Caught this a little bit ago from The Living Labs Global Mobility Report:

…The website is the front end of an impressive back end algorithm. Geo-tagged photos of particular city scapes are presented to visitors of the site in pairs. Users are asked to click which place looks safer, more unique, or more upper-class. The algorithm uses the resulting binary data to classify places into these three categories.

That may not seem impressive, but check out the results. Among all cities surveyed (Boston, New York, Vienna, Salzberg, and Linz), Boston and New York have the most unsafe-looking places, while the Austrian cities have the top 10 safe-looking places. Just quickly looking at the photos categorized this way provides amazing insight into particular characteristics that draw people to, or send them running from, a public place. A sense of enclosure, vegetation, street-level retail, and other human beings are common characteristics among the safe-looking places…

Read the rest of the post at Living Labs Global and the full report of Place Pulse at MIT Media Lab.

For as much as we would like to believe in the perception of our churches and faith communities as being beneficial to our surrounding communities, the truth is that we don’t really know about what people think until we ask them, legislation provokes our response, or disaster happens and we aren’t asked for assistance. In a recent conversation, a musician told me how he didn’t care for many people of faith because he found them to be hypocrites, liars, and in denial of the day-to-day issues in which some go through – in a sense, he called the church “disconnected from the real world.” That was a scathing assessment of things, especially in a city like Charlotte which is (a) in the Bible Belt” and (b) has over 1000 registered churches by some accounts.

Could your church or community therefore stand up to a system such as what’s described in the MIT project? No, not are you preaching the Gospel, but what is the intensity of living the Gospel (James 1:20-21) that your surrounding communities can see, or even measure. And if your reputation was more public ally known, how would you change? Could your church/community culture change? Or, will such information cause such the kind of breaking down of things that the only way to rebuild would be to have an effort very similar to Jesus resurrecting?

This is another side of mobile ministry that has to be considered. Its not just the channel or the technology that you need to address, but the perception of the faith that people already have. If a project came like this to put your efforts on a heat-map, would your faith be hot or not?

Always nice to see others putting together various experiments and implementations of edge-case technologies. This one, from the folks at Church Mag is taking the idea of QR Codes, and mapping some interactive and sharing elements to it. Here’s a snippet of the experiment:

A thought popped into my head:

Bible. Verse. QR. Codes.

This might actually be a good idea. There are Bible verses on posters and t-shirts and bracelets; why not QR codes? I reach for my Bible, and select a few verses. I make a few codes, planning to show them to some friends, and think no more about it.

But God has bigger plans for this project. The seed had been planted.

Read the rest of this at Church Mag, and share your experiences with this QR tract experiment.

Explaining, Repenting, Relating as recorded via Qik last night.

I’ve spent the better part of the last year (not to mention all of my college and a few post-college years) in rural America. Computing is certainly a different experience than in urban and suburban settings. In most cases, the difference comes because of the difference in cultural approaches to reputation, leadership, connectivity, and ethnicity in those rural settings. For lack of better terms, its not the same world and depending on how off the wall you are, being too innovative can put you in a position where you self-learn yourself into a cloistered existence. If you aren’t innovative enough, you blend into the fabric of your community, and the elements that effect it which are usually out of your control to which you only have terceary knowledge/understanding of.

So, there’s then this opportunity in such contexts to create something new – to define a new paradigm. This is usually done by connecting to those who pass through or aspects of knowledge/information which aren’t a part of the normal fabric of your surroundings. Your imagination becomes entreated with the “possible” and those energies/purposes inside of you persuade how far you go towards those efforts. Indeed, you can literally learn youself into a new reality. Some people do this. They take advantage of those streams and create a new opportunity or several.

