We’ve been so busy over here that we forgot to announce that the City is in Beta!

What does Beta really mean?

Well, it means that the general functionality of The City is getting firmed up, and even though we’ve got a couple hundred things in the queue to work on right now, we’ve got enough functionality that we think The City is “useful” for alot of things. It also means that it’s pretty close to hitting our adoption target…as of today there are over 4,000 Mars Hillians on The City. Considering that it’s only open to folks over a certain age that are a part of one of our Campuses, that means we’ve cleared 80% adoption; that’s pretty exciting.

What’s in store for the future?

At this point, we’ve tackled alot of the main things that Churches and other organizations need to be able to do (campaign management, community growth and management, email functionality galore, massive community networking, file sharing, event planning/scheduling/assignment, content sharing, spiritual disciplines and discipleship plans, membership process, assimilation for community and service groups, families, distributed administration and oversight, secure and private email replacement, classifieds/marketplace/business listing/need sharing, email client integration with the City, in context video help…and so on and so on). In addition to all of this we’re going to build out a donor management piece and a bunch of other things to assist with organization-wide management…we’re really just getting going and are very excited about some of the ideas for the future.

Favorite Beta Feature?

I really like the new Families structure. Rather than having a profile page that links off to my wife’s, my wife’s picture is right next to mine (likewise on her page). I love this because it shows that we’re one and a good theology of marriage is built right into the page. In the same way, I can now see everyone in the context of their family (kids too!) which reinforces that The City is about community, not individuals acting individually. I love it.

Coming Soon

We’ve received alot of questions about what the City is all about, so we’re working on an informational website to explain more of the DNA. Nothing to announce yet, other than ‘coming soon’

The City is a Community Network, not a Social Network.

To address a common misunderstanding, I’ll employ a little self-Socratic method…

Why draw a distinction from Social Networking?

I mean after all, everyone understands what a social network is, and if we’re to be engaging culture shouldn’t we be engaging on the same soil?

I don’t think so. The redemption of different aspects of culture means handling them differently in some cases, and I think we must transform the traditional social networking experience if it is going to lead to the life transformation experience of a personal encounter with Christ.

No one is going to see the light of Christ through how big my Mob on Facebook is, or whether I ‘poke’ them enough, or through what ‘cities i have visited’, or any of the other diversions which a typical social network provides. There is a difference between diversion and depth and the medium reinforces the message.

Aren’t you being a bit tough on games/leisure as a part of the online experience?

Let me ask you this question…is our culture suffering from a lack of leisure? Is more leisure going to transform our communities?

What makes the City more Community than Social?

A social network is centered around the individual…my friends, my media, my blog, my connections, my thoughts, my experiences, my pictures, etc…whereas a Community Network is centered around the Community, groupings of people, real relationships forge the bonds, not imaginary ties that have aspirations to reality. My becomes our and I think that’s a significant change…significant enough to warrant a different name in my mind.

This isn’t just a clever branding technique to differentiate The City from other offerings…everything about The City is geared to build up a community of people and not the community of one.

What about…(insert objection here)

Yeah, I know that having a Facebook strategy is a good thing to have for us ministry folks…in fact, I think we’ve got a pretty good presence on Facebook and I think it is excellent for getting the word out. But that’s also a different objective than building a transformative community. Both necessary, but very different from one another.

Coming posts…I just realized that we’ve disclosed precious little about what the City actually looks like and what it does. I plan to change that!

Technology Volunteers Volume 3

Last time I talked about the types of tech volunteers that have really frustrated us over the past several years, and I have to admit that I was rather harsh, but none the less truthful. However, I certainly do NOT want to give the impression that we have had nothing but frustration, as nothing could be farther from the truth. We currently have (and have had in the past) many great volunteers who are extremely giving and serve very humbly. In part one of the series I listed four qualities we look for in volunteers, let’s take a look at how those play out practically in our tech volunteers.

Mark 12:28-31 (ESV)
28 And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” 29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

1. Loves Jesus
   Again, this seems obvious for anyone who has a desire to volunteer with the Church, but as Pastor Mark is fond of saying let’s not miss the big E on the eye chart. Its the first part of what Jesus said was the greatest commandment. We see this in our volunteers by seeing the fruit of their life outside the boundaries of serving in the tech ministry. We listen to their testimony and we look for life transformation. We are not legalists who want to see a bunch of rules followed, but testimony and behavior are the indicators of the heart, and your heart needs to be with Jesus before it’s with the computer.

