I expect there is more to what John calls the “Post Method”, but the challenges covered in this short MP3 recording of their talk include:

• Who is your audience?
• Who will champion this plan and strategy?
• Who will execute this plan and strategy?
• Who will not be participating?

• Exploration of Online Campuses & Digital Congregations with hard-learned lessons from our 18 months of building and running one.
• Scoping, resourcing, and project managing your ministry web projects, with a particular focus on using outside people (freelancers, agencies, and volunteers) for an inside job.

I can’t tell you how honored I was to be asked to be a part of this event. Check out the Ministry 2.0 website at http://www.ministry2.org/ and be sure to register for the event in Austin.

This blog post is to gauge interest in a Florida Regional Church IT Roundtable event. We seem to have a group in the Tampa area and others along the East coast of Florida from Orlando to Miami. Redundancy could be a good thing, so let’s talk it out in the comments below about what everyone is looking for, if people are willing to drive, and what the focus could possibly be for the event. Whether we land on two gatherings or one, I think it would be good for Florida churches to represent better through some networking, fellowship, and knowledge-sharing.

A Couple Options

I have tentative approval from Christ Fellowship leadership to host a regional event in January on our main campus. If you are unfamiliar with this type of an event and this loose coalition of geeks, here are the topics of discussion they meet on periodically in regional and national meet-ups. Since next year appears to be a tight year financially for many of us, I thought a low-cost training opportunity (typically $50 per person including 2 meals) might be of interest across the many disciplines of Church IT (Websites, Network, Information Systems). We could decide to include vendors in this gathering or not. I tend to want to hold it to just a few sponsor companies ($500+ donation in cash or hardware for give-aways?) so the focus stays on the community of churches. Then again, many of us use contract labor to augment our full-time staff, and they probably should be equally as welcome.

Large Potential Participation

There are roughly 500 churches of size in Florida that might be interested in such an event, including 11 of the largest 100 churches in America. I feel that if we can get participation confirmation from a few influential churches in Florida, many of the other churches interest will rise and our event marketing will go that much easier. For this type of unconference event, you need a broad perspective and so the more participation the better. I think the maximum number of participants my church could reasonably host would be 200 people. Most other regional IT Roundtables call 15-30 people a huge success so I am not that worried about having more people than we can all connect with.

My Thoughts on Focus

In thinking about this since the Fall ‘07 Roundtable at COR, I have been feeling a strong desire for the focus of this first gathering to be on Disaster Preparation/Recovery/Response, Storage and Backups, and Network/System Monitoring/Reporting. Agenda is driven by the participants, but these items seem to have a uniquely Florida focus to them that we may not cover as in depth at a national roundtable event.

Kevin McCord of Oasis church shared with me his thoughts by email:

I would propose having that topic with a fairly broad scope. In a world with hurricanes, arson, and terrorism the following could well become just as important to the disaster response and recovery:

• Internet Campuses (for when the church building is unavailable)
• 3rd Party Hosting to Supporting Web Applications (through disasters)
• Moving to Gmail/Google Aps (they have your data)
• IT support in a multi-site environment (some disasters are campus specific)

But When?

I am thinking Monday January 19th or the 26th might work great since it is after the weekend and pastoral staff take off Mondays at many of the churches. This might also give those who want to drive in on Sunday an opportunity to worship together and then go tour some of the larger churches along the east coast to see what they have going on.

Ok, So Now What?

If you are at a Florida church working in IT or Web, please let us all know what you think about the idea. If you have connections with other churches with IT leaders, feel free to check-in with them to see if the event seems like it would be of value for their staffs. I hope we’ll narrow down a day/date quickly and start preparing. If someone else wants to head this up and drive it, I am happy for that to happen as well. Just want to see it happen! So, everyone jump in here and let us know if you want to participate, when works best, and how many people you might bring.

See, every week people from mid-sized mega-churches ask me a) for referrals of web developers looking for work (I dunno if there are any) b) for general advice on getting a decent website off the ground, or c) how to improve what they have. Much of the time I save the requests and hit them all at once when I am in the mood. Last night though I couldn’t take it any more and went off a bit on one unsuspecting friend who really just wanted a). I kinda feel bad, but there are some big truths in my response that I thought I would share. You are just going to have to show me grace and look past the unprovoked, frustrated tone.

