Post from Joseph Gibbs

My name’s Joseph, and I work in campus ministry at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.  One of my desires is to see technology used more effectively to enhance field ministry.  Working for a large, world-wide organisation such as Campus Crusade, one thing you notice is that communication is hard.  Whether it be between campus teams, across ministries within a country, or across countries, I see evidence of things being reinvented because someone didn’t know where they could find information on how to do or build something, or situations where I would have loved to ask someone for advice on developing a method or tool focusing on a specific area of ministry, but I didn’t know who to ask.  I remember one time when a friend from HQ in Orlando asked me if we were doing anything for a World-wide Day of Prayer, but that was the first I heard of such a thing even existing!

Out of this need I have started to develop a website called “inConversation“.  Many of you read blogs by those in ministry within CCC, and you may even have your own such blog.  inConversation takes posts from blogs and aggregates them in a single place, and then aims to provide ways for you to find what you’re looking for from that pool of information.  The site uses RSS feeds (which most blog software provides) to pull posts in, and then takes keywords/categories from those posts which can be used when searching for a specific topic later on.

The other side of things is of course putting people in contact with each other – let’s say you discover a blog on a topic you’re really interested in/looking for.  You may wish to go further, contacting the author of that blog to ask them further questions, or start a discussion.  I think that this type of thing is one of the potential long-term benefits from the site.

If you do blog about things related to CCC ministry, please consider adding your blog to the list of those aggregated – you can do that by registering on the site.  Whether or not you are a ministry blogger, take a look to see what’s already out there (we have 17 blogs being aggregated right now).

The site is also under development; things are working well, but more features are planned for the future. Specifically, I have a few ideas to make it even easier to find information that you’re looking for quickly (offers of programming help would be appreciated!).

This is really a short overview of what the site is about. Why not check out more for yourself?

NOTES:

• If you want to add your blog to the inConversation aggregator, click here to get started.
• Find out the criteria for acceptable blogs.
• If you have a mix of personal and ministry articles on your blog, find out how to have only your ministry-related posts in the aggregator.