Monthly Archives: April 2012

Is Keeping Up All Your Community Amounts To?

screenshot of Facebook friends page
Sunday mornings in the SE USA offer a distinct impression towards communities and what people value. For some people, the hours between 8AM and 1PM are spent in within their faith communities, singing hymns, listening to sermons, and reconnecting to people they may or may not see throughout the course of their week. For some, those hours are a recovery period from work, parties, or family engagements held throughout the week. And for some still, those hours are spent leading the charge for the new week – whether that’s working in retail, starting meeting, project, and lesson plans, or getting in that exercise regimen that can other times during the week be more elusive. Indeed, there’s a lot of life that happens in these hours, and within those contexts noted above, there’s a question that a few moments on a recent Sunday begged me to ask in light of what kinds of communities we’ve become.

Two contexts…

The first sees several of the local broadcast channels displaying current or replayed messages from local, regional, and national churches. Within one of these I stopped on, the encouragement from the pastor was to align the fact analogy of the resurrected Jesus walking with the two gentlemen on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35). Inside of the sermon, the pastor goes inside and outside of the margin of the text – beginning first with the aligning of the appearing of Jesus as a matter of comfort to the situation which was a matter of shock and anxiety for those who walked with Jesus and knew him. And then he ends towards another margin, speaking to the need of people to be connected to the community of believers whom are on the road of life as well, with a chance that at some point in the relationship they will meet Jesus. As this broadcast happened, there were several points where the camera panned to various persons in the congregation, as well as the on-screen notation of the name of the pastor and the church. No address, website, etc., just the pastor’s name and the church’s name. After the sermon ended, I continued to parouse other channels to see what else might be asking for attention.

The second was a few hours after the above sermon was broadcast, while setting myself to work on a few pieces for the site in a local Starbucks. As I entered, I overheard a group of people talking about the communities they grew up in. Seemingly excited to know that there was so many similar connections between them, one of the women mentioned someone in her circle that has some local nortoriety. At least from her tone, she was proud of the connect. Then male in that small group spoke up about him going to school with her. He remarked about going the entire gamut with the famous woman in the same classes, all the way through to the end of high school. Then he said, “these days I’m connected with her on Facebook. That’s how you keep connected to people you used to know. Well, I’m only as connected as seeing her updates. We don’t interact all that much.”

It was the latter context that led me to sit down and write this much. In the latter, we have a participatory medium – the Internet – and a common channel – Facebook – being used for communication between those people, organizations, and brands who wish to interface with one another. In the former story, we have the one-way medium – TV – and itself a common channel – the rhetoric of the sermon – being used to share a central message that’s designed to knit the listeners around that common experience of listening, and moreso around how they share in the interpretation and activity because of what they listened to. And yet, both of these medium choices (Internet and TV) bill themselves as creating a community, or at the very least enabling community-defining behaviors.

What are the communities that are intended to result from these media actions?

If I’m being critical of the TV message, I found it confusing to be getting a message about being connected to both faith and community, but nothing in the broadcast – at least while I was viewing it – left a bread-crumb trail as to how to do that to that specific community or another one. At least, not the bread-crumb that we are used to – there was a name of the pastor and name of the church – certainly the Yellow Pages would be sufficient for making the next steps.

But then, there’s the critism of of Facebook users I overheard. They already had their Yellow Pages, and indeed something more defined than a name and address, they had some cycle of activity so that they could see for themselves when and how best to build some kind of relationship with another. However, it was only being used as a signaling channel – connection only good enough to get reception of what’s going on in another’s life, but not to build into their lives or be built from their’s. Very much similar to listening to a TV message in application despite the Facebook’s ability to be more than simply receiving a broadcast message.

I wondered, is this the kind of community then that we create with social networks? Yes, I know that many of those visiting here are quite active on their social networks, mixing broadcast announcements with rebroadcasts of other’s brands/announcements, with conversations. But, we can’t assume that everyone who uses these social networking channels are doing the same behaviors. In fact, if one were to take our second story as the norm – following people to keep tabs, not to have a conversation – then we might want to make a better question about social media strategies and approaches that mark our use.

