local Jewish community, which is undertaking an ambitious project to rethink its presence on the web. Like the Catholic makeover, this endeavor will start with a new and non-institutional URL – JewishBoston.com. But Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the umbrella organization that is overseeing the project, is taking a somewhat unusual approach to developing the site, inviting the Jewish community inside the design process by pre-launching the site more than six months before the content is ready and using the URL to share with the public some of the design documents (including the RFP) that show how the site is being envisioned. Most notably, the page now features a blog that is chronicling the step-by-step process of developing the web site.

Because I was redoing my blogroll recently, I’ve found myself thinking about how religious denominations portray themselves on the web, and musing about the different challenges that face hierarchical religions with centralized authority, like Catholics and Mormons, compared with nonhierarchical religions, with no central authority, like Unitarian Universalists and Jews. For the Catholics and the Mormons, it’s a lot easier to articulate where the religions stand on various issues, and to decide what views and organizations to highlight on an official site. But for religions like Judaism and Unitarian Universalism, as well as others, in which disagreement is so much a part of the fabric that it’s hard to imagine what the word dissent means, deciding what the role of an official site is is more complex. Jewish organizational leaders in Boston are fairly practiced at working together despite serious differences – the Jewish Community Relations Council, for example, has members spanning the entire denominational spectrum, and Combined Jewish Philanthropies funds everything from Orthodox day schools to gay and lesbian advocacy groups. But differences of opinion over Israel have been harder to smooth over, and how that will work on-line is one of the many questions that JewishBoston.com developers are thinking about as they develop a web site that seeks to take a big tent approach to the Jewish community.

The first phase of JewishBoston.com is expected to launch in late winter – sometime before March 1 if all goes according to plan – with a complete calendar of events in the Jewish community (along with the ability to register or buy tickets when applicable) and a resource directory. The site will be integrated with Facebook and Twitter, which should make possible viral event publicity. And each Jewish organization will also be able to have its own blog on the site.

I asked Patty Jacobson, who is overseeing the site development, what the purpose is. Her answer:

First, there is the concept that we’re really all Jews by choice now. If the Jewish community doesn’t invest in being in a place where the next generation is, it will be very hard to get them to choose to be Jewish. And the next generation connects with everything else through technology.

Related to that is evidence we collected which basically said that, if you’re an insider, you know where everything is, but if you’ve just moved to Boston, or you’re intermarried, or you didn’t grow up with a tremendous amount of Jewish tradition or presence in your life, when you try to come into the Jewish community, you don’t know where to start. The greatest barrier is the simple lack of information. So we want to open up the community wider to more people.

I also asked Jacobson what the point is of blogging about the site development. Her response:

The essence of web 2.0 is that it’s all about user participation. JewishBoston.com is not envisioned as something that gets pushed out, but something where the community comes together and organizations and individuals across the entire geographic spectrum contribute information. We didn’t want to wait to create that mindset until we launched the site – our goal is that by getting feedback along the way, we can build a site based on user input. Also, one of the underlying themes of the CJP strategic plan was increased transparency and accountability and collaboration. So we want to practice what we preach.

The effort has already attracted the attention of JewSchool, where David Levy observes that watching the site develop "probably won’t be of interest to many, but for those of us who deal with how Jewish communities communicate and organize information, it’s a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain."