Today, I attended a tweet-chat (think: text-based conference call held on Twitter) that took a hard look at the mobile app economy. This was sponsored and moderated by Amdocs Interactive and Peggy Ann Saltz from MSearchGroove. Besides getting a chance to interact with a few folks who could spare an hour to discuss the finer points on this topic, it offered some things I wanted to pass along here to possibly spark some conversations in the digital faith arena.

Questions that Brokered the Chat

Here are the questions that fostered the conversation:

• Q1 – What are the key content trends based on real data passing through your systems?
• Q2 – What is the impact of the Amazon app store & what does Google’s response tell us?
• Q3 – What is the role of the mobile operator?
• Q4 – What revenue share can/should operators expect?
• Q5 – With commerce poised to be THE next big thing in mobile – are operators heading for a showdown with banks and credit card companies?

Of these questions, ministries and developers need to pay the most attention to the first three as it relates specifically to their efforts in mobile, and the potential hurdles that you’d encounter.

Observations

For example, I noted that one of the characteristics happening in the mobile apps market for digital faith apps is that there are two kinds of approaches being taken by new market entrants. The first is that of multimedia-text mash-ups in smartphone-rich regions (US, Western Europe). This is a case of “putting a new spin on old norms” while bridging the gap to other experiences to come. The second is the concentration of audio downloads of literary and learning content in other regions. In action here is the understanding that (a) connectivity isn’t cheap, and (b) access limitations means that people want to engage the ears before engaging the eyes (Romans 10:17 if you will).

That doesn’t mean that social networking efforts are for naught. I also mentioned that there’s action happening here. Social networking in the digital faith context has looked more like bringing along familiar markets to the future, not necessarily cutting new paths. But, its yet to be proven that social media is a consistent or profitable path for all opportunities in mobile or otherwise (the opposite is more true it seems).

Concentrating on those first three questions, if you are developing or publishing, you really should be paying attention to Amazon’s work. One of the experiences that eats at me is how hard its been for my mother to find Bibles and Biblical content on her Nook Color. Alternate app stores like Amazon, B&N, and others are areas where there’s potential for audience engagement, and longer-term relationships with people who might not have or like the brighter (name-brand) lights of the Android Market or iTunes App Store.

Engage the Conversation

Those are just some of the items that passed through this conversation. You can take a look at the conversation as it evolved through the Twitter Search or TweetChat links. We’ll be sure to retweet the summary posts made by MSearchGroove and any other participants. In terms of defining a strategy for mobile/digital faith efforts, these kinds of views are needed.

There’s a phrase that I’ve come to hate as I’ve ministered within the Church.  It’s a phrase that, more than any other, tells me, “Don’t try to teach me anything – I’m perfectly happy where I am, thanks.”

The phrase is, “I’m not much of a techie.”

As I’ve become known as “the computer guy” in ABCNJ I hear a variation of that phrase just about every time I’m introduced to someone.  “Oh, you’re the computer guy?  I’m afraid I’m not much of a techie.”  Some people feel an overwhelming need to repeat the phrase over and over and over again.  As if, should the phrase not be repeated, I might forget.

Typically, what people mean when the utter the dreaded, “I’m not a techie” is, “I don’t know what buttons to push, so don’t bother telling me any of the value this stuff might have for me.”  It is, essentially, a pre-emptive strike against the possibility of change and growth.  Why do I know this?  Because I do it for other things – any time I say, “I’m not much of a…” I create the same effect.  Bad me.

Look, I honestly don’t want everyone to be a “techie” (especially since it seems that only non-”techies” ever use that nomenclature).  Everyone does not need to be a geek because it’s not everyone’s calling.  I don’t expect people to understand how to manipulate a database, or change permissions from a command line, or write a shell script, or even have a clue what a regex is.  To me, geek-tasks like that are what people are afraid of – the “magic” which happens below the levels they are able to access.  Fear of that “magic,” however, causes them to settle in several levels above where they are actually able to access (lest the “magic” do them some harm if they came to close).  It’s easier to keep away from such dangerous stuff than it is to go as deep as you are able.

