About the General Conference Web Pages
Welcome to the official web pages of the 1996 General Conference of the United Methodist Church. These web pages will be available to the general public during and after the conference.
The 1996 General Conference WWW Pages were created to provide
"an electronic bulletin board system that has the contents of the Daily Christian Advocate and the Advance Edition of the Daily Christian Advocate. The information on this bulletin board system shall be maintained and updated for the period of time that the various editions of the Daily Christian Advocate are published for the General Conference and until such time as the new edition of The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church is published. This bulletin board system shall be available to all who are interested in the business of the General Conference."
-- ¶ 608, 1992 Book of Discipline.
These pages will contain information about every petition submitted to the General Conference. Committees will meet to discuss petitions and make recommendations to the plenary session of the General Conference. You can search for information about the status of petitions via a number of techniques. For more information on searching for petitions, see Petition Search Methods.
Once a Committee has made its recommendation, the petition is assigned to a calendar item. Each calendar item is voted on by the plenary session. You can also search for information about the status of calendar items. For more information on searching for calendar items, see Calendar Item Search Methods. Obviously, you cannot search for information on Calendar Items until the committees have had time to meet and make their recommendations. Calendar Items will most likely not begin to be assigned until several days after the start of the Conference.
As calendar items are processed, you can view changes to the in-progress 1996 Book of Discipline throughout the duration of the conference. Once the Conference is over, the 1996 Discipline will no longer be available online. However, all the petition and calendar item information will remain online at the UMCom site.
We also hope to include the verbatim floor proceedings, as reported in the Daily Christian Advocate, but it is not clear at this time whether that will be feasible.
If you are attending the conference, you will be able to access information contained in these pages via terminals located throughout the conference center. These terminals are networked on one of our local servers. The information on the local servers will be updated frequently throughout the day. Because the server only allows access to local files, you will not be able to access off-site files and pages. In these cases, you will get an error message. However, most of the links on the General Conference pages are local links.
If you are not attending the conference, you are accessing these pages from the GBGM server. We plan to upload all the files on our local server to the GBGM server once per day, most likely in the late evening. This means that the information you see regarding the General Conference will not be updated throughout the day, as it is for those attending the Conference. If you are not attending the Conference, you will see only daily updates to the pages, much like the frequency of the Daily Christian Advocate Updates.
General Conference Webmaster: Susan Brumbaugh
PETS Creator: John Brawn
About the General Conference Web Pages
1996 United Methodist General Conference