   I have personally seen this in the lives of our volunteers, heard many stories of how God saved them, changed the way they thought, changed their behavior to be more like him. A volunteer must be willing to share this as a good relationship with Jesus is our first priority for someone, we don’t simply write code, we worship Jesus.

2. Loves the Church (global and local)
   This is part of the second commandment Jesus talks about, loving people. Loving the church is loving other Christians ( and loving non Christians, as part of the mission of the Church). Practically the idea here is being on mission with our particular Church (Mars Hill Church) to love people in a way that glorifies God. Our volunteers need to either be members or pursuing membership, to ensure that we are all on the same mission. They need to be involved with a community group, to ensure that they are participating in the community, being discipled, and loving our brother and sisters in Christ in a real physical community. We consider this to be very important to a successful volunteer. On a couple of occasions, we’ve had people who didn’t think these were important, they just wanted to work. It is NEVER NEVER NEVER just work, that’s a mistake in thinking.
3. Humbleness
   I have found in my corporate career that technology people are very prideful people, having very strong opinions on technologies and methodologies. I’ve seen many “Holy Wars” over stuff that in the end really don’t matter that much (PC vs Mac vs Linux, Programming Language #1 vs Programming Language #2, my framework can beat up your framework, etc). A volunteer on mission for Jesus needs to push that stuff to the bottom of their priority list. They need to recognize that there is an existing mission strategy with leadership in place, and they need to start by just helping where help is needed. We value creativity and expertise , certainly. We are always developing leaders who can move into roles of responsibility, but those opportunities are for faithful humble servants who follow Jesus who set our example for humbleness.

   I’ve seen humbleness exemplified with our great current set of volunteers. This is a group of extremely smart and technologically gifted individuals, who simply asked where they could help out with they first got here. Over the course of time, as they have served faithfully, they have made suggestions and had ideas that have changed the course of our technology strategy and influenced our thinking for the better. We need good faithful people to help us be better at what we do, but having influence is all in the approach.

4. Called to serve in this area
   This can be the trickiest quality to identify as many people have the desire but not necessarily the time to devote to something that can require a decent amount of time. This is something that requires prayer and very serious consideration. A good volunteer needs to be prepared to serve in the technology area faithfully for a longer period of time (think a couple hours a week for 6 months at least, preferably longer). Now, we aren’t going to give a volunteer so much work that it overwhelms them, we understand that people have very demanding day jobs and family commitments, and that is perfectly fine, we understand. A good volunteer though needs to understand that we (staff and other volunteers) will be making an investment in them that is time consuming for us, and they need to be considerate of that. We just ask that if we are going to make an investment in you, please be faithful to honor that investment. Don’t get me wrong, people do serve for a while and then transition to other ministries, this isn’t a life long commitment, but the key words are: “for a while”.

   Looking at our current set of volunteers, again, these guys took this to heart. They have a history of faithfully serving over a longer period of time, faithfully doing the tasks they agreed to take on, understanding that we are investing in them and trusting that they will do what they agreed they wanted to do. The have earned that trust with their actions.

In summary, let me say that volunteers have worked out nicely for us. I have seen our volunteers have a huge impact on our technology and direction, because they love Jesus, they love the Church, and they humbly serve in a difficult area that they are called to serve in. The entire tech department, and indeed the entire church, owe them a great deal of thanks, and we thank God for them.

Next volume, I will finish up by outlining some of our needs and how people can get plugged in.

Good technology volunteers have been and will continue to be an absolute must for our department as the Church continues to minister to tens of thousands of people locally and hundred of thousands (if not millions) across the world, bringing Jesus to people by using technology. We simply cannot efficiently function without them, as the current work load and the far reaching vision of what we want to do in the future is far too high for the available staff. I’ve discussed the kinds of traits we look for in good volunteers, and I want to examine what a good volunteer looks like practically, but before I do that, I need to show what a good volunteer does NOT look like.

