Posted: September 18

A Work in Process

When I was in tertianship, in Austin, Texas, in 1984, I remember going to Lilly Tomlin's one-woman show that she was performing around the country to develop it before opening in a New York City theater. I had never seen an actor/writer develop material before—it was fascinating. Ms. Tomlin had several different scripts she was working with, and she would thumb through them as the night went on, choosing one bit, trying it, and then changing her mind about what she should do next, always gauging the reaction of the audience.

I thought of that long-ago evening in the theater because she subtitled her performance, "A Work in Process"— but not one in "progress," the expected phrase. I feel that this Jescom website, and the bigger effort to develop ways of using the new digital media and the internet to improve our Jesuit communication, are also works in process. We jumped into production without knowing what the ending would be, and certainly without having everything finished. In fact, the model we are following is sometimes called rapid development, in which you roll out software as you finish each piece, without waiting for everything to be perfect before letting people use it. The process we are following is imperfect, but it is working: get some things done, use them, get feedback, learn from them and think of three other things that you could do. It is not always a neat process, but we are making great progress.

This week I finally got the Jescom Portfolio to work. Apologies to Ray Bucko, who was the first to respond to the possibility of having some work published and sent me photos. I kept waiting for him to fill out the description of his work; and only months later realized that the mechanism for uploading that information wasn't working right. So I went back and fixed the problem, but also realized that the way the pages were set up was too complicated. I have learned a lot in the year since I first did them. So now they are much better. I also fixed the feedback pages. The process is working. Fr. Myron Pereira from Bombay put up a news item about the death of the Jesuit who pioneered the communication department of the Jesuit college in that city. I would never have known that without the web site and the mechanism for members to upload stories themselves. I don't even mind it when we get email about errors, like the recent correction a sharp-eyed Jesuit sent in noting that sjweb says St. Ignatius appointed St. Francis Borgia as superior of Portugal when the latter was only six years old. Oops. The year should have been 1555, not 1515.

Traffic is steadily increasing. We use page requests as the basic unit of measurement. Back in April of this year we averaged 2,207 successful page requests per day. That figure jumped to 12,747 in July and then dropped back to 6,227 in August. Not surprising for a vacation month. A work in process indeed.