theLAB

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!

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.

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.

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.