Out-Sourcing

With all our recent thought about moving to Fellowship One for church management, I got to thinking about other things we do or are planning to do. How much of that stuff could or should be outsourced? We’ve planned to buy a server to put in our office to serve things like our website, our church management system (the home grown one), a groupware server, and blogs.

The cost of buying a fairly nice machine for a server was justified because we could do all that stuff with it. However, if we decide to outsource our church management to Fellowship Tech, one of the pillars of our justification is knocked out and it becomes less important for us to have our own server. We’re already hosting our website on a local ISP so that could also be left alone. All we have left in that case is groupware and blogs. As you can see, I’m already using Typepad for my blog and we could simply encourage our leaders to use a service similar to Typepad for all our blogging purposes.

All that is left now is groupware. So I set off on a quest to see what was available. I found the following services. Does anyone have any experience with any of these?

• http://www.scheduleworld.com/index.html
• http://www3.contactoffice.com/
• http://www.hyperoffice.com/hypermain/index.cfm
• http://www.intranets.com/default.asp
• http://www.quickbase.com/

We still have not made any decisions about Fellowship One, but by making a decision either for or against Fellowship One we will be making decisions on all these things as well. The decision no longer just comes down to Fellowship One vs Homegrown. It’s now, out-source vs in-source.

My chief concern with out-sourcing is the volunteer factor. While I don’t want to create ministries just for the sake of keeping people busy, providing ministry opportunities for people who want to participate is fundamental to the growth of our church. In addition, volunteer hours save us money, grow people, and provide many of the same benefits as outsourcing.

How do you decide which things should be in-sourced and which things should be out-sourced?

How Does God Speak?

A big thanks to all of those who took the time to comment on my recent church management post. I never imagined I’d get so many great responses. I can’t thank you guys enough for giving me your time and thoughts. They’re extremely valuable.

While the decision isn’t 100% up to me, my leadership is looking to me right now for recommendations on where to go. My biggest concern right now is that I make the decision God would have me to make. The book of Proverbs talks about seeking wise council and I’ve done that. Now I need to seek out God’s guidance.

How do you know what God wants you to do in specific cases like this?

Much of my life the leading of God I’ve experienced has been situational. I can look back and see that the path I’ve followed has been guided by a very powerful guiding hand. But there have been very few times – if any – that I’ve actually felt God telling me to go one way or the other at a fork in the road. It seems that he leaves those decisions up to me or one of the paths closes by itself.

Does God guide by placing people who will naturally make the right decisions in the right places at the right times? Or does he speak to people and tell them where they need to go? Or does he do both?

How do you listen for God’s voice? Is it a feeling? Is it a still small voice? Is it a decision based on Biblical principles, wise council, and analysis of the situation?

What are your thoughts?

Why I’m an Open Source Junkie

What is the purpose of insurance (other than to make money for insurance
companies)?

The fundamental purpose of insurance is to distribute the costs of
catastrophic events across a large group of people so that individuals
are not totally financially wiped out by such a catastrophe.

Open source development works the same way. Instead of requiring a
single entity to go through an involved development process, it allows
groups of people or organizations to band together and distribute the
development across the group. Instead of requiring a team of full-time
programmers, the work can be distributed among many part-time or
volunteer programmers.

There are added benefits. By distributing the work across a group, the
software is tested in multiple environments. It becomes more robust.
Features that one group would have never thought of are added by another
group that needs those features. The software goes through an organic,
evolutionary process that has the potential to produce a Superior
product in the end. In the end you have the potential to come up with
products like Firefox, Apache, MySQL, Linux, or even Mac OS-X (since
it’s based on the open source FreeBSD). On top of that you can borrow code from other open source projects. If someone has already written an accounting package then you can take their code and adapt it to your project. Talk about time and cost savings!

Some might argue that closed development methods provide the same
benefits, but it is this last group of benefits that such methods lack.
Closed source commercial development allows costs to be distributed
across a large group of people just as insurance companies distribute
costs across groups. The method of contribution is just different.
Instead of contributing people skills and participating in the
development, customers contribute money. This causes start-up costs for
closed source development to be higher. A single organization has to
foot the bill to get the ball rolling because nobody is willing to pay
money for a product that isn’t complete.