What is the community that you are building as a result of how you utilize one-way (broadcast, P2P) and participatory (Internet, social networking) media channels? Could the resulting behaviors you notice within those be influenced by something more than the content you are filling it with?

Today is Internet Evangelism Day (updated)

internet evangelism day calendar[Release from Internet Evangelism Day]

Updated with video from Mobile Advance

A Changed World
The digital world has changed remarkably in the last year or two. Although a part of Internet Evangelism Day’s emphasis has always been to mobilize individual Christians into digital evangelism, until recently the options we could suggest were quite limited. Writers might be drawn to blogging, or create a website if they felt technically competent. Those good at thinking on their feet could share in chat rooms and bulletin boards. But most of these suggestions were time-intensive and intentional initiatives only suitable for a small minority.

What has changed? The emergence of the ‘three-fold cord’ of social networking allied with video shorts and mobile phones. At last it has become remarkably easy for any Jesus-follower to build relationships and discuss truth appropriately, especially within social networking platforms. Our digital communication culture has become highly visual and dialogue-based, and the sharing of conversation-starting video shorts on Facebook and Twitter is as easy as a mouse-click, though only if we know where to find them. Read this article in full.

Phone Apps
There are now a few smartphone apps that are genuinely aimed at outsiders, that can be shared one-to-one or in a small discussion group. UK team Damaris has just released a strategic iPhone app called Talking About Jesus (Android version coming soon). Read more about the Talking About Jesus app.

Curation
Pinterest.com allows anyone to create a very visual set of curated recommendations, within their own chosen areas of interest, with no tech knowledge needed. Read more about Curation w/Pinterest

Books and Giveaways
Like last year, we’ll be offering normally pay-for evangelism/communication ebooks free on IE Day, plus the chance to win others. Visit the Internet Evangelism Day website for details.

For more information/Contact
For radio or telephone interview with an IE Day representative in US, Canada, Australia or UK, see contact details.

With 2.3 billion people online and 4 billion mobile phone users, including increasing numbers in the Majority World, the opportunities are ever expanding!

Introduction to Mobile Ministry Video from Mobile Advance

7 Years Online, 2 Years Full-Time, What It Looks Like Today

One of the questions that comes not long after giving a description about MMM and its activities is, “how does it enable you to make a living?” I’m not married, and so that’s an easy question (some months are much harder than others). But, seeing that today is one of those days where I’m engaged with a client -this post, as with many others, has been written at least a week in advance of it posting – I thought it good to talk a bit about how MMM exists beyond the articles published, and what could be coming down the pipe to help things further for all interested parties.

Training and Consulting

MMM is a very low-overhead operation. Much of the output that comes from this endeavor comes as a result of using the mental capacities of me (Antoine, the founder). One of the ways this capacity is leveraged is in training and consulting opportunities.

Training usually happens with small and medium-sized businesses whom are looking to implement a technology or series of technologies to a team or several teams. To that end, I work with a few companies and groups local to NC and PA to be an available trainer for software and the occasional mobile implementation. That has been as simple as BlackBerry training, and as complicated as training project managers to use MS Project for their specific brand of project management processes/workflows.

Consulting is another area that’s used (not as often as I’d like, but hey, that’s the economy for you) to fund things here. Consulting takes place around two core communication technologies – web design/development and Microsoft’s SharePoint product. That’s my background, and given the scope of work that I’ve done in development, administration, and analysis around web and projects, it makes for a suitable engagement point for fundable activities. What that can look like for you can be any number of things – minus building your mobile app for you – as it is a wide and deep set of skills.

At any given point, there may be zero to four companies that I’m engaged with at a time (not including those just talking to to develop the relationship). The bulk of that work is developing the relationships, and (the slow process of) turning that into compensated work. Much of this work is short term (hours to days), and so there’s no need to be present in a cubicle for months on end – the flexibility allows for the consistency of content that you see on the magazine, and the constant pressing forward of skills and knowledge. It does allow for an office that can be nearly anywhere (#todaysoffice), which is its own source of market visibility.

