We’ve had a great discussion pre-lunch at the Florida Church IT Roundtable today. Great to hear different perspectives on how best to serve church staffs with foundational technologies. Interesting also how staff culture impacts how staff adopt and leverage technologies, as well as the opposite of how technology platforms impact church staff culture in the areas of collaboration, sharing, planning, communication, and more generally fellowship.
Here is the official announcement to Florida churches that the Church IT Roundtable event is a go for January 26th, 2009. Host church will be Christ Fellowship, West Palm Beach. My team threw up a little event wiki to get us started, so feel free to check it out and register (if you are a Florida church) at http://fl.citrt.org
We are also going to try something new that I am calling Vendor Flavor. Rolls off the tongue doesn’t it? VENDOR FLAVOR. Here is the bottom line of that part of the event:
6 vendors each demo their product in 7 minutes and then have 3 minutes to answer questions and get off the stage.
I’m really excited to be able to host this event at our church and to get to know all these very capable IT people in other churches. If you know anyone working in IT or Web in a Florida church or ministry, please be sure to let them know about the upcoming event.
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.
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.