Blender 2.37

We got our new website up just in time. Now I can take a break from that and play with the latest version of Blender that came out today. This upgrade is well worth the wait. There are some major new features including soft-body dynamics, improved transformation tools, and faster subdivision surfaces.

Look out. When I go on a Blender kick I don’t come up for air for weeks – or even months…

New Website

It’s finally here. The new Mambo based Crossroads website is up and running. There are still a few tweaks that need to be made, but I’d say it’s a far sight better than what we had.

Comments and constructive criticism is appreciated.

What is Open Source?

I had an interesting question in email recently from a Pastor/reader. I’ve mostly been talking to technical people in my blog, but in order to make this blog more accessible to other church leaders I’ll try to answer this question here.

Open-source software is basically software for which the source-code is available to anyone who uses it. Source code is the human readable code that is used to create/compile/produce a machine readable program. It is difficult (though possible) to reverse engineer machine code. Having the source code available makes it easy to modify a program for one’s own purposes. It’s like having the blueprints for your house.

Open-source applies not only to computer programs, but any kind of media. An earlier post talked about an open source movie project in which all the files and materials used to produce the movie are open and available for people who want to modify the movie.

Often times open-source is equated with free. There are two types of free. Free as in free beer. And free as in free speech. The free beer thing is (I think) due to a tradition of some open-source developers asking for donations of beer for their work rather than charging. The free speech thing is the core of open-source. Rather than keep the source code closed and hidden as a trade secret or private intellectual property, it is open. Open source software is not necessarily always free as in beer, but it is always free as in speech.

Open source software also allows for the sharing of this source code. You are free to take the source code and modify it and "fork" it to make a new product. You could take portions of the code and incorporate it into a completely different product. The whole idea is to promote sharing of ideas and code.

Some people have wondered how a business could run on such a model. Traditional commercial software has always been closed-source. However, it is clear to me that business models do exist for making money on open-source software. IBM and Red Hat are both doing very well making a business on supporting and selling Linux. There are other examples.

Because of the open development model, open-source software usually has a lower cost associated with it as well. Usually you can download open-source software for free. The TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is not necessarily less though. Some open-source software has a steep learning curve and requires technical skill to get up and running and use. On the other hand, many open-source packages such as OpenOffice.org are easy to use and install. The TCO for OpenOffice.org is quite a bit less than say Micro$oft Office.

See my previous posts Why I’m an Open Source Junkie and Cathedral or Bazaar for more on this.

SugarCRM

I’ve been hearing a lot about SugarCRM lately. I had been seeing a lot of headlines in the Linux press about it lately but hadn’t really bothered to look into what it was all about. I finally broke down and checked it out.

SugarCRM is an open-source (OS) customer relationship management (CRM) package. It is designed to help businesses keep track of contacts and the process of communication that goes back and forth between a contact and the business. It looks like a very nice system.

What I realized after looking at this is that Fellowship One has more in common with a CRM package than it does with most church database software I’ve seen. It is designed to manage communication between church leaders and individuals, be they first-time visitors, or core team members.

So why not just use SugarCRM instead of Fellowship One? Because Fellowship One has all these features in addition to everything you’d expect in a church database plus some. SugarCRM does not provide secure child check-in, check scanning, on-line giving, small groups, families, etc. It is geared toward business rather than church.

However, I might suggest to the OS church management system developers out there that SugarCRM might be either a good place to start, or a good source of ideas for your development.

The Blender Movie Project

Link: The Blender Movie Project.

I’m a huge fan of both open source and Blender. Blender is one of my favorite programs ever. Now there is the Blender movie project. Not only is all the software being used in the production open source, but the resulting movie with all the production files will be open source.

It would be very cool if Christan animators could come together and pull something like this off. A short film in the spirit of Veggie-Tales would be awesome! It would take a sizable team of writers, designers, animators, and video/sound editors to pull this off.

I’m Back

I was on a trip to South Carolina for the last 6 days visiting the outlaws… er, in-laws. I was planning to do regular blogging during the trip since I did have access to a broadband connection. But… I felt really really lazy the whole time. I barely even checked my email. Sometimes it’s important to just take a break from everything.

Since we were only 2 hours drive from Northpoint Community Church, we made the trek there to see how they do things. Shari and I were really impressed with Kidstuff. It’s a really cool program designed for both kids and adults. I think they have made the curriculum available. If we had the facilities and people-power we’d love to do it. Someday…

I’m always curious about how the auditoriums are designed. I’ve been to several mega-churches, and Shari has been to even more. So far we like Willow Creek’s auditorium the best of any we’ve seen. Second, I’d have to say I like the auditorium Crossroads rents. The thing that does it for me is the theater style seating. The key is the progressive elevation. At Northpoint I could see everything on the screens, but couldn’t see the stage because of all the heads. Willow has a cool setup with collapsible theater seating that folds up to reveal basketball courts. You’d never know it though because the seats are just like what you’d find in a theater.