In addition, closed development creates a bottleneck at the company that
sells the product. In an open source project if you need a feature
developed then you don’t have to wait for the company to do it. You add
it yourself. Then you contribute it back to the project and others
benefit from it. All of this results in increased openness and a
tightness of community you seldom find with commercial products.

So open source is not really like insurance. Closed source is more like
insurance. The key difference is that closed source distributes COSTS
while open source distributes WORK.

On the other hand, open source provides one type of insurance that
closed source cannot. Once I have the source, companies can come and
companies can go and I’ll still be OK.

XAMPP

I recently decided to build all my web applications using XAMPP.

The beauty of XAMPP is that is a nearly complete web-server in a box. It comes out of the box with PHP, Perl, MySQL, and various and sundry other cool tools. It comes in a simple tar.gz (or zip, or exe) file that you simply extract to a certain location on your computer, run a command, and voila, you have a complete running web-server.

Since everything is built in an isolated way you have VERY few dependencies. This makes it easy to simply copy your entire web/XAMPP tree to another computer and have it running in minutes. This is great for development, backup, etc. There are also versions for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

I installed this on my Ubuntu desktop and installed our Mambo based website in it in minutes. Once I had it running I simply tarred up the whole thing and plopped it onto a Mandrake laptop and started it up.

I’m currently in the process of installing our church management software in XAMPP. It wasn’t quite as easy since this software has a lot of dependencies on Perl modules that aren’t installed by default in XAMPP. However, once I’ve got it going I’ll be able to post this tar.gz file to a website for people to download and try out (without our data of course). It seems like a great way for people to try out Open Source web applications without a lot of work.

Church Management

As I’ve mentioned before on my blog, I’m developing an open source church management system. It is currently in production for checking in and tracking kids in our children’s ministry. Right now it is not complete so we  continue to use People Driven Software for some of our management tasks.

Several large (larger than Crossroads) churches in our area have recently moved to Fellowship One for church management. It looks like Fellowship One is truly the ultimate in church management software/service.

The question I’m dealing with right now is whether or not I should continue development with my software or jump ship and plunge into Fellowship One. There are a number of dilemmas involved here. There are both money and time costs involved in jumping ship. There is data conversion, specialized hardware investment loss, switching from plastic photo ids to phone numbers, training/re-training, etc.

On the other hand there is the potential that jumping to Fellowship One could get us up and running on a very sophisticated system in relatively short order. It all depends on how much work is involved in conversion of data and re-training. At the same time, dropping the development of the open-source solution cuts off the potential for other churches to benefit from our investment in time. Which leads me to my gripes about Fellowship One.

I have two chief complaints with Fellowship One. One, it is a closed source proprietary solution and it is fairly expensive. I feel that is simply the wrong approach for a church. Churches should be leaders in sharing – which is what open source is all about. Yes, people have to make a living, but I hear rumors that there is a waiting list for Fellowship One which indicates to me that there is a large enough demand for this type of service that the source could be opened up to other people and allow more service providers to fill the void – while still making a living.

Two, it’s built on a closed proprietary Windows system. The world is moving away from this model and tying your application to Windows is simply a bad idea. Now I may be wrong on this and maybe Fellowship One will run in Mono on Linux or Mac, but as far as I know not. Windows has never impressed me with its stability or security. IMHO it’s simply a bad platform all around. There you have it, I’m biased against Windows.

Now while the ultimate answers to these questions still depend on my previous questions about conversion costs, what this really boils down to is a question of what has the most potential to reach people for Christ. Moving to Fellowship One has the potential to give us more gauges to help show how to reach more people for Christ here in Adrian, Michigan in a relatively short time period. It may be the better answer for Crossroads the local church. Staying on our current path has the potential to provide a complete, open, inexpensive system to do the same thing for as many churches as are willing to try it out at little or no cost to them. This may be the better answer for the church at large.

As I’m learning in my leadership class, I need council. Please give me your thoughts.

Groupware

On the to-do list for the Crossroads IT team is to get a groupware server up and running. Hopefully this will happen sometime in the second half of the year.

Right now I’m seriously considering going with Open-Xchange. It looks like it has a really nice web interface and also a relatively inexpensive Outlook connector. I’ve also looked at OpenGroupware and Kolab. There are numerous web-only groupware servers such as eGroupWare or MoreGroupware, but we have people who are tied to Outlook and need to sync with hand-held devices so those are not really an option… but we do require that whatever solution we choose has a very good web interface because a lot of people will be using it that way.

