One of the coolest things that develop in a growing community is the sharing of resources. This attitude and practice is very close to the heart of scripture, and I dig it a lot.

Tyler Sims is donating his old copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium for Mac to one lucky individual.

For many, Adobe’s products their “bread and butter” in terms of what they produce, but it can be a large hurdle to overcome financially. This particular collection originally cost about $1,700 bucks. It includes:

• Dreamweaver
• Flash Professional
• Photoshop Extended
• Illustrator
• Fireworks
• Acrobat 9 Pro
• Contribute

So, if you (or your ministry) is in need of a copy, please just leave a comment below with your name and what you intend on using it for. The winner will be determined randomly this Friday.

Thanks so much Tyler for giving out of your abundance to someone else in need!

Also, if you’ve got anything else like this to donate, please let me know!

This is a Guest Post by Rodlie Ortiz. This post is somewhat of a different kind than we typically get here but I thought it was a good principle worth remembering. It’ll be your job to extrapolate that out to technology and it’s use.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of incentives recently. Steven Levitt, the renowned economist from the University of Chicago devotes a chapter to the topic in his book Freakonomics. The chapter is called “What do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?”

So here’s the gist of the issue: People will cheat if the incentive is big enough and the associated risk is small enough.

We’re all used to the idea of students cheating to do better on tests. After all, if you don’t pass some tests, you may not pass the class. Once, when I was in high school geometry, I entered some answers into my TI-89 calculator. I passed the test. Another time in AP English class I carefully…well, let’s move on.

What we’re not so used to hearing, though, is about teachers cheating.

I always looked up to teachers as castles of moral integrity and as civil missionaries. Those that seemingly don’t make a lot of money but still choose to work with hormonal/moody/hyper kids were surely saints on earth. But in the book Levitt details what happened when the state of California introduced $25,000 bonuses “for teachers who produced big test scores.” Many cheated.

More thoughts after the jump:

He also details the case of sumo wrestlers in Japan and how they (purportedly) cheated. He came to this conclusion by examining the data of wins vs. losses. In a sumo tournament, a wrestler must play a total of fifteen matches, and win at least eight of those matches to stay in the top tier. What stood out to the author, though, is what happened when a player with a  8-6 record fought against a player with a 7-7 record. It would seem that the player with the 8-6 record would be more likely to win, due to their better record, but in 80% of all similar matches the player with the 7-7 record won. What does this mean? The better fighter gave the other guy a win so that they could both have a winning record. In other words, “I’ll scratch your back right now, but when the time comes, you owe me a really nice scratch on the back.”

So what does all of this have to do with churches and organizations? In a sense, as leaders, we’re all dealing with the issue of incentives- that “means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing,” as Levitt says.

In a macro way there’s always this polarity of urging people to do the good (and get to heaven) and do less bad (to avoid hell). And in a more specific way, what leader doesn’t use incentives to get his first time guests to come back, or to encourage a volunteer by sending a thank you card. After all, it’s the behavior that gets rewarded that gets repeated.

I think this all makes sense, and we don’t have to look for further evidence than a child avoiding a hot stove after getting burned just once to understand this.

But what I found truly surprising was his analysis of incentives amongst voters in Switzerland using similar variables of monetary incentives. In one “county” in the country, they tried to pay people to vote to see by how much their voting percentages would increase. Guess what happened? Much less people voted. It turns out there was a much more powerful force at play in encouraging people to do “the good.” It’s a force so powerful that it goes beyond monetary incentives: positive social pressure.

It turns out that people vote because there is a sense of a”national culture,” and that is what good citizens do. They want to be seen walking towards the polling stations and they want to sport the sticker that proudly proclaims to everyone that, yes, I did my duty. I dragged myself to the polling station and I voted.

So I wonder how this principle could be used to better help shape corporate or organizational cultures? In this post I wrote about my experience in Colombia and shared how I thought the simple value of courtesy worked its way into the national culture.

In one of my churches I tested out this principle in two ways:

A few months ago, we were going to be launching a new system of small groups based upon the book Activate, by Nelson Searcy. We’d be launching a new semester of affinity based groups, and decided that we’d spend a whole month promoting the small groups, and each week as people signed up, we’d ask those that had signed up to raise their hands. Every week as more people raised their hands, it began to give a sense of inevitability and that more and more people were jumping onto the bandwagon. This sense of positive social peer pressure helped us get more people to sign up for the small groups.

