Acts 435: The Charity

Acts 435 is designed to help us fulfil Christ’s calling and give to those in need. I hope and pray that it will be a wonderful blessing to those on the receiving end of these gifts of love. May it also be a source of joy to the donors as they see the immediate impact of their generosity on those struggling to make ends meet.”
Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, Patron of Acts 435

Acts 435 is a Christian Charity to bring immediate help to people in financial need. It works by matching up those who want to give with those in need. The website, which initially served only Yorkshire, went national on 17th August. The site is also on Twitter and Facebook. A great example of the way that social media can offer practical help – this really is a good news story for social media… and all those who’ve been helped by making connections that wouldn’t have happened before.

Acts 4:35 (The Message)

^34-35And so it turned out that not a person among them was needy. Those who owned fields or houses sold them and brought the price of the sale to the apostles and made an offering of it. The apostles then distributed it according to each person’s need. (Via @biblegateway)

I make an appearance at 2.26 for about 10 seconds… I love the idea of themedianet.org,a network founded last year for Christians and others who work in media. It is hosted by the Church and Media Network, who host the annual conference in Swanwick (always smack bang in the middle of marking time, but I find it such an inspiring event!). Encourage young Christians you know to apply for one of 16 places on the MediaNet Academy, which I attended in 2007, which led to an invitation to ‘Christianity in the Digital Space‘, which has led to great contacts and currently some interesting discussions about possible projects.

“TheMediaNet is a broad-based community. People come here from all sorts of backgrounds and faith traditions. They may hold different views on issues that you feel strongly about, and they may express themselves in different ways to you. We view this positively.” Core Values for Participation (PDF).

There’s now over 300 people on the site, and some great content, contacts and job opportunities floating around. The list illustrates membership backwards… and I was only the 8th person on the site… ahead of the crowd, that’s me, clearly!

I’ve had some interesting experiences at recent conferences (reverse chronological order, although I also wrote the most recent last)!

JISC E-Learning Fair
My iPhone was still awaiting repair/replacement, and as there was a £15 fee to use the wireless, I decided I’d stick with pen and paper, but when it then took quite some time to sort through the information and reproduce a blog, I’m thinking a Netbook may be the way forward other events. As I only have 7.5 hours a week to work on Blended Learning (although I invariably do more), got to conserve the time for working on new ideas, although clearly the dissemination of such information is important!

Why I Study History
PowerPoint was banned at this session, which was intended to be as responsive as possible, but I did write a few notes, and not too long after the event adapted those notes to integrate some of the discussion we’d had afterwards, and posted onto my WW2 Poster blog..

Men at War/Framing Film
Again, at these conferences I was armed only with a notebook. Neither conference was set up for Twitter, so it wasn’t a question there. In giving my paper, I had access to a presentation remote control, and this makes such a difference to presentation – allowing more flexibility, and more engagement with the audience. As to blogging however, I’d blogged BEFORE each conference, which generated a lot of interest (judging by my hit counter), bit I still haven’t got round to putting elements of my paper online, even though I could easily upload  the PowerPoints to Slideshare, and maybe even just cut and paste my notes (yes, I did use PPT, but I didn’t have a fixed script).

Greenbelt
Attended Greenbelt after the previous couple of events. I’d maintained contact with a number of people from those events via Twitter, Facebook, blog comments, etc., and it was a great chance to meet up with a number of people face-to-face again, and to have a clearer idea of which elements of the event to attend. Greenbelt experimented with an iPhone app for the first time, with around 300-400 users paying around £4 each (rather than £8 for a paper programme), in which you could favourite particular sessions. Only drawback with this was that the battery kept running out, and keeping it charged was either expensive (there was a place to recharge phones) or time-consuming in trying to find a plug socket not in use by someone else/combined with a session you’re interested in! So all my notes, again, were on paper, although I did send out a number of Twitpics from the event (don’t do this overseas, I tried a few from Twitterfon/Echofon, and it downloaded all my tweets as well – my bill for a couple of weeks abroad was about £200!)

Christianity in the Digital Space
At “Christianity in the Digital Space“, I came armed with… a notebook and my iPhone for the first session! Everyone else was hunkered down behind their laptops, and my phone, under the strain of so much Twittering, ran out of battery before the morning was up! After lunch, therefore, I returned with my laptop/partially charged iPhone, and joined the general melee for a power socket! We talked about the experience of constantly Tweeting (and other online interactions) whilst someone was giving a paper. Most presenters were quite happy with this, as they were the ones Tweeting when not presenting (even I didn’t manage both!), and the exceptionally brave ones kept an eye on the Twitterfall, and interacted with it.

