There has been a great deal of discussion recently--both in our presbytery and in the wider church--concerning web policy, website security and presbytery minutes.

I have given the matter a good bit of thought, and invested some time in researching the current state of the "art" on PC(USA) websites, and thought I would share the results. I am organizing this in 3 parts:

PART I) CORE ISSUES REGARDING PRESBYTERY MINUTES, TECHNOLOGICAL CAPABILITIES AND WEBSITE POLICY

A. The Conflict Between Privacy Concerns and the Desire to have Websites Function as the Presbytery Repository of presbytery documents.
When the question of privacy concerns and the posting of Presbytery minutes arose at a Clerks’ Consultation last year, the clerks advice that minutes not be posted on "open to the world" websites was not welcome news in many presbyteries. This is because quite a few presbyteries have just gotten their technology together enough to post their minutes on their websites at all. The posting of minutes offers presbyteries significant advantages, chief among them being the savings in postage, paper, equipment and staff time in duplicating and mailing print minutes. The second reason the open posting of minutes seemed to be the evolving standard is the significant convenience of having an easily accessible "online file cabinet," thereby reducing the clutter on commissioners’ desks and making minutes instantly retrievable when needed.

As the privacy concern issue has filtered out into the online presbytery web community, a hodge-podge of standards and solutions are emerging. It seems to me there are some fundamental questions, issues and definitions of terminology which are missing from this debate.Questions for Consideration:

1. When citing "privacy concerns," what specific content of presbytery minutes ought to be "private"? It seems the emerging standard is that matters involving 1) terms of call and other financial details and 2) judicial matters are what we mean by "privacy concerns." This query, and the related one regarding whether directory or other contact information ought to public or protected, is now being hotly debated. No clear standard has yet emerged.

2. What is the current "state of the art" practice concerning posting the reports of presbytery meetings on presbytery websites?
As Part 2 shows, it’s all over the place.

3. If a presbytery decides to post meeting "summaries" in the public part of the website, (rather than the full-blown minutes) what are the guidelines for discerning what content to include in "summaries" – i.e. what is the difference between summaries and minutes? The depth and scope of summaries varies wildly from presbytery to presbytery. The terminology varies as well.

Some terms used are: Minutes Lite, Digest, Summary, Synopsis, Highlights, Meeting Happenings, Meeting news. Some presbyteries post highly detailed dockets, which are, in effect, "minutes before it happens" with all financial and occasionally judicial details.

In general, the sites seem to indicate this emerging standard in terminology:

Minutes: often refer to the "legal minutes’" some are posted before being accepted by the pby and some after

Summary or Digest: often refer to a "blow by blow" description of the meeting, some more detailed than others, with financial, judicial and perhaps other information deleted. These are in some cases prepared by the pby Stated Clerk; in many cases the author is not named

Highlights: These often, although not always, indicate a breezier, more casual, "web friendly" style and often include pictures and other details intended to give the relational "flavor" of the meeting. Some provide hyperlinked content and other web-depth while others are an online version of a 2D print newsletter. Highlights seem more geared to "marketing" the relational/missional character of a presbytery.

But----some digests include all sensitive information, while some minutes are really digests. There’s no common meaning to the words yet. Just because a posting is called a "digest" doesn’t mean the privacy concern issue has been addressed.

B. TECHNOLOGY ISSUES AND PRIVACY CONCERNS
A brief gander at presbytery websites reveals that whatever else presbyteries might excel at, web technology generally isn’t it. There’s a mighty hodge-podge of many minimalist sites to a few sophisticated, professional ones. It’s clear presbyteries need technological help which clearly is not a top-level priority of our beleaguered denomination. Do the clerks/other policy-formers and the webmasters ever communicate?

It seems a simple solution for policy makers to pronounce that presbytery minutes need to be on a protected part of the website. Here are some of the issues surrounding this concern:

