United Communities of Spirit

OPPORTUNITIES

As UCS continues to grow, there are emerging a variety of opportunities for network involvement and volunteerism. We can use all the help we can get, and we would be glad to find a way that you can contribute your insight, time, energy, skills and vision to our work.

It will take a little time before all of these features and opportunities are fully in place. For now, here is a brief listing of what might be possible. Please get in touch if any of this seems interesting.

Welcome new UCS members
When a new member joins UCS, it would be nice if a few other UCS members would greet them, welcome them to our network, perhaps offer some assistance on explaining how to use the tools the network offers, etc. We could set this up so that members of this "welcoming committee" would receive a brief email containing the new member's name, intro, email address, faith tradition, belief tenets, keyword choices, etc. Members of the welcoming committee could decide whether they want to receive notices on all new members, or only members from their faith group, keyword group, nation, etc.
Manage UCS Art Gallery
We can use some help in managing the new UCS art gallery. Responsibilities will incldue reviewing each listing as it is suggested by UCS members, confirming their correctness and appropriateness, and removing dead links.
Manage UCS WebNet
UCS has built a large network of "member websites". This list is somewhat out of date. We need to keep this list clean, and encourage our members to maintains their links to UCS. The web maintenance system involves sending personal emails to WebNet members
Complete the World Scripture html project
We first put World Scripture online in 1994, in a text-only format available through an email archive. Then, we put it on the web, in text-only format. A few years ago, we completed 3/4 of the work to translate the text into good-looking html. That task was never completed, so our transcription into html is still rather fragmented and unfinished. It would be good to get that work completed. This is not real easy work, and takes time and care.
Put World Scripture into a database format
Our long-range vision for World Scripture is that these text passages should be stored in a searchable database, so that they can be displayed in any number of ways, depending on how we want to group them. Right now, they are grouped by "165 themes that religions have in common". This is important, and valuable -- but it would be good to be able to search and sort these 4,000 passages in any number of other ways. And it would be good to grow the systenm, so that it includes other types of writings -- such as commentaries by scholars and saints, etc.