YWAM Information Technology

Does anyone out there have any suggestions or experience in creating a local / regional social network for our base?

We have been active on Facebook and MySpace, but have been thinking about a more localised or focused social networking idea. We've looked at a few different options, but I was wondering if anyone else out there had any suggestions?

Thank you for all your feedback on the on-line application form application. The application is coming along slowly, but we are getting there. We have been able to incorporate a lot of your feedback into the application including ways to hopefully address the varied application processes out there and the legal issues.

Here are some of the features that the programmer is building into the on-line application:

I just received an e-mail the other day letting me know that there have been problems registering on this site. First off I want to apologize for the problems.

Does anyone out there have an on-line application form for YWAM courses? We are wanting to develop one, but also don't want to re-invent the wheel, so to speak.

How much value do we place on our staff members time? How much time is wasted on IT projects in YWAM?

I have previously written that I think outsourcing is a viable option of IT in YWAM.

I am closing the Skype Poll that Stephen set-up and here are the results:

• 1 vote for "I think its a bothersome annoyance, just another distraction from getting work done"
• 4 votes for "Some Internal and External Calling"
• 8 votes for "We use it in the office for some outside calling and as a communication point from people outside

Stephen Schmale wrote a comment about the IT Outreach from YWAM Perth and I thought that the concept would make a good entry in and of itself.

What would an IT outreach to a base look like? Stephen talked about going to a YWAM base and being there for a week, and still having a positive impact. I know that one thing they did during their time there was to revamp the bases web-site, but what else did they do?

As I mentioned in one of my comments we are looking at running an IT school sometime soon, and one of the things we would want to do out of it is an outreach, so your input would be very appreciated.

Also, is a YWAM IT Outreach something that we could even look at organizing here, with some of us from this community? (GENESIS does similar outreaches to this, so there is already a model that we could look at.)

Any feedback would be great.