usccb

After seeing about 50 responses on Twitter to a casual comment about the USCCB not being able/willing to allow open access to the Bible (NAB or NABRE translation) or Catechism of the Catholic Church to developers like me (and many others), I thought I'd simply post here all the information I have about the current situation, and what might be able to be done to remedy this situation...

[I set up this little petition just to allow people to voice support. Petitions don't help change things in the Church, but it's good to see what kind of things people would like to see happen!]

Correspondence with USCCB about licensing/access

I have contacted the USCCB twice now, asking once on behalf of the Archdiocese of St. Louis (I used to work there as Director of Web Development), and once on behalf of flockNote, Open Source Catholic, and Midwestern Mac. Both emails asked a simple question: Is there any way I could get access to the only USCCB-approved biblical translation and CCC translation so I could use these translations in mobile apps and websites?

I was hoping to see if they would offer the works under some sort of free license that would allow Catholic developers the ability to build apps including Catholic bible texts and CCC integrations (something like the Westminster Shorter Catechism in 90 Days study guide app, but for Catholics). But the responses I've received have been less than encouraging—see the forum topic Public Domain Catholic Bibles for the full details.

The gist of their responses: They have things 'in the works', and anyone can get the bible and CCC on Kindle ('for a low price...'), and they're working to allow brief excerpts (but definitely not a whole chapter or section) to be emailed to people.

Current Access to Catholic Catechisms and Bibles

Currently, there's a $17 Catechism for the Kindle (where the paperback version is $9), as mentioned by @BrandonVogt1 on Twitter. He appropriately tagged that with the #EvangelismFail tag... why is this not free in eBook format, at a minimum?

And the ONLY canonical source for these texts is the USCCB website, which is still set up like a 90s era website, with a link structure by which people can access any book of the bible, or chapter, but there's poor/no search ability, and it's hard to actually discover topical information, or find particular topics or indexes of either the Bible or the Catechism on the USCCB's website.

There are a few companies who have paid (large?) licensing fees to the USCCB to use the official translations in their software and websites—one in particular is the Logos bible software, which charges $17 on top of the fee for their software for access.

Resolution

The most helpful thing the USCCB could do is allow completely free and open access to the texts of both the NABRE and CCC by anyone. But as I see this is quite unlikely to happen (but I'd be very happy to be surprised!), I think something like the following could be more amenable:

The USCCB could have a NABRE/CCC API available to developers—could be something simple like JSON or something—and developers could send a request for, say, CCC #2150, and their API would return the contents of that section.

To gain access to this API, a developer would simply need to register an account and authorize access, getting a token in the process that would allow them to request up to one chapter of the bible at a time, and one section (or a group of sections) from the CCC at a time.

If the API tracked calls, then developers would be allowed a certain number of calls per day for free; any more than that, and the developer would need to pay some small fee per month/quarter/year.

Developers could cache the results of API calls for a certain period of time—say, 1 day, 1 week, or 1 month—so their apps and sites would be able to run faster. But data would need to be refreshed to ensure the integrity of the translation, including any textual updates.

I don't know if this is going to happen, and I don't think it will, but I pray that this might possibly be considered someday. (I've talked about this before, but got no traction).

If I, as a Catholic developer, have to continue to use old English translations of the Bible from the Vulgate, or the King James Version (not even Catholic!), I'm at a major disadvantage. Information wants to be free—and right now, some of the fundamental parts of our faith are locked up under strict licensing restrictions.

My prediction: 2011 will be the year of Social Media for the Catholic Church... at least in the United States.

Let's look at some of the latest developments:

• One of the topics for next week's Fall Assembly of the USCCB is "Integrating new media into diocesan communication structures."
• Blogs, Twitter, and other social media outlets are becoming less derivative and dependent on mainstream media, according to a recent Pew report.
• The USCCB recently released a synthesis of social media best practices in its Social Media Guidelines.
• Catholic websites are slowly beginning to integrate more into social media. Catholic news sites are leading the charge, along with high profile bloggers. Dioceses and larger parishes are joining the parade, albeit slowly and begrudgingly at times.

Sadly, there are still very few diocesan-level social media initiatives, but I think this will quickly change in the coming year. There are also relatively few bishops represented online—this is something that may take longer to happen, but it will happen.

It will be interesting to see what comes of the USCCB's discussions on social media.

The USCCB has launched yet another one-off website, this time for Advent and Christmas, 2009. I commend their willingness to continually push tons of new data out to the Catholics in the US through these one-off websites (Health Care Reform, New Roman Missal Translation, et all), but I wonder if they are starting to consider more long-term solutions to the problem of creating mass quantities of different HTML-only websites that don't really seem to fit together or use any kind of CMS.

Some oddities in source code aside, what happens if the USCCB wants to change its logo across all these websites. Right now, it seems the title bar is the same across all the sites, which is good, but they'd still have to update a plethora (thousands upon thousands, in fact) of html / shtml pages with the updated code for a new menu, and many instances of the logo.gif file.

Everything I'm trying to do in my work, I do it with an eye not towards the end of this year, or even five years down the road. Rather, I'm hoping that the seeds I plant today, with regard to data structures and data presentation (which should always be separated!), will germinate and be able to continue to grow, expand, and flourish for at least the next 20, 50, 100 years.

So many data-intensive projects reside in individual HTML files in Church work - we need to move towards using open, accessible data formats, databases, and markup in our work, so that we can preserve and continually improve our Catholic data online in the years to come.

HTML files are fine, in my opinion, if they are the front end to a good database backend (for instance, if you're caching pages from a CMS, or if you're generating a version of the file from a database, which can be updated from the database later). Let data be data, and presentation show that data in various ways. This is the only road we can follow if we want to continue to grow on the Internet, and on the semantic web.

What if the USCCB offered the Bible via an API so programmers/iPhone App developers/web developers could query a verse or chapter for display/search?

What if the Vatican offered better searching, indexing, and referencing for their vast library of Papal encyclicals, Church Council documents, and other other messages?

What if the USCCB offered, perhaps, some sort of 'widget' for displaying a random bible quote, the day's readings (or a blurb from said readings), and other Bible-related topics on people's blogs, websites, etc.?

I really hope these kinds of things become reality, and sooner rather than later. Does anyone know if these kinds of issues are even on the radar?

I'd also like to find out more about how our Church is working towards the lofty goals set forth in Inter Mirifica, the letters for the World Day of Communication each year, etc., besides implementing a YouTube channel and Facebook app. I'll volunteer time to help accomplish some of these goals—can't we bring some of these projects into the 'open source' sphere? The dogmas of the Church are not 'open source,' but couldn't the technologies be more so?