So I hear the phrase, “I’m not a techie,” and know that in the future I may get a call from them to fix a pdf in which everything has been aligned by spaces or to clean up a document where all the text suddenly moved over because they accidentally hit the right-justify button and were too frightened to click (touch?) it again.  People are very appreciative of my ability to manipulate the arcane forces of technology on their behalf, but in the end hearing that phrase just makes me feel lonely.

Here’s the thing.  To communicate in this world people need, at the very least, a basic level of technological-savvy.   This does not mean that people need to know what button to push in any given situation.  It does mean, however, they learn to press buttons on their computers and not be utterly terrified while doing it.  We can’t afford the panic that the “I’m not a techie” attitude grants us permission to have.  Why?  First, because it’s completely silly for people who are normally competent and capable of thought to lose their heads when a text message comes to their phone.  Second, because that panic shouts to the world in which we live, “I have no idea how to communicate with you!”  Third, because the tools we have at our disposal require wisdom to use well – and panic and wisdom to not compliment each other. These three reasons, when combined, tell us that technological panic doesn’t just make our witness irrelevant to people, it makes it non-existent.

So, if you suffer from “I’m not a techie” syndrome, I make you this promise.  I know how easy it is to succumb to it’s effect, and I can honestly say I’ll do my very best to avoid the “I’m not a…” syndrome myself. I just ask for a similar effort from you.

Originally posted at Painfully Hopeful; image via Life is Full of Interfaces.

A few recent conversations have me thinking a good bit about age and multiple languages, and how mobile addresses but also adds questions.

The first is that of the iPad and learning. I was approached by an older woman who wanted to ask and observe me on my iPad for a bit. This has been happening more recently as I’ve been drawing in public spaces. Nevertheless, she asked me about the iPad, what I use it for, and then wanted to see me in use with it. One of the things that caught me off guard was when she remarked that in going to the Apple Store, that there was too much noise and activity there for her to concentrate on the product(s) she wanted to know more about.

That leads me to this question: while we are used to a stadium-sermon approach for many aspects of teaching, would it be better to offer bite-sized aspects of content from church/ministry websites instead of entire sermons. Giving folks something more personalized, and maybe even having some kind of small group around that content that allows people to ask questions of that “shortened” content?

The second situation has to do with a friend of a friend who is an evangelist specifically to Spanish-speaking and Latin/South American nations. We were being introduced to one another and he wanted to throw against my mind something that he has been thinking about in respect to making certain types of content available to the thousands of pastors that he’s connected with. Amongst the many questions that I had, I again came back to this thought of concentrating on what people wanted – if you will, not filling the channel with the junk that people go for because its there, but with what they need.

Which led me to thinking about the way that we consume and approach media from different backgrounds. With the first situation, I could reference my context and speak to that woman basked on what I could assume (from a few factors). With the second, I had to ask more questions, many of them which he could not answer because he’s more or less designed to go to where he’s sent, not really to know the specific demographics of whom he effects.

With these, I am usually asked around the technical side of things: “what can we build to get this audience to do ‘something’?” And yet, the question isn’t really a technical one, its really a sociological one – and one where I am balancing what I know and what questions it is that can be answered. Believe it or not, its much easier for me to ask these questions than to solve the technical issues – however its always harder to get answers to those questions which speak to what exactly needs to be addressed.

Framing this into mobile…

Many media engagements are at the point now where they are saying with little to no hesitation, “if we are going to do this, then we need to go mobile.” Which is good. You are making an effort to think about and address the personal nature of some kind of content production. However, in “going mobile” are you asking – and therefore answering – the right questions as it relates to what needs to be addressed? Or, are you merely looking at mobile as the technical answer to your channel-filling needs? Because there’s a lot more to the channel than the type of pipe and faucet. There’s someone on the other end that has a reference and a need to be touched with some aspect of the Gospel. Are you answering that?

Is parenting is the most apparent form of discipleship? There always seems to be lessons each generation learns that the previous didn’t have. Such is the case these days with the use of digital technologies and how parents (who might not be so native to aspects of digital living) and their kids (who also might have their challenges, but not the same background of experiences in other channels).

