Practical documentation and resources for Quaker meetings
Quaker.cloud provides accessible, structured documentation to help Friends manage the practical aspects of meeting life—from technology and communications to stewardship and organizational structure. The site serves as a complement to existing Quaker resources, focusing specifically on the operational questions that clerks, committee members, and volunteer administrators encounter.
This project emerges as a spiritual successor to the Friends General Conference Quaker Cloud service, which provided website hosting and tools for meetings from 2011 until its discontinuation in December 2023. Rather than hosting websites directly, quaker.cloud focuses on what may be more sustainable: documentation, guidance, and resources that meetings can use regardless of their technical setup.
Quaker.cloud is designed for Friends who find themselves responsible for some aspect of meeting operations, often without extensive technical background or formal training:
- Clerks and recording clerks seeking guidance on virtual meetings, minute-taking tools, or communication practices
- Communications committee members managing websites, newsletters, or social media
- Treasurers and stewardship committees looking for practical administrative guidance
- Technology volunteers supporting their meeting's digital infrastructure
- Small meetings and worship groups working with limited volunteers and resources
- Anyone curious about how Quaker values might inform our use of technology
The resources aim to be accessible to Friends who may not consider themselves "tech-savvy" while remaining useful to those with more technical experience.
The site's primary offering is structured documentation organized around common needs:
- How-to guides for specific tasks (setting up a virtual meeting, creating a newsletter, managing a website)
- Explanations of concepts and approaches (what makes hybrid worship challenging, how different platforms compare)
- Reference material for quick lookup (platform feature comparisons, accessibility checklists)
- Tutorials for learning new skills from the ground up
This structure draws inspiration from the Diátaxis framework, adapted for a Quaker context rather than technical documentation.
Beyond practical documentation, the site includes articles exploring questions at the intersection of Quaker faith and contemporary challenges—technology discernment, the role of AI in meeting life, stewardship in a digital age, and related topics viewed through a Quaker lens.
Quaker.cloud is designed to complement, not compete with, existing resources:
- Woodbrooke offers excellent courses on clerking, eldership, and Quaker practice—we link to these rather than duplicate them
- Friends General Conference provides spiritual deepening resources, QuakerSpeak videos, and the QCCOP peer network
- Britain Yearly Meeting publishes Quaker faith & practice and extensive guidance on meeting roles
- Quaker Meetings Network (quaker.app) offers website hosting and tools for meetings seeking a managed solution
- Western Friend publishes articles, poetry, and reflections from Friends across the western United States
Where these organizations provide resources, we aim to curate and link rather than recreate. Quaker.cloud focuses on gaps—particularly around technology guidance, practical documentation for non-technical Friends, and emerging topics like AI that established organizations haven't yet addressed systematically.
Contributions from Friends are welcome. Whether you have expertise to share, corrections to suggest, or topics you'd like to see covered, there are ways to participate.
See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines on how to contribute content, report issues, or get involved with the project.
This project uses a dual licensing approach:
The code and software components—any scripts, templates, or technical infrastructure—are licensed under the MIT License. You're free to use, modify, and distribute the code with minimal restrictions.
All website content—documentation, articles, guides, and images created for this project—is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
You are free to share and adapt this content, even commercially, as long as you provide appropriate attribution. This reflects our hope that useful guidance will spread throughout the Quaker community and beyond.
For more about CC BY 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
[Contact information to be added]
Quaker.cloud is an independent project and is not officially affiliated with any yearly meeting or Quaker organization.