I’ve even thought of using MS Exchange, but I can’t see tying us to that platform. I’ve heard too many horror stories about maintaining Exchange servers and I’ve never been impressed with Windows stability. That and we have several Mac and Linux users who would not necessarily be best served with a Microsoft solution. In addition, this solution needs to be open source because I would eventually like to connect our church management software and website with it. I don’t want to have to deal with proprietary software or closed protocols when this happens.

At this point Open-Xchange looks like the best all-around open source solution. I’d be interested in hearing comments from people who have tried any of these or other solutions. I’m still very much open to suggestions.

Multi-Avenue Marketing

My boss (at my day job) just came out of his office amazed at a brilliant piece of marketing. He received what appeared to be a hand addressed envelope that contained an actual physical key inside and a very short note to use the key to gain access to a particular website. It turned out to be a Communication company (www.xo.com).

Now my boss is not very susceptible to marketing and is very good at throwing away advertisements and in getting rid of telemarketers, but this ingenious bit of marketing actually piqued his interest enough to get him to go to the website just to see what it was all about.

Churches need to be clever like this and continually be thinking about how to reach people in fresh and innovative ways.

Cathedral or Bazaar?

Eric Raymond’s short book, The The Cathedral and the Bazaar is arguably the closest thing to a manifesto that the Open Source movement has. So what does that have to do with church or IT other than the very obvious parallel of a cathedral being a really elaborate church? Actually, a lot.

In the book, Raymond uses the two as an analogy to compare the corporate software development mentality  (the cathedral) to the Open Source mentality (the bazaar). In the cathedral we basically have the priests of information breaking off small chunks of the bread of technology for us and feeding us what they think we want. There is a rigid hierarchy of development complete with a pope (Bill Gates), cardinals, bishops, and priests. Everything is quiet and pristine. The inner workings of the cathedral are hidden from our view behind an impassable facade.

The bazaar is a hubbub of noise and a bustle of activity. Rather than the rigid hierarchy there are people everywhere offering this or that piece of technology – warts and all – to anyone who is interested. People are coming together in groups offering this piece or that piece that might fit well with another. Contributions from all are accepted. Anyone who wants can look down through all the hubbub and see the tiny gears and pulleys all working at the lowest level. People are invited to become involved.

Now I could turn this little essay into an argument for churches to move toward Open Source software, but I won’t. I’m going to ask questions instead – and no, I don’t know the anwers to these questions.

I believe (though I’m not sure) that it is Leonard Sweet who has described us as a post-modern culture. In the modern culture people tended to want to collect things for themselves. People love buying technology and gadgets and stuff. In the post-modern culture things are no longer the key. People have had the things now and realize that there is nothing special about things. They are not fulfilling. Instead, the post-modern person wants to collect experiences.

I’m now going to draw the obvious parallel with the cathedral and the bazaar. The cathedral of technology likes to create "things" for us because it thinks that’s what we want. The bazaar, however, offers to let us come in and experience the making of technology for ourselves – or at least look under the hood.

Should a church be a cathedral or a bazaar? As a church, how do we give people this participatory experience they are looking for and still maintain Biblical organization and structure? How do you allow people to participate in the creation of "Church" while maintaining a certain level of quality.

What are your thoughts?

Questions

OK. Maybe the previous post was a bit on the negative side. They were, like the Ten Commandments, a list of do-nots. Our Tech team as a whole (lead by Pete Bishop) has adopted Andy Stanley’s 3 questions. These are questions to ask when creating any type of media or content.

1. Is the context appealing?
2. Is the presentation engaging?
3. Was it helpful?

Let me expound a bit.

If you walk into a house and the paint is chipped, the floors are dirty, and the walls are bare of pictures, the "context" is not appealing. For the web team this pretty much applies to our website look and feel – the template we plug all of our content into. It has to look nice and be appealing even thought it’s not the main point of the site.

We’ve all sat through sermons that have nearly put us to sleep. This type of sermon is the opposite of "engaging." Engaging content is something that draws you in and engages your mind. This means that the photos and the writing have to be interesting.

