Today I spent some time describing to someone from the worship team the process we use in order to podcast our weekly message. They wanted to learn so that they could help one of their volunteers from another ministry setup and begin podcasting some event they are recording each week.

As I neared the end of my overview, it was very clear to me that Podcasting is still a complex process that involves too many steps for the non-technical person.

Afterwards I did some quick research on possible free systems that might be used to publish their podcasts. I liked the overview of podcast publishing that yahoo created , but I shutter to think of someone using Notepad to create the XML for their podcast as described in step 3B.

Blogger has no real support for podcasting (without doing it this way -- yuck).

I managed to setup a sort of podcast on a new Wordpress account, but it was still not as simple as I think it should be. However, with a little training, I think a normal person should be able to use Wordpress for their simple podcasting needs.

As a staff person, facilitating and empowering our servant ministers (volunteers) is one of the most important things we are responsible for doing. It is because of this that my heart aches when I realize someone may not have the skills (or tools) they need to succeed with their dream/vision/task.

What solutions are your people using to publish their podcasts? Are they easy enough? Are you satisfied with them?

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AZGroups (formerly AZ.NET User Group) had their yearly 'big event' yesterday. The following is a brief digest of the event...

Eric Sink, original creator of Internet Explorer and founder of SourceGear, gave the first presentation (which I missed) on mistakes made with version control. His second topic was marketing mistakes. Surprisingly, Eric's presentation was both interesting and enlightening. I think these principles can be applied to many other domains -- including rolling out a "program" in your church whether it be software or a new thing/service/event.

Here are a few of my favorite points from his discussion.

Mistake #6 - Trying to target too many people. I think many of us have used software that suffered from feature bloat. This is software that has lost its niche. In attempting to become all things to all people, this software looses its identity and no longer does its core well. When this happens you will find new competing products pop up to deal with this problem. Do you have any "programs" in place that are trying to be all things to all people?

Mistake #8 - Forgetting about the stages. Each stage has an associated group: early adopters, pragmatists, conservatives, and laggards. When you fail to identify the stage that your product is in you will not be able to serve the group that is vital to move you to the next stage. Are you trying to please conservatives when in fact you should be finding early adopters who will spread the word because they love your program? Eric also says "forget the laggards".

Axosoft founder, Hamid Shojaee, gave a great presentation (9/18: watch it on youtube) and demo on feature, defect and bug tracking using their OnTime 2006 software. If you're in a single developer shop, you can get a free license of OnTime 2006!

Scott Guthrie gave another great demo using Windows Vista, IIS7.0, ASP.NET 2.0 and Atlas. It's impossible to summarize all the tips Scott gave during his talk so I won't try. Just read his blog -- it is an amazing source of information.

Scott's second presentation was on LINQ. While I knew a bit about LINQ, I was happy to think this was just another technology that I need not consider (After all, every year there are tons of things to learn but time and energy are a limited quantity. It's an information survival tactic we all tend to use.) I can now see that would be a mistake. In a nutshell, LINQ is putting the "query language" into our coding language (C# and VB for starters) For us developers, LINQ is going to change the way we access data and make getting complex data much easier. Scott did some amazing demos with 1 line of LINQ which, as he said, "I would not even know how to get this data using SQL". Very impressive. This is on my list of technology to dig into.

Lastly, what would an AZGroup meeting be without a chaotic prize give away? The picture shows how the winner selection process worked.

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Here is a first draft of a Web App UI Style Guide I created for myself and for my volunteer team of web application developers. As small as this may seem, I think it's important to base your UI decisons on something concrete -- otherwise you'll probably just "wing it".

I was inspired by two things: a style guide for MS CRM and the clean look and feel of Jon and David's (of CCV) web app work.

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[Note: This is my once per year, lengthy, non-IT/software focused blog entry. Feel free not to read it.]

I am ashamed. I was misled by my assumptions and by what I read. I had judged Bono.

At the Leadership Summit Bono gave a very articulate interview with Bill Hybels. Bono held none of the punches he aimed at the Church, but he threw them with a spirit of love and humility.

He caught my attention when he said 'here is a lie: being the person you want to be instead of the person you are. I suppose this could be a step of faith. But I associate with the blues, like David songs in Psalms when he cries out "Where are you God?"' How interesting... I felt that same way after I was baptized in college. I was very loved by my new brothers and sisters in Christ but I still did not feel the way they appeared to be. I could not just act as someone I was not.

When Bono said 'some people have said I am like Mother Theresa. I am not like Mother Theresa. I am a rock and roll star...I focus on Grace a lot because I'm so heavily depending on it,' he was quite serious. If we think we're any less dependent on it, we're dead wrong.

Some things he said such as 'I have no problems with Jesus only with Christians' and 'that we [Christians] tend to judge by things we see on the surface' were expected.

Other things he said surprised me such as 'Jesus went to the cross for us. He kept telling us who he was. Jesus said he was God in the flesh.' This is not the Bono I read about.

Then he made a statement which would be the pinnacle of his message. It was the first five words of this statement which made me think, 'ok, here is Bono's 'all roads lead to Heaven message' when he said "All religions can agree on this..." Little did I know how ashamed I was about to feel.

Bono said 'All religions can agree on this...The poor are to be blessed... The poor should be at the head of the table not collecting scraps. They should have an honored place at the table. This is what God would have.'

He said 'How could this be, in a world of plenty... how could people be left starving. Was this just the way of the world? Perhaps, but we must overthrow the world.'

He spoke at length about how the AIDS epidemic is something that the Church cannot ignore and I was beginning to understand what drives him. He said 'Christ won't let us walk away from the AIDS emergency...liken it to Jesus' talks about leprosy. Love thy neighbor is not advice, it's a command. 2003 verses in scripture are about the poor and disadvantaged. Jesus speaks of judgment only once.' Bono then went on to paraphrase Matthew 25:31-40 saying 'I will put some of you to the left and some to the right. And those on the right he called righteous saying 'you who fed the hungry and clothed the naked' and 'whatever you did for the least of these you did for me.'

It's hard to capture the strong conviction I felt at that moment. I was left with a powerful feeling of truth from the Holy Spirit.

He concluded with some insight into his purpose when he said 'celebrity positively upends Gods way of doing things. It's actually ridiculous. I will spend mine strategically.' And finished by promoting this organization called ONE (http://www.one.org/) I quickly went to that website and watched the counter move from 2,388,724 to 2,388,725 as I added my name to the list.

[I'm sure I messed up some of Bono's quotes so be sure to check out this interview which the Willow Creek Association and Bono are making available to your church.]

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A few years ago we built a custom check-in system for our Children's Sunday School that is layered on top of our Shelby system. I wrote a small article about it on the Church Crosstalk website.

Some time after that we extended that system to handle check-in for our Student ministries. Since Church Crosstalk is no longer being updated, I've placed
my follow up article (Check-in part 2) here.

While this solution served us well for the past two years, we will almost certainly be looking at the capabilities of Arena and if necessary we'll tweak it to do check-in the way we do it at Central.


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