Technology Volunteers Volume 3

Last time I talked about the types of tech volunteers that have really frustrated us over the past several years, and I have to admit that I was rather harsh, but none the less truthful. However, I certainly do NOT want to give the impression that we have had nothing but frustration, as nothing could be farther from the truth. We currently have (and have had in the past) many great volunteers who are extremely giving and serve very humbly. In part one of the series I listed four qualities we look for in volunteers, let’s take a look at how those play out practically in our tech volunteers.

Mark 12:28-31 (ESV)
28 And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” 29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

1. Loves Jesus
   Again, this seems obvious for anyone who has a desire to volunteer with the Church, but as Pastor Mark is fond of saying let’s not miss the big E on the eye chart. Its the first part of what Jesus said was the greatest commandment. We see this in our volunteers by seeing the fruit of their life outside the boundaries of serving in the tech ministry. We listen to their testimony and we look for life transformation. We are not legalists who want to see a bunch of rules followed, but testimony and behavior are the indicators of the heart, and your heart needs to be with Jesus before it’s with the computer.

   I have personally seen this in the lives of our volunteers, heard many stories of how God saved them, changed the way they thought, changed their behavior to be more like him. A volunteer must be willing to share this as a good relationship with Jesus is our first priority for someone, we don’t simply write code, we worship Jesus.

2. Loves the Church (global and local)
   This is part of the second commandment Jesus talks about, loving people. Loving the church is loving other Christians ( and loving non Christians, as part of the mission of the Church). Practically the idea here is being on mission with our particular Church (Mars Hill Church) to love people in a way that glorifies God. Our volunteers need to either be members or pursuing membership, to ensure that we are all on the same mission. They need to be involved with a community group, to ensure that they are participating in the community, being discipled, and loving our brother and sisters in Christ in a real physical community. We consider this to be very important to a successful volunteer. On a couple of occasions, we’ve had people who didn’t think these were important, they just wanted to work. It is NEVER NEVER NEVER just work, that’s a mistake in thinking.
3. Humbleness
   I have found in my corporate career that technology people are very prideful people, having very strong opinions on technologies and methodologies. I’ve seen many “Holy Wars” over stuff that in the end really don’t matter that much (PC vs Mac vs Linux, Programming Language #1 vs Programming Language #2, my framework can beat up your framework, etc). A volunteer on mission for Jesus needs to push that stuff to the bottom of their priority list. They need to recognize that there is an existing mission strategy with leadership in place, and they need to start by just helping where help is needed. We value creativity and expertise , certainly. We are always developing leaders who can move into roles of responsibility, but those opportunities are for faithful humble servants who follow Jesus who set our example for humbleness.

   I’ve seen humbleness exemplified with our great current set of volunteers. This is a group of extremely smart and technologically gifted individuals, who simply asked where they could help out with they first got here. Over the course of time, as they have served faithfully, they have made suggestions and had ideas that have changed the course of our technology strategy and influenced our thinking for the better. We need good faithful people to help us be better at what we do, but having influence is all in the approach.

4. Called to serve in this area
   This can be the trickiest quality to identify as many people have the desire but not necessarily the time to devote to something that can require a decent amount of time. This is something that requires prayer and very serious consideration. A good volunteer needs to be prepared to serve in the technology area faithfully for a longer period of time (think a couple hours a week for 6 months at least, preferably longer). Now, we aren’t going to give a volunteer so much work that it overwhelms them, we understand that people have very demanding day jobs and family commitments, and that is perfectly fine, we understand. A good volunteer though needs to understand that we (staff and other volunteers) will be making an investment in them that is time consuming for us, and they need to be considerate of that. We just ask that if we are going to make an investment in you, please be faithful to honor that investment. Don’t get me wrong, people do serve for a while and then transition to other ministries, this isn’t a life long commitment, but the key words are: “for a while”.

   Looking at our current set of volunteers, again, these guys took this to heart. They have a history of faithfully serving over a longer period of time, faithfully doing the tasks they agreed to take on, understanding that we are investing in them and trusting that they will do what they agreed they wanted to do. The have earned that trust with their actions.

In summary, let me say that volunteers have worked out nicely for us. I have seen our volunteers have a huge impact on our technology and direction, because they love Jesus, they love the Church, and they humbly serve in a difficult area that they are called to serve in. The entire tech department, and indeed the entire church, owe them a great deal of thanks, and we thank God for them.

Next volume, I will finish up by outlining some of our needs and how people can get plugged in.

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.