Before coming on staff, I volunteered in the software development here for about 6 years as our church grew from around a hundred or so to the 5000 range. As I’ve said I’ve seen many volunteers come and go, and I’ve had my fair share of frustrations with people who had either incorrect attitudes or intentions.
As I’ve reflected on some volunteers who haven’t work out, I can generally classify them into two basic groups.

1. The first group I call Super Software Consultants. These are people who generally aren’t interested in doing any actual work but more interested in telling us what we are doing wrong and what direction we should be going (which inevitably is not the direction we are currently going). They normally have a pet technology that far exceeds other pet technologies and usually instruct us that we should re-create everything we’ve already done using that technology, this apparently has the effect of making us a world class development shop (since we are primarily an open source shop, the most common type of pet technology that has been pushed on us like this have the words “dot” and “net” in the name). In the past, I’ve normally suggested that if we would be better off with their pet technology then by all means they should go ahead and implement that and let us know when they are done. I usually get a less then excited look on their face, followed by reasons why they are too busy to do that (usually because work is too crazy) but that we should definitely implement those changes ourselves. Normally, they didn’t come back, I guess work got crazy.
2. The second group of people (I don’t have a formal name for this group) are people who really have a desire to help, but underestimate the amount of time it requires to effectively do so. My frustration with someone like this has been the time it takes away from myself and other staff/volunteers to bring them up to speed on our software systems, only to have them never come back after the second meeting because other things in life got too busy. I admit that this frustration was partially my fault, as I was almost always very optimistic when I saw somebody come in who was excited to help and I didn’t take the time to really determine if this person had the time and the skills to do what was needed. I even had a period of time a while back that I became jaded with other volunteers as this happened to me several times, but with the arrival of several volunteers who have worked out great, I’m not nearly as jaded, but I am definitely far more cautious.

So these two types of “volunteers” have definitely caused us some headaches over the years, and we’ve made some changes in how we approach integrating volunteers into our development process to avoid the frustrations that come with dealing with these situations.

I do want to stress thought, that more importantly, we have some awesome volunteers that definitely do NOT fall into these categories and who are great examples of an awesome tech development volunteer.

I will take a look at what makes a great volunteer in the next volume.

Though the Alpha sticker is still on The City, it is really close to coming off. We’ve passed some major milestones, launched some really exciting new features, and successfully enabled the church-wide Call to Mission efforts. Praise Jesus, it has been a really exciting time seeing The City grow up so quickly and see it become part of the DNA of what Jesus is doing here at Mars Hill.

More than 3000 people have joined the City in the last month, mostly through the Kiosks setup at each campus. As we value real physical community, we wanted to make sure that everyone on The City has actually been through the doors of the campuses…hence no online signup.

We also wanted to do away with the typical “online discussion forum” as that is just another way to avoid real community and replace it with a virtual surrogate; by doing so, we’re seeing the level of communication skyrocket compared to the levels on our old member-only large-forum site. Having right-sized groups that mirror the real-world counterpart, has driven the stickiness of The City (how frequently visitors come back) to low days of 50% and high days of 75%. That’s three quarters of the people staying in touch with their communities on a daily basis…it’s incredible!

We are very excited about this, as it’s real relationships deepening through reinforcing actual community. It’s technology serving the mission, not being a mission to itself, and that’s something I’m very passionate about.

As far as the road ahead, we’re full of ideas. We still have several hundred things we’re working on, some of which are minor, but some are gargantuan possibilities for this framework. So stay tuned!

In the last six months or so the technology department of Mars Hill has seen an upswing in volunteers seeking to help us in our development efforts. First of all let me say that we LOVE volunteers.

They have become an essential part of our development team that has a number of complicated web applications with only a few full time staff working on them. The recent upswing in volunteers has caused us to reflect a bit and attempt to communicate to those who might also be interested in volunteering what a good tech volunteer looks like (base on our past experiences) and how one gets involved.

Before coming on staff last year, I spent several years as a volunteer doing software development projects for Mars Hill Church. My adventures are are more fully chronicled in some recent blog postings. As I’ve volunteered fairly consistently for a number of years, I’ve seen other volunteers come and go, and seen several really great volunteers do great work for us. I’ve also seen some people come in with incorrect attitudes and intentions that has resulted in them not lasting very long.