Here is what I said:
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The Church Webmaster is Dead

I took a look at your current site and your job description for the position. What you seem to be asking for is the old concept of a webmaster. Listen to me very carefully my friend, as I am going to give you what churches normally pay me to tell them. Having launched two of the largest church websites out there, I am going to step out here and give it to you straight because if you guys don’t get focus in this area you are going to find yourself spinning your wheels and wasting time in the quantity of years. I have paid the price of this mistake already, but take it for what it is worth.

The Webmaster is Dead. Besides, web developers don’t function well in dark rooms by themselves; they need community of other uber-nerds and have a high need to be understood. The type that would take your job listing are temperamental, naive, and really just want to work for themselves on a desert island or for Apple/Google/Yahoo like all the other successful web developers.

What a Church Really Wants

Ultimately, what you really want as a church is someone that is willing to take the responsibility for all things web and own it so you don’t have to. You think you need a geek since you aren’t one and websites are technical. But don’t think a web dev can just get some instructions from the CFO or Dir of Comm and go run with it. This stuff is much more complicated than that because it involves messaging, community, design, technology, planning, staff politics, and people’s preferences. One person can not do all things needed for web in a decent sized church.

My Not Humble Enough Recommendation

I would recommend you reconsider hiring a single web developer who neither reports to the Dir of IT or Dir of Comm (unless your CFO really, really gets Web 2.0 and digital communities), and do these three things:

• Read this article by me: http://churchcio.com/small-church-website-building-tips
• Read this article by me: http://churchcio.com/to-build-a-church-web-site-plan-the-project
• Hire yourself a great web marketer who can do web writing and blogging for you, drive your digital community, focus on search engine optimization so you bring new visitors in your local area to church, build inbound links from other sites, as well as steer/manage a quality vendor partner in the right direction. If they sneak in some programming and system administration in also, fantastic!

Next, consider….

• The site you have is 50% phenomenal and 50% unexecuted. The base design and artwork is brilliant and you should not abandon it. Rework the top navigation drop downs as they are old school, get over the fear of scrolling… cause your users are way past not knowing how to scroll, and have a better default on the left side column than blank.
• As solid as your design is, you need it implemented into a content management system (instead of custom scripts on a page by page basis that you can’t easily change) and it needs to be reworked such that you can expand the pages. Consider having http://www.busynoggin.com/my-approach/ implement the http://webempoweredchurch.com/ content management system like many other churches (including Stonebriar & Christ Fellowship) have done.

  This will allow your communications people, other staff, and your web marketer to manage content in minutes rather than hours. To do that, you will need to get the original artwork from the designer, have the changes you want mocked up (wireframed), and have the site design spliced up and coded for the content management system. Turn-key, expect to spend 2-3k on the design work and 6-10k on the implementation. This is a much better (and faster) investment than hiring a web developer and praying he “gets it”.

• Ask and teach every Dir and Pastor to blog three times a week within a defined set of guidelines and strategy that isn’t restrictive but purposeful. It is like sitting down and writing three information focused emails… most anyone can do it.
• Consider integrating Unifyer with your website and ministry.

Wrapping it up

So this was so much more than you asked for, and even a bit presumptuous on my part, but it is my gift to you my friend. I offer this instead of recommending one of my web developer friends come have a bad experience at your church… but if you stay centered on your current direction of wanting a single web developer doing the heavy lifting on everything, the ones doing stuff for churches mainly hang out at http://godbit.com
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Note that my comments on church web developers were focused on the type that would take the do-everything job that was being listed, and not a commentary on all web developers. I just have a prejudice that the best web developers work on a team, work at dev firms or large companies, or are hired guns who freelance and know how to rock it (these are my favorite). Sorry in advance to any of you web developers working solo for churches who are pouring your life into ministry. God may make a way for you that he hasn’t made for many before you. Best case is He brings you co-laborers who can help you at the church where you already are and bring you the relief and organizational alignment you need to be successful.

After 5 months of complete silence on this blog, I thought I would tip everyone off to a cool event going down today in LA and online called #churchtechcamp. Tony Steward and some other web-focused Church Technology folks are behind it, but others of you will find it interesting as well. You can stream it live TODAY on this page: http://churchtechcamp.com/LIVE/LIVE.html 

You can find out about the genesis of the idea on Tony’s blog, but it is very similar to the unconference idea I was promoting in a post a while ago.

