Here at CTM, a good bit of what we post is related to the ‘How To” for a particular subject.  This could be Audio, Video, web site, podcasting, video casting, using new tools or expanding on old tools.  Sometimes, as tech ministry leaders/volunteers, I believe we can get caught up in the “How To…” and forget the “Why To…”  I know I am guilty of this. In this post, I specifically wanted to humanize the technology and provide a few small examples of “Why To…”  Please understand, these examples are not meant as bragging about what my small church is doing.  These are simply meant to remind us (me) WHY we really do what we do.

Video Streaming / Archiving

It may not be that big a deal to those of you that are involved in churches on TV, etc., but for our church it was pretty cool.

RRBC has been live streaming via Ustream for a couple of years now.  The church is  small – 200ish on a Sunday morning – if we’re lucky. The video gear is cobbled together (a Sony Handycam over firewire into a desktop PC), but it’s accomplishing what we need it to for right now.

Anyway, to the cool part.  We had a guy call the church recently.  He just wanted to talk to someone a little about the church in general. He said that he and his family have been looking for a church and they had been watching our services online for the last three weeks and had enjoyed being able to do that.   Since that call, this family has visited the church in person.

Podcasting

Podcasting has been around for some time now.  At no time has it been quicker and easier for churches to make their messages available to anyone that has web access anywhere in the world.  So too, it has never been easier to share the message with those you see regularly.

One of our former Youth shared this with me about a year ago.  Her mom, due to work, was unable to be there every Sunday.  So, she would download the sermons and burn them to a CD for her mom to have on her way to and from work.  Her mom loved being able to listen while she drove and she felt more connected.

YouVersion

YouVersion is the new kid on the block.  Like many other churches and ministries, we have created a YouVersion LIVE group that people can access during the sermon whether they are on site or watching via the web.  This has been a great new way to interact with even more people.

I saw another church leaving their LIVE event “open” during the week.  That seemed like a good idea so we decided to try it.  We now leave the event “open” from Sunday until Saturday at 11:55 PM with a link to the video replay.  The first week, I decided to check the prayer requests during the week to see if we had any. This is when the stories of those touched outside our walls began to develop.  Via the prayer request function available in YouVersion, our church has had the opportunity to:

• Pray with a young lady about her finances and new business
• Reach out to a family in severe financial need just around the corner (sadly, she told our pastor that our church was the only one she contacted via the web that responded)
• Pray with a woman about her aunt’s health
• Pray with a man whose daughter was being admitted into the hospital.  (Both are in Nigeria. He found our event on his BlackBerry in the waiting room)
• Reach out to someone with addictions

From a tech standpoint, we have hiccups each week and things don’t always go the way we want them to go.   But, I’m trying to let go of the worry about the “How to…” and focus on the “Why to…”  God has still been able to use the tech/media and the operators – with all their imperfections – to reach people in need.

And that is the “Why to…”:

Even you can help out… just turn off your computers and monitors, printers, fax machines whatever.  When you leave for the day, turn off the whole system,the monitor, printers, everything that is not essential.  Imagine how much energy we’d save if  we  all powered off every non essential  electronic devise for 8 hours in every church or at home every night.. how about just starting off small with one night!!

HP, Intel,  Citrix and Microsoft, Challenging Government and Industry to Turn Off Computers, Printers and Peripherals on August 27 so why should churches be excluded.  The Power IT Down Day’s goal is to reduce carbon emissions by promoting responsible energy and raise awareness about what you can to do to help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

“Last year, over 2,800 government and industry employees pledged to power down their computers, printers and monitors when they left their offices for the evening, which resulted in over 37,000 kilowatt-hours saved,” said Tom Simmons, area vice president for Citrix Federal. ” If just one percent of government’s 1.8 million civilian employees turned off their processors, monitors and peripherals for only one night, the U.S. government would save approximately $23,40″ talk about a stimulus package!

Did you know that a personal computer at 10 hours a week uses 150 kilowatt hours. While a small laser printer uses 90-100 watts while printing and 5 watts when electricity connected, but not printing.