Presenting and Speaking

Another means of bringing in income to fund living comes from presenting and speaking. I will admit that this has probably been the hardest aspect of things because to be recognized as a speaker you have to (a) be seen speaking and (b) have something unique enough to talk about that people will pay you to do it. There aren’t as many opportunities to do this as I’d like – some say its because there’s been no formal book published (!!) – but as things move forward with not only the magazine, but the subject of mobile ministry, there are those opportunities which present themselves.

Unfortunately, some of the hindrances with the presenting and speaking comes of the very wide geographical, theological, and political applications of mobile ministry. I just can’t afford to travel as much as some do, and working on grants and sponsorship takes as much time as living. Don’t get me wrong, there’s opportunities to leverage the technologies of the moment to get to some places (as done with BibleTech in 2011), but that’s not always the case and you miss those connections that should turn into those training, consulting, and speaking engagements when you do. For a recent example, I missed being in on the Mobile Ministry Forum webinar that happened yesterday, because of ork scheduled that was needed to put food on the table. The folks whom are missionaries and constantly going between raising support and not fainting from their ministry work have taught me a ton because of this.

Other Stuff

Beyond these activities, there are actually some friends and family who have been quite generous for some of the living needs. I know that some have gotten tired of my monthly calls for prayer to make sure that I make the budget for the next month (its honestly hard for some of them to understand why I’d ocntinue with MMM rather than get a “regular” job – that whole “calling” thing is not normal language to some). Perhaps things will improve on over time as mobile and ministry are seen to have a more implicit intersection beyond “let’s get that app done.”. I’m not sure. But, that’s just to say that I’m not resting on just getting the four activites described above as the main pieces of the puzzle. I’m always looking for additional avenues where the knowledge and understanding gained from MMM pushes the Body forward, and keeps compensated work flowing.

Truth is, I never wanted to do this with the intention of making a dollar, I just needed an answer to a question that no one was looking to answer… in 2004. Perhaps the value in that is all that should be gained from this for me… What you and those who have written or visited here over the past have gained is another thing – of which I hope has been very valuable to forwarding your understanding of the faith and the technology lens of mobile alongside it.

There is some rumbling towards partnerships with other ministries and companies with whom this venue is a suitable launching pad towards their audiences. Stay tuned for that, or get in touch if that’s something you/your organization might find suitable.

That’s pretty much it. I’ll continue to push along here until something else happens that means that this shift is no longer needed to be pushed from this person/angle. This magazine has been online 7 years (as of a few days ago), with about 3000 articles/posts published, a methodology finalized, and a number of experiments. If this it continues, that means that these and other avenues will present themselves. If not, and this is how it ends, well, I can’t say that I didn’t do my part in seeing search engines as intended. I just hope that when you leave this site, whether you’ve read one or several pieces, that you’ve come away with a perspective to understanding the implications of mobile and technology that puts your best faith forward.

Measuring the Impact of Mobile Ministry

Rule app for iPad and iPhone
Continuing down the hole of understanding the implications of life at the intersection of faith and mobile technology, I came across an article that puts forth some perspectives around some research that has sought to quantify the actual change from connectivity and communication technologies advancement over the past decades. According to the post over at Irving Waldawsky-Berger (Measuring the Forces of Long Term Change), Deloitte’s Center for the Edge has published this first in 2009, and again in 2011 – so it is relatively new in terms of research. The findings reach backwards well though upon inspection and do leave much to consider about the benefits of communicaitons and technogical change, with and without the human element.

As I read that post, I was prompted to investigate the profitability of mobile ministry along similar pillars. Granted, this isn’t a field that has much length of change, let alone can be said to be as disruptive as some would like at this point. But, this magazine has been in the business of making introspective looks at the validity of this approach, and throwing itself against the wall to see what sticks. Here’s what sticks as suitable measuring sticks for this approach:

The Foundation index captures the first wave. It measures the fast moving advances in technology performance and infrastructure penetration, as well as the shifts of global public policy that are reducing the barriers to entry and movement. The Foundation index has been growing at a ten percent CGR since 1993, and is the primary driver of all the other changes.