Now, what if the connectivity that mobile and web computing offers allows for those self-learning moments, while also keeping some connectivity to a larger (global) community of thought and discussion? A post at Mental Floss sparked just such a question:

…Sugata Mitra’s TED Talk starts with these words: “There are places on Earth, in every country, where, for various reasons, good schools cannot be built and good teachers cannot or do not want to go….” From this jumping-off point, Indian education scientist Mitra shows us a variety of experiments in which he placed computers with internet access in contexts where kids could experiment with them on their own — without teachers. “At the end of [the early experiments], we concluded that groups of children can learn to use computers sand the internet on their own, irrespective of who or where they were. At that point I became a little more ambitious, and decided to see — what else could children do with a computer…”

I would encourage you to check out Sugata Mitra’s TED Talk and then place your educational mobile ministry methods into this context:

What could your efforts do to instigate opportunities for self-directed learning and maturity in spiritual matters?

The opportunity to create streams for people to learn and mature in areas about faith is certainly present when we talk about mobile ministry. However, if we are using mobile and expecting it to be a constant tether (we or someone we assign is always the source for learning), does this make mobile into a profitable measure for spiritual formations/maturity, or present opportunities to allow for us to go hands-off in some contexts to allow for people to direct themselves to avenues of learning we might have never before considered?

What are ways in which your use of mobile tech has grown the knowledge of others around you?

In a recent conversation, an older woman spoke of how she really enjoys items like her new iPad, but the ease at which it brings information to her attention has caused a kind of running-over of her cup of attention. And while she’d been in a career where she had to manage several types of data and attention streams (a few decades as an administrative assistant), the amount of attention that’s required (or built into) the various media channels and devices around her are overwhelming. So much so that its not any more a question of learning how to use a technology, but how does one build-into themselves or their communities the skills to manage the noise.

A similar sentiment is taken in a recent post at the New Media Project at Union Seminary’s blog. Dr. Byassee’s piece, Lament of Attention, describes some of what this very present issue looks like:

…And yet I want to maintain something of a lament for this shift. (I say this as I work on the New Media Project, preparing this for a blog on a laptop, while surfing websites that may help as links, and preparing for a sermon tomorrow that will be accompanied with visual images downloaded from the web and splashed on screen. Alexander the Great would be impressed…) One clear victim of this shift is a certain habit of paying attention: an ability to read forward rather than in all directions, to attend to a line of reasoning or story or argument, to engage that line of thinking, disagree, make connections with other works, etc. This shift in attention has been detailed in many places (see The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age & The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains). Others disagree. But my interest is more properly religious. We read biblical texts and prayer books with a habit of attention that focuses on God. This is a hard-earned practice. In every age people become distracted—monks in ancient monasteries were no different. But they fought against the sin of inattention, and with a little grace, they could win this combat. Now we are not even trying…

So then, what is to be made of this acquisition and approach to a technological lifestyle that begs of us its attention, but our spirit and health demand otherwise? Or, to quote the signature that I’ve had for years at the Brighthand forums, “if your smartphone is so smart, then why are you spending so much time learning it? Shouldn’t it learn you and adapt to your leanings?” Yes, part of that is about learning the technology, and programming it to respond to us accordingly – yet, another part of that is taking account of our own lives and making that time to meditate, contemplate, regard, and retool.

As I write this, I’m reminded of something that I wrote in response to a question about the Sabbath over at Holy Culture Radio’s forums:

…It is in that rest from their “work to make a living” that they were to begin to re-realize the provision that God had always granted to them – even mores because they were His people set aside for His grand design to reconcile all men back to Him. Hard to be a point of reconcilation of an all-providing God when you are breaking your neck just to have enough to put food on the table. The observation of the Sabbath therefore had a dual role. Not only were they getting a rest from “making a living” but also a rest from the deblitating effects of the curse (remember, “cursed be the land… you will have to work it to eat…”)…

…Psychologists will also tell you that to drive yourself (“work”) for more than six days at a time will mentally wipe you out. Observing God’s initial example of resting from His work to enjoy what He created (what He “worked” if you will) allows your spirit, mind, and body to recover and restore itself…

When I wrote that, I was thinking specifically about the times that we should take to consider that God’s provision for us in all matters has to be considered. Our provision in this context can be considered an over-abundance of information. Somehow, in the midst of some working the land, we’ve got to take time to consider our steps (Joshua 1:8, Proverbs 3:5-6), and that means the activity we instigate of taking ourselves from those streams and putting ourselves elsewhere – usually in shut-off place. When we do this, we allow for our minds, hearts, and bodies to receive a kind of provision that just isn’t able to be met in the opulence of attention.

