Is the person that you really are the person that we see on Facebook or other social networks?

Somehow I reckon that quite often the person that we portray on-line, whether it be on a blog, forum or social network, is not a completely true representation of who we really are. This “alternate personality” could be hugely misleading (Brad Paisley’s song “Online” personifies this), partly misleading (but still deliberately so) or simply missing pieces.

I’ll be the first to admit that who you see on-line is not a complete picture of who I am. I don’t think that it’s because I’m being deliberately misleading about who I am, it’s just that there is only so much you can say about yourself on-line. I am also generally pretty reserved with how open I am about some of the things that I’m going through in my personal life. Some things are better left to in person conversations I reckon.

Knowing how I represent myself on-line reminds me not to be quick to judge people by what I read on-line. It’s impossible to get a complete picture of someone simply by what I read on-line, even if they’ve written it themselves.

So that begs the following question:

1. Can I get a full picture of who you are on-line?
2. Do you judge others by what you read about them on-line?

Let us know below in the comments…

It’s been an interesting transition for us as we’ve made out move to Calgary. Not only have we been settling into our new home, but we have also been working on defining our new role as we continue our work with YWAM.

Working on a YWAM base back in Australia with over 100 staff meant that most of my time was spent doing tech support and network management. Now working from home has opened up all sorts of other possibilities.

At the moment there are four main projects that I am working on within my role on the YWAM International Chairman’s Team:

1. The new YWAM International Web-Site (the current site is at www.ywam.org)
2. Capturing, editing and distributing leadership training videos by Lynn Green from his visit to Calgary a few months ago
3. Developing a new web-site for YWAM Resources (www.ywamlife.com)
4. YWAM “Social Media” Interaction (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

In addition to this I’m also toying around with creating an on-line radio show (audio podcast) out of the news and content developed within YWAM. Each week I usually see dozens of stories from around YWAM about upcoming conferences, schools, outreaches and more. I try to document some of them at YWAM News that Bill finds Interesting.

As I continue to connect with the YWAM ICT I’m finding more and more opportunities and needs presenting themselves. The problem certainly isn’t going to be finding stuff to do, the challenge will be finding where to best spend my time and effort …

A few months ago before we moved into our house I wrote about some of the ways that God’s been providing for us. Since then we’ve had a lot of ups and downs with moving and settling into our new house. Some of the downs have been:

1. Most of our major appliances (clothes washer, drier, fridge and dish washer) need to be replaced (read more here).
2. I need to paint the deck and all the trim on the exterior of the house before winter comes to prevent more wood rot.
3. Two of our windows need to be replaced or repaired because of wood rot or broken seals.

There is also a lot of other work that needs doing to the house, but like my pastor reminded me on Sunday, at least we aren’t raising and enclosing under our house to create a whole other level again.

This week we’ve seen a few little things that have really helped to lift my faith, even though they may seem little to some:

1. We were given an annual pass to the Calgary Zoo and were able to enjoy a family trip there this week.
2. At the last minute we were given some discount coupons to Calaway Park, a local amusement park. Even with the discount we still didn’t have it in our budget to go, but within about 10-minutes of putting our need for $40 to go to the park on Facebook we were donated the money to go. We all had a very good, albeit wet, time at the park.
3. Last night I was sitting on my back deck trying to listen to Amazing Grace streamed from the Internet. I couldn’t get it to work for some reason, so I gave up. The people across the street were having a bit of a party and all of a sudden someone pulls out a set of bag pipes and starts playing Amazing Grace! It was pretty cool, I love the sound of the bag pipes playing Amazing Grace.

These are just some of the little things that we’ve been blessed with recently. They continue to remind me that regardless of our circumstances, or what else if happening, God’s looking out for us.

Here is one of my favourite versions of Amazing Grace on You Tube, albeit there are no bag pipes in this version:

If you want a version of Amazing Grace by Il Divo, with the bag pipes, then you can listen to it here. It definitely ranks up there with the Randy Travis version as one of my favourites.

One of the things that the YWAM International Chairman’s Team is working on is to improve the communication inside and outside YWAM. It is a part of the mandate to “heal the nevous system” of YWAM.

After a disussion I had with some other members of the YWAM ICT I setup a simple YWAM news site. The goal for the site is to help communicate what is happening around YWAM to anyone who is interested.

The site is built on Wordpress, a free open source CMS / blog engine. I used Google Feedburner to deliver the news via email because it was easy and free. There are many different free themes available for use with Wordpress, so I played around with a few and finally settled on the one that is currently running on the site.

To help with the functionality of the news site I added a few Wordpress plugins to it. Most are available for free (all the plugins I used were free) and are easy to install on the site. I’ll put a list of my current plugins, the template and the other resources used for the site at the end of this post.

Right now the site is really more of a prototype or proof of concept news site. Trying to gather stories by myself is a very time consuming job (hence why there is not too much up there). To really make the site or concept work would require either a lot more time on my part, or more people doing it. I would also want the site to do more than just aggrigate the news (Planet YWAM already does some of that), there needs to be some editorial work involved, and a simple script or plugin can not do that.

