Tony did a very nice job moderating our closing discussion on “CITRT: Where do we go from here?” Some conclusions:

1. When we get together in future, vendors will be invited and allowed to speak during the roundtable sessions. However, we strongly encourage vendors to send IT, engineering, product development, or consulting people – not sales people. We want to relate as peers with the upper managers who run the data centers, lead the software development, and manage the engineers. Regardless of title, we will start throwing things at vendors if they start getting “sales-y” and they won’t be invited back. We know when we’re being pitched, and it will make us very cranky! Also, when we’re talking about a vendor or competitor, that’s the time for them to just shut up, listen, and take a ton of notes. That seems fair enough. We absolutely require the ability to speak openly in our sessions without worrying if we’re saying the wrong thing or hurting someone’s feelings. As far as I’m concerned, people like Dean Lisenby, Curtis Simmons, and Nick Nicholaou (and others) have demonstrated that they understand our community and know how to be a vital and healthy part of it. Any vendor who patterns their behavior after those guys will be on very safe ground.

2. Our next CITRT will be in connection with MinistryTECH in April 2008. Can’t wait!

3. We will plan on two national CITRT events per year – spring and fall. Budget accordingly. Plan to come to at least one of these events each year. If you have multiple staff, you can send some to one and some to the other in order to keep things running back at your home church while others are away at the RoundTable.

4. The CITRT events might be hooked on to other conferences (such as MinistryTECH), but they will be in churches, not convention centers or hotels. A big part of the experience for us is seeing and being in the host church. Let’s not lose that.

5. Rather than starting yet more groups, associations, websites, etc., let’s look for technical ways to aggregate and leverage existing structures (tagging, blogrolling, feed aggregating, etc.). Eric Busby’s talk on Thursday morning spoke directly to that idea. I couldn’t agree more. See also the thoughtful post from Jason Reynolds on this topic.

To those of you who honored us by coming to Church of the Resurrection, thank you. It meant more than you can know. God is in this my friends. Let’s keep it going.

Here are all the Fall 2007 RoundTable-related posts I’ve found so far.

Tony Dye:
http://tonydye.typepad.com/main/2007/10/cor-citrt-pre-e.html

Andrew Mitry:
http://www.anchorite.org/blog/2007/10/03/pre-roundtable-at-cor/
http://www.anchorite.org/blog/2007/10/03/unity-in-the-body-of-christ/
http://www.anchorite.org/blog/2007/10/05/roundtable-roundup/

Jason Powell:
http://www.jasonpowell.net/jason_powell_church_it/2007/10/cor-senior-past.html
http://www.jasonpowell.net/jason_powell_church_it/2007/10/eric-busby-via-.html
http://www.jasonpowell.net/jason_powell_church_it/2007/10/cor-roundtable-.html
http://www.jasonpowell.net/jason_powell_church_it/2007/10/is-tony-live-or.html

Bryson Medlock:
http://www.bamed.org/2007/10/03/packing/
http://www.bamed.org/2007/10/03/not-your-usual-helpdesk-call/
http://www.bamed.org/2007/10/05/im-home/

Ian Beyer:
http://netplumber.blogspot.com/2007/10/recovering-from-citrt.html

Nick Nicholaou:
http://ministry-it.blogspot.com/2007/10/fall-church-it-roundtable.html

Jim Walton:
http://churchtechmatters.com/2007/10/02/church-it-roundtable-starts-today/
http://churchtechmatters.com/2007/10/02/citrt-day-1-pre-event/
http://churchtechmatters.com/2007/10/03/opening-morning-session-citrt/
http://churchtechmatters.com/2007/10/03/goodbye-citrt-hello-kci-and-beyond/

Justin Moore:
http://www.wantmoore.com/blog/archives/2007/09/28/church-it-roundtable-kansas-city/
http://www.wantmoore.com/blog/archives/2007/10/03/pre-cit-rt/
http://www.wantmoore.com/blog/archives/2007/10/03/church-it-round-table-day-1/
http://www.wantmoore.com/blog/archives/2007/10/03/day-one-round-table-wrap-up/
http://www.wantmoore.com/blog/archives/2007/10/04/church-it-roundtable-id-system/
http://www.wantmoore.com/blog/archives/2007/10/05/roundtable-asterisk/

Jim Edwards:
http://itchurch.com/?p=112

Jason Reynolds:
http://churchcio.com/hello-to-everyone-at-the-church-it-roundtable
http://churchcio.com/two-church-it-roundtable-goodies

David Szpunar:
http://infotech.lakeviewchurch.org/2007/10/03/whew-im-not-jason/
http://infotech.lakeviewchurch.org/2007/10/03/room-b-morning-discussion-notes/
http://infotech.lakeviewchurch.org/2007/10/04/church-it-roundtable-pre-dinner-wednesday-recap-and-more/
http://infotech.lakeviewchurch.org/2007/10/04/planet-citrt-aggregated-roundtable-feeds/
http://infotech.lakeviewchurch.org/2007/10/05/on-my-way-back-and-thanks/