Maybe, this attempt to address the increase and impression of attention in our lives has to sit in a similar vein as humbleness – humbling ourselves under the observed and soverign hand of God, looking forward to not us finding that thing to be noticed, but that he would open us up to those opportunities that present themselves as He wwills (1 Peter 5:6).

PS: looking at the picture chosen for this piece, its almost too ironic the caption to it.

An item sitting on the plate this week is that of accepting a speaking engagement for one conference and partnership with another group. For both groups, its the unique and specalized knowledge behind MMM that’s desired. Both groups have spoken clearly their reasons for asking for MMM, yet only one has adjusted their request for participation in such a way that seems like they understand the value of what they are asking for.

While I totally understand that some groups just don’t have a budget to bring out a speaker/trainer/consultant/subject matter expert (that’s another issue of organizational management, but I digress), the very unique nature of the few folks in digital/internet/mobile ministry can’t be freely given away if folks aren’t just asking for that knowledge/wisdom, but also travel and any other expenses.

I am finding it very hard – as a person doing this as a primary endeavor – to say yes to engagements when there is literally only ego compensation (am not the only person who thinks that economy is backwards, re: Jaron Lainer). I run a site which is free, it feels very much like a slap in the face to ask for me to also put up lodging, registration, travel, setup, and (the inevitable) post-speaking activities when there’s nothing coming back this way. This puts me in a very hard position. I’ve got to spend hours looking for work/clients, as well as working current projects, and then spending the time to develop that specialized knowledge. Even if this was a multi-person operation, that would be hard (we won’t talk about folks that don’t pay in a timely manner and the 8-ball that presents).

Simply: if you would consider MMM or any uniquely gifted person or organziation is worth asking for their time, they are also worthy of being compensated for those labors. A laborer is worthy of their wages, and digital is where we labor. Yes, there needs to be some meeting halfway for many of you whom are also financially constrained. That’s one of the reasons why *everything* you see on this site is freely available. There’s too much data out there for commentary and analysis of this degree not to be. But, when you want something specialized, then you move into that space where you can’t rely on free, and have to be considerate of the time and resources that it takes to make specialized work for you.

Services like MinuteBox (see profile) I’ve started using to help faster convert some of those conversations into compensated events. I’m not sure that it is any longer (or if it ever was) fair to ask any of us in this space to give place to speaking/demonstrating our knowledge in this space without some form of compensation. There aren’t a lot of people in this space – check the list. If this is worth its value to up-skill your organization to meet their goals, then demonstrate that in your approach. Don’t let the perception of “Christian online/mobile” be that of “undervalued and under-appreciated.”

IE Day pointed to similar questions of value and our approaches in ministry in this post.

Disclaimer: Our hosting (incl. domain registration and WordPress administration) had been taken off my (Antoine’s) hands for sometime now. LW (name withheld) has managed that for us freely for years. And for as appreciated as I am that he has done so, I would love to be at the point where I could compensate him for the few times a year that there’s a request for domain/WP items. Or, remove the site completely and let MMM live completely on mobile and self-hosted servers…

When I am at a coffeeshop, I usually have my mobile to the side of me and my iPad in front of me -occasionally with my wireless keyboard. At times, at least when I’m typing on the keyboard, I’m stopped to ask if I like my iPad, or how I get along with the keyboard. On one particular day, a woman asked me my opinions on the iPad as she was considering one. It just so happened that less than an hour before she asked me that, Amazon announced its new slate of Kindle reading devices (Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle Touch 3G, and the (color/Android) Kindle Fire). I mentioned to her that she might want to consider the Kindle – and it was apparent that she had. And then showed her the image seen on this post – her expression and the conversation that ensued afterwards got me thinking about how leaders, technologists, and then everyone else tends to consider technologies like what is exposed with Amazon Kindle.