So based on previous experiences, when somebody identifies themselves as a potential volunteer we look for several identifying qualities. These qualities are:

1. Loves Jesus - this seems like an obvious one for a church volunteer, but you should never assume anything. The way we look for this quality is to look for the fruit in their life, do they have a testimony, how has their life been transformed, etc.
2. Loves the Church (global and local)- again, seems obvious, but are they in Christian community, are they in agreement with the church by being or pursuing membership, etc.
3. Humbleness - in order to serve effectively you have to be humble. Technology can be a very prideful activity as people base their entire professional careers and devote much of their “free” time to various camps/philosopies of technology. We need people to make those values secondary to serving Jesus (See #1).
4. Called to serve in this area - everybody is called to serve somewhere, just not everybody is called to serve in technology, including people who are technology professionals. Serving in the technology area can be a fairly time consuming activity depending on the project given to the volunteer, we want to make sure people are going to actually complete such a project, as the entire staff and/or church body may be waiting for that project to be completed. This has everything to do with calling, and should be carefully considered by a potential volunteer as there are only so many hours in the day and lots of areas of the church to serve in.

There’s nothing ground breaking about these four qualities, but we have definitely experienced some heartache over the years by not intentionally looking for them in technology volunteers. In the next post in this series we will take a look at what a good tech volunteer does NOT look like, which will be followed by a post on what a good technology volunteer does look like, then finally more specifics on what the process to get involved looks like practically.

By Mark Blair

In my last post I talked about how I integrated new discussion features into our little Members Site and how the code I wrote was terrible. I promised in the last post that I would talk about writing good code, but I’ve changed my mind and decided to finish the story because I think its time.

To give the brief summary of the rest of the story, after integrating the members site with some static pages, a Members Directory, and a phpbb forum, I decided to move to an actual CMS. Yes, a CMS. They were all the rage at the time, and there was an endless supply of them. The one I chose was called PostNuke, and it was a fairly popular little CMS at the time along with its father, PHPNuke. I chose PostNuke because it seemed more determined to be completely open source, which I liked, and they had a cool web site (hard to admit but there is some truth in it).

Postnuke has worked out great for us. It has been pretty stable, it had a published module writing scheme that made at least some sense, and there were a lot of modules out there that other people (probably heathens) had written that we could take advantage of, which we did. It also had some semblance of a theming system, which allowed us to update our look every so often. We adapted the members directory to be a postnuke module, we had PNphpBB2 with our forums, and of course took advantage of all the built in News Items, Calendaring, etc, that comes with it.

This setup has lasted up upwards of 5 years now, which in my mind is a pretty long time, given how much our church has changed. But there it is, things do change on the internet if you haven’t noticed, and yesterday’s “awesome CMS solution” is today’s “so what, we’ve moved beyond that”.

So what is this leading to, well, essentially, it’s time to move on, from the members site that is. We are now focusing the vast majority of the attention on The City, which is today’s “awesome Social Networking solution”. If you follow this blog, you’ve probably been reading about it a lot, as the Pastor Zack has put together a great application that meets many needs within our now multi-campus church, much better then the existing Members Site. I’ve had the honor of putting in some features myself, and it’s great to see the next generation of software that will help define the technology of Mars Hill Church in years to come.

Personally, it is actually been harder then I thought deprecate the members site, not because it’s such a great piece of software, but because I worshiped so much through it over the last 7 years or so. Building something like that is an act of worship because I didn’t get paid a dime to build anything (not during those years), and I can only hope Jesus found my worship to be worthy. It’s still hard to hear people today bash it as seems to be a favorite past time of many, and all I can say is, it WAS an “awesome CMS solution”, and yes, NOW it’s “so what, we’ve moved beyond that”. I still think my worship was valid, even if the website is no longer relevant.

I’m also learning that God moves us on, even if we sometimes drag our feet, and it’s time, so, let me say:

Rest In Peace - Members Site

It’s difficult to adequately capture the enthusiasm that we have on the Technology ministry for how we’re seeing The City reinforce the many communities of Mars Hill…it’s way beyond the expectations of any of us.