UPDATE: Now that I think about it, I believe that Cedar Creek has theater style seating as well. Their auditorium is slightly less interesting than Willow’s for purely subjective reasons. It has a sort of vast empty feeling that Willow does not.

The Real Reason

Link: Pete Bishop: Fellowship One.

In this post, Pete Bishop has made me sound more humble than I really am. My wife Shari will confirm that I have a long way to go in the humility department. I posted this comment to Pete’s blog entry.

I wasn’t as self-less as you make me sound. It was a huge struggle to come to the point of letting go of the old system we built. I felt like I was throwing away the 5 month period of my life I spent building that.

God finally made me realize that if I was that attached to it then I should probably get rid of it. It was a huge struggle for me. Not all of it was visible, but it was there.

Sometimes it takes throwing 5 months of work away for God to teach a lesson.

There were two or three weeks during its development that I spent 40hrs working on it. This was on top of a full-time day job. It sure wasn’t getting me brownie points with my wife and kids. The only reason Shari could swallow the whole thing was that I was doing it for her ministry (she’s one of the children’s ministry directors).

I still struggle with working too much on ministry. I’m addicted to it. I have to keep telling myself to step back and only do what I can reasonably do. Maybe someday I’ll listen to my own advice.

Open Source vs. Fellowship One

If you’ve been reading my blog recently, you’ll know that I’ve been struggling with a decision between continuing development on an open source church management system, or switching to Fellowship One (F1). Recently, my leaders and I have made the decision to go with F1.

Some of you may be wondering what happened to my dedication to open source. Well, it’s certainly not gone. I still use Linux on both my home and work desktops and servers. Hey, even my wife uses it for everything. The only closed source software I use on a regular basis is Flash player and occasionally Java.

I’m a firm believer in open source – where an open source solution exists. In this case an open source solution does not truly exist. To compare F1 with the open source tools that are currently available is like comparing a shovel to a backhoe.

I’m also not opposed to paying for a service like F1. I would prefer that their software be open source, but if Fellowship Tech open sourced their software I would still pay for their service. I would then hope to contribute to the software myself.

I have two main reasons for discontinuing work on my open source church management system. The first is that I believe God has shown me that the place he needs me the most right now is at Crossroads Community Church. The world church is also very important, but it takes a secondary role in my ministry. Therefore I need to focus on what is best for Crossroads at this time. That happens to be F1.

Two, there are 2 or 3 existing open source church management projects in progress. While Infocentral appears to be dead, the occasional gasp of life squeaks out of it and it could turn into a very viable system. Perhaps the most promising looking project right now is 3CMS. It has been released as open source and seems to be reasonably complete. There is one other project being put together by a group of churches that may or may not go open source, but if it does it also looks very cool.

One other odd bit of rumor floating around the net is that Saddleback will open source their software sometime during the next couple years. I have not attempted to confirm this rumor, but it’s an interesting thing to think about.

I would encourage developers to band together to eliminate duplication of effort as much as possible. A good place to gather seems to be The Freely Project. I’m not stepping away from open source development. I will probably be contributing some of the modules I’ve written for Mambo sometime in the near future. I will also be passing on the source-code for my check-in system to Sourceforge. There is already someone who has expressed interest in taking over the code.

My Pastor’s New Blog

My pastor, Scott Winstead, has just launched his blog! Scott would rather talk than type, so we’re trying our first video blog at Crossroads.

Scott has a Mac so Pete Bishop hooked him up with an iSight camera. We’re using videoaddon.com for the streaming Flash video and Typepad for the blog host. So far I’m really happy with with videoaddon. Obviously I’m a Typepad user and very much like that.

We’re all very excited to have pastor Scott blogging!

Fellowship One

I have now experienced the Fellowship One demo. I must say that I am very impressed. It slices. It dices, and everything else. We are pretty much settled on moving to Fellowship One. It really was a no-brainer. This will simply revolutionize the way we operate Crossroads.

