anchorite.org

With all the buzz about the Coptic Mission, I thought I would take this chance to share a little about the their technology infrastructure. My wife, Sherry, and I have had the blessing of serving in the mission with His Grace Bishop Paul numerous times during the past eight years. In the fall of 2004, we got the opportunity to go to East Africa for an extended stay, during this time one of our major responsibilities was to establish the information technology infrastructure for the Coptic Hospital and Hope Center in Nairobi, Kenya.

Our goal was to setup a scalable network infrastructure from the ground up, the current setup consisted of only a few computers running Windows 98 and they weren’t networked. We needed to support five different buildings and about one hundred users to start with the expectation of rapid growth. Before leaving the United States, we packed up and sent over in a container one new server, a few used servers, several desktops, a 220V UPS, switches, server cabinet and a 45KW generator. We did get some funding from the US Agency for International Development to help cover costs.

When we got there, we trained the electricians on staff how to run and terminate CAT5E cabling. We purchased the cabling, jacks and patch panels locally. Within a few weeks (and after a lot of drilling, the buildings are all cement/block) we had most of the compound cabled. As that none of the building are more that 200ft apart, we used copper for the gigabit uplinks.

The mission had a lot of donated old hardware sitting in storage, so we brainstormed how we could effectively use that equipment. We decided to use Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP), specifically the K12 LTSP distribution. LTSP allowed us to use the old computers as dumb terminals and rely on the server for all the processing horsepower. We also could ship over small thin client computers rather than full desktops when additional client are needed.

K12 LTSP included most of the applications they needed, mainly OpenOffice.org and Firefox. Paul Kist, a developer from New York, came out and built a custom web based electronic medical record application running on LAMP for them.

The web based application was key as they expanded to multiple sites, they setup up satellite internet connections and were able to update the database using a web browser across an SSL connection without any advanced configuration necessary.

On a more recent note, we recently helped them launched CopticMission.org, running on Drupal 5. They perform all the content management from Kenya.

As President Bush mentioned in his speech, the Hope Center (and affiliated Hospital) has seen substantial growth in the past three years, God willing we can continue to scale the technology infrastructure along with it.

Yesterday, President George W. Bush, in a speech on HIV/AIDS, praised the Coptic Hope Center in Nairobi, Kenya and thanked the director, His Grace Bishop Paul.

From the President’s speech…

Play the video, the Coptic Hope Center is highlighted at 5:45, and the President takes pictures with the Bishop near the end.

The Hope Center is one of many projects belonging to the Coptic Mission in Africa which operates under the care of His Grace Bishop Paul.

Update: I was able to obtain additional pictures and higher quality footage.

Photo Album / DivX Video (78 MB) / QuickTime Video (205 MB) / DVD ISO (625 MB)

(more…)

BLOGOS: The Feast of Pentecost: Unity and Diversity

Geeks & God: VoIP and Your Church Podcast

Geeks are Sexy: Dell finally ships Linux PCs

Micro Persuasion: Tips for Starting and Maintaining a Blog

Seth Godin: Alignment

Worship Tech Online: Service

I had pre-ordered the blogging church, by Brian Bailey with Terry Storch but I didn’t get a chance to read it until a couple of weeks ago while I was on vacation. I definitely recommend reading it if you want to understand more about blogging, have your own blog or want to start one.

There a lot of benefits to blogging as well as a few downsides, the blogging church goes over them all, painting an enthusiastic picture for those willing to invest in the blogosphere. Also included are several interviews with prominent bloggers, giving real life examples and advice.

I hope and pray that the blogging church will encourage ever increasing participation from church leaders and members in the online community.

Read more reviews or check out the video…

Yesterday, by the grace of God, we had a successful launch to the Washington, DC Church IT RoundTable. David Russell has pictures, audio and more here. One thing David forgot to mention is that Mark Batterson popped by and soaked in a few tech vibes, we also got a tour of their quasi coffeehouse/church/office facilities. I am already looking forward to the next meeting, noon on August 24 at St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Church.

Just a reminder…

The first Washington, DC Metro Church IT RoundTable will be meeting at Ebenezers, tomorrow, May 24th at noon.

Tony Morgan of Simply Strategic fame, started off Saturday morning with his keynote speech, “10 Stupid Technology Mistakes that Churches Make.” Having made a few of these mistakes myself, the list is a great guide to remember. Jeff Bull has additional notes here. Next, Tony and Terry headed up a fun unconference session, answering questions about their various endeavors. My last session was an unconference about Online Giving, where I threw up a few suggestions for tweaks in the online giving and weblink setup.

After a great steak at Texas Land & Cattle, we headed over to Prestonwood Baptist Church for a tour. They weren’t joking that everything in Texas is big, I think the hallway in this church is larger than our sanctuary! We took a close look at how they process check-in for junior high, they use barcoded tags/stickers that the kids flash by a scanner as they enter. They encourage the kids to place the sticker on their cell phones so they don’t forget/lose them. The whole process for check-in takes seconds and they get a pretty accurate attendance count. As promised, here are all the pictures I took.

