The 2012 Biola Digital Ministry Conference will be getting started in a few hours. I’ll be doing a session on the first full day of the conference talking about making ministry websites mobile which features some information from past posts including pieces from the Mobile Ministry Methodology and our look at the biNu Mobile App Developer Platform. As usual per our presentations, you can view these by going to our Issues, Presentations, and Experiments page.

Presentation Link

About the Biola Digital Ministry Conference

The Biola Digital Ministry Conference
is designed to empower individuals with the vision, knowledge, and relationships necessary to be thoughtful designers, developers, and practitioners of digital technologies for the cause of Christ.

The theme for this year’s talks is “the disruptive nature of digital.” Also new to this year’s conference is a three-pronged attack on the topic areas: Theology, Strategy, and Technology. You can bet that there will be some amazing insights passed along not just from the speakers/presenters, but also for those attending to glean and share. Take a look at the sessions listing, there’s a lot of neat items being brought to the front of the digital ministry discussion.

Keep up with the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #bioladigital. Depending on things, I might even get a chance to sketchnote things when not speaking/conversing.

Continuing from yesterday’s post of looking at mobile beyond your borders/contexts, here is a presentation from Chris White Ministries demonstrating how to share mobile-to-mobile materials created with PhonePublish. In this presentation he talks about sharing Swahili Bibles (NT) and the book Treasury of Scripture Knowledge.

There is also a PDF of this presentation

This is the second video we’ve seen from Chris White Ministries. The first video got a great response as it pulled together much of what’s been talked about here and a few other places, but spoken thru the perspective of a missionary preparing to enable a community of pastors with content materials.

View other mobile ministry videos.

Its easy to pine for different and insightful observations and activities in tech, it’s another thing to identify the primary narratives and then go out and make something distinct. I felt that was why it was better to plant and do MMM from Charlotte, NC and the Bible belt rather than aim first for tech centers and then build in faith’s direction from there. More would have been possible, but perhaps as Dave Winer points out ever so nicely here, perhaps it wouldnt have sounded much different than the Cali/NY narratives that push much of media’s directions now:

…I’m still looking for a home that wants to begin at at different place. That we accept competition, embrace it, as a way to keep us on our toes, and to keep the flow of ideas strong. To keep Moore’s Law thriving not just in hardware, but in software, networking, humanity. Instead we’ve got a culture that divides us up into smaller and smaller tranches, and sells us to Wall Street, for our ability to read ads, not our ability to solve problems. My point of view is this — I make tools for people who are really smart and motivated. I make the tools then I get out of the way and I learn from them, learn how to make those tools better, and learn which new ones need to be made. I get paid a fraction of the money my customers make using my tools. This incentivizes me to make more. My customers are Nobel Laureates. They cure diseases. Solve crises. Lead our culture. They are anything but hamsters. 

New York and California tech interfere with that process. Their model is still hopelessly rooted in the 20th century industrial model, of media and entertainment. Elite inventors, stars, personalities with millions of followers and passive consumers clicking on Like buttons. Very little crossover (though there is some, like Kickstarter)…

Read the rest of New York Tech at Scripting News… then go cut a road somewhere new or make a distinct sound worth following.

A few times this week, I have had items come up which make me think on the position towards mobility that I’ve taken over the years. Specifically, the posture of doing just about 100% of things via mobile and connected services. This isn’t something that everyone can do, and its been one of those conversations where I’ve had to mature in seeing the point of mobile context more than just mobile ability. In that, its always great seeing some companies and individuals disrupt themselves and find that mobile and connected services are a better route towards getting things done than whatever was in place previously.

…So how does Butcher’s team pull this off? A handful of tech tools are key. “We use Google Apps for email, chat and calendar. We also use Vocalocity, which is our phone system. It’s cloud-hosted, which allows us to take our handsets anywhere. OfficeDrop was one of our last legs in becoming truly paperless. Anybody that we’re doing business with, we’re paperless with them if possible, but not all companies are at that level yet, so they are mailing us items that are important. Instead of sticking them in a file cabinet, we scan them and upload them right to OfficeDrop’s cloud,” Butcher says.

Techs in the field all carry stripped down netbooks with touch screen capabilities. Industry specific proprietary software sends their assignments straight to these laptops. “It’s a little piece of software. It’s got a custom drawn map and a job roster list, and we literally drag and drop the service calls. Once the day of the route comes, the technician turns on his laptop and he’s running a little utility that automatically pulls those service calls right in,” Butcher explains. “Through that utility they can capture all the information they need – what they did, model, serial number and they also can bring up a ticket image on the screen. The customer can sign right on the screen. It’s very nifty.”…

Read the rest of Fred’s Appliance from Web Worker Daily/GigaOm

Have you gone the route of changing all or parts of your office or administrative tasks using mobile? Has this translated not only into organizational efficiencies, but also ministrial ones?