A blog entry like this cannot convey how cool F1 is. You really need to experience the demo and talk to the people who use it, but some points worth noticing are:

• check scanning – it gets the account numbers and matches them up with the people automatically
• the check-in system is slightly more sophisticated than mine, but more complex and less user friendly
• integration into your website is very simple and easy
• website integration for such things as event registration, small group management, giving, etc.
• contact management is extremely comprehensive and the work-flow is very well designed – this is probably F1’s biggest strength. Couple this with web access for all team leaders and you’ve got a very powerful tool for leader accountability and making sure that people do not slip through the cracks. The entire communications process between leaders and contacts can be exposed to top-level leaders.
• access control is sufficiently fine grained and powerful
• I don’t have to do backups

I am still a strong believer in Open Source and I will continue to encourage Fellowship Tech to move in that direction, but there is no comparison between Fellowship One and anything else I have ever seen. To hold back Crossroads to wait for an Open Source solution would be foolishness.

I’ll talk more in the coming days about how I have resolved my burden for an affordable Open Source solution and how our team will change as a result of this decision.

A big thanks to a lot of people. Thank you to Terry Storch for our long talk on the phone. Thank you to Jeff Hook, president of Fellowship One, for his numerous posts to my blog. Thank you to all the other people who posted. Thank you to Jeff Pelletier for our demo. And a huge huge thank-you to Jason, Andy, and Ed from Granger Community Church for all the time they spent with us. Thank you also to all the guys who encouraged me to keep on with my open source project. It meant a lot and my heart still lives with open source solutions, but I believe that God needs me here ministering at Crossroads more than he needs an open source church management solution.

Emerging ASP model targets health records

Link: Emerging ASP model targets health records – Computerworld.

Here’s an interesting example of how small businesses are out-sourcing IT functions in a similar fashion to the way Fellowship One works for churches.

Why should you outsource?

Link: Why should you outsource? – ZDNet UK Insight.

This is an interesting article on why businesses should outsource IT services. The key sentence for me is:

In short, if the IT department spends most of its time struggling with
routine IT services, then it will have no time to move onto the higher
demands the business makes of it — better business intelligence, better
processes, and a sharper focus on the strategic goals of the business.

While infrastructure things such as email, calendaring, website hosting, and numerous other things are required to keep Crossroads (or any other church or business) in operation, if the IT team focuses on these things, the higher purposes are neglected. Obviously, when a church gets to a certain size it may need to
devote some internal resources to maintenance of internal
infrastructure such as networks, backups, etc. Minimizing – not eliminating – focus on infrastructure is the key.

The article mentions better processes and intelligence.
This includes things such as examining and improving the way we acquire
data and choosing what data needs to be collected and how to interpret
that data. It also includes analysis and improvement of our work-flow. Crossroads is a Purpose
Driven Church. The core of this is a focus on five "goals" -
Evangelism, Fellowship, Discipleship, Ministry, and Worship. Crossroads’ IT team should outsource anything that does not
allow us to focus on these higher demands.

What are specific examples of things that should be focused on? How about evangelism through internet technologies such as web, email, pod-casting, etc. Discipleship through tools like on-line courses, pastoral blogs and other things. How about fellowship through developing an on-line community. How about establishing a strategy for tracking kids, guests, and volunteers. The list goes on.

What are your ideas for practical, strategic things church IT should focus on?

A Big Thank-You

Pete just posted BacK From Granger, a short write-up about our trip to Granger Community Church. Pete Bishop (Crossroads tech director), Rick Mink (our executive pastor), and I all took a trip to Granger on Monday.

Pete has a picture of us all on his blog, but he took the picture so he’s not in it. I’ve Gimped the photo to include Pete here.

From left to right, Ed Buford, Brian Glass, Jason Powell, Pete Bishop, Andy Hosier, and Rick Mink.

This trip was all thanks to the power of blogging. I "met" Jason through his blog and ended up requesting a trip to see how Granger uses Fellowship One and get feedback about it. Jason, Andy and Ed graciously took several hours out of their day to spend talking and showing us around Granger, Granger’s IT setup, and F1. They are really great guys and performed a tremendous ministry to help a growing church. It is awesome when a more experienced church can help shepherd a smaller growing church through the same processes they’ve already been through. The trip was immensely valuable in a multitude of ways.

Jason, Andy, and Ed’s amazing contribution will play a significant role in our decision on F1 (see previous articles Church Management, and Portable Check-in Systems for more details). We still have a demo with Fellowship Tech coming up on Thursday.

I’ll write more details on this whole process over the next week or two.

Blog Style Website

What’s the difference between a blog and a "regular" website? As far as I can tell there are three key things that make the distinction. Let me know if you disagree.

• Items on a blog are usually posted in chronological order starting with the most recent.
• Blogs usually revolve around a single person (though not always).
• Blogs facilitate discussion by providing a means for leaving comments.