John Ventry:
http://johnventry.blogspot.com/2007/10/church-it-roundtable.html
http://johnventry.blogspot.com/2007/10/great-round-table.html

Andrew Conard:
http://thoughtsofresurrection.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/that-must-be-an-it-guy/

Mobile Ministry Magazine:
http://mobileministrymagazine.com/2007/10/church-it-roundtable-currently-underway.html

Me:
http://appianway.blogspot.com/2007/10/day-one-whew.html
http://appianway.blogspot.com/2007/10/thursday-opening-session.html
http://appianway.blogspot.com/2007/10/all-i-can-say-is-wow.html

An open letter to all Fall 2007 Church IT RoundTable attendees:

When people started responding to my RoundTable invitation, it wasn’t long before I realized it was going to be “off the hook!” Little did I know.

My friends, the last three days go down as the #1 highlight of my ministry at Resurrection so far. And YOU did it. All it took was for you to gather at our place. That’s it. I honestly believe the planning doesn’t matter much because the Holy Spirit shows up, is evident in your lives and on your faces, and gets everyone else fired up. It’s a positive feedback loop. The more pumped you are, the more pumped everyone else is. Wow!

Remember when I said one of our three main purposes for this RoundTable was inspiration? In the planning for this event, I was very conscious that we needed to create opportunities for inspiration to happen. I hoped, planned, and prayed that YOU would be inspired, but oddly, I didn’t expect ME to be the one inspired. Our great God had other ideas in mind. I ended up being inspired – not by any particular content, session, or moment – just by being with all of you.

Only upon reflection this evening did I fully confront the fact that I’ve been considering quitting. I don’t know how long God will continue to call me to serve in my current capacity, but I’ll tell you right now that I’m not quitting. Tonight I have rededicated myself to the work God has set before me. Why? Because the Holy Spirit, working through you in some kind of mysterious way that none of us can understand or articulate, has reignited my passion for this work. Thank you. You have been an immeasurable blessing to me.

MinistryTECH won’t come soon enough …

Did I hear correctly that this man might be presenting to the opening session Thursday morning? Cool!

OK, so the Adobe Connect webcam thing at the RoundTable didn’t work, but at least not because we weren’t prepared. In this case, the cause was something we couldn’t have known in advance. Turns out that 60 users simultaneously in Adobe Connect sessions by themselves chew approx. 1.5 Mb/s. When you try to add 4 webcams to that over a pair of T1s, it’s all over, baby. (See Justin Moore’s good-natured ribbing about our bandwidth quality!) So now we know. By the way, it totally slammed Internet access for our staff as well, and they were a bit cranky about it. 😉

Second issue, even if the technology had worked, my “touch point” idea might very well not have worked anyway. Turns out getting everyone to stop at the same time and interact with the other rooms is a cat-herding exercise.

On the plus-side, the rooms are small enough to have really great conversation. My group in Room A has been outstanding. I’m thinking this breaking-up-into-groups idea is generally on the right track. Also, I think it was good to collect topics in advance and have all rooms generally discussing the same themes and topics at the same time. Even though we can’t see/hear the specifics in the other room, there is something cool about knowing they’re all having similar discussions. That simple fact has created a shared experience in an unexpected way.

Tomorrow we’re going to try to get everyone in one big Connect meeting, spanning across all the rooms. Not sure if UMCOM has a room big enough to hold all of us simultaneously, but we’ll see. Thanks for your flexibility.

The banquet and worship tonight were, for me, exactly what I needed at that moment. I hope most of the attendees had the same reaction.

Our own Matt Bradshaw built a cool web application that generates a web page from a list of feeds and auto-refreshes. We have dropped in feeds from people at the conference we know are blogging. Check it out at http://bitshepherd.com/planet/citrt/.

Overall, I’ve had a great day and I’m thankful to all of you who have come to be a part of it. Day 2 is tomorrow. Geeks for Jesus!

If you want to know about the Asterisk open-source phone system, ask Andrew Mitry. Amazing stuff.

If you’ve been trying to comply with my request to fill out Jason’s survey but have been unable, it’s because Zoho is down. This is outside of Jason’s control. (He’s sorry.) Please keep trying. Maybe they’ll be back up soon???

