This is Part 1 of a series proposing a methodology towards implementing and understanding the implications of mobile tool-sets within ministries. It is deliberately shortened, and at the same time, should assist the understanding behind MMM’s specific expertise offerings.

Defining Mobile Strategies
While it is many times helpful to look to other industries to define and implement strategies around new technologies, mobile is one of those clear areas where everyone is still trying to develop a sense of what works and how. MMM is one of many groups at the front of this intersection between faith and mobile, and proposes a framework which might assist many of you towards not just seeing the value of mobile (devices, services, etc.) and discerning the impacts personally, locally, and globally.

Mobile as Content

Mobile can be defined in several different categories. One of the easiest ones to understand – but not necessarily the smallest grouping, is that of understanding mobile as content.

Mobile as Content means that you are seeing just the base elements of mobile as they are, before they are implemented within a specific context. This includes the devices themselves (Nokia, Apple, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, etc.), the software platforms (iOS, Symbian, Windows Mobile, etc.), and elements within these platforms (applications, web browsers, mobile websites, etc.). It will also include the data that passes through these devices/platforms (email, SMS, audio/video, etc.).

Mobile as Content doesn’t deal with the specific application of these items, it merely identifies them and recognizes that all of these are a part of making one’s strategic engagement possible.

Mobile as Content means that you recognize the various layers which can be used within mobile for your endeavors, and then shorten the list of what exists to those specific elements that you’d target for your endeavor. For example, you want to build a biblical text delivery system, then your mobile-specific content areas need to include the devices most prominent to your target group (which includes the hardware and software), the delivery method most likely to be used by that group (this bears in mind actual and used infrastructure, not ideal methods), and the content itself (and most likely to be used data formats).

After this point, you can start building out your contextual understanding of what can be done (see Part 2).

Reading is good for the soul – or something wise like that has been said before (smile). Just a bit of a headsup that the 237th Carnival of the Mobilists is posted at Blog.AntoineRJWright.

There’s another small, but nice collection of posts from around the mobile blogsphere, and as a whole offers something to consider when looking at mobile as something to add or hone as a part of your ministry toolkit (re: strategy and UX are important considerations). Take a read and don’t hesitate to engage the Carnival participants directly for more information around your specific engagement.

Over at Internet Evangelism Day, there’s posted an open letter on digital media and the Great Commission. Here’s a snippet:

…‘Inreach’ came first: Mission web communication has usually focused primarily on publicity (reaching the support base in the West) and communication (linking mission staff with each other and their admin bases), which offer a measurable return on investment. Technical and design staff have been appointed to fulfill these roles, rather than for a direct evangelism focus.

‘Immigrants, not citizens’: Some mission staff may lack background knowledge of the underlying philosophy of digital evangelism or specific potential strategies, especially older staff whose age makes us ‘immigrants’ to digital culture, rather than born ‘citizens’. This is also reflected in the current lack of training modules about these opportunities, in bible colleges and mission training institutions…

Read the rest of IE Day’s Open Letter on Digital Media and the Great Commission.

MMM partners with IE Day and several other organizations which not only see the potential for digital tools in missional engagements, but realize the opportunities and implications of the use of these tools. Don’t be surprised for more letters and wisdom like this to come our of the Body, we are only at the beginning stages of this digital mission field, and it only gets more fun from here.

Sometimes, it feels as if MMM is one part marketing and another part thought-leadership. I mean that more in respect to the conversations had with different people about MMM and why such a resource is relevant.

For example, one recent conversation cam about because the person is a parent of an IT-minded pre-teen. It is one thing to have kids which like to be online, but another to direct and answer questions as to why it works the way it does or what might be it’s relevance. We tackled this in a report here, but it probably begs to be revisited.

In another recent conversation, it was asked about some of the future of technology, especially for ebooks and education. And while it is easy to think and act as if everyone has gone iPad or Kindle, the fact of the matter is that these devices and services are still capturing the imagination of many. We would do just as well to talk about the future, as we do making sure not to lose sight of the relevancy of this to all.

That is part of the challenge and fun of MMM. And at the same time, this speaks to what’s happening more and more around us, IT isn’t just the geek and their computer, it’s the ability to use technology appropriately and understand it’s implications at the point of where it is relevant to individuals or groups.

For MMM, we engage the folks around us seeking these stories and asking those questions so that we don’t lose sight as well. It just so happens that many of the moments to bookmark these moments appears publicly.

Do you have a story you wish to share? Feel free to engage MMM to find out how we can help you write or tell it.

Just came across this excellent testimony of a communications center which has recently (April) been established in Cameroon via A Brit in Africa.

What is encouraging about this is that this isn’t just the implementation of tech, but the training of people who are already thought and opinion leaders in their communities, as they will be best able to teach and enable their communities in a “voice that is familiar to them.”

There are few discussions that illicit more views of amazement, preplexment, and laughter than talking to some pastors and adults about Twitter. For all of the buzz that it seems to be, there’s still a sizable amount of people who just don’t understand it – or rather why one needs it compared to (for example) Facebook or MySpace.