The popularity of blogs is growing at an alarming rate. How can a church (or other organization) harness this popularity to help accomplish its mission?

While IT blogs like this one have helped to build connections among church technology bloggers and local church ministers (one of the five purposes established by Rick Warren), it seems that we could expand upon it to help build community in the local church and to reach people for Christ. Could we take some aspects of blogs and incorporate them into our church websites?

Some tech sites like Newsforge are now providing a comments section at the end of each article, but I haven’t seen very many church sites doing this. I think there is some fear that a comments section could turn into a nightmare of flaming and arguments. On the other hand Crossroads has had forums for a couple years with no problems like that.

In a week or two Crossroads will be rolling out our new Mambo based website. We’re planning to try this. Our current plans are to allow completely un-moderated commenting. We’ll keep an eye on it and see how things go. If problems arise we’ll have to turn on comment moderation.

I believe that people desire participation and bi-directional communication. This will keep people coming back and make the content more interesting. I can certainly attest to the fact it is not I who have made my blog interesting to read. It is the participation of many people in discussion that makes it interesting. Perhaps it could do the same for a church website.

What are your thoughts?

Church IT Blog Article

There is a very cool article on church IT in Sound and Video Contractor. There’s even a link to my blog there! There was an earlier version that somehow leaked out onto the net before publication. That version contained an error that confused me and Brian Bailey from Fellowship Church. The problem is now fixed and we are both mentioned in the article.

Baking Soda

This is a bit off topic, but useful for nearly anyone who has a stomach.

The other day, in a fit of nostalgia, I recalled a practice my dad used to engage in regularly. He would take a spoonful of baking soda and stir it into a glass of water and drink it for his "gas." (I also remember a particular gas station in Berrien Springs, MI that reminded me of my dad every time I drove by it because the sign out front simply said "Gas").

My reminiscence came at a time that conveniently provided a test case for the effectiveness of baking soda as an antacid. And what do you know, the baking soda even had directions on the box for how to use it in this manner.  You take ¼ teaspoon of baking soda and dissolve it in water and slurp it down.

I can now attest to the fact that it works very well for the stated purpose. Perhaps even better than over-the-counter antacids. This may be the beginning of a proud family tradition carried on from father to son over the generations.

I will add a warning. Wikipedia claims that excessive consumption can lower blood pH. It also links to a cool list of 61 uses of baking soda.

O’Reilly Open Source Convention

I just got permission from my boss to go to the O’Reilly Open Source convention. While my primary purpose for going to this conference is for my day job at the American Mathematical Society, it of course will also have an impact on what I do for my church since my roles at both places are similar.

If there are any other church IT people who are going to this conference it would be very cool to get together as a group. Post a comment here if you’ll be at the conference.

Content Legality

Over the last few years that I’ve been involved in Crossroads website, I’ve been asked several times why we don’t have our weekend messages on-line in either audio or video format. I keep hearing that "other local churches" have their messages on-line, why can’t we? The answer is always a legal issue.

Crossroads uses a lot of material from sources like pastors.com, and creativepastors.com that we pay for. There are very good reasons that we pay for this material. One, we don’t have the resources that these larger churches have to professionally develop the top-notch material they produce. And two, the prices are reasonable and necessary to help fund the further development of new material.

While we certainly do tailor the material for use in our locality, the material is still fundamentally not ours. Most of the requirements for using the material limit the use to our local church. It is not to be redistributed outside our church. I understand the reason for these requirements. I’m just looking for a way to reach more people while still fulfilling the requirements.

I could turn this into another open-source rant, but instead I’d like to hear practical solutions to this problem. We’ve talked about having a special area of our website where you have to log in to get the messages. This would create enough barriers that the average first-time visitor to the site would not have easy access to the content and it could be considered used "within our local church." On the other hand, once we limit the usage we are no longer reaching people with the message.

Am I reading the legal issues wrong? Is there some way we can provide these materials while still remaining true to the spirit of the agreement we make when purchasing the material? Are others having the same issues?

Portable Check-in Systems

Check out this setup: terry storch @ fellowship church.

I talked to Pete Bishop our Tech team leader, and he said that if we really wanted to do this we could probably find some space to squeeze it into. Storage space is at a premium for us so the smaller the better, but this sure would save us time.

It also looks like we could re-use much of our hardware if we decide to move to Fellowship One.

For those interested, here are photos of our current storage method. We manage to cram two kiosks into this little box. Unfortunately it takes close to 45 minutes to set it all up each week.