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

By Mark Blair

In our last episode, I had just completed a new version of the Mars Hill Church members site which consisted of some static HTML pages, and some dynamic PHP pages that was a Directory of Members. This was an interesting coding experience for me, a first time volunteering the skills God gave me for a Church based ministry, and I actually kind of thought I was done with it. You know, did my time, contributed what I could, and now going back to my regularly scheduled life. What I soon learned was that this WAS my regularly scheduled life, even if I was not the one doing the scheduling.

I also learned that the needs never stop, ever. I should have figured this, being in the software development biz as long as I had already. There are always new features, no real useful product is ever really done. If it is, it dies and nobody will be using it for very much longer.

So what happened? Well, the church always had a good public facing site that tended to draw a lot of attention. Shortly after completing my previous work on the members site, it really started to draw a lot of attention due to a feature called………Midrash. All the Mars Hill old timers are like, yeah, I remember that. Midrash was really nothing more then an open forum that any anonymous user could sign up for and post whatever they wanted using any identity they choose to make up. I guess we figured since it was on a Church url, that the discussion would be proper, polite, and appropriate for the Church. As it turns out, the Internet in general is not really that at all, so in retrospect it is no surprise that the things got way out of control on the Midrash. Things really started drawing attention when a Mel Gibson impersonator showed up and declared war on the English. You can read about in a book if you want (something about confessions and a Reverend).

When this all came to a head, I was asked if we could recreate the forums on the members site and remove the anonymity that had caused so much havoc. This was to be a closed forum for members only, so some random nitwit from some random place couldn’t give official church statements to the public like on the Midrash if he wanted. So, I snapped out of the delusion that my work was done, and began doing what so many people talk about these days, I re-factored the code.

I didn’t write my own forum software, that would have been way over kill, I incorporated some forum software called phpbb into our existing system. This including modifying the existing phpbb code to recognize people who had log onto the site using the previously incorporated system. People would log onto the site using HTTP Basic authentication and the phpbb code was modified (hacked) to use that login as a registered user. No anonymous users were allowed. User information was stored in the mysql database, and the apache web server used a module called mod_auth_mysql to authenticate users. Users were added using a user/group tool I created on another website, that was only accessible by staff.

So now on our members site we had some static pages, a members directory, and members forums. All this work took a great deal of time, as most software projects tend to do. I’m not saying this to brag, I’m just saying that I learned that God demands our time and not JUST our thoughts or money. I also learned that I enjoyed the work, and really felt that this was a worthwhile effort, even if it was really bad code I was writing.

I did finally learn to write decent code eventually…….but I think I’ll talk about that next time.

RSS Feeds.
Feeds, Feeds, Feeds.

We love our feeds at this church. There is an RSS feed for pretty much every piece of content we put out online, and we put out a lot of content. I have to admit, it is quite a convenient way get the information you want in this over bloated information age that we live in, the only way to avoid information overload, which in some cases can lead to insanity.

They are very convenient, until one of your feeds has an issue and you’re the tech guy charged with fixing it, then it can just be a giant frustrating mystery.

So what is this all about, well, we have many feeds that come out of our Voxpop network site. Voxpop is a site of many blogs and many feeds, but one in-particular has been troublesome, the Voxpop Master Feed. The Voxpop Master feed essentially contains all the latest blog entries from ALL the blogs on our site. The problem stems from the application we use to manage all these blogs, that application is called Wordpress MU. Now for you non blog geeks out there, Wordpress is a very popular open source application that lets you publish a blog and a feed to the blog very easily, and works very well. Wordpress MU is a version of Wordpress that lets you publish multiple blogs, and multiple feeds in one system. The one lacking feature of Wordpress MU, is it doesn’t have an RSS feed aggregator that would produce one feed from all the various blog entries. It does great publishing individual feeds for individual blogs, but nada on the one master feed idea.

So, we did what every self respecting open source user does when they meet a limitation of the software, we wrote our own master feed aggregator. Actually, a very faithful volunteer wrote one, and it worked great, put out a master feed that just about every RSS feed validation tool said was perfect. So, what’s the problem? The problem was feedburner. We use feed burner to give us statistics on RSS feeds (ie, how many people subscribe to our feeds, what is the feed traffic, etc). Feedburner takes our feed, then returns our feed to us, while keeping track of statistics so we don’t have too. Sounds simple enough, but for some reason, feedburner was having an issue with the master feed. It wasn’t automatically getting new content from the master feed. When the master feed got updated with new content, feedburner wouldn’t see it, so the feedburner feed didn’t have the new content. The only way to get feedburner to see new content, was to manually ping the feed using a tool that feedburner provides, but this is very tedious to try and do every day, so we had to find a solution.