The sponsors will be making a donation of at least $20,000 to Wounded Warrior Project (WWP). WWP provides support for the nation’s severely wounded military personnel, helping them on the road to healing, both physically and mentally.

Over 3300 people have signed up on HP’s website to track how many KW we can save with over 43,000 KW and rising!

Be GREEN and help save some energy. Register now to receive an email reminder.

UPDATE As of 8:00am EST Friday Aug, 28 5,592 people have signed up to Power IT down saving over 72,000 kilowatt hours!!!

By the way, I’m writing about this special cause because I believe that we are all called to be good stewards of all God’s resources; there is no benefit to myself or CTM.

Anyway, today I’m going to let you in on my secret.

 I have a three step setup.

 1. Install Anti-Virus and keep it up to date – currently I run Avast at home and Nod32 in our Church.

2. Install a firewall and keep it up to date – for this I use Online Armor.

3. Finally I install and use Sandboxie for all my surfing.

Actually, my regime is much more than that but with just these three steps you’ll go a long way to keeping your machine clean^**. Today I want to talk about sandboxie which is a superb application and along with my other two security steps can be used personally for free, but in most other circumstances needs to be registered for €22 – approx UK £20 or US $29 per license.

The best way to understand this little application is to go and see its homepage which has a little animated gif running. From my youth a sandbox was always considered a safe place for a child to play. In essence the application creates a computer sandbox and allows whatever application you run within it to be safe and contained within the sandbox. Effectively a virtual computer is setup and you surf, download, install to your hearts content – all of it remains safe within the sandbox and will never infect your PC. In contrast, all of your security software will continue to work and alert you as per usual if a sandboxed app tries to do something naughty. So if you, or one of your users is a frequenter of the shadier sides of the internet, or they have a habit of clicking on all and any links they get sent then let me suggest you sandbox them.

One of the beauties of this is that you can change the startup for any app to be run sandboxed or force any app to run sandboxed. You can even (as of the latest version – 3.34) carry over application run restrictions. There is of course so much more to sandboxie than my brief introduction and maybe I’ll return to it another day! 

All that said, I don’t want you to misunderstand me, as I am far from complacent about my computer security. But if all you did was use these three steps, then I feel pretty confident that your (or your users) machine will remain fairly free of nasties.

 ** other things you can do are:

            - respond intelligently to any popups
            - keep drivers and software patched
            - keep OS patched
            - never click on a URL within an eMail unless you are 100% certain where it is from
            - never open an attachment, even if you know who it’s from. Always double check if you weren’t expecting one.
            - run a regular malware scan
            - don’t underestimate a good backup

Do you use a sandbox / virtual PC application?

What are your must do changes to a users PC? 

What do you do with persistent offenders?

I finally went to my first roundtable last fall at Church of the Resurrection in KC and I can’t wait for the one on April 5 in OKC.  Last fall I was able to meet many people I knew of and people I interacted with via e-mail, yet had never met.   Take it from me, this church IT community is the most open, friendly, helpful bunch of people I have ever been with, seriously.  Everyone seems to be available to help anyone in any way.

There are so many different backgrounds, experience levels, denominations and more and as far as tech goes, it’s all the same.  Some are full time staff of mega churches, some at smaller churches, some are volunteers but we all have the same goal.

My experience in my short time (I had to leave early) at my first roundtable was that we all had something to contribute.  We all have experiences and backgrounds that bring us to where we are right now and we all have specific issues that we are facing in our church right now.

I say all of this to lead up to my point for writing this.  Last night, we had a tech team work night and honestly, some work nights are more like sit around and eat cake night, which is what last night was.  We actually had cookie cake for someone’s birthday and we sat and talked tech.  We talked about upcoming projects and many different things related to our world at church.

One thing we discussed was MinistryTECH and CITRT.  One guy on my team, I’ll call him Daniel, expressed an interest in CITRT and we talked about it.  At one point, he wasn’t sure he would have anything to contribute, yet he’s been serving in this church  for at least 5 years in various techy ways.  I encouraged him to find a way to get there.  Another guy on my team, whom I’ll refer to as Mike, is going with me to MinistryTECH so we will already be down there.  At this point, Daniel is working on coming up with a way to get there, which also prompted my 12 year old daughter, who I’ll call Rachel, to speak up and say she wants to go.  She has served in various way in tech for at least the last 3 years and really has a heart to do more.  She is an important member of our team.