The second wave, represented by the Flow index is designed to measure the flows of capital, talent and knowledge across institutional and geographic boundaries that have been enabled by the first wave. In the past, our stocks of knowledge, – what we know, – was a great source of economic value. This is no longer the case, because the increasing rate of change all around us is rapidly obsolescing knowledge. Therefore, the real economic value has now moved from the stocks of knowledge to the flows of new knowledge that we are now able to quickly acquire, and thus refresh and expand our rapidly depleting stocks of knowledge.  Since 1993 the Flow index has been growing at seven percent CGR. 

The Impact index is a measure of the transformations underway in markets, firms and people. It aims to quantify the ways the overall economic environment is changing, as well as how those changes impact companies and individuals. This third wave has been significantly lagging the first two, growing at a much slower 1.5 percent CGR since 1993. The intensified competition and increased pressure on business performance caused by the first two waves accounts for the lagging growth of the third wave.

It makes some sense right: Foundaton, Flow, and Impact. Go back to the mobile ministry methodology. There, you have a process for iterating throughout a mobile ministry-focused project. But, the measuring of what is success or not kind of sticks on the point of whether you make it through the project or not. If you add the filters of Foundation, Flow, and Impact to your goals for the project, there is a good chance the you would be better able to see the full-impact (long-term, if using these in context) for your efforts.

Part of the problem with that is that these measurements are long-term in context. To date, I don’t know one mobile ministry project that isn’t tightly focused on the short-term. In fact, that’s part of the problem with many of the projects, their aim is to enable something to happen through technologies or processes that works at a speed which is much more towards a human-scale.

Time is the sticky in all of this. What is the value of time in relation to mobile ministry? What about time are you trying to alter someone else’s perception within mobile ministry activities? Perhaps, something I wrote on my personal blog fits here as well:

…For years, I have been trying to understand the intersection of faith and mobile tech, but didn’t realize until a few minutes before writing this that it was all about time. Does the use of mobile invite someone to redeem time in their life to live the faith they have bubbling on the inside of them? Chances are, it doesn’t. And all of these layers (apps, media, services, sign ups, etc) to make mobile the right channel is ultimately a failure to understand and speak to what actually matters. Time to live…

Every miracle that Jesus did add time to the lives of others. When you are measuring the Impact of your mobile ministry efforts, do you see the same? Or, are you more applicable to the Foundation and Flow aspects of change? If so, those rates are much faster than people, and probably should be regarded a bit less until change happens.

Mobile, Palm Addict, and 7Yrs

Mobile Ministry Magazine (logo)Today is e 7 year anniversary of Mobile Ministry Magazine (MMM) being online. That’s something that almost didn’t happen. At the Lord’s suggestion of going online with it, I didn’t think that it would be something usable, let alone sustainable. And yet here things are, 7 years later. It wouldn’t have probably jumped online if not for Palm Addict:


I’m getting a chance to look back at 7 years of doing MMM and its been interesting. I’ve had all kinds of trouble with posting images and video until I figured out how to easily do the YouTube embed code on a mobile. Archiving has also been interesting – and its been there that Dropbox has probably been better than most. Each device, each service that I’ve used has been infused with some sense of “if its going to be mobile, then it better add some time to my life.” That’s been one of the lessons that seems to resonate throughout Palm Addict, and clearly has done the same with me as I’ve evolved with MMM…

Read the rest of Mobile, PA, and 7Yrs at Palm Addict

Palm Addict has a lot to do with MMM. Am very grateful for Sammy’s support and the posts there that have tuned my thinking on mobile in ways that I am still only beginning to understand.

What Do You Understand About This Space

I asked at a meeting with several internet ministries last year if there was a methodology to their behaviors/intentions to use the web as a connection point for evangelism and discipleship. I was concerned in many respects, because while I was listening to a group of people passionate about sharing the fruits of their faith, I heard very little about understanding the implications of being in this space. This magazine takes the posture of bearing to understand the implications of mobile before and during sharing the passions that make mobile a suitable addition to the toolkit of ministers and developers alike. To that end, we poke a ton – its unique and then some. And then… its not all that unique at all:

