Demands of the information age

Last night before bed, I started preparing a soup of butternut squash and red lentils for the Ignatian meditation group lunch today at our house, and finished it off before having breakfast this morning, in time to head across town to St Germans for the midweek Mass. There were a dozen of us there. It looks like I'm going to continue helping out there in the New Year, with two baptisms on the Feast of Christ's Baptism, and a wedding in February, to prepare for. It'll be the first time for me to officiate at a wedding in UK since retirement. 

Regulation is now more demanding because of abuse of church wedding ceremonies for marriages of convenience. Also people with a family connection to a church can now ask to be married there, even if they don't live in the Parish. Passport and address checks are now required at an early stage in the preparation. Clergy must prove they have no criminal record before they get permission to officiate in a new diocese. Trust and credibility must be legally formalised and kept updated, consequences of ministering in a society where a priest and the people served are no longer known to each other, as was used normal in previous centuries. It means ministry is far more based on the required function than relationships between people. No matter how much effort goes into making the offer of ministry personal, it is far more likely to be transient in nature. I wonder if we've yet taken into account the impact of this on Christian spirituality as well as practice.

There were five of us for the meditation session. As the group meets most months and has done for years, it's an appreciated part of the more permanent aspect of our respective journeys in faith. The same can be said for the small core group of people in each church congregation that's responsible for maintaining services and keeping the building open. Sometimes these relationships are life-long, and without them, something of the mind and heart of Christian tradition would be lost. They often seem to be older people, simply because they are people who stayed in a place to grow up and grow old together. The group always seems to be dying out, but more often than not its membership gradually changes over the years. A small aspect of growth which often goes un-noticed.

Much of the evening I spent working on migrating CBS user account record notes one by one into a OneNote file that can be easily accessed by all who need to. It's far from being an ideal solution, as the software doesn't offer all that it would be useful for it to do, but once the migration of data is  complete, it'll be easy for anyone with information to add to the common cloud based file. It's quite a dull routine task, but it requires concentration to maintain. I'll be glad to see the back of it, so that I can relax my worries about us keeping an up to date set of working information, easily accessible right back to when the business was set  up, going digital in 2009. 

Information age issues

Yesterday morning, an email arrived saying that my verified identity documents had been received by diocese in Europe child protection officer, and that now I could complete the application on-line, through the Churches Agency for Safeguarding website, something of a change from the last time I applied five years ago. Thankfully, the process was simple and user friendly, and ended with a confirmation of reception registration number, allowing the enquiry to be tracked if needs be.

In the morning post was a set of application forms for the Church in Wales CRB check. The older paper process is still used by the Provincial child protection office. I believe the reason for this isn't that the Church is Wales lags behind in technological labour saving devices, but because the automated enquiry cannot be carried out in Welsh - something I noticed when I logged into the CAS website. A bilingual church has its own values and priorities to maintain, and this may require a different way of engaging with a necessary process.

I wrote in my Lenten blog on Sunday on clouds in scripture, and the contrast between the image of the 'cloud of unknowing' reflecting the common experience of how cloud obscures all we think we know, and the marketing image of the internet Cloud as the ultimate receptacle of information and knowledge. Such a remarkable change has occurred since I retired. The user friendliness of interactive services delivered by the internet has improved vastly, shopping, banking, video and audio entertainment, travel booking, tax payment, CRB checks increasingly 'just work'. 

Personal productivity tools which were once a necessity on everyone's PC can now be used freely from the internet, courtesy of Microsoft One Drive or Google Drive and other services providing data storage and apps. All depends upon having an internet connection and a device that can be used for access, and that's a different story to what it was a few years ago, with phones and tablets now as powerful as a desktop machine, albeit, not quite so easy as a proper sized physical keyboard. But, there are still limitations, not least confidence in the continuity of this vast and elaborate electronic construct.

While writing this my internet connection, twice as fast as when I retired, and still the cheapest offer from TalkTalk has temporarily disconnected half a dozen times, and then stalled the router altogether. Using my Chromebook on this occasion resulted in losing the final part of my text. Despite caution in copying and saving before rebooting stalled router and Chromebook, the fully saved text was nowhere to be found, and the internal SSD is certainly not full. It a clever Cloud device, but not that clever. I'm not clever for trusting it, knowing how flaky my connection can be.