There’s certainly a reconciliation of experiences needed, and we’ve covered as much in the past within our Parents and Mobile Kids Report in 2008/2009. Yet there’s always newer and clearer takes on the subject, such as the upcoming God’s Technology video from HeadHeartHand Media. Here’s the trailer:

God’s Technology Trailer from HeadHeartHand Media.

What kinds of resources have you come across that have helped you relate your values of life and faith to kids (your own or others)? What have been some of the challenges in doing so?

~ via Don’t Eat the Fruit

One of the points that we tried to get across in our BibleTech presentation is that there are several layers to mobile life that need to be understood if mobile ministry initiatives are going to meet with any success. Part of understanding those layers is indeed the relationship between mobile and faith. Another perspective of the layers of mobile life comes from the marketing and analytic fields.

For example, the results of a mobile life survey by TNS Global Marketing displays some of what could be understood from following, or not following trends in mobile.

See this in more detail along with other visualizations of the Mobile Life survey data from TNS’s Mobile Life website.

Just as important as these observations are, understanding mobile living also has to be considered from the viewpoint of what’s happening on the ground. There’s not as much data from those areas, so we are good to rely on reports such as Mobile Active’s How Small World News Trains Citizen Journalists and Captures Footage from Libya and the book Where Are You Africa?

Trends analysis (such as this one recently posted at Wireless Week) helps to get an idea of where to focus towards, and also where to look for those spaces where data is or can be best interpreted. You don’t base products or initiatives on those trends though. Trends – like prophetic versus in Scripture – need to be interpreted in light of the context in which they are given. And especially with some mobile trends’ data, you will want to get below the high-gloss level of trends to what’s actually happening as we talked about in the items above. That said, you can do a lot worse than Chetan Sharma‘s data – his work in this space is really well founded.

For mobile to be better utilized, this kind of research and data is needed. And from these efforts can sprout the kinds of insights that enable people to engage mobile not just as a layer to their lives, but as a wand to create better lives for themselves and others.

Note: If you don’t know what *nix is, this post will utterly confuse you. Instead, let’s go get coffee and chat.

Being part of a Christian congregation is frequently frustrating for me. This not because I don’t love the people, nor is it because I look at the congregations I’ve been part of and think, “Who needs this?” Rather, the frustration comes because most of our congregations are set up with systems that work the world of the mid 20th Century. There are multiple boards, various levels of permission structures, and several territories which must not be touched, looked at, or mentioned. I’m not wired to work that way. If there’s a good idea out there, I don’t want the person to sit around wondering which board as the authority to “give permission.” If there’s a (typically dusty) button which says, “Do not push,” well… that thing’s getting activated! I tend to be a rooted individual, personally, but when it comes to group interaction I’m wired for a more dynamic reality. To me, a congregation should be POSIX compliant – it’s a *nix.

Operating systems that are POSIX compliant (such as Unix, Linux, and BSD) are wonderful things. Instead of creating a huge, tightly-woven, thread of processes which are mostly “all up” or “all down,” a *nix system has lots of little processes which do one thing, and can be tied together to performed larger tasks. If a process is not needed, it can be shut down and the system will keep running as normal. If you’ve ever had to re-boot a windows machine when you change the network name, installed a driver, or updated the network settings – you’ve see what the alternative to a *nix is like. Everything runs at the same time, and to restart (or alter) one aspect of the system requires the entire thing to be temporarily inaccessible. In a *nix, you simply turn the one process off and then back on.

The Church, over the last 60 years or so, has been more like Windows than *nix. Or, rather, it’s been more like several windows machines trying to collaborate on multiple tasks without networking. So, if an idea comes in that needs a new process to run – the Church (metaphorically) looks for the system that has the closest approximation to the idea and then “installs it there” (usually by a board appointment). The promise is, in a sense, “eventually we’ll get the software needed to do what you want – but until then you want to stay at this system because if you aren’t here when we get to it you might not get to use it.” By the time the one system (i.e. board) is ready to act on an idea the users figure out that they need resources on another machine – only to find that’s it been shut down, and all the people who know how to access it have gone home for the month. If the users of the first system remember to bring up the idea with the users of other needed system when they come back (a month later) it is usually found out that the data (the proposed idea) from the first system isn’t compatible with the data from the second system. Then the first users are sent back to reformat the idea into a language that works on the second system. By the time this is done, the users of the second system have shut it down and gone home – for another month.