Churches:
Asbury United Methodist Church, Tulsa, OK
Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, MN
Christ Fellowship Church, Palm Beach Gardens, FL
Church of the Resurrection, Leawood, KS
Churches in Covenant, Carrollton, TX
College Heights Christian Church, Joplin, MO
Crestview Baptist Church
First Baptist Church, Atlanta, GA
First Baptist Raytown, Raytown, MO
First Presbyterian Church, Bellevue, WA
First United Methodist Church, Wichita, KS
Grace Covenant Church, Cornelius, NC
Granger Community Church, Granger, IN
Indian Creek Community Church, Olathe, KS
Kansas City Baptist Temple, Raytown, MO
Lakeview Church, Indianapolis, IN
Lincoln Berean Church, Lincoln, NE
Living Word Lutheran Church, Grapevine, TX
Northwoods Community Church, Peoria, IL
Perimeter Church, Duluth, GA
Pinelake Church, Brandon, MS
Pleasant Valley Baptist Church, Liberty, MO
Rhema Bible Church, Tulsa, OK
Seacoast Church, Mt. Pleasant, SC
Sheffield Family Life Center, Kansas City, MO
St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Church, Fairfax, VA
St. Michael the Archangel, Leawood, KS
West Side Christian Church, Springfield, IL
Westbrooke Church, Shawnee Mission, KS

Other:
Christian Computing Magazine, Belton, MO
The IT Roundtable, Dallas, TX
MinistryTECH.org, Edmond, OK
Trinity Technology for Ministry, Kansas City, MO

Vendors:
ACS Technologies, Florence, SC
C&M Support Services & Consulting, Elkhart, IN
Circle Builder, Santa Monica, CA
Fellowship Technologies, Irving, TX
iBiz Initiatives, Lenexa, KS
MBS, Inc., Huntington Beach, CA
Ministry Management Solutions, Orange Park, FL
Shelby Systems, Cordova, TN
The ACTS Group, Houston, TX
United Methodist Communications, Nashville, TN

If you don’t want the background, jump to the bullet points below. If you do want the background, here goes …

You may recall that after the last RoundTable in Houston there was general agreement that our growing group needs to include more people, but at the same time keep it small so that we can continue to enjoy full participation of every attendee around a table. This presents a paradox. Perhaps even a conundrum!

How we’re going to include more people and keep it small

For this RoundTable we’re going to beta test my idea to address the aforementioned conundrum. We’re going to break the 60+ attendees into four separate rooms of approximately 15 people each. In order to allow interaction between the rooms, we will have “touch points” during the sessions where we will be able to pose questions to attendees in other rooms and see/hear them responding.

The technology we’re using for this is Adobe Connect, generously provided by UMCOM Tech Shop. This will be a brave experiment that could fail spectacularly, or possibly be cool. If it works, Woo Hoo! If it proves to be cumbersome or we have technical or facilitation problems, we can always punt. With everyone’s input, we hope to devise a way for future meetings to keep it small for the best possible info exchange, to continue to include more people, and to allow at least the possibility of having a national meeting by linking multiple regional sites (an idea inspired by the Willow Creek Leadership Summit).

Since we’re using Connect to provide the A/V link among the four rooms, we figured it would be cool to use it to enhance the experience within each room too. Each participant will join an Adobe Connect meeting that includes the other people in the same room. That Connect session will be displayed on the projector in that room. Any participant can become a presenter in Connect, allowing them to demo, explain, or illustrate something by showing web sites, applications, etc. on the projector. Is that clear as mud? Even if you don’t understand the explanation, hopefully it will make sense once you see it.

Adobe Connect is an online meeting tool that will help us:
* more effectively exchange information in each room
* simulate a distributed RoundTable with meeting rooms in different cities

Connect requirements:
* Mac (any OS; Safari 2.x)
* Windows (XP/SP2 or Vista; IE6 or later, or Netscape/Firefox)
* Adobe Flash Player
* a broadband connection
* cookies enabled

To use Connect:
1. Set your screen resolution to 1024×768 (so if you present, your screen will match the projector’s resolution).

2. Download and install the presenter client:
* Windows: https://admin.acrobat.com/common/addin/setup.exe
* Mac: https://admin.acrobat.com/common/addin/AcrobatConnectAddin.z
* Alternate: http://www.cor.org/Information_Technology.41.0.html

3. Test Connect by going to the Chat Lobby at this URL:
* http://umc.acrobat.com/chatlobby
* Login convention: (1stname).(Lastname) – (church initials) (for example: Clif.Guy-COR)

4. After a successful test, you’re ready to go to your assigned room and join the meeting for that room:
* Room A – http://umc.acrobat.com/itroundtablea
* Room B – http://umc.acrobat.com/itroundtableb
* Room C – http://umc.acrobat.com/itroundtablec
* Room D – http://umc.acrobat.com/itroundtabled

5. Once you log in, Connect will set a cookie. It’s a good idea to add a bookmark so you can quickly re-enter your meeting room the next day.

Speaking of renewal strategies, I think Mark Batterson’s idea about a “church planter in residence” program is right on the money. We need a good way to use our resources to support church planters and make them more effective.