Kathy Sierra on user happiness

Kathy has an excellent post today on what happens when the "policies and procedures tail" wags the "user happiness dog." I continually remind my IT team here at Resurrection that our job is to serve users, not the other way around. My team has a lot of ideas about how to increase our efficiency, which I think is great so long as it doesn't make things more diffcult for those we serve. Do you advocate for users in your organization?

Skypecast - Cooler than I Thought

I came across the Skypecasts beta directory on Sunday, I don't even remember how. I have been aware of Skypecast for quite a while now through Jason Powell's blog, and had always thought of it as an alternative to hold on-line meetings. I was blown away to find a directory of open discussions taking place about all sort of subjects!

I clicked on a "Join this Skypecast" link for one of the entries, and found myself listening in on a Arabic speaking discussion as though I was standing in a public square in Saudi Arabia and just walked up to a group of people, listening to the conversation. This is wild!

I began thinking, the potential of this is huge. This is not just free conference calling, this is a globally accessible public forum. If you want to hold a discussion on any subject all you need is to download Skype, advertise the discussion in whatever manner you chose, and host and moderate it. The barrier to holding a discussion is broadband Internet access, a computer, a headset with microphone, and the knowledge to get Skype installed and a Skypecast created. This is exactly the flat world that Thomas L. Friedman discusses in The World is Flat. I found people hosting their own sociological and political discussions, some of them with very controversial subjects, with people from all over the world participating.

Think about that for a moment. If you were to mash the technical ability of Skypecasts up with the right social networking service, you could bring a great deal of the worlds population closer together than ever before. Say you're a student and you are writing a paper on antibiotic resistance. You've got a few questions that you're not able to answer through the Internet resources, so you set up a Skypecast for next Wednesday evening and publish this event through a social network service, asking for help from any experts on the subject. On Wednesday you get to talk with a couple other people writing similar papers and you all share resources, and in the middle of that you get a leading expert join in that has seen your advertisement for the discussion and now multiple people benefit.

The potential uses for churches and small groups really excites me. Imagine a globally diverse small group that anyone can be a part of, or just listen in on. A pastor can host a discussion on applying the scripture to your life, and interact with real people with real questions in a moderated format. I think these sorts of technologies will ultimately re-define the roles of evangelism and caring in the physical church to include the global community. The phrase, 'your neighbor,' will not mean what it used to mean.

I haven't posted here much, so to reiterate why this interests me so much, I am very driven to get churches on-line. By that, I mean encouraging churches to utilize web ministry and enabling them to use technology for ministry and evangelism. Why? Because I strongly believe that on-line evangelism will be highly important in reaching future Christians, and that God has many great things in store for technologies such as Skypecast and social network services.

United Methodists Reaching Postmodernists

A disappointing thought crossed my mind as I drove home early Saturday morning from a late night out. (The late night BTW was much less harmless than it sounds. My wife and I attended a high school musical in support of a friend, and we stayed up late conversing about different subjects.)

What if, on the whole, the United Methodist church can not reach postmodernists? I mean simply can not do it. What if the things that make a worship United Methodist are exactly those things the postmodernist revolts from?

I began thinking about the church reaching the postmodernist, and recalled conversations that I've either witnessed or been a part of. They all go something like this:

UM Pastor: "You say that the service doesn't speak to you, but give me an example of how would you change it?"

Postmodernist: "There needs to be more music. It needs to be cool, not boring. Hip! It needs to be more emotional and less institutional."

UM Pastor: "But those are not specific examples of what you would change about the service today. I understand what you said, but I don't understand how you want us to do that."

The conversation usually goes down hill from there, with the postmodernist trying desperately to explain what hip and cool means and how they could be so very moved if it were done better. Both parties walk away having no idea what the other meant.

I've heard at least one pastor explain this as, "They aren't able to explain what they want." That baffles me, as I'm pretty sure I just saw human beings who speak the same language converse about what they want. This ends up sounding like the modernist saying they are open and willing to improve the worship experience, as long as they don't have to change anything about it at all. Why can't you just be happy with the way it is now?

To me it comes down to this: The answer that modernists are looking for is which portions of the service today need be changed to reach postmodernists, without changing or losing the structure of the worship? What the postmodernist is trying to answer politely - everything. That being said, I'm sure there is a middle ground. I believe that churches that are successful in reaching postmodernists are those finding ways to say yes rather than no, and still hold in their hearts the significance of denominational traditions. Those that tie the significance of a worship service too tightly to the rigid procedural tradition may have a really tough time reaching postmodernists.

Where does your church apply the significance of worship? The process, or the expression? Are they doing church, or being the church?