Have a look at the YWAM News site and tell me what you think.

Here is the list of resources, plugins and the template that I used:

CMS / Blog Engine

• Wordpress

Template

• WP Premium theme by WP Remix – Nice and clean theme with the e-mail subscription built right in. Available in three different colour variations.

Plugins:

• Contact Form 7 – for contact, feeback and submit story form
• Dragon Design Sitemap Generator – Generate sitemap
• Digg Digg – The Digg button on each post to submit the story to Digg
• Google Analyticator – Plugin used to tie in with Google Analytics, which allows me to see the stats for the site (about 10 visits a day right now)
• Google XML Sitemaps – Create an XML sitemap for submission to the search engines
• Redirection – Mostly for when I mispell something in the URL and then change it. This plugin lets the old URL still work
• Social Bookmarking RELOADED – Makes it easier for readers to submit the stories to social networks and bookmarking sites
• WordPress Database Backup – Allows automated backups of the database to be e-mailed to me every day or week
• WP-SpamFree – Eliminate annoying spam comments
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Adds related stories that are already on the site to the individual stories, and the RSS feed and daily news e-mail

Other Resources

• Feedburner – Used for the e-mail function to send out the stories daily to anyone who subscribes in the top right of the page
• Google Analytics – Package for the web-site to help me see the stats about what’s happening on the site
• Host Gator – My web-site hosting, which is the only thing that I pay for on the site

I was watching this video of Seth Godin speaking about Tribes, and how they are and can be used to influence the world and create movements. It thought that it was a great talk, and a fantastic thing for us to think about for YWAM and how YWAM is, and can be a tribe.

Seth asked a few good questions, and made some good points, and I have a few of them below:

1. Who are you upsetting (if you aren’t upsetting someone you are not challenging the status quo)?
2. Who are you connecting?
3. Who are you leading?

He also made some good points about leaders within the tribe and what they do:

1. Tribe leaders challenge the status quo
2. They build a culture
3. They have curiosity about people inside and outside the crowd
4. They connect people
5. They are committed to the cause / tribe / people

YWAM has often been referred to as a tribe of people, and I reckon that Seth’s talk about it gives a great discussion point as we look at how we can as a mission continue to draw people to us who have a passion “To Know God and to Make Him Known”.

One of the exciting / challenging things that we experience serving in missions is God’s amazing provision. Since we are full time volunteers we rely fully on financial and practical gifts given to us by friends, family, churches and other organizations that believe in the work we do.

In the last week or so we have seen God provide for us in two rather unique ways…

A few friends of friends heard that we had just moved to Calgary from Australia and were setting up our house from scratch. They contacted us through our friend with offers to go through their surplus stuff and take all that we wanted! It was amazingly generous and we ended up with a van full of quality stuff to help set up our new home.

Through another friend we got invited to their church garage sale with a difference. The difference was that it was open to families in need, and everything was free! Wow! We filled the back of a pickup truck and my dad’s sedan with gear to help us out even more in setting up our house.

God is good…

We take posession of our house here in Calgary on Monday, June 1. The house is about 120 years newer than the one we left in Australia, and needs WAY less work done to it. I am looking forward to seeing how God continues to provide in His own unique way.

My Youth With A Mission – Discipleship Training School (YWAM DTS) was an amazing experience for me, and many of the stories live on and continue to have huge impacts on my life.

Everyone who has done a YWAM Discipleship Training School has walked away with their own unique stories. I thought that it would be fun to gather some of those stories stories together in a “YWAM DTS Blog Carnival“.

So how does the YWAM DTS Blog Carnival work?

To participate in this carnival all you need to do is write your DTS story on your own blog, with a link to this post. If you already have a story written then you can just add a link to this post and you can submit it. After you have written your story make a comment below on this post to let me know you have written it.

On July 1 2009, I will close submissions to the carnival and start to put all the posts together. I will be linking to all the stories that meet the criteria (true stories from your own YWAM DTS) in a final post and highlighting some of my personal favourites.

Your story can be about any aspect of your school; lectures, outreach, finance, etc. Here are some story ideas from my own YWAM DTS that instantly come to mind:

• Falling off a cliff while running away from God’s conviction
• Camping in the middle of nowhere and digging our own pit toilets
• Getting high on paint fumes while painting an enclosed room in a Pastor’s house in Charters Towers
• Getting left at the airport when we first arrived in Vanuatu, and no one noticing you were missing for a few hours
• Getting forgotten for a second time while in Fiji, but this time at least knowing how to get to where we were meant to be
• Three weeks of dysentery while on outreach
• Being taught to dance in a small village in Vanuatu
• Experiencing amazing hospitality while door knocking in an Indian neighbourhood in Fiji
• Crashing a billy-cart while on outreach in the Sunshine Coast and driving over my passenger, breaking a few of his ribs

Those are some of my stories, but I would love to hear about some stories from your own school. If you don’t want to write them down, then how about recording it on YouTube or an audio file and putting them in a blog post? We can work with that as well.