For instance, the woman asked me what it is that I do with my iPad (reading, drawing, then everything else was my response). I showed her my artwork, and then the notes that I’d written at a recent church visit. The notes impressed not just because they were handwritten, but because she could see the point in not just having an electronic bible, but an ability to write notes, highlight, and then have those available on any computing device she owned. It sounds almost normal to many of us, but the perception that you can disconnect content from the devices you read it on is still a new idea to many.

She asked about saving the data on my iPad and how much space it takes. I explained to her how I don’t save a lot on the device itself as I use the entire Internet as my hard drive. We talked about how Amazon, Dropbox, Microsoft, and others essnentially give you their servers to use as the hard drive. In that case, its not always a limitation of the space that you worry about, but how you are able to control access, security, and what you are comfortable with storing on another company’s hard drives (servers). She noticed that on the pages for the new Kindles that there was no mention of the size of the internal storage and asked why that could be. I told her how Amazon is positioning their servers to be your hard drive – essentially making the Internet your hard drive. Her expression again amazed at not considering before that you could take what seems to be a normal computer function and turn it on its head.

So what becomes of how we talk and demonstrate Biblical texts? Could we have moments where instead of simply telling people to turn to such and such a passage that we could have shared that bookmark via YouVersion or another Biblical service. Or, maybe as a minister who is an aspiring author, do we learn and utilize services like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and Lulu to disseminate our locally-created materials instead of or in addition to the traditional publisher route? Obciously, there isn’t a need to do these kinds of things all the time, but devices like the Kindle will mean that we do have to consider that our use of the technologies available will endorse the purcahsees that many are already making.

Or, we can choose to not see efforts like the Kindle as being useful or beneficial for our respective audiences. Which is ok. But, if you are in the business of content creation or teaching, what kind of perspective will that lend to those whom you say you lead?

~ picture via Gizmodo

In some recent conversations with clients/friends, I was asked if I would check out a few pieces of mobile software that were looking to be utilized for a few different mobile ministry projects. I used to not mind doing so, but this time I did. A few pieces of the software that I was being asked to investigate/review were core to the goals of those projects. In addition, the persons asking that I’d take the time to investigate those mobile applications had seen in projects or used similar mobile devices to the ones which would be utilized in those projects. They’d essentially be relying on my disconnected use of the software on a device and platform they had little familiarity with in order to roll out a solution that they felt met the needs of their project.

I battled several moments with these requests – not the least because they were being asked in the (usual) “please do this as soon as possible” tone. As I poured over how I would respond to the latest of these requests – I started wondering how it is that those who are forwarding efforts utilizing mobile devices and services could take steps to being servant-leaders of the technology. If you will, how could they take steps in their home usage to make strides to being equipped and knowledgable when in the field?

The first thought was that folks have to become more knowledgeable about mobile devices. Not just about the devices they can afford, not just about the ones their carriers sell, but about the ones that are prominent on the field to which they’d like to pursue mobile ministry opportunities. The easiest way to do this is to take sites such as GSM Arena and PDA Database and just getting associated with the manufacturers of various mobile devices. Look at the device that you own, the carrier and the manufacturer, and then compare that to similar models from the same carrier and manufacturer on those websites (these are two of the largest datasets for mobile devices online).

Second, at least in respect to the mindset of knowing what you are talking about when you refer to the device or service’s effectiveness on the field, is to purchase a similar mobile device to what would be on the field. For many of you reading, this means getting a second or third GSM mobile made by Nokia, RIM (BlackBerry), or any of the many Android licensees or purchasing at the very least an Apple iPod Touch in order to test non-cellular-based applications. These devices cannot be items left in your drawer either, you’ve got to use them regularly so that you know their positives and negatives. Load them with applications, burn through the battery with multimedia and Internet, and even share content with others. Get to know the device and any services you wish to run on it before making the decision to use that device and/or service in the field.