People won’t stick around if the first 2 items aren’t taken care of, no matter how helpful the content is. However, if the content is not helpful and you continue to pull crowds because you’ve fulfilled the first two requirements, then you are not fullfilling your purpose. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is engaging (some might debate the appeal of the context), but it is a Complete Waste of Time™. We’re in the business of changing people’s lives, not wasting thier time.

When creating content for the web please ask yourself these 3 questions each time you create a new piece of content.

Crossroads Web No-Nos

Here is the list of No-Nos I’ll likely be using for publishing articles on the Crossroads website.

<!–
@page { size: 8.27in 11.69in; margin: 0.79in }
P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }
H1 { margin-bottom: 0.08in; page-break-after: avoid }
H1.western { font-family: "Bitstream Vera Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 16pt; font-weight: bold }
H1.cjk { font-family: "Mincho"; font-size: 16pt; font-weight: bold }
H1.ctl { font-family: "Tahoma", "Lucidasans", "Lucida Sans", "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 16pt; font-weight: bold }
–>

• No email addresses – we will do this with form based email.
  If you need a contact let me know and I will add one that you can
  link to. This is to reduce spam.

• No font changes (fonts can be different in the pictures). No
  colorized fonts (links are automatically colored). Do not make
  everything bold or italic. Do not make your font larger than
  everyone else’s. Comic Sans is evil (except perhaps in the case of
  the kid’s pages).

• Do not center everything. Occasional centering of tables is
  OK, but use it sparingly. Do not justify your text.

• For front-page items pictures should be no larger than 200
  pixels wide by 112 pixels high unless it is for a message series.

• Use complete sentences. If you do not they will either be
  fixed by the editor or rejected for you to fix yourself.

• Keep things concise and clear. People who are browsing will
  not read long stuff that isn’t clear. If you can say it in one
  sentence instead of 3 then by all means do it. If you must go longer
  than a couple paragraphs, break things up into sections with
  sub-headings.

• Do not attempt to make your images fade into the background
  using gradients. If we ever decide to change the background color
  these types of pictures will no longer look good.

• I’m sure I’ll think of more later.

<!–
@page { size: 8.27in 11.69in; margin: 0.79in }
P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }
H1 { margin-bottom: 0.08in; page-break-after: avoid }
H1.western { font-family: "Bitstream Vera Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 16pt; font-weight: bold }
H1.cjk { font-family: "Mincho"; font-size: 16pt; font-weight: bold }
H1.ctl { font-family: "Tahoma", "Lucidasans", "Lucida Sans", "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 16pt; font-weight: bold }
–>

Team Structure

I emailed a question about team structure to Brian Bailey who is the internet manager at Fellowship Church. He responded to my question on his blog. You can read the answer there. It is question #1.

Link: Leave It Behind > Brian Bailey: From the Inbox.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu Linux 5.04 was released today! This is the best distro I’ve ever used. I’m using this at work and will be moving my home Mandrake box sometime in the next week or two. Get it while it’s hot.

The Beauty of Open Standards

You’ll never truly understand the benefits of open standards until you use them.

The Children’s ministry director told me last night that she needed a list of all the families with kids and addresses so that it could be used to do a mailing – by Sunday. I figured I would just do a quick query and dump them out to a comma delimited file. Then I had a brilliant idea.

I found a Perl module for creating and modifying OpenOffice.org documents. In a few short lines I was able to get the data from the MySQL database and dump it into an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet. I’ll plug this into my web framework which will create a URL for accessing this dynamically created spreadsheet.

In OpenOffice I’ll set that URL up as a data source and then I’ll be able to mail-merge the data into a letter, mailing labels, or whatever.

(Yes, I could have done this by setting MySQL up as a data source in OpenOffice, but I needed some magic Perl massaging to get the data to look the way it needed to.)

This was all possible because the OpenOffice.org file format is an open standard. Try doing that with MS Office in the same 2 hours I pulled this off..

Content is King

Heal Your Church Website has a great article on designing your site to actually reach unchurched people.

http://www.healyourchurchwebsite.com/archives/001482.php

Church IT

What is church IT?

The current Crossroads team (which we’ve been calling the web team) started about 3 years ago when my pastor approached me about managing our website. At that point everything was done by me, myself, and I. This was great for learning the nitty gritty of doing websites. I learned how to use the Gimp to do graphics, organize a site, and use HTML::Mason with Perl for scripting.