So again, here are the steps to participate in the YWAM DTS blog carnival:

1. Write your YWAM DTS story on your own blog
2. Link to this post from your story
3. Leave a comment on this post with a link to your story
4. I will be closing submissions on the 1st of July, so do all the above before then
5. Stay tuned to this blog to find out about all the submitted stories

As we are selling or packing up everything we own I found some of our original video podcasts that we did way back in 2003. I was disappointed that I was unable to find the pilot episode, which Brad Davies and I produced in an afternoon, but here is the earliest one I could find.

YWAM Reef to Outback Internet News – 4th Edition – October 2003

Here are the stories that were covered back in October 2003:

• YWAM School of Event Management (SEM)
• October YWAM DTS (Discipleship Training School)
• Discipleship Training School Camping Testimonies
• Role of Intercession in YWAM

I remember making the Monthly Video Podcast was definitely a highlight of my month. We used to keep it short and small, usually under 5MB, as back in 2003 there was still a lot of people on dial-up.

In this episode, and all those before it I would have to write out the news and read it off the paper on my deck. I also thought that my glasses reflected the lights too much, so I always took them off.

Judging by me laughing while trying to start the show I reckon that it was probably David Couper doing the filming. I always had a hard time keeping a straight face when he was around.

YWAM Reef to Outback Internet News – 5th Edition – November 2003

By November 2003 we had started to do the video podcast using a TelePrompTer. It was actually just a PowerPoint slideshow on my laptop, which was propped up under the camera, but it worked.

In November 2003 the news highlights at YWAM – Reef to Outback were:

• Impact Summer
• July and October Discipleship Training School (YWAM DTS) Updates
• The Important Role that Families Play in YWAM
• Birth of Joyous Hope to Luke and Angela Haythorpe

Since then the Video Podcast at YWAM – Reef to Outback has continued on. It’s gone through a few stages of inactivity, but is now running fairly consistently, five and a half years after I started …

Here is the latest YWAM – Reef to Outback Internet News:

YWAM – Reef to Outback inews episode 20

I have no idea where they got the new episode numbers from, I think that they abandoned the episode numbers that I started quite a while ago now. This means you may find a few episodes with the same numbers going.

Reef to Outback also has a lot of Mac lovers / worshippers / cult members. Hence the “i” in inews.

Wikipedia defines the Third Place as:

A term used … to refer to social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace. (source)

The “first place” is defined as your home, the “second place” as your place of work or school, and the “third place” is the informal meeting places that are in between the first and second place. The place where you meet with your friends for social occasions.

Starbucks has tried to position itself as the “Third Place” in peoples lives around the world, and in many regards they have been quite successful at it. Starbucks is the place where people go to hang out, relax, read a book, browse the Internet and of course, and grab a coffee. It’s the stopping point between work and home.

Let’s take another example…

Think of the Television series Friends. Their “Third Pace” was a coffee shop called The Central Perk. It is where, besides the home, most of their interaction with their friends takes place.

Now, imagine if YWAM could position itself as the “Third Place” in the communities they minister into.

I was privileged to spend most of the first 11 – years of my time in YWAM at Reef to Outback in Townsville, Australia. One of the things that I saw develop over my time there was it slowly becoming a “Third Place” to some of the youth in the city.

You would see the young kids hanging around the YWAM base after school, sometimes with the YWAM staff, and sometimes just hanging out with each other. But to them, Reef to Outback had become a place for them to just come, relax and chill out.

This was a fantastic privilege for us at YWAM – Reef to Outback. It gave us input into the lives of these kids that otherwise would definitely not exist. Reef to Outback has become these kid’s “Third Place”, and as they spend time there the ethos of YWAM, and who the staff are, can’t help but rub off onto the kids.

So, what are you doing to make your YWAM ministry into a “Third Place” for those you are called to minister to?

Or even, do you want your ministry to be a “Third Place”, is it relevant for what God’s called you to?

This is a subject that Tamara and I have been talking about for a long time …

When we found out who Caleb’s possible teachers were going to be one of the first things that we did was to go home and “Google” the teachers names. We wanted to find out who they were, what they stood for, what they were involved with and of course, do we want this person teaching our child?

I can guarantee that we were not the only parent’s to do this, and I know that employers are doing the exact same thing with job applicants. Here is a good example of three job applicants, and three bad search results.

When we searched for Caleb’s potential teachers we found that one was heavily involved in their church, and the other one was involved in short term mission trips with her family. Both of which were very encouraging finds for us as parents.

But what if we had found a binge drinking party animal, or someone who was having a whinge about their students on a blog? I reckon we would have been walking into the school and requesting NOT to have that person as our kid’s teacher.

In the days of Facebook, MySpace, camera phones, blogs and an unrelenting desire for exhibitionism in some people I can guarantee that you are being searched for, and found.

What are people finding when they search your name?

Update:

Slashdot has a great ongoing discussion about this exact topic, and the ethics of searching for potential employees here.