One of the frustrations that we faced with this issue is that feedburner doesn’t really provide any information on their side as to why a feed hasn’t been updated. I mean, when we manually pinged the feed, it updated just fine, it said the feed was perfect, no problem. It just wouldn’t tell us why it hasn’t been updating the feed automatically as it was the other feeds. If there was something wrong with the feed, we would have gladly fixed it, but you need to tell us what the problem with the feed is, otherwise, we spend a lot of time just guessing and tweaking, which is where we found ourselves.

So, what now? Well, I began looking around the intertron, and found a feed aggregator plugin that someone else wrote called WPMU Sitewide Feed . Sounded interesting, and exactly what we were doing. So, we tried it out, and it worked great. It did everything we wanted, and feedburner was much happier.

So, we just wanted to say a public thank you to itdamager.com, and recommend this plugin to anybody else who may be struggling with this issue.

Thanks

By Mark Blair

Last episode, I started attending Mars Hill Church and around 2001 it was suggested to me that I check out serving in the Mars Hill Tech Ministry.

Writing code for Jesus, what a beautiful thing, in fact, I had never even heard of such a thing. It wasn’t something they stressed at the public University I attended.

So, what did I do? I contacted the deacon in charge of that area at the time, to protect his identity, let’s just call him Jason (some people actually call him Hugh), and asked what I could do.

He wanted me to work on this thing called the Members Site which was a site for members only that at the time was a bunch of static HTML pages that somebody had put together with a little bit of information on them. The design was nice but not particularly convenient. In retrospect, I wish I had saved a copy of it for historical reminiscing, but I didn’t know any better at the time.

The church wanted a members directory, I guess because they were tired of having members call the office looking for other members contact information. Sounded interesting, especially for a guy who had a little bit of dynamic web site experience, so I said sure and started working on it.

The first thing I noticed was that the members site was hosted on a FreeBSD unix sever. This presented a problem to me because the little experience I had in this area of technology was in Microsoft’s ASP (I had some classes in college that used this). So, I promptly asked to switch our site to a Windows NT server, so I could do what I knew (and honestly, at the time I was kind of a Microsoft fan boy anyway). Jason responded that we couldn’t do that because the hosting of a Windows NT server was like 10 or 20 dollars more expensive a month, that’s why we had the FreeBSD Server, and we didn’t have money to spare.

Seems silly NOW in a church with a budget in the millions of dollars, but at the time the budget was slightly less (or, like, really less). So, thus began my venture into the open source software world, and I think that crucial moment has influenced us in that direction ever since, at least with our back end systems. Sorry Microsofties, if you weren’t such money grubbers, it might have gone the other way (DISCLAIMERS NOTE: This last comment is the sole opinion of the author, and in no way reflects the official views or opinions of Mars Hill Church. In other words, Jesus loves Microsofties too.)

So, I had to learn a new language called PHP, and a new database server called MySQL, which is what that server had available to me. I got a book called “PHP 4″, and learned how to write really bad PHP code. I mean, it was bad. To be honest, that is probably the main weakness of PHP, it lets you write really bad code really quickly, and there is a lot of it around, including mine. To be fair though, at the time, ASP was about the same in this respect, as was most server side web scripting languages.

So, I wrote the first version of the members directory, and it served the basic need. So now we had a Members site that was part static pages, and part dynamic pages (Directory), and I actually kind of thought I was done with it.

Not by a long shot.

Next time…..more work.

By Mark Blair

I work for a church writing software.

Wow, didn’t see that one coming.

At least, that is what I would have said five years ago, alright, two years ago even. In fact, sometimes it is still hard to believe, but I’m here. It certainly took a while (in my puny human perspective that is), and I can’t always say I’ve been the most willing participant in God’s plan for my life, but God has a way of overriding what I think and I end up doing what he wants anyway.

My story begins in the year 2000. I was a year or so into my technology career when I moved to Seattle. I was young, eager, had an engineering background, and ready to tackle the exciting world of cutting edge technology that Seattle was so known for at the time. I also arrived just in time for the dot crash. Oops, now what.

Well, by the grace of God, I didn’t actually lose my job at that time, although many of my co-workers did, but it certainly limited my opportunity to do the cool things I had hoped to do with technology when I moved here. I really wanted to do something worthwhile with my skills, I now it sounds cheesy but it’s true. Although the company that sustained me through those lean dot crash years was doing some interesting things, it all seemed kind of hollow when I thought about how everything I did just made some investors a little richer, hardly world changing.

Then came the opportunity that was unexpected. I had started going to this little church that met in the evenings at First Presbyterian Church downtown, you guessed it, Mars Hill. I started in the summer of 2000, and around the end of that year or the beginning of the next (can’t remember exactly), I was talking to one of the staff who suggested that I get involved with the tech ministry at Mars Hill.

What? Tech Ministry? Write code for Jesus?

Sounds interesting, sure, i can help out, why not.

The journey starts…..and the story continues next time.