It is in this way that congregations put new ideas to death. It’s what I refer to in another metaphor as, “The Bureaucratic Nightmare.”

Now, instead of having several systems (which constantly have to be rebooted every time you even a slight change) I like to think of the Church as one system with many processes going on – like a *nix. These different processes can be turned off and on at will, and are designed to work together in order to accomplish larger functions (that’s the beauty of POSIX). If there comes a time where a particular process is no longer needed, it can just be shut down completely – allocating the resources it used to other processes which are needed. This creates a dynamic reality that can flow with the current situation.

There are two things about this idea that I want to share.

First, while I am frustrated by the “Bureaucratic Nightmare” which exists in many congregations, I don’t want us to consider the people who came up with that type of system as unintelligent. The systems created by a Bureaucratic structure worked when they were developed. If they hadn’t, they would have never survived. In fact, at least in the context of Western Civilization, I’m certain that the structure I’m naturally wired for wouldn’t able to function at all prior to the advent of mobile technology. It’s mobile, and the arrival of “pushed” data, that creates a human-network where small specialized processes (the ideas people have) can be easily tied together to accomplish larger tasks. Before mobile, a *nix metaphor for a congregation would end up hanging while data waited for someone to get home to answer their voicemail and, if it wasn’t too late, call back. With mobile we can send out a request and expect to receive a reply in minutes, if not seconds.

Second, even a *nix has an underlying core, or kernel, which governs all the processes on the system. The kernel tells all the other processes what resources are available, and sets boundaries for the processes running on the system (among other things). In a Christian congregation, our kernel is the truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ – the Gospel. That kernel is what keeps us “running” – and without it we wouldn’t be a Christian congregation.

So, here are my musings. Enjoy, and may your reboots be few and far-between.

This item was previously posted at Painfully Hopeful

In previous articles where we’ve looked at some of the applicable contexts for defining mobile ministry, we’ve only lightly touched on the specific discussion of Spiritual Implications. However, we did start with a focus:

theological constraints/precedents; psychological/cultural effects of mobile vs. other personal/connected technology media elements

So what are some of these in a bit more of detail? Let’s explore a few memes:

Theological Constraints/Precedents for Using Mobiles in Ministry Contexts

John Dyer (Don’t Eat the Fruit) posted about the 10 Commandments as a communication event, here is a piece of that post:

…The Israelites might have argued that the technological means they used to approach God didn’t matter as long as they were devoted to him and him alone. But God begged to differ, because he knew that the instruments we use for worship always reinforce certain beliefs…

Through our lens of today’s computer technologies, what becomes of the rules and the methods that we used to govern other types of technologies (communications – with an ‘s’)? Does the teaching of language structure, cultural context, also bring into the understanding of the shaping of the message and how a message heard in one context (for example Twitter) can shift or change the effectiveness of the entire message? Or, in looking back at Dyer’s piece, why didn’t Moses come down from the mountain with tablets for all 2 million persons? Surely, it would have taken longer, but wouldn’t the message been easier to keep with them? Or, was the device not the point, and there was something greater with the message that needed to be taken in that we sometimes miss when we take our churches into the realm of social media.

There are theological questions here. Let’s dig.

Psychological/Cultural Effects of Mobile vs Other Personal and Connected Technologies

We can also look at those spiritual implications as matters of culture and psychology that effect us on another level. Surely, getting an SMS conjures up different response mechanisms than seeing a paper mail message. An article that I read recently put forth a figure-ground relationship not just to technology, but how are technological affects are effecting how we understand and maneuver through history. Here’s a piece of that article that I found relevant and leading for this kind of discussion:

…The biblical archetype for hunter-gatherers has traditionally been the Garden of Eden. Savages are minimalist predators, and simply live off the bounty of nature, in areas where it is effectively inexhaustible.  To the extent that their gathering has evolved into agriculture, it is slash-and-burn agriculture based on immediate consumption and natural renewal rather than accumulation and storage of vast quantities of non-perishable food over long periods of time. You could call their style of farming “nomadic” farming, since they move from cultivating one cleared patch of forest to the next, rather than staying put and practicing crop rotation in a small confined (and “owned”) patch of land.

