Over the last couple of days, Anthony and I have been kicking around the idea of ‘neighborhoods’. Social networks are replete with friendship based networks, and while I love the wonderful friends that I’ve been blessed with, they mostly know Jesus…so who’s my mission field? Stated another way, how can I meet new people that I can share the love of Christ with and invite into community?

This is where ‘neighborhoods’ come in.

Simply, your neighborhood is everyone that lives near you. Pretty basic eh? So why is this a cool concept? Let’s look at a concrete yet fictional example.

John is a community group leader in Ballard; he hosts his group just a little down the road from the public library off Market. He’s got a relatively new group with just five folks in regular attendance. He invites people to his group regularly, but they live all over the place! Ballard draws people from all over Seattle (and beyond), and finding the right people has been tough.

Jim is new to Mars Hill. He attended his first service, stopped by The City kiosk afterwards, and signed up to be “connected”, whatever that means. The volunteer that helped him was nice enough, but Jim doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do next. He lives near the old firehouse on Market, in fact, he works as a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu coach at the studio there. If only John knew Jim was in his backyard…

This is where the ‘neighborhood’ thing I checked into the code this morning comes into play. John would see in The City that a new guy showed up in his neighborhood (without having to dig for it), maybe The City would even say, “hey, you’re the closest community group!” and John could reach out to Jim with a couple of clicks.

A similar scenario could be played out with a business network downtown…ever wonder who works in your building that goes to Mars Hill? Could be cool to have a lunch group once a week, talk about your life in Christ as you work at the Columbia Tower.

That’s the idea.

I’ve written just briefly about The City, but as we get closer to launching the pilot version, I’m going to write much more. So let’s kick this off with a high level review of what The City is all about.

What is it?

The City is an online meeting place for Mars Hill that ties together existing community groups, service groups, and interest/strategically-based affiliations into a social network. This social fabric undergirds many forms of ministry and greatly enables the Ground War. It also enables linking the Ground War of many large communities (ie. networks of churches).

What are key themes in The City?

• Attractional - The City invites those not yet connected to form deeper relationships, get more involved, and become on mission with Mars Hill
• Developmental - The City is designed to show you the next step according to serving in your area of gifting
• Content Finds its Target - The City shows you information that you need/want to see (which you can fine tune). It does not deluge you with so much unimportant information that managing your involvement at Mars Hill through The City becomes a part time job. It also doesn’t show you information you shouldn’t be able to see.
• Administration at the Edge - The City is not centrally managed; every group leader is given the tools and ongoing training they need to effectively lead those they’ve been entrusted. For those business book readers, it’s more like a Starfish than a Spider.
• Real, not Virtual, Community - The City is all about real relationships, real ministry, real life and community change.

How is The City built?

The City is a Ruby on Rails 2.0.1 custom application developed and designed internally at Mars Hill. If you’re a developer or designer and a member of Mars Hill, come hang out with us and get involved.

Why not use another white label social network? (like Ning, etc.)

Stated simply, Mars Hill changes frequently and we need to have the agility to keep up with a rapidly changing organization. I also didn’t want to be tied into a vendor’s release schedule for new features…if we want to make something happen, we can do it.

When will it be available for Mars Hill?

Pastor Brad and I are working through the deployment schedule, but the bottom line is that it will be with Community Groups first, so get plugged into your group, go to the Syncs, and you’ll hear more in the next two months. A lot more.

Over the next several installments, I’ll describe each of the design principles in more detail, giving examples of what those principles mean in the life of The City. My last post, “Location, Location, Location” gave a preview of what favoring Real Community over Virtual Community, but I’ll outline this more fully.

I’m personally very excited about what will be happening through this avenue in the coming year, and I’d ask for your prayers for the team and the faithful volunteers that make all this happen.

One of the design principles of The City, which has guided virtually every decision we’ve made, is that the physical is more important than the virtual. This subtle but significant difference provides the foundation for understanding how this new thing is going to work.

