Fall Church IT Roundtable plans have begun

The spring church IT roundtable will be here before you know it, in about a month. That’s all good, however, it’s not too early to start looking ahead to this fall. Clif has offered to host the Church IT Roundtable this fall at Church of the Resurrection, in the Kansas City area. Tentatively, the date is set for October 3-4, maybe both days or maybe one of those days, it’s still up in the air but that gives you a timeframe to set aside.

The reason for doing it that week is to correspond with Resurrection’s Leadership Institute, October 4-6. I was at the Leadership Institute last year and it was a great conference. It’s no problem if you want to attend the Church IT Roundtable, then bolt, but I would encourage you to plan to stick around, there is definitely some tech stuff that is presented at this conference, plus some great teaching, as well.

Clif is part of the mega-(giga-)church IT group, which is an informal gathering of IT leaders from extremely large churches, and he has started the conversation with some in this group to participate as well.

There is also discussion of taking the roundtable up a notch, Clif explains:

Now here’s where it gets really exciting (we think?!) or maybe even crazy. For the last couple of years I have been meeting informally with church IT leaders here in the Kansas City area such as Mike Mayfield of Pleasant Valley Baptist Church. I suspect many of you have had similar meetings with other church IT leaders in your own cities. Perhaps some of you have already held roundtables in your cities. This makes me wonder if the best way for us to scale up would be to have roundtables in cities across the country and then link them technologically.

He goes on to say:

What if we made a first effort at this idea for the Fall Roundtable? What if we limit attendance here in Kansas City to 15-20 people and find some great way to link in roundtable groups from other cities? This idea is partially inspired by the Willow Creek Leadership Summit that brings together church leaders from around the world. We’re imagining some kind of “un-conference” that retains the strengths of peer-to-peer sharing but is scalable to involve many more people than you can fit around one table. We would like for everyone to be able to see/hear each other and use their own laptops to annotate/live blog the discussion and have side conversations. We’re not even close to figuring out how to do this from either a facilitation or technical standpoint, but one idea is to use Adobe Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze). Whatever the mechanism is, we would need to fully test both the technology and the method of facilitation prior to the meeting.

We will be exploring these options and determining what it’s going to take. So, not to distract from the Spring roundtable in about a month, but I just wanted to help get the word out, encourage you to block October 3-4 out on your calendar and share Clif’s vision for what we are looking at doing.