YWAM Information Technology

Dear Colleagues,

I want to apologise for the sarcasm I used in this blog post and any inference that I feel all the hard work you have been doing is a waste of time. On reflection, I think I have erred in the way I have written this post. I also have confused some by posting under the subject of Ethics. I meant this in the abstract sense of Communication being an important Ethic, not that people have made poor ethical choices (they have not).

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.

The need for a dynamic collaboration tool and info repository for YWAM came out in some of the group discussions at CRIT'05 in Colorado Springs. During CRIT'05 a Knowledge Base group was formed to keep looking at this area. Here are some reflections on that.

I know that for me at times it has been a struggle to keep up with the volume of support that is required here. I have been quite distant and jaded towards helping people at times and it's gotten to the point where people would rather live with the problem then have to talk to me about it.

Obviously this is not a good position to be in for tech support, or for me as an individual. It is definately not displaying a Christ-like servant attitude.

Rachel Cunliffe over at the cre6 design blog had a very challenging post for those of us working in YWAM IT, or any tech support in general. The gist of her post is that those of us working in tech or web support need to be easier to approach and more accessible. Her post is from a web developers position, but it would work for us well.

This is something that we have been trying to cultivate a bit on on this site. Sometimes however some of the comments have actually gotten a bit too out of hand (especially that Mac vs PC post that is up here somewhere). I think that sometimes we need to pull our head in a bit, get over it and remember why we are doing what we are doing, and that is to Expand God's Kindom.

You can read Rachel's entire post here:

• cre8 blog: single-most important personal attribute

What are some things that you do to make sure that people can actually talk to you when they have problems? In addition to that, how do you balance being able to help people and still be able to complete all the other work that you need to do?

I have been writing about how we "do" technology and I have been talking about the importance of commodity technology for YWAM. Commodity IT today is Windows PCs, Macs, Email, MSWord, Skype and similar "no-brainer", plug and play technologies. Commodity IT is important to us because is allows us to benifit from the 80/20 rule -- we can get 80% of the benefit of technology by outputting 20% of the effort.

Hi gang,

 Just was looking at a few blogs coming off of ZD Net that things to watch and could be relevant for us in the future. Take a look at these links...

Microsoft pushes standardized SOS at RSA

Why standardization is necessary

Why Wikipedia is the next big thing

It would be great to hear some of your commets on these topics. 

The way we view YWAM affects the kind of IT systems that we build.

To illustrate how our view of YWAM affects IT, this lets look at the area of web presence of YWAMers and YWAM ministries. Leaders across the mission see different things when they see YWAM.