A natural question would be why we emphasize the physical so much, I mean, isn’t this the internet, isn’t the medium inherently “virtual”? The power of the internet (that it is a globally prevalent platform for Technology) can also become it’s weakness if we eliminate the possibility of _local_ community. Let me explain this with an example.

On my Facebook page, I’ve got dozens of friends. Of those friends, I would imagine that about one third are actually in the Seattle area. The other two thirds are people literally all over the world. While there is a certain cool factor in having a virtual Rolodex of everyone I’ve ever known, is there anything more to it than that? Sure, if I’m planning a trip out to one of the areas where they will be, it’s rather convenient, and I get to find out that my college friend is eating a ham sandwich (a la Twitter), but that doesn’t change my life or their life for that matter. When you’re trying to build an intentional community, Facebook just doesn’t cut it. There are too many off topic, off mission sorts of diversions that the game aspect of the site dominates any mission it could try to carry.

Now, Facebook can be incredibly missional for the 1% that choose to use it as a mission field and network specifically with that in mind, but I’m trying to think along the lines of how you get the 80% to that level. The framework will either make a compelling community, or it will not. I don’t believe Facebook ever will do that for the 80%.

Ok, so why local community? Why build an application that is so “limited” to just the physical communities that people are a part of? Isn’t there a huge benefit to a large network? There certainly is! But I believe we need to be selective in matching the right strengths to the right problem, and not inheriting the weaknesses along the way. So we’re trying to make The City all about small communities, but massively leverage the benefits of being apart of a large network.

For instance, we just made a major change to our Members’ site. This is a site which formerly was an all-church forum (2000+ people participating). While it was very cool that so many people were on it, it also led to a nasty Pareto-like problem…about 5% of the people dominated the platform, and the other 95% didn’t participate. Well, that’s not community! So we made a change so that forums are now organized around the physical campus, so each member participates in a forum designed for just their campus, and participation has gone up quite a bit. I’m seeing many more names that have never posted before, now comfortable to participate in these smaller communities which are still part of a singular larger community.

So the next step with The City is to move even closer to where community happens…in every single small gathering where a member of attendee of a Mars Hill campus is involved. I’ll explain more in the next post.

A few months ago, I (Zack) was away on a personal retreat for prayer and Scripture reading. It was a surprisingly clear day down by the water, and the quietness of being away from the city was quite cathartic. Just me, my bible, and a laptop for note taking…the day was wide open for anything to happen.

But this wasn’t a retreat for relaxation, rest, or anything like that. I urgently wanted to hear from the Lord about the greater purpose of Technology at Mars Hill. Especially pressing on my heart had been the idea of community at Mars Hill…what does it really look like and how does Technology fit into the picture? Does community need Technology, after all, don’t alot of people believe that the golden years of “real” community was in the era before Modernism? Hasn’t Technology just separated us from one another?

I don’t think so. Anyone that comes to our Thursday night Technology meet-up at Mars Hill knows that I believe that Technology is an agent of change just like Writing, Music, or many other creative activities: it can be redeemed and used in the service of the Gospel, and that God calls those whom He gifts with technical minds to serve in their gifting.

Anyway, I was talking about the retreat, so I’ll have to set that aside for a bit.

Later that day, as I was reading passage after passage on community, the pieces started coming together. The City was founded.

Explaining the idea is always difficult at first, but let me try this progression to get you thinking along the right lines:

1. MySpace - first massively successful social network (I know about the others, but that’s just an aside), but MySpace was focused on the individual. Customization was highly emphasized in the context of the individuals page, with the individual’s tastes, etc.
2. Facebook - this took it the next step by generating social graphs around large physical communities (colleges, at first). This was actually a very productive step in the sense of the Gospel in that the emphasis subtly shifted to the physical and away from the virtual community.
3. The City - Radically physical social network of intentional and missional small communities (think Community Groups and Service Groups) within a large community (the campus, then the church, then a network of churches). There’s alot to unpack in that statement, so I’ll have to spend some time doing so, just not this episode…