Today i’ve been on location representing TEAM PVEL at the first ever #churchtechcamp at Fuller Seminary in Los Angeles, CA.  What is #churchtechcamp?  Well the website says:

#churchtechcamp is a localized unconference for people of faith to gather and share their own best practices and “in the field” insights.

I’m sure this camp is just like other camps (foocamp, barcamp, wordcamp, rubycamp, etc etc etc… the list goes on and on).  A group of thinkinker coming together to discuss a topic.  It’s got all the pre-requisites:

• Speakers
• A live webcast
• People blogging about it

Being the first of it’s kind - and hopefully not the last - there was a lot of open discussions after brief presentations.

The morning has focused mostly on using the web & technology for The Church.  The main theme was discussed how an “Opensource Church” or “Church 2.0″ would hurt/help/change The Church.  Here’s a break down of the mornings talks:

1. Ex-CIO of Saddleback Church, Eric Busby speaking on Missions and Technology.  And the following discussions talked about how technology can serve “missions”.
2. Matt Frazier (or was it Lance Bauslaugh) then spoke about their “web 3.0″ app, Unifyer, which allows churches to create “sites” which users can determine which part of that “site” they see.  It’s a reaaaaal cool concept and even before I knew I was going to see them speak, I thought it was a cool product.  This spawned an intense discussion about 
3. Robert Yang of Kindle (a realtime online prayer resource) wrapped up the morning.  Kindle’s product really speaks for itself and how useful it could be to a church or community.

After a “user-generated lunch”, the afternoon was comprised of a series of “powertalks” about the church.  Quick summaries follow:

1. First John Saddington (Human3rror & gospelr.com) spoke about online communities. His site has a pretty-pretty powerpoint presentation on the topic.  I recommend having a look through it. 
2. Then Tony Steward put on the nerd glasses spoke about how to GTD (”Get Things Done”) and various productivity applications for download and on the web.  
3. DJ Chuang then talked about whether or not blogging still matters.  Which is quite a good & relevant question according to a recent TechCrunch article “The State of the Blogosphere”.  Are blogs dying?  Experts might say “Yes”.
4. Lastly Andrew Seely  to using Twitter (and other stuff) to foster community.  It was a brief yet poignant talk.

In all i enjoyed the first #churchtechcamp and I think it’s a great group of men and women who look forward to aiding the Church. Not just being hip, tech-saavy, mac users -but into a incubator of innovation.   It fostered lots of discussion about how the church can use current and emerging technologies to make a “glocal” (Glocal => Global + Local) impact to communities.

And with that, I’d like to shamelessly self promote my “freetime” side project: SOSOJU.org

hopefully it speaks for itself, but it’s in super beta right now. why i choose to code up super projects in my freetime *much to my wife’s chagrin*, i don’t know

But what I do know -thanks to #churchtechcamp-  is that gifts are to be used for world benefit and not for selfish ambition.  I think the secular (atheistic even!) group of thinkers TED, bears a similar cross:  How can we use technology to better the world?

Dave Rupert | September 26th, 2008 | The Business |