…Corman believes that the spread of “hacktivism,” which first made mainstream headlines when Anonymous attacked the Church of Scientology in 2008, demonstrates that “those who can best wield this new magic are not nations. They’re not politicians. The youngest citizens of the Net don’t even recognize allegiance to a country or to a political party. Their allegiance is to a hive. In some ways this is very exciting. In other ways this is terrifying.” The terrifying part, for Corman, is that the Web gives individuals immense power without instilling the “compassion, humility, wisdom, or restraint to wield that power responsibly.”…

Read the rest of In the Battles of SOPA and PIPA, Who Should Control the Internet at Vanity Fair

What do you get about this level of access, security, connectivity, and affordance? Do you understand that content isn’t king, the person who designs the user experience is king – and you are simply a steward of one part of the field? Are you concerned about DNS activities? Or, does your mobile lifestyle begin and end with those communications which happen without the facilitation of global cables, interested governments, and occasional support of standards bodies?

Nothing about tweeting a post embeds compassion, justice, or even the hope of the Gospel into the Internet. That only comes when that tweet intersects with the personal reality of the person reading it. Its relevant (and therefore points to salvation) when its personal. Nothing more, nothing less. This isn’t a magic hat. Nor is it the best thing since sliced bread (though, you can argue that there are probably more mobiles than sliced bread in the hands of folks and that might be near-correct). What do you understand about the implications of telling people to go see announcements on Facebook – when you are also not teaching them about Facebook (or Internet) addiction? The two go hand in hand in terms of lessons – as well as hand in hand in terms of how you lean on these communication technologies for the prosperity of those reading/listening/watching.

Do you need to understand everything about how the Internet and mobile works in order to do ministry? No. Should you know as much as possible about the implications of it not working for whatever reason – whether you can solve it or not? Yes. And its to that end we exist in this space… its not that unique at all, just an acknowledgement of something different amongst the hype of the moment.

The Firehose that is MMM

The other week, we were approached with shuttling some of our content to a mobilized service. That service would basically take the RSS feed and then do some optimizations in order to make it work best for its platform.Well, we’ve got a lot of content here, and one of the items that came back to us was that we’ve got a lot of content and it makes it hard for them to figure out the best way to present our content. That’s a problem, but also speaks to the nature of the content here at MMM, and some of what has been happening behind the scenes to make the experience of reading the most relevant content more possible.

Developing The Firehose

Back when MMM got started online (April 2005), we had a model that was basically a copy of many of the high-traffic websites of the time: publish, publish, publish. I can remember at one point putting up 5-6 pieces a day, and many times unique pieces. For those not knowing what MMM was (amazing how folks stumbled upon us via a simple search), this wasn’t a bad thing. But over time, that got to be a bit much. We went to a single-post-a-day schedule many years back, and for the most part have been able to keep a consistent and constant stream of content flowing.

With that change in frequency came a change in the type of writing. I noticed from the analytics that the longer posts that we made had people stick around a bit longer. And not just to read that post, but they were most likely to go visit someplace else on the site. I shifted into making long-form content, best suited for contemplative reading – rather than quick skimming (other tech sites went this route) – but not to the length of what would be found on many theological sites (dissertations I tell ya). That change was also good for consistency, but a pain in the butt for organization.

The Battle to Organize Content

The move to WordPress from Blogger presented a chance to address some issues in terms of how content was organized on the site. At the time of that move, there were almost 3000 posts published and not quite a half of them were tagged/categorized. Google moved Blogger to a tagging system in the midst of our writing, and – well, its a lot of work to go back and retag content. I did a retaxionomy of the content based around some tighter editorial needs in that move to WordPress, and for the most part, its served us well.

What you might not have noticed is that some of those old posts from Blogger (see, http://archived.mobileministrymagazine.com) have been slowly making their way into WordPress. Unfortunately, the amount of content and structure of content wouldn’t import into WordPress, so each post has to be individually added to WordPress, retagged, and then categorized. That’s just something that will continue to take a while. In the meantime, there’s new content being produced that meets the current organizational schemes, in that long-form method, that’s usually quite unique, and generally posted on a consistent basis.

See the fun?

