Types of content

[crimperman]

When I first thought about this project I was imagining music and related printed matter (sheet, chords, lyrics etc.) but it occurs to me that there would be a need for more than that. What types of content would you ideally like to see?

Please feel free to add a comment if you want to as well. Whilst you need to register to comment you don't need to register to vote in the poll.

[Adam W.]

Mostly I care about music. Everything else is nice, too.

What I really want to stress, though, is variety.
A project like this has the potential to bring together people from lots of musical/cultural/denominational/theological traditions, providing an opportunity for a Baptist to learn some old Catholic songs, or a Pentecostal to be introduced to early-american shape-note harmony. This would be a wonderful, glorious thing.

Alternatively, if the first 20 or 30 people involved are all vaguely homogenous white male evangelical protestants doing pop-based praise-band music, we will likely not expand horizons.
(To clarify- I like white-male-protestant-pop-based-praise-band music... I just don't want that to become the overwhelming default).

So- as we think about who we invite, and how we proceed (and even how we talk about things like "tabs, overheads, lead sheets" and so forth, I think we should actively seek out variety. If we don't seek it out purposefully, we'll end up defaulting to people just like ourselves.

[ordinandy]

Personally, I'd like to see anything and everything that could be considered a possible resource on a site like this.

I'd also agree with Adam that we'd need to be proactive with respect to promoting variety of source and style.

[DJones]

Another option for helping spread God's word could be the use of free software.

As examples, there is the operating system Ubuntu Christian Edition which includes openly available bibles and reading software, Christian desktop themes, parental control and filtering software, the open office word processing, spreadsheet and database suite, which can be, where the user is able to accept that it isn't MS Windows, an alternative to Windows. http://www.ubuntuce.com/

For Windows, there's software like eSword for bible reading. http://www.e-sword.net/

And also with mobile phones, I use an Android based phone and find that there are various applications freely available to assist with bible study etc. http://www.androlib.com/r.aspx?r=christian

Hope there's some useful suggestions there.

[crimperman]

Hope there's some useful suggestions there.

Good stuff and thanks for the links. Remember that it's not free as in cost that we're concerned with but free as in freedom (to borrow the free software phrase - "free as in speech not beer"). Zero cost content can still restrict the user as to what they are able to do with it.

Thanks for input and welcome to the project.
Ryan

[Adam W.]

Or freedom as in "freedom of religion, freedom to worship..."