In conversations about Twitter, there’s usually the comparison to Facebook asked: “what’s the difference?” In the most simplest terms, Twitter is just the status wall aspect of Facebook. It’s not (necessarly) groups, conversations, or discovery – even though changes to Twitter and applications can bring those kinds of features towards it.

Twitter is a one-way conversation broadcast channel. It is unweildy for conversations, though it happens. It works well to following opinion and thought leaders, but you will have to cull through other types of content. In a sense, Twitter is a self-publishing platform, in all of 140 (or so) characters. It many many times fall under the pressure of several users – and at the same time, its speed in information delivery has ripped a paradigm shift towards traditional news reporting and consuming shorter snippets of information.

That all being said, this aspect of looking at Twitter as a self-publishing platform is an interesting one. And specifically for how it could end up changing how we think about reading, sharing, and applying the text of the Bible.

Two articles recently posted at the BBC looked at the subject of Twitter and the Bible. The first looked at Chris Juby and his attempt to condense the Bible into just under 1200 tweets (Twitter: @biblesummary). The second article expanded that look on Twitter and the Bible towards the various other persons who are tweeting the Bible, and taking different approaches to interpret and disseminate the classic text.

What are your thoughts on these endeavors towards re-translation and evangelism? Could we get to a point where the entire Bible is in Twitter (a Digital Twitter Version perhaps) and this decentralizes (again) the lines between publisher and reader? What about textual analysis – could someone understand the Scripture (for doctrine, correction, or instruction) in this format?

Let’s hear your thoughts.

It was a lot of years ago, but MMM rightly predicted and noted how Bible apps were going to go mobile and why this was a suitable area for companies and developers in this space to pay attention to. Now, let’s take our gaze to the future a bit, what could be next?

Know Your Past

The old paradigm was simple: developers licensed content from publishers; then crafted a user interface and added varying degrees of value to that content offering. This was usually done by creating a reader” to which this specifically licensed content, and the value-added abilities were wrapped into.

This worked well even in the beginning stages of the Internet. With smaller pipes, and few persons able to afford what amounted to a “extended licensed” content (license went from publishers to developer, and then content was made available to the user), it made sense that connected features (email, notes, send to blog, etc.) would appear also within these “readers.”

PDAs and Mobile Pioneering

Then we had those PDAs. Applications followed the PC paradigm of use by offering a reader and downloadable content. Some of these applications would even sync with desktop counterparts so that bookmarks or notes could be shared (remember, initially PDAs weren’t wireless-data capable except for a few isolated and very expensive models).

From PDAs we started to see the Nokia Communicators and Palm Treos of the world start moving users to this idea of constant connectivity. Bible apps for mobiles started to adapt – first in general user interface design, and then slowly in the adoption of mobile/web features.

From Mobile Boom to Realizations

Then came the boom known as iPhone, and this greater acceptance that people were more apt to want to read their Bible or have Biblical content on their devices before consulting a desktop, and even a dedicated application. An explosion of mobile websites and mobile apps for iOS, Android, Symbian, Blackberry, webOS, and Windows Mobile showered the mainstream marketplace. For most it seemed that this model pioneered with having a reader app that people would read licensed content would work.

But, something happened as data became looked at as more than just accessible anytime. A type of user workflow began to rise to the surface. It wasn’t so much that people were not using their desktop Bible readers and websites, but they no longer were using these screens in isolation from their mobile screens. Searches, notes, and bookmarks needed to appear on all of these screen equally, without the intervening of a syncing conduit (after all, everything was connected to the web already). These workflows and behaviors weren’t really new, but the abilities of the technology along with the flexibility of the delivery conduit made these behaviors easier to see and adopt.

The understanding and shaping of Biblical data even began changing. What was once understood on the print side as glyphs and manuscripts became chopped and reorganized alongside Unicode languages, metadata schemes, database types, and even the constraints of physical devices (displays, inputs, etc.) and their presentation layers.

To add to the fun, people also embarked on changes of their own. Now, Bible reading wasn’t just a personal affair driven by devotions and reading plans, the idea of going social set in. Doing more with your Bible included engaging within virtual communities, affixing a Biblical context to social activities. The Bible and biblical data was just as much about the devices and data as it was the behaviors and actions of people once they assimilated it. And so instead of just a group of trained (technically and linguistically) users as the primary userbase, we started to see various communities arise as accessible user types, collecting more around the social actions, but using software and services in a shared manner (for ex., YouVersion and Facebook communities).

So What’s the Future to Behold

A common theme emerges when you look back at this summarized history of Bible software, we go from technical abilities, to social activities, to new technical abilities, to richer social activities. What is to be gained from biblical software now then, it does seem as if all that’s left is to live it, right?

I can see a few distinct software changes coming to biblical software and the faith community at large. On the software side, we should begin to see more consolidation in terms of the larger companies in this space. Don’t be surprised for more announcements similar to the one forged with Zondervan Publishing and Olive Tree. It makes a lot of sense for publishers and software houses to align their resources as they are building and mining on the same data.