Steps of Manage the Firehose

Now, you would think that with some background in content management and information architecture that we probably shouldn’t be in this situation – but the fact of the matter is that MMM has changed over the years, as has its audience, as has the content. There are some streams of content not as often posted here anymore (direct software and hardware reviews), and there are others which tend to get much more the light of day (processes and UX matters). Where the content here becomes usable for you is in two offerings – based on the detail of the types of categorizing that happens here:

  • Search
  • RSS

Search is probably the most important (and most used) functional feature of this resource. Mainly because it is able to not only deal with the content that we’ve organized, but also dig a bit more into what we haven’t organized (thanks Google and WordPress). One of the pieces that is (unfortunately) missing from our mobile website is a suitable search interface (this is present on the alternate mobile website however). Not sure how and when that could be addressed on the mobile site, but its clear – at least from those of you who come here via Internet Explorer/Firefox/Safari that its a needed feature in terms of getting around.

RSS is the quieter feature used to manage the amount of content here. The way its used is actually a crafty by-product of the tags and categorization system present within WordPress. Every category and every tag points to a page that has its own RSS feed. This means, if you are looking at a subject area (perhaps Mobile in Missions/Evangelism for example) and you want to just get the updates for that stream of content only as it is published here, then all you need to do is either click on the RSS (orange colored) button in your URL bar, or take the URL for that page (http://mobileministrymagazine.com/tag/mobile-in-missionsevangelism/) and just add “feed/” to the end of the address and you have just the data stream for that page. Nearly every page has that functionality built in – and I’ve just not done a great job in talking about it.

The Missteps in that Firehose

The problem with things comes on some of our static pages (Bible apps, Case Studies, etc.) of which there is a listing of content, but those items are merely just a listing. There wasn’t a design to that set of data other than just putting it out there, making sure it linked to the right places, and sat under the correct subheading. That’s now biting MMM in the butt. Especially with the Case Studies/Resources page, there’s just an increasingly deep listing of content, and outside of searching on the page (click F3 on your keyboard if you are on a laptop and you can search within any single webpage), you just will have a hard time of finding what you are looking for.

WordPress is a decent content management system. However, making it work for this application (a multi-contextual listing of resources) would be stretching it a bit – even with extensions. The goal for each page is to be available, but to also be easy to manage. Until recently, that’s not been a problem. The query from the mobile services provider poked at that crack in the wall and we’ve got to figure something to do around it.

One of the solutions is to republish every resource and link on those static pages as a posting with their own set of categories/tags, and then build a custom page that would be able to contain those items. For those reading the blog, that’s going to be a lot of content coming through – and while some might be good to see, there are a lot of links to republish there. Another solution is to use the Links feature within WordPress, and then create a series of custom pages that would display those links as organized. Some of the work to do that has been started (in the background), but I’m still not sure what the final result will look like – though it will be a breeze to manage.

How You Can Help

As you can see, we are indeed aware of the amount and level of content that’s published here. Contrary to some opinions, we are quite focused as to what gets published and how it stays relevant to the overall purpose of this magazine. What we don’t know is how you engage the content here? That kind of information would help us better address what comes out of this hose, and how to continue to make sure what comes out is valuable. With that said, a few questions:

  • Do you use a mobile app to view MMM? If so, which app(s) and why?
  • Do you use an RSS reader to view MMM (which, why)?
  • Do you use either the normal or alternate mobile websites?
  • Do you use the email subscription via Feedburner to read content? If so, how do you archive, organize, resource those emails?

Thanks for your feedback on this. And if you have other ideas on how we can better manage the amount of content that comes here, do feel free to chime in via an article comment, the contact form, or Twitter (@mobileminmag)

Desknots and the 7 Deadly Myths of Mobile

Caught both of these last week while taking in some of the tweets happening during the Breaking Development Conference (#bdconf). I’ll let the quotes and full articles pretty much speak for themselves:

Desknots are connected devices that present alternative contexts and form factors for non-desktop computing… Desknots aren’t (necessarily) mobile. Desknots aren’t (necessarily) wireless. Desknots aren’t (necessarily) personal. Every category of desknot has contexts, form factor, use cases, and usability considerations that are very different from the desktop. It’s useful to have a term that suggests: “hey, it’s not just about the desktop…

Read the rest of Desknots at Global Moxie – would you agree with the term?

