dcf.cymru stimulus sheet · RE · Year 10
The communities below are invented; the practices and the problems are real. Each case ends with a decision that a real committee has had to take somewhere in Wales.
Since 2020 the chapel has livestreamed its Sunday morning service. Eleven members who can no longer travel watch from home, and a further group of former members now living in Cardiff and London join in. The stream is free and nobody has to log in.
The camera at the back of the chapel shows the pulpit but also the first four pews. Two members have asked for it to be turned to face the pulpit only. One said: “I do not want a video of me praying to exist on the internet for ever.” Another member replied that the empty-looking chapel on screen makes the congregation seem smaller than it is, and that the stream is part of the chapel’s witness.
The decision: keep the wide shot, narrow to the pulpit, or ask for consent pew by pew?
Many members of this community do not use electronic devices from sunset on Friday until nightfall on Saturday, because Shabbat is kept as a day of rest on which such work is set aside. That shapes everything the community does online.
Nothing is scheduled to go live during Shabbat. Notices, study sheets and the times of services are posted on Thursday afternoon so that everyone has read them before Friday evening. Members who do use devices know that a message sent on Saturday morning will not be seen, and will not be taken as rude when it is answered on Sunday.
A new volunteer suggests moving all notices to a live chat group with instant notifications, because “that is where everyone is”.
The decision: how do you run a community online when a quarter of it is deliberately offline for a fixed day every week?
The youth group runs a moderated group chat with about forty members aged 13 to 18. Two volunteers are named as moderators and their rules are pinned at the top: no screenshots outside the group, no forwarding, no arguing about doctrine at two in the morning.
Last month a member clipped eleven seconds out of the middle of the imam’s Friday khutbah and posted it with a caption that reversed its meaning. It left the group, was reshared several hundred times, and people who had never been to the mosque began commenting on what the imam “really thinks”.
The moderators can delete the clip from their own chat. They cannot delete it from anywhere else.
The decision: what does the group publish now, and what rule would have prevented this?