Good technology volunteers have been and will continue to be an absolute must for our department as the Church continues to minister to tens of thousands of people locally and hundred of thousands (if not millions) across the world, bringing Jesus to people by using technology. We simply cannot efficiently function without them, as the current work load and the far reaching vision of what we want to do in the future is far too high for the available staff. I’ve discussed the kinds of traits we look for in good volunteers, and I want to examine what a good volunteer looks like practically, but before I do that, I need to show what a good volunteer does NOT look like.

Before coming on staff, I volunteered in the software development here for about 6 years as our church grew from around a hundred or so to the 5000 range. As I’ve said I’ve seen many volunteers come and go, and I’ve had my fair share of frustrations with people who had either incorrect attitudes or intentions.
As I’ve reflected on some volunteers who haven’t work out, I can generally classify them into two basic groups.

1. The first group I call Super Software Consultants. These are people who generally aren’t interested in doing any actual work but more interested in telling us what we are doing wrong and what direction we should be going (which inevitably is not the direction we are currently going). They normally have a pet technology that far exceeds other pet technologies and usually instruct us that we should re-create everything we’ve already done using that technology, this apparently has the effect of making us a world class development shop (since we are primarily an open source shop, the most common type of pet technology that has been pushed on us like this have the words “dot” and “net” in the name). In the past, I’ve normally suggested that if we would be better off with their pet technology then by all means they should go ahead and implement that and let us know when they are done. I usually get a less then excited look on their face, followed by reasons why they are too busy to do that (usually because work is too crazy) but that we should definitely implement those changes ourselves. Normally, they didn’t come back, I guess work got crazy.
2. The second group of people (I don’t have a formal name for this group) are people who really have a desire to help, but underestimate the amount of time it requires to effectively do so. My frustration with someone like this has been the time it takes away from myself and other staff/volunteers to bring them up to speed on our software systems, only to have them never come back after the second meeting because other things in life got too busy. I admit that this frustration was partially my fault, as I was almost always very optimistic when I saw somebody come in who was excited to help and I didn’t take the time to really determine if this person had the time and the skills to do what was needed. I even had a period of time a while back that I became jaded with other volunteers as this happened to me several times, but with the arrival of several volunteers who have worked out great, I’m not nearly as jaded, but I am definitely far more cautious.

So these two types of “volunteers” have definitely caused us some headaches over the years, and we’ve made some changes in how we approach integrating volunteers into our development process to avoid the frustrations that come with dealing with these situations.

I do want to stress thought, that more importantly, we have some awesome volunteers that definitely do NOT fall into these categories and who are great examples of an awesome tech development volunteer.

I will take a look at what makes a great volunteer in the next volume.

Though the Alpha sticker is still on The City, it is really close to coming off. We’ve passed some major milestones, launched some really exciting new features, and successfully enabled the church-wide Call to Mission efforts. Praise Jesus, it has been a really exciting time seeing The City grow up so quickly and see it become part of the DNA of what Jesus is doing here at Mars Hill.

More than 3000 people have joined the City in the last month, mostly through the Kiosks setup at each campus. As we value real physical community, we wanted to make sure that everyone on The City has actually been through the doors of the campuses…hence no online signup.

We also wanted to do away with the typical “online discussion forum” as that is just another way to avoid real community and replace it with a virtual surrogate; by doing so, we’re seeing the level of communication skyrocket compared to the levels on our old member-only large-forum site. Having right-sized groups that mirror the real-world counterpart, has driven the stickiness of The City (how frequently visitors come back) to low days of 50% and high days of 75%. That’s three quarters of the people staying in touch with their communities on a daily basis…it’s incredible!

We are very excited about this, as it’s real relationships deepening through reinforcing actual community. It’s technology serving the mission, not being a mission to itself, and that’s something I’m very passionate about.

As far as the road ahead, we’re full of ideas. We still have several hundred things we’re working on, some of which are minor, but some are gargantuan possibilities for this framework. So stay tuned!

In the last six months or so the technology department of Mars Hill has seen an upswing in volunteers seeking to help us in our development efforts. First of all let me say that we LOVE volunteers.

They have become an essential part of our development team that has a number of complicated web applications with only a few full time staff working on them. The recent upswing in volunteers has caused us to reflect a bit and attempt to communicate to those who might also be interested in volunteering what a good tech volunteer looks like (base on our past experiences) and how one gets involved.