Admittedly, much more is required of our channel of communication to the internet now than three years ago. Three computers, two tablets, three smartphones, the phone signal booster, and the YouView internet TV box could occasionally all be running at the same time, and their connected data streams competing to communicate with the world outside the house.

It's not long since we had only a third of that number of devices connected. That's bound to make a difference. However much basic and essential service capacity is improved, however much we benefit from them, it's likely that demand will continue to outstrip supply. If I pay extra for a faster service, what guarantee will there be of improvement, as more devices are made requiring on-line access? Connectivity limitations have consequences for all development. It will remain a political, economic and social issue until the next paradigm shift in global communication occurs.

We're being warned that technological development has bred an obsolescence in hardware and storage media which puts at risk vast amounts of early digital data because it becomes unreadable, either due to deterioration of the media, or the breakdown of irreplaceable equipment used to read it. In addition to this is the long standing issue of file format incompatibility bred by unhealthy business competitiveness between software producers. Universally readable file formats are now becoming more widespread in their acceptance, but this can still be problematic for reading historic data and documents, so there is a double risk of loss.

Written information about life in ancient times exists because of the way records were kept. Although a great deal has undoubtedly been lost over millennia, new investigative material keeps on turning up. Thanks to forensic archaeological techniques more is discovered about our past. Understood better than ever today is how vital good data about anything is. Data retention needs future proofing, so that our generation aren't dubbed the problem ancestors who, despite themselves were careless about how they kept records. Thankfully, there is growing collaboration in the effort to find long term solutions to these problems, and hopefully the historic impulse to competitiveness can be be transformed into a desire to excel for the common good, if not for the glory of God.

Credential check time and Borsetshire flood crisis

A lovely sunny day today, slightly warmer, yet not a good one for me. I received an email from the Diocese in Europe child protection officer about renewing my safeguarding credentials with the CRB now re-branded as the DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service), as a precondition of retaining my Permission to Officiate in Europe. This runs out in six months time, when it'll be five years already since it was first issued and there's a small question to be resolved as to how eight months in Spain non-continuous residence in two different government regions should be properly accounted for in. It's not my problem it's a matter of getting the right advice from the bureaucracy and acting on it.

Well, I have six months to get it sorted out. On checking my personal documents I realised my Llandaff diocesan DBS also needs renewal, so I sent an email reminder to Glenda at the R.B. Cathedral Road office to set that process running too. Like a passport and a driving license, it's a necessity for anyone with a mobile ministry, and a matter of pride to keep it up do date.

As I was reading through the application papers and trying to fill them in, I was visited twice by a migraine aura which stopped me working temporarily. Fortunately it isn't followed by an awful headache. It was a nuisance, but also a bit worrying, as I've never had two in a day before, and it's unclear what triggers it. The conditions for generating an aura seem consistent. It only happens when there's bright direct morning light and the sun is low in the sky, and I'm wearing reading specs. Once it happened during a flight over the Alps. Is there something about the pattern of light being received which is causing the visual disturbance? Possibly light that's polarised in a way the eye isn't used to coping with? If it happens again soon, a visit to the opticians will be my next appointment. It left me feeling somewhat disconcerted and grumpy.

Father Mark dropped by after lunch and countersigned my identity documents, so that I could get them off in the evening mail. Then I went into the office and worked for several hours, until I'd had enough. On my way home I went into John Lewis', and received a phone call from Martin. We chatted for about twenty minutes, and then I went on the bargain trail, unsuccessfully, as usual. Then I realised it was dark outside. I had a longer than usual wait for a bus and a longer than usual ride home, as the traffic congestion was terrible, probably due to a traffic stopping bus fire on Western Avenue, I'd heard report of earlier in the office.

I was home an hour late for supper, and had to listen to a double episode of the Archers on Catch up, having missed two nights running. This week has been very interesting and dramatic, all about flooding in Borsetshire. The Archers BBC website has innovatively displayed fictional information about the breaking news of this weather crisis, cleverly crafted to fit together with the storyline since Monday. Nicely done. iPlayer keeps improving and the waiting time between broadcast and re-run is now down to about half an hour. Very creditable indeed. The BBC's on-demand services are worth the license fee in their own right.