My point is this, if you are within driving distance of OKC and are involved with tech ministry and have a heart to do more and connect with like minded people, then go to CITRT.  Don’t get stuck on the thought that you don’t have anything to contribute, trust me, you do.

(Within driving distance to OKC includes but is not limited to: Dallas, Tulsa, Bentonville, Carthage, OKC, Wichita plus many more, I’m sure.)

If you have a legitimate excuse, like wedding shower or replacing your roof then that might exempt you from missing it.

Otherwise, I guess my team and I will see you there on April 5!

Off and on in the past, I have heard talk of wanting to create a church tech community within Twitter, a place where we can share ideas, ask for help or whatever, but it has never formed into anything that I know of. However, lately there has been discussion about #hashtags.

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

Hashtags were developed as a means to create “groupings” on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and later from Jaiku’s channels.

More info from the site:

A good rule of thumb to follow is to focus on your update first, and only if it quantitatively adds value, to append one-three hashtags. There are no hard and fast rules, but Twitter should continue to be about answering the simple question: “What are you doing” rather than “What tags apply to what you’re doing?”

Over the last several days, a few of us tossed around ideas for what hashtag to use and at one point, we were considering one that was 11 or 12 characters long. My point was that out of 140 characters, 11 or 12 was a big hit to take, so we continued discussing. Somebody then suggested #citrt, to unofficially tie into the Church IT Roundtable that has been created and many of us participate in. It’s brief and to the point, so that is what we agreed on.

So, if you are part of the Twitter community, join in our church IT conversation by first of all following the user named hashtags, then they will follow you. At that point, just start slapping #citrt on the end of your tweet. To track it without participating, go here to the #citrt page and you can listen in on the conversation. You can also go to TerraMinds or TweetScan to search on anything within Twitter.

I don’t know if this is going to last, but I’m willing to give it a shot. So, check out Twitter, follow me, follow hashtags and join in the conversation.  You will quickly be following others and they will follow you. There’s a great group of church IT people out here, so come join us.

Links:

• Twitter
• #hashtags
• Terraminds
• TweetScan
• Twitter Fan Wiki
• Twitter Fan Wiki / Hashtags
• hashtags
• jimwalton

I am mocked by some, you know who you are, because I essentially have a community in my cell phone.  For the most part, anyone who calls me gets saved in my phone, which makes total sense to me.  If you call me, chances are, you will call me again and I want to know it’s you.  The people in my cell phone community are made up of all kinds of people, neighbors, people around town, family, people from church, people from other churches I have worked with, people I have met as a result of CTM, business clients and other types as well.

What makes a community?  The examples of community I have given are all different, some are online, some are face to face, and the reality is that I have never actually met some people in my community.

Specifically, what we are looking at is called a Community of Practice:

The concept of a community of practice (often abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs when people who have a common interest in some subject or problem collaborate over an extended period to share ideas, find solutions, and build innovations. It refers as well to the stable group that is formed from such regular interactions.

Furthermore, in today’s world, it’s acceptable to be part of a community where you have not met face to face, simply due to the fact that we can participate in the community via e-mail, forums and comments.  A definition of an online community has been carved out on Jeremiah’s blog and boiled down to this:

“Online communities are bodies of people joined together by a common interest”

I have other communities I participate in, as well:

• church tech community
• church leadership community
• church community
• Monday morning breakfast with 2 guys from my former church
• Tuesday morning breakfast with the men at my current church
• many more……(need to make a list)

This concept fascinates me, so I hope it interests you on some level.  Let me know your thoughts on this and that will help me to know what your role is in this CTM community.  If you don’t comment, that will enlighten me on what your role is, as well.  We’ll discuss that next time.

Sources:

• Jeremiah Owyang, fellow Twitterer and Web Strategist and Senior Analyst, Social Computing at Forrester Research (posts I favorited in Twitter, which is where the remaining links came from)
• Strait’s Knowledge
• GreenChameleon
• Patrick Lambe