Mac vs. PC

"As a Mac user, I wish Microsoft would run an Apple-like ad about the process by which Mac users get service for broken hardware. It would be really hard for Apple to respond, because their system for dealing with broken hardware is itself horribly broken. They need serious incentives to fix this." - Dave Winer

Just last week my team at Resurrection and I were joking about exactly this idea. (We support both PCs and Macs.) The Apple commercials are terribly funny, no doubt. But Apple would have you believe that their stuff never breaks. In our parody commercial, Mac would be broken and a poor, hapless user would be striken by the question, "How do I fix this thing?" PC would answer, "I don't know." Then the user would ask, "Who DOES know?" Followed by nothing but dead silence.

When PC is broken, we call our friendly Dell service person, who comes out a day or two later and fixes it. It's painless and nearly effortless. When Mac is broken, we are faced with a small number of bad options, all of which will cost us a lot more time and brain damage than calling Dell. Surely Dave Winer and us aren't the only ones who have faced this issue. Does Apple care?

Visual communication

I've posted before about the importance of visual communication in our world. Unfortunately, I've spent my whole life honing my ability to communicate with words. That skill will be nearly obsolete by the end of my life. Seth Godin points us to an example of how ordinary people can use video technology to communicate. Wouldn't it be cool to use this video to teach church staff about web technology? Would it be even cooler for all of us to learn how to communicate this way?

From Vision to Reality

This past week in our bi-annual all staff meeting Adam, our senior pastor, said something that coalesced a reoccurring thought I'd had for a while. He mentioned a list of large projects our church had either completed, or moved from the idea stage to a living process. Then he suggested that to do this repeatedly and continually succeed you have to go through a strategic planning stage. That's a simple statement right? So now - everybody go do that and succeed much more often .... If only it were that easy.

I'm sure that statement is in a thousand books and repeated by even more people, but the reason I'm blogging about it today is that it seems to be one of those statements where the absorption and understanding of it are worlds apart from the action and ability to perform it. Why is that? Is it simply a factor of the human condition, or is a skill that can be learned and honed? I would lean toward the latter.

Pastor Andrzej from
Katowice, Poland

The idea that strategic planning is a critical ingredient of any vision to reality project is at first too simple to be so profound. One of the questions I have been asked on multiple occasions, after people learn I work at Church of the Resurrection, is "Why is Resurrection so successful?" The last time I was asked this it was from pastor Andrzej while I was visiting him in Katowice, Poland. Pastor Andrzej has been a United Methodist pastor for more than 25 years and is currently positioned in a thriving church with a congregation more than 100 strong. To put this in perspective, the United Methodist presence in all of Poland is less than 4,500 people.
Pastor Andrzej, spoken in my poor English as "ahhn-jay," is a person who comes off very calm, with waters just underneath the surface that are roaring to bring God's Word to the non religious.

Up until now, my answer to the above question has been these things, in short: One is leading with prayer. Another is effective leadership, and the last is an uncommon hive of people who possess a drive from within to do things with excellence. These are still accurate, but what I may now add to those is effective strategic planning.

I think if there were a great suggestion for pastors striving for success in ministry, it would be to educate yourself in strategic planning. When Adam spoke about this at our all staff meeting, Andrzej came back to my memory. He and I had discussed the importance of prayer, and asking for God's guidance. No one should underestimate this, but God rarely lifts those of us up who are sitting back waiting for Him to take the wheel and drive.

It made me wonder what programs or resources we have set up for our local pastors, as well as our International pastors. I couldn't find much searching through Google, though it may have been the keywords I was using. My co-worker Chuck, who you can see in this post's picture, recommended this book by Kennon L. Callahan.

Would anyone else who has read this recommend it? Does anyone know of other resources out there that focus on strategic planning in the church?

Nerds on retreat!

We got out of the office for a day-long retreat yesterday. Most of my IT team was there:




Clockwise starting from left (goofy guy with Texas Tech t-shirt):
Chuck Russell - Internet Communications Director
Jeremy Grabrian - Desktop Support Specialist
Ian Beyer - Network Administrator
George Smiley - Desktop Support Technician (part time)
Brian Slezak - Software Developer
Leo Johns - web consultant (part time)

Oh yeah, and the end of the table with a laptop, a flat-panel monitor, and no one sitting there - that's me. ;-)

Fun With Statistics

So I am perusing the new Umc.org and looking at findachurch - which has been vastly improved - see Resurrections Page here. I decided to play around with the Advanced Search functions - mostly because I couldn't type in 66062 - my zip code, and see Resurrection come up - that's crazy do you know how many resurrection people don't live in the Church's zip code - I'll tell you - most of them, anyway tangent averted back to my point I found some interesting stuff when i searched for churches by size. Here are my results (More than 1000 means between 1000 and 2000 etc)