Let’s Bring These Communities Together

Please don’t take this as a detractor from the above event, as I will be participating between meetings today. But, it looks like we have even more separate movements and conferences now with overlap. I am totally excited to be leading some sessions at a December Ministry 2.0 workshop (a hands-on training opportunity for church web folks) and the other things going on, so don’t get me wrong. And I want to commend Church IT Roundtable and MinistryTech for doing a joint deal next April. I think that is a smart move. But my prayer is that all these groups will stayed loosely coupled and not create factions and competing resources that don’t best leverage our time, talents, and treasures. One thing is for sure, more is better!

So what can we do to prevent having walled-gardens within the Church IT and Web Community? Simple: PARTICIPATE. Join in and do them all. I know, I know… easy to say for a guy who hasn’t blogged in 5 months, huh? Ok, ok, I am reengaging. Now go stream ChurchTechCamp live and join in the conversation. We might just learn something together.

IT Governance is an area of practice that many CIOs in for-profit businesses struggle to get movement on. This may be because when pushed up against a deadline, most staff just want to get things done and forget the “arbitrary rules” they don’t understand the benefit of. In some ways, this is our American culture pushing us to conquer our enemy with whatever method is necessary so long as it isn’t illegal or immoral.

Recognizing that most ministries have no less pressure to perform than what is found in enterprises, I pondered if it is even practical to request staff to live within boundaries which are hard to define and harder to nicely, kindly enforce. After all, most executive staffs do not even understand the legal and security risk of not governing IT well. None the less, the world of IS is chaos without direction and management.

What I knew from the beginning was that we couldn’t create respect by waving a thick policy around and carrying a large stick. Church IT Governance has to look a lot more like relationships than yet another religion, so I did my best to prepare our staff for the rules by building trust and respect in my first six months here. Then, we rolled out this Information Systems Policy (PDF) as a section within our larger Employee Handbook.

Feel free to download it and use whatever is applicable to your context. I wrote about 40% of this, took 20% from another church (they offered), and the remaining 40% is a remnant of what was here before I arrived. Our HR Director also provided editing services. One of our goals was to make it as brief as possible without sounding harsh. Hopefully we struck a balance, but I would love feedback and comments on how we did.

Tony Dye also made The Perimeter Church generic manual available for download a few years back and it seems to be a bit more conversational.

For those of you following the IT Roundtable going on at COR this mid-week, listen to the linked file below to see what cool worship you missed out on last evening. This is totally bootleg I admit. Grabbed it with two clicks on my Mac during the song. I would give attribution for their work, but I frankly couldn’t remember anything else after a great day of fantastic discussion. Someone else help me out with their name and summary/link of the church where they play. Was a neat vibe. Church IT Roundtable Worship mp3.

National Church IT Association

Also, we will be talking at some point in the day Thursday about the prospects of a national IT association. Since I won’t be able to stay the whole afternoon and could miss the discussion, I thought I would link back to a post I did on the subject a long while ago title What Ministry Technology, Church IT, and Web Ministry People Have in Common. My feelings haven’t changed too too much, but let me summarize my main points:

• “Church IT” overlaps with Web Ministry. This becomes particularly true with open protocol APIs, web-based applications, intranet/extranets, and integrations of ChMS and CMS. Media and Communications are also both converging with web and traditional IT.
• The Ministry Technology cloud is huge and it is just beginning to coalesce. We should focus on the identification and discovery of the network nodes rather than the formation of another walled garden. We know technology so lets do technology. Leave group formation and organization to the denominations who do it so well.
• We need more glue and less groups. We already have:
  • Established Organizations, Meetups, & Conferences
    International Christian Technologists Association
    National Religious Broadcasters
    ICCM
    Christian Management Association
    NACBA
    ECFA
    Campus Crusade for Christ
    MinistryCom
    Nonprofit Technology Network
  • Group Blogs, Forums, & Listservs
    BetterMinistry.com
    United Methodist Church
    IT-Roundtable
    GodBit
    Church Marketing Sucks
    eMinistry Notes
    ChurchBit Google Group
    TechSoup
    ChMS Discussion
    IT discuss
    Church Tech Blogs
• What we need for glue is an unconference template for regionally-based meetups (at a frequency the local participants desire) all over the world with no significant, centralized overhead. No formation costs. No risk assessments. No insurance. The meetups should be open to traditional IT and Web people in churches and para-church ministries.
• What we need is an approach similar to bitshepherd.com for opening up, syndicating, and aggregating the ministry technology discussions. We need more discovery than this to be able to reach deep into the community that is forming.

In that old post I go into much more detail about what I am saying and not saying, but this is believe it or not the overview of my dissent.