Team leaders were encouraged to incorporate more people into thier teams, so I began to take people under my wings who were interested in doing "web" stuff. I’ve always worked mostly independantly so leading people was a new thing for me and I’m still doing a lot of learning. In trying to incorporate other people into the team I decided that we would have to move to a new system. Hand editing files with Perl code embedded in them was not possible for most of the people on my team. This is when we decided to use Mambo.We need our ministries to be able to easily get information on our website and this has the potential to facilitate that.

About that time I was approached (or I approached) the Children’s ministry leader. They were looking for a check-in system using plastic photo id cards and stickers. My bread and butter is software developement so this sounded interesting. Our current church management system did not have this type of capability so I commited to developing this. I used web based technology since that is what I am familiar with and also because it seemed like the wisest choice for the future. We’re now running with that system in production (call it version 0.1) and will be expanding that to replace our old church management system. (More news will come on this. This will be an Open-Source package I’ll be putting on Sourceforge sometime soon). That project is temporarily on hold now while work goes forward on moving to Mambo.

Eventually I’d like to tie our church management system into our Mambo website so that events, small groups, etc. can be entered in one and show up in the other. I’d like our finances to be tied into this as well. I’d also like people to be able to share files, calendars, to-do lists, etc. I’d like them to be able to have blogs, communicate in forums, chat, etc. I’d like them to be able to do all this from thier homes via the web.

So in a way church IT is the "web team." We’re building a "web" of communication. We’re providing the conduits through which information flows and the cabinets in which the information is stored.

We’re the arteries of the church.

Maintainable Content Management

In the process of preparing to move to Mambo for our website management we’ve done a fairly major overhaul of our content and its organization.

Mambo is template based so it’s very easy to change the entire look of a site in less than a minute. You simple change the template. At one point we thought we had settled on a look and so started to design our graphics to fit in with that look. Now, a few months later we’ve decided to scrap the original look and move to a completely different template. This poses a problem because now the graphics don’t really work well with the new design. We’re going to have to go back through all our graphics and re-work them to fit the new design.

This has lead me to conclude that your content (including graphics) needs to be as independant from your site look and feel as possible. Your templates need to be designed in such a way that whatever graphics you decide to use in your content it will look just fine.

Some of the graphics we designed to fit into a black background. The edges fade to black and thus blend right in. Now our background has more of a gradient to it (it’s still dark) so the edges of the graphic are visible and it just doesn’t look right. What this boils down to is that our graphics need to either fill a rectangular space, or be PNG or GIF with transparency information. Making your graphics fade into the background doesn’t work if you change the background.

It’s also best to let the stylesheet decide how to align the image. We had settled on having most of our images aligned on the right. That’s still going to work OK, but thinking ahead to a day when it might not it would be best to leave that up to the template designer.

It seems that the best way to ensure your content is independant of your design is to view it with different templates.

Creativity

I’ve recently been listening to Just for Fun by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond. It’s basically the story of Linus Torvalds and the developement of Linux. It’s an entertaining and light read but also has some interesting insights.

Linus described being in awe of his sister. While Linus himself is a very smart fellow, he explained that his thought process is based on taking other people’s ideas and work and rearranging them into something else. His sister was able to come up with original ideas that were completely unthought of before. Other examples of people like that are Einstein or Niels Bohr.

Now I truly do believe that we all stand on the shoulders of people who have come before us (even Einstein), but I have always striven to come up with completely original ideas. Unfortunately I have never really been all that successful at this and usually end up taking a previous idea and bending it to my will. In this way I am like Linus.

What this book has helped me to realize is that I need to embrace this in myself and stop striving for something that isn’t natural to me. If it’s good enough for Linus then it’s good enough for me.

Also, this has showed me that this very thing is Linus’s greatest attribute and it is what has allowed him to accomplish so much. This is actually what leadership is all about, Linus orchestrates the melding of pieces of code written by numerous people. Leadership is the melding of people into a team to make thier contributions into something bigger than any of them could make on their own.

My conclusion is that this is one aspect of a leader that I am good at. I simply need to redirect my focus from melding code to melding people. Hmmm, maybe I need to work on my people skills…