For the record, I think the Garden of Eden story has it right. Savagery is the most pleasurable state of existence, if you can get it (until you annoy the witch doctor or get a toothache). Not in the sense of noble savage (an idea within what is known as romantic primitivism that is currently enjoying a somewhat silly revival thanks to things like the Paleo diet), but in the sense of what you might call the idle savage state. In some ways, an idle savage is what I am, in private, on weekends…

And here are some of those psychological thoughts, some that shouldn’t be divorced from the understandings that we should get about spiritual implications of mobiles (all tech) in ministry.

I admit that some of this gets incredibly philosophical and academic, and to some degree might even by why spiritual implications might not as well developed or explored as other areas of mobile that we’ve looked at. And yet, I am determined to mine the available understandings and thoughts present so that there can be some merit towards our efforts in mobile/social web. Maybe then by penning some of those thoughts and observances, we can corporately better direct ourselves – and the world at large – towards the kind of thinking that is more proactive than reactive.

What might some of your thoughts be here? Surely, I’m not the only one thinking about this, but there should probably be a better (pastoral, theological, etc. framework) given to this segment of thinking that I’m missing. Let’s chat, let’s learn together.

Unfortunately, funds and life have prevented MMM from being present for this year’s BibleTech Conference. There is always a lot of interaction, fellowship, and techie talk that happens, and I’m totally sure that by this point, I’d be recharging my mobile for the 2nd time in the day.

Mobile Ministry: Definition, Contexts, And State Of The Body happens to be a timely topic seeing that now many ministers and ministries are seeing that mobile is where they need to be and asking questions of where in ministry mobile fits. This talk recenters the context of mobile around the term mobile ministry, and then points to where mobile has been demonstrated in a ministry context.

In some respects, this presentation answers why MMM was started in the first place (to answer the question of what the Body is doing in mobile). And as such, gives the focuses to mobile ministry areas which might have been addressed, but maybe not as strongly because of the youth of this tool/channel.

View the Presetation (or scan/share the QR Code). The meat is in the notes (viewable by toggling the “slide view” (Ø) symbol at the bottom right of the screen). Per our usual BibleTech presentations, the information in the presentation is designed for consumption and mobile interaction.

(Abbreviated) Live Presentation via Qik

Blame a few folks for thinking that it was possible, and me for taking it further than my hardware and experiments usually go. But here’s an attempt to do this presentation via Qik. You can see the live presentation below, or visit http://qik.com/arjwright and then click on the video noted Live. If you have the Qik app, you should be able to interact with the video stream there.

This is being done over a Wi-Fi connection and using the lower-resolution front-camera of my Nokia N97. I’ll do what I can to keep this interactive, but I’m also really, really experimenting here. If it fails, BibleTech again gives some lessons learned and applied.

As for the rest of BibleTech, catch it on Twitter (#bibletech) and we can chat about what’s next in mobiles for Bible studies and other ministry endeavors along the way.

Just a few items to note on this Friday:

• The stream of back-chatter is alive and well at BibleTech
• John Dyer has releaed Bib.ly – a Bible reference shortener which can work on any website (we’ve got it working here now – 1 Chronicles 12:32)
• Great case study from the folks at Mobile Active – How Small World News Trains Citizen Journalists in Libya – see that and other case studies we’ve linked to here
• Had a great conversation yesterday with Dr. Jason Byassee from Duke Divinity’s Call and Response blog – in the conversation, was pointed to an interview of Albert Borgman via Religion Online
• The Digital Evangelism Issues blog (via Internet Evangelism Day) has posted about yesHeis, a video clip sharing and outreach tool
• Lastly, ReadWriteWeb has posted how some are using Twitter as a means to preserve minority languages

Not being able to get to BibleTech has me thinking that I can do more to the presentation (slide deck) in order to at least give a better hint towards attending and interacting.

If you were attending a conference virtually – as a presenter – what would your setup look like?