The last couple of days were nonstop so I didn’t get a chance to post on the rest of the Dynamic Church conference until now. Curtis Simmons kicked off the second day with a keynote address on where they are going with Fellowship One. The roadmap definitely looks exciting and I pray that God guides and leads them as they decide what has priority. Curtis mentioned the upcoming release of a Digg style site where Fellowship One users can submit and vote on what features they want.

Next up was Terry Storch, who introduced some of the out of the box ideas that he is a part of at LifeChurch.tv. They are using everything from Second Life to set-top boxes to “maximize reach” on the Internet. See posts by Terry, Jeff and Eric for more details.

Staying on the techie track, I headed over to Nick Floyd’s session on “Consuming DataExchange: Platform and Language Independent.” To give us a picture of what can be done with DataExchange, Nick setup a demo where he simulated a scenario between a volunteer on the greeting ministry and a first time visitor. He used his mobile phone to capture the contact info and push it back to Fellowship One. Nick wrote up all the details on how he made it happen here. Nick explained that DataExchange is Fellowship One’s XML-RPC API. He also, explained that they support versioning, so that if we write an application and they make an update it won’t break, they will always support previous versions. We are hoping to use DataExchange to provide a customized user experience on our next release of stmarkdc.org.

For the afternoon I took leave of the technology track and bounced into a session on “Check 21 and the Local Church” by Curtis Simmons. The session was informative, explaining the difference between Check 21 and ARC and how Fellowship One hopes to provide support for both in a single, integrated solution. I am sure our finance department will love the new tech.

Curtis Harris highlighted a few of the upcoming features on the roadmap, two things caught my attention. First, the availability of attributes via DataExchange, this would allow us to store and access any kind of user data and connect our website or any other application to it. Second, the release of a web site content management system (cms). A web site cms that is already integrated with Fellowship One is a great feature that will allow churches to establish a dynamic online presence quickly.

John and I hung out with my cousin Christine Eskander and her husband Mina for the evening. They are volunteers at Saint Mary Coptic Orthodox Church in Coleyville, Texas. We spend the evening talking about technology and service. The Wednesday night service at their church has taken off and they mentioned that His Grace Bishop Youssef will be starting a series soon. If you are in the area, it is definitely worth checking out – hopefully we will be able to watch online as well.

Congratulation to John and Lisa Basta on their new baby boy, Zion Noah Basta.

John barely made back in time from the Dynamic Church Conference to escort Lisa into the delivery room. Thanks be to God, Zion came out a healthy, happy and big baby.

We started off the day at 3:30 AM, heading out to Dulles airport to catch the early bird flight to Dallas, TX. Thankfully, John and I both got a little shut eye on the flight. After a checking into our hotel and pick up some grub we headed over to the conference center to check in.

Of course, Fellowship Technologies checked us in to the conference using their check-in kiosk, all went smoothly and we were ready to delve right into the sessions. I chose the Maximize Technology track, where the focus is in web integration and data exchange (the F1 API). The first session in the track was given by Tim Hardy on Mass Synchronization with Fellowship One DataExchange. I ended up sitting next to Andy Lang from Bethlehem Baptist Church, turns out that they were already using the API to customize the web experience for their site visitors based on status (member, prospect, etc). In a very kind gesture, he copied the code they used over to my usb thumb drive so that we could use it as an example for our own site.

Tim gave various examples of applications for their Data Exchange API, most of them were about batch synchronization with other sets of data that are outside of F1. He walked us through how you can take data collected via a simple spreadsheet (name and email), convert into XML and using a small app he wrote upload it into F1. The app would work with API to check if the records already existed, if they did not it would create a new record with using a defined status.

As they continue to grow and develop the F1 API, they are working towards REST compliance, which would allow access to the data directly via http requests without having to use SOAP. That is great news for all of us copy/paste engineers because it would allow us much deeper data access without having to delve deep into XML.

Curtis Simmons, with quite a bit of spunk, delivered the next session, Dynamic Websites with Fellowship One DataExchange. Curtis illustrates the two different methods of integrating F1 into your church website, pop-up versus embedded. The pop-up method is just a snippet of javascript that you paste into your site that generates a pop-up login window. The embedded method is more complex because the church site must manage the cookies, but it does allow for a seamless user experience and user personalization.

Tara Coulson gave the next session on, Using CSS to Customize Fellowship One WebLink. A few of the tools she recommended while learning/working with CSS are W3 Schools, css Zen Garden and two Firefox add-ons, EditCSS and CSSViewer. The CSS allows you to skin weblink so that it matches the rest of your website. An interesting trick she mentioned is that you can use the visibility:hidden tag to hide items that you do not want displayed.

During the break I got to hang out with Matt Singley for a few minutes, he brought down a whole team from his church. Chris from Fellowship snapped a pic of the the bald bloggers.

John and I had dinner with Jeff Bull, the Technology and Internet Pastor at Capital Christian in Meridian, Idaho. Jeff just started full time over there and has also started blogging, make sure to add him to your RSS reader.