Look for a few companies to take an approach similar to Logos and their Biblia.API project. The benefit of an API is that you can stack data into new kinds of applications or services. For example, if you are a missionary who lives in your car (so to speak), it would make a lot of sense to map your GPS device’s POI database to passages you might have preached or privately held for devotions. Imagine possibilities also where augmented reality services allow you to embed a Scripture on a virtual location, but you are able to interact with it in the physical world. These and other possibilities are doable.

Also, we should expect the loosening of English as the primary language of our Biblical communities. Even as I write this, there are more mobile web users in China alone than there is the total population of persons in the US. English definitely served as the world’s language when there was only the G7. There’s the G20 now, and you can bet that all languages will have to be given space on the world’s stage for communication and interaction.

More of this thinking has been expounded in our post about trends coming in the next 10 years (also, see presentation deck).

Imagine This

Imagine this, a future Bible software application isn’t an application at all, but a validation key brokered between you, the developer who holds the API, and the publisher who owns the content. Your license enables you to read the content via whatever reader or browser you choose, and you have a limited license to share it with certain people or through specific regions. The developer, as part of their service agreement with you, gives you access to a panel where you can purchase additional API capabilities or upload your own contributions. And the publisher also has a panel, to which you can offer feedback, purchase additional licenses, and view the analytical data that goes into their marketing and research efforts.

In my opinion, we aren’t that far off from this happening. Will you as a user, developer, or publisher be ready to make the next change in offering or engaging with your Bible/biblical software. The idea of owning content, managing apps, and even browsing  is changing. What I describe might not be the future realized, but it does point to what are some of the likely outcomes.

For those of you invested in the future of Bible software, I hope this helps to address your current plans for what’s next.

A conversation the other day got me thinking again about some of the principles that drive the consulting and training services offered here at MMM. It falls into this idea of recommendations and behaviors, and how our perspectives of these drives how we value our choices with web and mobile tech.

Recommendations

Recommendations are probably the most common bucket of questions that comes out when a person finds out about MMM. They want to know “what’s the best mobile phone,” or “what are some of the best mobile applications.” There’s nothing wrong with this approach, and in many respects it is helpful to have these recommendations, they allow us to create usage scenarios around which we start understanding the value or relevancy of the hardware, software, or service technology choices we are interested in.

The thing about recommendations, and this is even true of the famed recommendation engines (AI, servers, and software) from companies such as Amazon, Google, and Apple. They can analyze clicks, behaviors, and even environmental conditions and then serve to us the created content (devices, accessories, books, software, music, etc.) that would likely interest us. There’s good money in it for these companies to have people use their services based on these recommendation engines too, as it creates a better engine, and more defined metrics for marketers.

In the same way, when we recommend something to one another, we are putting our stamp – our validation – that this item (whatever it is) is relevant and valued to us, and therefore might also be to you. This is one of the most effective means of sharing views and opinions, and no good magazine would be without this approach.

Behaviors

Behaviors are a slightly different beast. These are taught and learned actions which create perceptions. While a recommendation can foster or culture already existing perceptions, they do little to expand your overall viewport. Behaviors on the other hand, by their very nature, create, enhance, sustain, or destroy perceptions. Positive behaviors become references to others as a bar to keep towards (a recommendation); while negative behaviors also become a reference, though as a boundary to keep away from.

An interesting thing in respect to mobile and web technology is that behaviors are still at this stage (speaking globally, socially) where we are still looking for the best practices. If you will, we are still looking for enough consistency that we can recommend to others practical and profitable methods. For example, here at MMM, we’ve talked a few times before about taking a break from connectivity and social technologies in order to reconfirm to this idea of a Sabbath. This behavior is recommended, as it has been found that time away from those things digital enhances one’s abilities to rest, grow, think, and reflect. Such behaviors therefore become encouraged.

The other thing about behaviors is that once you’ve learned them, recommendations take on a different perspective. For example, before you learn how to read and write in Greek, you rely on various dictionaries and contextual references in order to discern those Greek words. You likely also rely on the recommendations of others towards the “right” dictionaries, applications, and even opinions. But, after you’ve learned the language, the weight of these recommendations takes on a different light. Because you have learned the system, your behavior is now that you can read and write Greek, and your reliance on recommendations is much less. In effect, cultivating certain behaviors, sets back the prominence of recommendations.

A Wise Approach

MMM has been changing over the years in that there’s not so much in the way of “what’s the best device/app/service/etc.” In our consulting, conversations, and workshops, we’ve found it a better value to people when you can direct them towards learning and discovering their behaviors, rather than simply tending to their recommendations.

Even in our various communities, we understand that we can recommend to people that they read and study, but it is only when we sit with them and cultivate what it means to read and study effectively that they create a behavior that looks like reading and studying daily (Joshua 1:8).

So remember this the next time you visit a website, read Consumer Reports/Kelly Blue Book, or even answer a poll. Are you just interested in a recommendation that will affirm your current stance, or are you interested in cultivating a new behavior that may change your perceptions. Both methods appear within sound consulting and doctrine, but behaviors are the only ones which will mature your perspectives.

This item is reposted from my personal website: