Going through some of the photo blogs I like to follow I saw a link to this story. After watching it I had a couple of thoughts. One is a prayer that God would use us as a team to approach a design problem like the one presented in this story using our skills, experiences, and perspective to radically change the intended results. The other thought is that I hope we will get a chance to tell stories like this story to better our mission and mission results. This video is just 5:55 long, but I really think you will enjoy it.
John Boggs Loves Twitter
Yup, John is set up to Twitter. Now if John can get there everyone can. I hope we have some fun with this, and at the same time enhance excellent communication on our team as well as nurture good relationships. I like the way Common Craft says it in the video posted earlier, life happens between our connections and now we can keep up with each other 140 characters at a time or something close to that.
I will be away for two weeks. My family and I will fly out earlier Saturday morning to Sacramento, California. We will honor my friend who has been the pastor of our church for 30 years (Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church). We will also get a change to connect with some of our partners who extend their ministries through ours. We are looking forward to this time.
On Monday, September 8th I fly down to Los Angeles to meet up with the Operations RD’s for our Vertical Meetings. Lisa will return with the kids on September 9th and when Verticals are over I will return on the 12th. I know you have heard that I am backed up on email (it is true), but I make an effort to read yours first so if you should need to connect with me you can do so. Of course I am using Twitter and I will use Instant Messaging as well as much as I can while I am at my computer. Oh and my phone, that will be with me as well.
Be sure to help Justin, Jonathan and Trent find there way around as they settle into work with us. Remember all of us had to figure out mail, the phone, printing, and computer everything when we first reported to our offices. So ask them how they are doing with those things. Trent will be engaging with HRIS (Todd and Paul Alexander will initiate him tomorrow morning) while Jonathan will begin to engage with Campus Ministry communications. Jonathan will meet with Paul and probably Ruth to begin to survey this area of need. Justin will be learning the Monkey workflow hoping that his computer arrives soon. Doug will continue to focus on MPD, but will also be looking at our workflow with an eye on how to communicate it so we really do know how we get stuff done, and others will know how to engage with us as well.
I don’t want this to get too long so I will close now. I wanted you to be aware of my travels and to again welcome our new team members. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, you know John will!
A Type of Entertainment
- August 19, 2008
- Posted by Dennis
- 3 Comments
I know you are trying to stay dry amidst this school and office closing storm. Perhaps this will put a smile on your face. It did mine.
See this short movie.
Team Meeting Canceled
- August 18, 2008
- Posted by Dennis
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No doubt you are hearing that Lake Hart will close tomorrow due to the pending storm. We are being advised to stay at home. In light of this we will cancel our team meeting tomorrow. Our next planned meeting will be August 26th. We are planning to celebrate birthdays, new team members arriving and honoring those who have served with us for 10 and 15 years. Yvonne has impressed us in the past with her choice of cakes and I trust will continue to do this again.
August Team News
- August 15, 2008
- Posted by Dennis
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We enjoyed our first team gathering since late spring. We decide to do a soft launch of our new year as many of our teammates were still out and about. However, Tuesday August 26 we will officially launch the New Year. Yvonne will select some delicious cakes to celebrate some birthdays (mine included this time), so you don’t want to miss it.
There is still so much going on regarding the work of this team. Several of our staff were flown in from around the country to be trained in our new CRS version 2.0 system. Todd sent this message out to some of those involved. I thought you would be encouraged to read it. Todd writes,
Although we had a few small bumps along the way, the CRS training went well. Matt was quick to put out the fires (I’m not sure how he was able to concentrate on the Oracle training classes at the same time).
We got a fair amount of positive comments, especially the look and feel. Thanks Jeff! I think people will have a better sense of the new or improved functionality as they use it on real conferences.
The big news is that our officially announced roll-out date is Wednesday the 20th of August!
Other big news is that Justin Kamiyama is at 95% of raising all his support. Doug and Lori Dawe will be joining our team, and at the end of this month we will be welcoming Trent Murray and Jonathan Beautfort to our team. Both of these guys will be part of Lake Hart STINT.
Twitter is gaining greater use on our team. Tina had a good idea to create a team twitter identity to quickly send out quick tweets for all team members to get. For those of you already setup on Twitter, search on Wearethelab and choose to follow. If you have not set yourself up yet please try it out (go to twitter.com). We are experimenting how this might contribute to greater “teamness”. Everyone that participates gets an iPhone. No, not really, just messing with you.
That is all for now.
P.S. By the way the Twitter movie is working once again. Watch it to learn more about Twitter.
- July 30, 2008
- Posted by Dennis
- 2 Comments
Tina Hood introduced me to Twittering. She showed me how Women of Faith team members message throughout the day and it impressed me that this very dispersed group maintains cohesive connections through these 160 character mini blogs. I think I have read that someone coined the term that twittering is micro blogging. That is a pretty good term.
Tina and I talked about twittering at length and wondered if we might use this on our team to draw us in a bit more especially during the summer period when many of us are away on assignments, working on mpd, vacations, etc. We have talked it up some on our team, and several of us have tried it on for size. It does seem to deliver a more connected experience.
Join us on this experiment. Set up an account on Twitter.com, and then see what team members you can find and “follow” us.
(hint Tina, Anna, Jeff, Greg, Mark and me are some that are already on Twitter)
P.S. It seems like a field team would really benefit from this kind of connection as they move through their days and weeks.
UPDATE: (08/13/08) We now have a team Twitter account. You can follow us at wearethelab.
theLAB summer work
It really is fun to watch all that is happening right now. Who said summer is a down time? This summer has been very busy. Here is a list off the top of my head that we have been working on.
- Summer Project Sticker (that was delivered at the beginning of summer)
- Summer Projects Hooray video
- Summer Project Project Yourself (this has run into a snag in that the programming team, FatCat, is now saying they can’t deliver. Yikes! Ask the Lord what you should ask of Him regarding this.)
- Summer Project Web site
- Summer Project I/I video (Gary is shooting in Israel right now!)
- Behind the Scenes video for the work of the Global Film Network shot in Austin, Texas
- Behind the Scenes video for shooting the Hooray video
- Tsunami story in Thailand captured (SimpleBulldog returned at the end of June from recording stories of relief efforts by our ministry in Thailand.)
- Conference Registration System (CRS)
- System Management Server (Jarvis can now through automation setup a PC computer with Vista)
- The Slice survey data reports (Yvonne and Shawna, with out the help of Anna this go around, got these out on time)
- Campus Help Center (Eddie is keeping the tickets cleared [Tina filled in for him while he did his tour this summer. She is really, really, really glad he is back!])
- Back2School Web page
- AllCallings.com involvement portal
- theLAB.uscm.org site (hey you are looking at it right now)
- Essentials materials/presentation
- Hardware acquisitions (Steve Van Eerden is putting an Apple order of more than 20 computers, and Eddie will be putting in an order for PC’s for LH Stinters, Interns, and New Staff joining us in the NCO)
- Our finances (which are always changing) are attended
- The Wiki enjoys ongoing management (as does 9 other web tools)
- Initiated discussions about our mail server system with ITG and CCCi
- Gathering statistical data regarding computing platforms in use that could or should influence future decisions
- Testing of various ways to use TnT MPD with a Mac
- Creation of a New Staff Technology page on the Wiki that instructions them in the use of various tools
- God@WorkPostcards from the Field weekly updates on the Staff Site
- Several LAB members did two weeks of IBS
- I trust ALL LAB members are working on MPD
Even in this list I have missed work that is happening. This is just what I can remember without looking at notes or logs (I think I have a little too much going on in my head). Really if any one of us had that list of work to do we would be sunk, but it is all happening as we work together as a team.
AllCallings
Over several months the development of what we are calling an “involvement portal” has been underway. It is a social community with a purpose. That purpose is to connect those leaving the campus and making a transition to the marketplace, but these graduates are wanting to stay engaged in the same missional principles they experienced on campus in their new work place world. You could say their new calling. It is a large undertaking as it has a number of similarities to the popular FaceBook.
Dennis was in meetings yesterday where he and others from our ministry met with the firm tasked with coding this web space. We are at the place where we need to hook up their work with our web world. You would not believe all the acronyms used in one meeting as we discussed how to connect the parts.
There will be a beta release of the site slated for August 11th. The goal is to get 400 beta users to kick the tires of the new site and help us ferret out all the bugs. We will say more about this in the weeks to come.
Tech Briefing at New Staff Training
- July 13, 2008
- Posted by Dennis
- Comment on this post
On Wednesday of last week Dennis had the chance to participate in the orientation phase of our new staff training taking place in Winter Park, Florida on the campus of Rollins College. More than 120 new staff now assigned to the Campus Ministry were introduced to how we acquire and use technology tools to help us do the work of our mission. We covered topics under hardware, software, and web applications. Technology tools are not forign to this audience, but what we use and how we use them in our mission helped kick start these new staff carreers to be effective in our quest to help turn lost students into Christ-centered laborers.