33 United Methodist Churches with more than 2000 in attendance
136 United Methodist Churches with more than 1000 in attendance
649 United Methodist Churches with more than 500 in attendance
3093 United Methodist Churches with more than 200 in attendance
5348 United Methodist Churches with more than 500 in attendance
8746 United Methodist Churches with more than 50 in attendance
10905 United Methodist Churches with more than 20 in attendance
4648 United Methodist Churches with less than 20 in attendance

So 818 who have made it to 500 + and 3900 approximately who have made it over the 200 barrier. Interesting stuff. Of course since our worship attendance is over 8000 now and they have us listed at 6300 (This is GCFA's fault not UMC.org's by the way) - I dont know how accurate those counts are but there probably pretty close.

Chuck

Who is using the new Blogger?

Who out there is using the upgraded version of Blogger? Is it cool? Should we upgrade?

MailFrontier is nearly perfect again

Last week we finally had time to focus on our spam problem. With some assistance from our friendly SonicWall tech support person, we installed a software update and tweaked our configuration. Turns out that at some point we white-listed everything from cor.org, no doubt to address a false positive situation, but that was a bad idea - too much spam is spoofed to come from your own domain. With the new software and the tweaks, we're back to nearly perfect, and just in time for the long Christmas-New Year's break when many of our staff take vacation. Almost no spam is getting through to our users' inboxes. Wee hoo!

SonicWall, I owe you an apology. When properly configured, SonicWall Mail Security is every bit as good as the spam filter built-in to Outlook 2003.

Guy Kawasaki talks about evangelism - the Christian kind

In case you missed it, I found it very interesting to see Guy Kawasaki reveal a bit of his personal faith in this recent blog post. In the post he includes this link to presentations at a church leadership conference in Hawaii this Fall. I'm glad to know Guy is interested in the original meaning of evangelism and not just his borrowed use of the term.

WEC Update

Now that Web Empowered Church (WEC) has been underway for a couple of years, Mark Stephenson has come to the belief that it won’t reach its full potential without Church Management System (ChMS) functionality, or at least deep integration with an existing ChMS. I totally agree with that assessment. So Mark and I thought it would be a great time to get together with Rubin Perry to discuss how ChMS fits with WEC’s vision and strategy. Like my meetings with Fellowship Technologies and Shelby Systems, our conversation was detailed, candid, and thought-provoking. While I’m not free to disclose everything we discussed, I can say that WEC has deep pockets, a passion for helping local churches use the Internet effectively, and a long-term view.

I’ve noted previously that combining content management (CoMS) functionality with ChMS and Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) functionality in a single, integrated system would be ideal. Most forward-thinking church IT leaders I know agree with this. WEC is looking for churches and church IT leaders who will partner with them to build just such a system based on the LAMP stack and TYPO3. As I mentioned, another possibility would be to do a deep integration of a market-leading ChMS with TYPO3. We’re in the process of discerning whether it makes sense for Church of the Resurrection to be one of those partners.

WEC is fully committed to open source software. By that they mean basing the software on the LAMP stack, licensing the software they develop using the GPL, and employing open source development methodologies. The advantages of this include risk reduction, ease of integration, competitive diversity, and distributed innovation. Already WEC is being adopted by churches around the world that have the technical ability to make use of complex technology. Such churches appreciate the fact that open source means WEC doesn’t have the licensing cost barrier associated with commercial software.

For churches that lack technical skills, however, adoption is challenging. TYPO3 is more than powerful enough for even the largest churches, but it is quite complex, it is difficult to learn, and it suffers from poor usability in some areas. Accordingly, addressing these issues represent top priorities for WEC.

1. WEC is actively working with the TYPO3 Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) team to improve usability.
2. WEC is developing TYPO3 training videos.
3. WEC is working on improved processes for providing tech support.

So that's a summary of how WEC fits into our ChMS analysis. I'm praying for clarity.

Ben Hill UMC

On Wednesday I had the pleasure of visiting Ben Hill United Methodist Church, just a few miles from the airport in south Atlanta. The Foundation for Evangelism’s technology leader, Rubin Perry, is a member of that storied church and one of its hardest-working unpaid servants. After 100 years of ministry, Ben Hill is still learning, growing, dreaming, taking risks, and serving. It has purchased the former headquarters site of Delta Airlines, a large acreage with a number of corporate-style buildings that have been sitting vacant for 20+ years. The site, adjacent to the Greenbriar Mall in Atlanta, has huge potential but carries many challenges. With Rubin helping to manage the project, the church is in the process of remodeling and renovating the first building, which will be used as a worship center when completed. The Holy Spirit is moving at Ben Hill and for that I say, “yeah God!”