Side note: doing #2 with GSM mobiles is simple. You can purchase a prepaid SIM card from any grocery/convenience store or gas station, or use services like Truphone, MaxRoam,Simple Mobile, Net10, and others to get a taste of what its like to use the device in a manner that’s similar to that of non-contract markets/users (pre-paid; using multiple platforms, international services for testing roaming, etc.).

Third, you have to get over the affluence that is marketed all around you in mobile and chart a path that looks like those you want to serve. Remember when Jesus, after his final meal with the disciples , rendered himself as a servant and washed the disciples feet (John 13). Besides breaking protocol (he was technically the host of the meal), he also demonstrated that there are times in which you have to break with social norms in order to demonstrate the fullness of your message. This might mean that you have to get away from the family plans, bundled services, or even smartphones that you cary right now. If you want people to pass content from one mobile to another via Bluetooth or memory cards, then you have to make a practice out of doing it in your day-to-day mobile life. Do you want people to utilize a mobile learning curriculum, then you also need to be teaching and leading groups from it. For you to lead effectively, you’ve got to have some understanding of what your efforts will cost those whom you are serving.

The best demonstration of mobile ministry is the act of living through that grace in your own life. Take these steps in mind when looking to make mobile technology a focus in ministry efforts. Yes, this means that you’ll have to make decisions such as using lower-end mobiles, or getting by without the security of a contract and device insurance. But, if this is what your target audience is doing, aren’t you better able to serve them by speaking from their experience?

She didn’t offend me. She didn’t even mean to say it as if I hadn’t paid attention. But, there we were in that small conference and enjoying a conversation that was slowly taking its way from technology and going towards writing, culture, and the voices that are prominent around us. A woman who was used to having a quieter voice and me who was used to ignoring the racial differences between myself and the majority of the other domestic participants. We talked and she said something to the effect of, “I’m really glad you are here. You are doing a lot for other minorities who don’t know that they have a voice in this space.”

I’ve kept the moments of that conversation with her (and later both her and her husband) with me. I noticed the ministry and mobile tech cultures that I am a part of. They are composed of affluent, usually caucasian Americans. There’s a prominence of Apple and Android devices in some circles, the addition of BlackBerries and managerial experiences in other circles. At one event I even cried on the phone to my best friend because I was literally alone there. There was no one who could share my passions, faith, and perspectives with – even though there were several people there who had bits and pieces of all of those.

It feels like I’m in a group of strangers when I talk with some friends who feel they are shackled with data plans for mobiles they don’t understand. Oh sure, they get what’s possible, and will not hesiate to call on myself or other “geeks” when problems arise, but to them their use of mobile isn’t about broadcasting a message or status, its about keeping with the relationships that matter. Their cultures dictate that being the only reason for the technology in their hands – scientists, journalists, and engineers aren’t normal.

So I roam around cities and towns, looking and listening to voices that aren’t normally in my social network activity stream. I’m asking the mother of four how she manages to handle all of those kids while playing Angry Birds. I’m asking the young man who is trying to push out of the ‘hood and into a junior-level middle management position how his technology choices help him get there. I’m cobbling together what I remember from my French class and mother (who taught me French when I was young that I’ve forgotten too much of) to talk to people in countries I’ve never visited but have perspectives of connectivity that aren’t something the infrastructure of the USA is used to dealing with.

I’m actively listening for the voice of how people other than the usual paintbrush of folks are using mobile and other technologies. Problem is, we aren’t used to hearing their voice. And so to realize that they are doing something special, innovative, or even needed is harder to discern. I should know better because I’m one of those minorities making those steps forward. I don’t know better because there are so few of those others voices and perspectives in mobile and ministry.