Some initial thoughts and web applications for IVCF Staff and fellowships
I have been in a number of conversations
recently with friends and colleagues about how technology could be used to help
staff and our fellowship better serve students, the campus, and those who
partners with us through support and prayer.
Around the country staff and student
leaders are innovating in order to better serve the campus. At the same time many of our friends and colleagues
are spending innumerable hours reinventing the wheel if for no other reason
than the previous inventors have not had the forum to share these ideas. The
purpose of this website as a whole is to begin the process of sharing, particularly
in the area of technology. In the
Silicon Valley we have been using some of these technologies since the late 90’s. My hope and prayer is that this blog will
enable the innovators around the country to go beyond inventing the wheel and
begin putting their creativity into other things like inventing the bicycle,
the car or things that I haven’t even dreamed off.
As I have been thinking about not reinventing
the wheel with my technology I realized that I have been reinventing the same
email to describe to a number of staff some of the things that I have seen and
been using. The purpose of this blog
post is to get beyond this wheel and move onto other things.
Below are some links and descriptions to
some of the technologies that I think are very helpful for ministry and that I
think more folks should consider using. Enjoy.
Event management:
Surveys
Shared pre-formatted tables:
New Student Outreach tool:
This integrates a campus website guestbook and creates a online
database where student information can be stored. Information entered
into it is automatically forwarded to the appropriate small group leaders or
other contact people. Student leaders staff/ can use this to track follow-up
with students. It is an ideal solution to add information collected from
fellowship meetings, small groups, and public area tables since it enables all
this data to be collected in one central location. It deals well with duplicate
entries.
To test it visit: www.ivevents.com/nsoapp. the sample guestbook
for the test campus can be accessed at: http://www.ivevents.com/nsoapp/pagaddself.cfm?campusID=6.
To see an implementation of this see the guestbook tab at www.ivstanford.org.
Portal site
One portal site that is more exciting than most of what I have
going on is www.studentjourney.org.
This enables easy creation of simple campus sites for their region and much
more.
File Sharing/Publishing
Currently implemented (but under utilized) at www.intervarsity.org/mx.
It is also present in many other context (www.studentjourney.org,
www.ivevents.com,
www.bayup.org
etc).
Calendaring (cal support, shared
calendars, published calendars etc)
This is stuff that most folks in the enterprise
world utilize a lot but underutilized by staff. Some staff are beginning to
share Google calendars which could potentially meet a lot of our need. At
Stanford we are beginning to publish our campus ministry calendar which can be
used by Area and Regional staff when scheduling events or students when they
are planning plane flights home. If a standardized
format was used (like ical) then staff would be able to spend a lot less time
trying to figure out which dates everyone is free and could spend more of their
time making the events worth the time we will spend at them!
Google Spreadsheets/Docs
This has been a wonderful tool for our teams collaboration on
things like teaching series, brainstorming lists, and tactical oriented staff
meetings. The online collaboration is really nice. We primarily use it during
our staff meetings as an alternative to a whiteboard.
Jon Paris Team Leader IVCF at Stanford, 2-8-07