The Spam Wars – What Does Microsoft know that SonicWALL doesn’t know?

The New York Times confirms that spam is getting worse, due primarily to two factors: 1) spammers are using farms of spambots running on insecure computers, which are abundant in homes with cable modems, making it ineffective to identify spam by originating IP address. Distributed security threats are always more difficult to block than localized threats. 2) A new type of spam with the message in an image that’s changed slightly each time it’s sent, making it impossible to recognize spam by a checksum on the contents.

I mentioned that the effectiveness of our spam filter, SonicWALL Email Security (formerly MailFrontier), is declining. On the other hand, it seems that Outlook 2003’s junk filter is keeping up. Since I began my experiment the week of Thanksgiving, I'm seeing 94-99% daily effectiveness from Outlook 2003 alone (with MailFrontier disabled on my mailbox). Yesterday it was 100% effective. Other staff we put on Outlook 2003 for our test have given similar reports.

What does Microsoft know that SonicWALL doesn't know? Why would we pay SonicWALL thousands of dollars per year for filtering that is LESS effective than the filter built-in to Outlook? Jerry, my SonicWALL reseller, has tried to get their attention. I also e-mailed one of their product managers nearly two weeks ago, with no reply at all so far. Jerry says we should hear something on Monday. Grrr.

Flurry of posts

Look out for a flurry of posts from me. It's amazing how much writing you can do in an airport and on a plane with no Internet. ;-)

Speaking of the airport, this is what greeted me when I tried to check the price to get WiFi today in Atlanta ...







Note: Because you are using an outdated browser, you may only view the raw textual content of this site. In order to view, use, and enjoy this site to the fullest at the maximum security level, please refer to our Browser Upgrade page to view a list of browsers that support web standards.

Let me see if I have this right, Sprint. I’m using an OUTDATED browser (IE 7) that should be UPGRADED to something that supports WEB STANDARDS (such as IE 6)??? You guys have had months to fix this page. Doesn’t anyone at Sprint use Sprint’s WiFi in airports? Haven’t at least some of them upgraded to IE 7? Even if they were asleep, it’s difficult to understand how they could have missed this. (Yes, Sprint is our friendly, neighborhood, telecom company located only two miles from Church of the Resurrection.)

Which ring makes the most sense?

Here's how I see the Church Management System (ChMS) marketplace. We're confronting the question of which ring of the market makes the most sense for us.


As you move in toward the center, the functionality is a closer and closer match to our requirements, but fewer and fewer organizations will be running it. On the outer rings, more organizations are innovating and influencing the feature set. On the inner rings, fewer organizations are innovating, but the features are more likely to be directly applicable to us.

Atlanta, here I come

This week I'm going to Atlanta to meet with Tony Dye as well as Mark Stephenson and Rubin Perry. Tony has graciously agreed to show me around Perimeter Church, introduce me to his A-team (A is for "awesome"), and talk about Church Management Systems (ChMS). Mark is joining in on the fun. Separately, Mark and I are going to meet with Rubin at Ben Hill United Methodist Church to talk about WEC's fledgling ChMS project.

This is my second trip exploring ChMS options, following my trips in October to Fellowship Technologies and Shelby. I should know by the end of next week whether my budget request to replace Shelby V5 has been approved for 2007.

Point, click, make a product to sell to the world

My friend Jay points us to Amazon's grand new scheme. Now let's see, how do we point, click, and plant a new church? Or, better yet, point, click, and lead people into a deeper relationship with Jesus? Hmmm ...

Birthplace of the web

Wired posted some pictures of the new particle accelerator under construction at CERN. At the end is this picture of CERN's "Internet Exchange Point," birthplace of the web. I'm feeling all weepy!

MailFrontier is struggling

We have been happy users of spam blocking software MailFrontier since 2004. MailFrontier was purchased by SonicWALL in February. When we first heard about the purchase, we weren't concerned because we respect SonicWALL and are happy users of their 2040 firewall with web content filtering.

Over the last few months, our satisfaction with MailFrontier (now called SonicWALL Email Security) is declining. We don't know if the issues have anything to do with SonicWALL taking over. We only know that spam blocking effectiveness is going down while total volume of inbound spam is increasing. Last week we saw a huge spike in inbound spam (Tony noticed this too) that coincided with most of our staff being out of the office for the Thanksgiving holiday. When they returned to their Outlook yesterday, they found large amounts of spam that got through the filter. With one voice they rose up in open revolt and stormed our IT office with pitchforks and torches.

Ahh the life of an IT Director. Now we either have to make MailFrontier work or start scrambling for other solutions. SonicWALL are you listening?