Earlier this week I got letters, actual hand written letters (for a mostly email guy, this was a great blessing to receive) from a few Community Groups that were enjoying how The City is helping them stay connected, plan events, etc. There were even a few anecdotes on some of the neat things they’re using it for…I love it! We’ve made some t-shirts to give away to those with the best stories about how they are using The City (contest to be announced shortly, Codex readers get a little jump start).

We are four weeks into our Alpha and are four weeks away from a really big milestone. I’ll try to come up for air and write here a little bit more frequently, but I hope our generous readers will excuse our absences for a little bit longer while we march forward launching The City.

If you are a Member, The Mars Hill Technology Team could use your help.

As we traverse these next six weeks, we’re going to be massively growing The City from the 300+ folks on it now to 2000+. This will create several volunteer opportunities, even for those that aren’t Technically inclined.

Community Liason
This team of three volunteers could use a little more help in organizing all the feedback we get from people on The City, boiling it down to the key issues, prioritizing them, and then passing them off to the development team to incorporate the great ideas we are getting. You’d be a great candidate for this opportunity if you care deeply about community, enjoy interacting with people and their ideas, and can use some simple websites for organizing this info. This opportunity fits into any available timeslots, no scheduling required. Contact me at zack[at]marshillchurch.org and Adam will connect you with this team.

The City Kiosk
We are anticipating that as we get closer to launching The City in the campuses, that we’ll need people at each campus that can answer questions, help people get signed up, and assist those that might have a really hard time interacting with a website (we’re thinking of some offline solutions like a printed out sheet that the Kiosk could provide). You’d be a great candidate for this if you’ve got some experience in any kind of call center, help desk, deskside, customer service, or are in general a people-person that’s comfortable with social networking websites. As The City is all about real physical community, you get to be the face of welcome to many new people. This would be a Sunday Service opportunity. Again, contact me at zack[at]marshillchurch.org or walk up to the Serve desk at your campus to get connected to this opportunity.

As I’ve hinted at, this work is adapting daily to the needs of Mars Hill and plans might change in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. Whatever happens, we know that we need your prayer and that we need brothers and sisters that can stand shoulder to shoulder with us as we labor to bring about a community network for Mars Hill. The first weeks of Alpha have been very encouraging and evidence of God’s Grace is everywhere. We all feel very thankful to be working on this and to see how Jesus is using it to strengthen His people.

Being a big fan of the Greek language, I’ve always got a kick out of the fact that alot of software teams like to use Greek letters to designate how ready their product is for prime time. For those not familiar with it, let me give you a quick run down on what each of the stages of product development looks like..in a somewhat unofficial manner:

In Development (pre-Alpha) - This is the first stage of a project’s life cycle and can range anywhere from, “I had an idea for this thing and I’ll work on it some day” to “we’ve started to hack out some code and test the waters with this concept.” You’ll often hear of something being, “in development” which may or may not mean it will ever see the light of day. For instance, The City has been “in development” up until now. Not all of the features have been written; it’s really wet cement.

Alpha - A wonderful Greek letter (the beginning of the alphabet naturally), that indicates the first “real” release of a project (generally to testers, which in web app parlance means your friends). In this stage, new features and bugs are found as often as the system crashes, (ie. daily). It’s a stage where the etch-a-sketch can be shaken up and the screen reset anytime as the project is definitely in flux. Generally an “Alpha” is released in a very controlled fashion, as system stability, performance, and other factors can jeopardize public opinion if it’s too open.

Beta - The second letter in the alphabet and the next step for a project, it generally designates a more stable environment and a much more open invitation policy. This is when the press releases go out and the buzz starts to build, as more and more people are experiencing the project and can comment positively or negatively about what they see. Being “in Beta” is actually quite nice from a software perspective because you aren’t actually done, so it’s ok to be rough around the edges. Some companies like to stick the “Beta” label on their products indefinitely, kind of like a warm security blanket for the project manager.

General Release - The golden copy is ready to ship and the project is done. This doesn’t happen with web applications in the same way as, say, Office 2008, but there’s still a point where pretty much everything is good to go and the Beta sticker can be taken off.

Last night, The City went Alpha.