LDS members encouraged to participate in online discussions
David April 24th, 2008
From ldswebguy comes a quote from Elder M. Russell Ballard, dated April 19, 2008, as presented to the Brigham Young University Management Society in Washington, D.C.,
If a national conversation is going on about the Church, are you going to be an active participant or a silent observer?
Church leaders must not be reluctant to participate in public discussion. Where appropriate, we will engage with the media whether it’s the traditional, mainstream media or the new media of the Internet. But Church leaders can’t do it all, especially at the grass-roots, community level. While we do speak authoritatively for the Church, we look to our responsible and faithful members to engage personally with blogs, to write thoughtful, online letters to news organizations, and to act in other ways to correct the record with their own opinions.
I think that it is amazing how far the LDS Church has come with regards to the use of technology and in particular in how it encourages internet use. Those of us who have been involved in technology has seen the potential for years, but now it is really hitting the mainstream church members. It has become not only an accepted channel, but one of the primary channels for communicating to the public about what we as a Church believes.
I was approached by Cassie Telford, site administrator for http://tech.lds.org, to be a guest blog contributor for the site. I agreed to make a few contributions and as a start have submitted my post from last week, 
I was inspired by a presentation of a small alcohol stove built using two paint cans and fueled with denatured alcohol at a recent preparedness fair at church. A few days later I decided to try to build it from memory with my own "custom air vents" to make sure that the fire would get enough oxygen. I placed this on top of my kitchen stove and lit it to see how long it would take to boil a small pot of water. It was working even better than I had supposed, but then it really started going! I ended up with two foot high flames licking the bottom of our stove vent hood! My wife rushed to get the fire extinguisher to save her kitchen cabinets, but I held her back for a moment because I thought that I could still get the flames under control. I used kitchen tongs to put the lid of the paint can back on the smaller can to limit how much air the fire could get. Luckily the flames died down quickly enough for me to carry the whole ensemble out the back door to the patio. I should probably not mention that last year I was a boy scout leader, teaching 11 year old boys about scouting basics including fire safety. Probably not the best example, right? Rather it was more like the bad example of young scouts playing with fire when the scout leaders aren’t looking! 
I found several other small stoves that I’m anxious to try out, built from two aluminum cans. The first, 