Before coming on staff last year, I spent several years as a volunteer doing software development projects for Mars Hill Church. My adventures are are more fully chronicled in some recent blog postings. As I’ve volunteered fairly consistently for a number of years, I’ve seen other volunteers come and go, and seen several really great volunteers do great work for us. I’ve also seen some people come in with incorrect attitudes and intentions that has resulted in them not lasting very long.

So based on previous experiences, when somebody identifies themselves as a potential volunteer we look for several identifying qualities. These qualities are:

1. Loves Jesus - this seems like an obvious one for a church volunteer, but you should never assume anything. The way we look for this quality is to look for the fruit in their life, do they have a testimony, how has their life been transformed, etc.
2. Loves the Church (global and local)- again, seems obvious, but are they in Christian community, are they in agreement with the church by being or pursuing membership, etc.
3. Humbleness - in order to serve effectively you have to be humble. Technology can be a very prideful activity as people base their entire professional careers and devote much of their “free” time to various camps/philosopies of technology. We need people to make those values secondary to serving Jesus (See #1).
4. Called to serve in this area - everybody is called to serve somewhere, just not everybody is called to serve in technology, including people who are technology professionals. Serving in the technology area can be a fairly time consuming activity depending on the project given to the volunteer, we want to make sure people are going to actually complete such a project, as the entire staff and/or church body may be waiting for that project to be completed. This has everything to do with calling, and should be carefully considered by a potential volunteer as there are only so many hours in the day and lots of areas of the church to serve in.

There’s nothing ground breaking about these four qualities, but we have definitely experienced some heartache over the years by not intentionally looking for them in technology volunteers. In the next post in this series we will take a look at what a good tech volunteer does NOT look like, which will be followed by a post on what a good technology volunteer does look like, then finally more specifics on what the process to get involved looks like practically.

By Mark Blair

In my last post I talked about how I integrated new discussion features into our little Members Site and how the code I wrote was terrible. I promised in the last post that I would talk about writing good code, but I’ve changed my mind and decided to finish the story because I think its time.

To give the brief summary of the rest of the story, after integrating the members site with some static pages, a Members Directory, and a phpbb forum, I decided to move to an actual CMS. Yes, a CMS. They were all the rage at the time, and there was an endless supply of them. The one I chose was called PostNuke, and it was a fairly popular little CMS at the time along with its father, PHPNuke. I chose PostNuke because it seemed more determined to be completely open source, which I liked, and they had a cool web site (hard to admit but there is some truth in it).

Postnuke has worked out great for us. It has been pretty stable, it had a published module writing scheme that made at least some sense, and there were a lot of modules out there that other people (probably heathens) had written that we could take advantage of, which we did. It also had some semblance of a theming system, which allowed us to update our look every so often. We adapted the members directory to be a postnuke module, we had PNphpBB2 with our forums, and of course took advantage of all the built in News Items, Calendaring, etc, that comes with it.

This setup has lasted up upwards of 5 years now, which in my mind is a pretty long time, given how much our church has changed. But there it is, things do change on the internet if you haven’t noticed, and yesterday’s “awesome CMS solution” is today’s “so what, we’ve moved beyond that”.

So what is this leading to, well, essentially, it’s time to move on, from the members site that is. We are now focusing the vast majority of the attention on The City, which is today’s “awesome Social Networking solution”. If you follow this blog, you’ve probably been reading about it a lot, as the Pastor Zack has put together a great application that meets many needs within our now multi-campus church, much better then the existing Members Site. I’ve had the honor of putting in some features myself, and it’s great to see the next generation of software that will help define the technology of Mars Hill Church in years to come.

Personally, it is actually been harder then I thought deprecate the members site, not because it’s such a great piece of software, but because I worshiped so much through it over the last 7 years or so. Building something like that is an act of worship because I didn’t get paid a dime to build anything (not during those years), and I can only hope Jesus found my worship to be worthy. It’s still hard to hear people today bash it as seems to be a favorite past time of many, and all I can say is, it WAS an “awesome CMS solution”, and yes, NOW it’s “so what, we’ve moved beyond that”. I still think my worship was valid, even if the website is no longer relevant.

I’m also learning that God moves us on, even if we sometimes drag our feet, and it’s time, so, let me say:

Rest In Peace - Members Site