• On a UNIX server, it is a relatively simple matter to password protect a directory or folder with a username and password. Other security concerns plague UNIX servers.
• On a Windows server using IIS/5.0 it gets much more complicated. Working in frontpage, the best solution is to convert the folder to be protected into a subweb. This can create major hassles in the navigational/theme structure of the website.
• Some message boards (which come with the capability for username/password logins) permit the posting of file attachments. But most of those programs require the webhost permit mysql–a programming/database language that many webhosts do not support. This can be bypassed by loading a message board based on .ASP–but these can be slow-loading and faulty in older browsers.
• Even if a directory/folder is password protected and requires a log-in, this does not solve the issue of "searchability"– which involves how to keep the sensitive document from showing up either in a web search, or in a site-specific searching using the microsoft indexing service.
• Our presbytery has decided to solve the problem by posting minutes as password-protected pdfs (adobe acrobat files), which secure the document, permits one password to be distributed, rather than trying to maintain a multitude of different username and passwords, and which don’t show up in search engines. The downside is pdfs can be individually searched from within the document, but not across documents if you’re trying to find a specific item from a specific meeting.
• There’s a preferred format war going on. Some post minutes in pdf (which seems to be winning); some in html; a few post Word or RTF documents. Highlights tend to be posted in html.

Is this Greek to you? It Shouldn’t Be. Clerks need to understand the technological issues and Webgurus need to understand clerks’ concerns if this is every going to evolve into a "best practice."

• As is evident in part 2, the majority of presbyteries are ignoring the issue altogether–either by continuing to post minutes or by not bothering at all.
• A few have competently found ways to post their minutes in protected fashion. 
• Some are posting highlights and have foregone the minutes.
• A few are posting minutes with senstive details edited out, and making the full copies available upon request.
• Some are simply giving up. The ones who are giving up should be a source of deep concern to anyone who cares about the technological resourcing of presbyteries.

One presbytery posted minutes with a login requirement, and these instructions:
"Please note: if you get a dialog box asking you for an id name and password, click on cancel and you should get the document". In a nutshell, that pretty much says it all.

PART II) SUMMARY OF CURRENT WEB PRACTICE ON PCU(USA) WEBSITES

This information is accurate to the best of my abilities. Some of the sites are very difficult to navigate and I may have missed hidden information or security intent.

I. THERE ARE 81 PRESBYTERIES WITH NO MINUTES OR HIGHLIGHTS ON WEBSITE
Most give no indication whether information about Presbytery Meetings is within their interest or technological capabilities

• 11 sites are being developed or upgraded with no way to determine future depth of site
• 4 sites are not maintained with current information or documents
• 5 may be found in search engines, but are not linked on pcusa directory
• 1 password protects member directory, but does not include pby meeting info on site
• 1 indicates meetings were previously posted and now are removed while the concept is being evaluated

II. THERE ARE 23 PRESBYTERIES WITH HIGHLIGHTS (BUT NOT "MINUTES"):

• 17 post in html and 5 in pdf; indicating the "web" character and easy accessibility of html is the emerging Highlight standard.
• Many only post material from the last meeting, with no indication whether this is a policy or technology decision.

III. THERE ARE 48 PRESBYTERIES WITH MINUTES OR FULL PACKETS ON WEBSITE

• 4 use password or password/username protection: Denver, Susquehanna Valley, Twin Cities all use username/login; Kiski uses passworded pdfs
• 1 has "minutes" edited to remove financial details (Philadelphia) (others may follow this practice, but do not so indicate on their site). (Note: digests or summaries--as in the 23 highlights above--mostly have clergy financial details and sometimes judicial information redacted out, but mostly do not seem to be "legal minutes" except for the edits.  I could not find any instances of minutes which indicate clearly something like: "protected information edited, apply to clerk for full minutes" positioned in the document where the edits had been imposed.)
• 43 presbyteries have minutes or summaries with financial and/or judicial details open for viewing

LOGINS FOR OTHER PURPOSES
3 have a login area for cmmttee or directories, but post packets or meeting materials in the open view area

MULTIPLE ACCESS OPTIONS
2 presbyteries have both passworded minutes and open view highlights
2 presbyteries have both minutes and highlights open for viewing

FORMAT OF MINUTES

• 20 HTML
• 19 PDF
• 3 PDF & DOC
• 2 HTML & PDF1 RTF

C. CONCLUSIONS

• 23 Presbyteries are posting highlights; 1 with edited minutes; and 4 with passwords.
  This makes 28 presbyteries out of 152 with websites which both have meeting details available and are responding to privacy concerns.
• 43 presbyteries have all their materials out there
• 1 is evaluating and 80 perhaps have not reached the technical capabilities to even have the conversation.

PART III) EXPANDED TABLES DOCUMENTING CURRENT PRESBYTERY PRACTICE: AVAILABLE AS SEPARATE TABLES AT http://www.kiskipby.org/documents/policycentral.htm