In light of desknots, there’s also this reclarifying about what mobile is and isn’t. Here’s a listing of some mobile myths from Josh Clark which break this down:

  • mobile myth #1: users are on the go and rushed
  • myth #2: mobile = less
  • myth #3: complexity is a dirty word
  • myth #4: extra taps and clicks are evil
  • myth #5: you gotta have a mobile website
  • myth #6: mobile is about apps
  • myth #7: cms & api are for database nerds

I’d recommend reading in detail why Josh Clark calls this myths on the full post at his website. At the moment, I’min agreement with all but one of them (go ahead guess that one).

How do these perspective fall inline with your existing thoughts about mobile? Do you gain clarity, or is there a muddling of definitions?

Have Tablets and Mobiles Changed How You View/Use the Bible

Bible apps on Palm Treo and HP iPaq 1940A few days ago, a post went up over at the BigBible Project talking about six ways a phone can change your view of the Bible. An insightful and reflective post, the six points were:

  1. Instant access to a library of commentaries and translations
  2. Make the text your own (w/highlights, notes and bookmarks)
  3. Bible reading becomes public and social
  4. Bible reading can be monitored and held accountable
  5. Bible reading becomes private and invisible
  6. Software is interpretation

Those reasons caused me to reflect a good bit towards how I’ve changed and evolved because of Bibles on my tablets and mobile devices. Some of the points from BigBible Project’s article fit – but then I realized how I’ve gone in a bit more on aa few of them.

For example, the idea of instant access to commentaries and translations is less important than what it used to be. I’m more interested in the sociological, geological, and other historical documents that affirm or challenge the text. Instead of highlights and bookmaks, I draw. I don’t care to be so public with me reading; but I do like the ease some services offer in sharing the text (such as Bib.ly and Ref.ly). Software is definitely interpretation – and that’s where I feel that biblical literacy shouldn’t just be reading the text, but building it as well. Its interesting, and through that list I can see how far I’ve come since getting that digital Bible on a PDA more than a decade ago.

So what about you? How has tablets and mobiles, or just the access to various Biblical services or classes, changed how you use or view the Bible? Do you see anything to be alarmed about it what has changed for you? Or, do you like the way in which you are evolving?

Enterra Gives Developers Insight to Business Mobile App Development

banner methodology written on glassOne of the requests we’ve had out there for sometime is some testimonials, or case studies, in which those whom are building applications and services that service mobile and mobile ministry endeavors can be highlighted and lend some light to the depth and challenges in this space. A response came from a company, Enterra, whose post on business mobile application development, specifically from a developer’s point of view, is quite appreciated. Here’s a snippet of this expansive and well-written piecce:

…One of the main steps of contract preparation is writing a SOW (Scope Of Work) – a brief list of requirements to the application. For small and medium projects SOW is enough to start the development. For large-scale projects after the contract signing there’s a preparation of technical task.

SOW and technical task are a formalization of developer’s and customer’s vision in terms of the developed applications. It’s an opportunity to get sure that the vision is the same, the borders are set and the wishes are known. But these documents are strictly technical and may not fully reflect the business processes inside the app. So it’s best to read the documentation thoroughly, ask about all the terms and require comments for acquiring your wishes.

In some cases the estimation changes after preparing the SOW, mostly to the larger side. Maybe you came out of your own task borders. Maybe it turned out that the cheaper technologies cannot be used, and the more expensive ones are required. Maybe the contractor offered something more expensive, but more progressive or easier to deploy. The decision of continuing/cancelling the work is up to you and your trust to the contractor. But I strongly recommend to discuss all the changes. If the increase of cost is really required and useful, the contractor will always be able to explain in adequately…

Read the rest of Business Mobile Application Development: The Developer’s Insight at Enterra

The perspectives in this mirrors our mobile minsitry methodology and how we’ve recommended you approach building a mobile ministry app/website, while offering some very real accounts of what works and what doesn’t.

For more information including getting a quote for development work, visit Enterra’s website.