Churches Media Council Conference
Once I overcame logging into the wireless network (there was no phone signal really to speak of), I had a great time Twittering about the event, along with a number of others, and having mini-tweet-ups, including meeting those I’d met before the event in person (always great – see, that’s why I talk BLENDED, not E-LEARNING). The event is quite rammed, and unlike many, I didn’t have a netbook, so tried to blog in the evening, but only managed a short entry on the first evening (trying to get agreement on a hashtag, and promoting the use of a Twitterfall – not quite this year, but it’ll be there next year), whilst it took a bit longer for the second entry, which was more of an overview of an event, and links across to others who had participated at the event.

With 2 minutes warning, giving a 5 minute summary of an hour’s conversation on “Creating Community” at the Christianity in Digital Space Conference, University of Durham, July 2009. A really interesting conference, with lots of new and creative ideas flowing.

The Gathering: An Experiment in Church

At North Winchester Community Church we’ve been discussing the idea of a ‘new’ type of service, once a month, on Sunday evening’s, around the theme of a Pub Church (within the style of Fresh Expressions).

So, welcome to “The Gathering“, to which you can find out more details on the website, launched last night! I am naturally a night owl, and gained inspiration after our inaugural test-run on Sunday, as to where I could see this website fitting in a bit more… not that any of us really know how this service is going to turn out, as the whole point is that it’s experimental, and ready to be shaped by its members! The website is therefore fairly experimental and more explicitly a ‘work in progress’ than other sites that I have done.

Blog Content

The blog is structured with 3 basic pages for static content: what is the gathering about?; who can people contact to find out more?; where can people continue the discussions? For the remainder of the blog, the expectation is that the remainder of the entries will be blog/diary entries, listed in reverse order, with strong use of keywords/categories (although as we’re so experimental, these aren’t entirely clear, but we will monitor their evolvement) to allow visitors to filter the content that they desire. Of course, it wouldn’t be one of my sites without search (apparently the online world used to be 50% search, 50% through navigation… I think that balance has tipped in favour of searchers!)

WordPress.com Theme

Pressrow by Chris Pearson, a nice clean design, which allowed me to design my own header (using a collage of images from sxc.hu), and appears to have the features we need. The current NWCC site is moving across to self-hosted WordPress, so this may end up upon here, we’ll see how transferable it is, but I think it shows up the stunning pictures well!

Multi-Author Blog

This is my first attempt at using WordPress for a multi-author blog, but we want to get at least the organising group involved in blogging on the site, and then encourage others to engage and comment upon the site – maybe we need a touch of the polemical topics!

Social Media

Other than the blog itself, we have set up a Twitter feed, a Facebook group,  YouTube (no content yet) and Delicious (also no content), which seems approrpriate for a church which plans to not base itself around ‘sermons’, but other styles of discussion and interaction – including mix/match of online/offline…. as we said, all very experimental!

“tangle is the new name of GodTube, our video-file sharing company. GodTube began as the dream of a small handful of individuals, the dream for a faith-based, family friendly network where people of all ages and backgrounds could come together in connection, bonded by a shared faith and love for Christ. It was a dream built upon faith, hope and excited possibility. And it was a dream that caught fire, far surpassing the growth of any other network of its kind.

tangle is a social networking site that allows GodTube to expand its vision to reach more people with the ability to connect, share and grow online. It’s a place where, in addition to sharing videos, our users can connect and share their faith and lives with others through photos, audio messages, blogs, prayers, music, causes and so much more.

tangle is not just a global technology company; it’s not just a safe, family friendly place to interact with others. tangle is a movement. We hope you join it.”

http://www.tangle.com/drbexl

Over a period of two years, and as my knowledge of web design improved, I developed various drafts of a new site design for the Church which I attended.

• I wanted to the site to be accessible to the entire congregation, and also of interest to those who may be interested in the church and Christianity in general.
• The site structure was largely my responsibility, and in April 2003 the site finally went live, although still incomplete.
• From 2003-2005, I kept the site updated with relevant ‘events’, whilst others worked on improving the graphic layout of the site.
• An eye-catching new site went live in July 2005, unfortunately with no search function! I was told that the site would not have launched without my input, which provided base content and structure.

Visit the current site: http://www.ccwinch.org.uk/