This has also worked in a similar fashion when we were doing a special month of ministry emphasis.

If this principle can be properly understood and implemented, I believe it can help to make positive strides in helping to build a positive culture in your church or organization.

What about you? How are they at work in your church or organization? How has it worked? In what ways does this “make sense” in terms of web technology?

[Image from TheMadGuru, Bass]

This is a Guest Post by Andy Darnell.

So the other day, I was in need of a good map of Israel. I’ve been working on a Bible study for some students that I’ll be using in the near future. Unfortunately, the maps that are in the back of my Study Bible didn’t show the specific terrain details that I was wanting at the time.

Most places online were wanting to sell me software that I could install, or even sell me giant wall maps of middle east terrain. That’s not what I needed. Actually, I didn’t even need an image in the first place. I was just interested in a high level feel for what the elevation is like between several of the cities that are named in the gospels. Long story. Really not important. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

Enter Google. Specifically Google Maps.

Search for “Capernaum” (No… Not Capernaum Pediatric Therapy, stupid, I’m looking for Israel)

After a couple minutes, I figured out how to change to Israel. (See, I take the long way around instead of just adding the simple comma and then the word, I manage to drag a tiny little focus box across the Atlantic to land on the middle east.)

Bingo.

Read more of my findings after the jump:

I am now looking at a present day map of Capernaum. There are exciting photos, even a link to the mount from Jesus’ sermon. Now to work on some directions to and from the city.

This is when I discovered that you can actually filter “By Car” or “Walking” directions. The walking directions are in beta and a disclaimer pops up telling me to “Use caution – This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.” Seriously, Google is starting to map down to pedestrian paths. That is awesome.

Within a matter of minutes, I can toggle between map, satellite, and terrain view. Sorta what I wanted. Enough to answer a few of the nagging questions that I had. Now back to the Word.

Later,  I started pondering the possibilities that may be soon available. We’ve all seen the street level views that Google stitches together. It’s not a large stretch to see this technology used to stitch together a virtual walking tour of Israel. How cool it be to virtually surf the streets where Jesus walked? It’d be interesting to scroll/stroll the streets that Paul’s letters would have traveled on their way to the early churches.

I personally have a life goal of taking a trip to Israel, but this would be pretty sweet in the interim.

Then I thought to myself, maybe this already exists in some form out there. If not, maybe a site could be created that would allow for folks who have been on tours to Israel a place to share and build a virtual tour for the rest of us. Do you know of something similar to this out there?

Again, I may be way behind the curve on this. I’m sure that someone will comment that the site already exists, and that if I’d just spent more time on a simple search engine search, than this post, I would have already discovered the end product.

Go ahead. Give it to me.

Registration… ah, that is the question for a lot of application developers these days: Do we include our own registration process for our software and/or service? Or, do we use the oAuth and/or open API’s of popular existing services for logins (eg Twitter, Facebook, etc.)?

The answer is most simply this: Depends.

Now, I’m not necessarily going to prescriptive about the what and why but I do know that if you’re going to make me sign up for something then make it as easy, fast, and as painless as possible. Keep the bar of adoption low.

Or, you can just do it really creatively, like how Moof.com does it:

I really liked how they did the registration at the bottom; it fits very well with a casual and somewhat-personal approach to it. In fact, it was so novel that I didn’t mind signing up.

We could probably learn a thing or two about this strategy; does your church have a signup process? How easy (or personal) is it? Or how impossibly hard is it?

Wow, now doesn’t that look pretty?

Announced last week, LifeChurch has rolled out their iPhone-version of their services streaming live, but with a much more pretty landing page.

What other churches and/or ministries are making the move here? Love to see some screens…!

It’s that time again…! Sunday’s a good day to take it easy.

I’ve decided that on Sundays I’m not going to do any blogging except for a very simple post series called “The Sunday Special” where you get to ask me anything you’d like.

You can ask about me about web technology, Wordpress, blogging, what I ate for breakfast… whatever.

I can’t promise that I’ll answer all of your questions, but feel free to answer each other’s questions as well.

I’ll try to answer all the questions throughout the coming week.

Simple enough, right? Go.

I just launched a Wordpress Theme for Pastors called “Simple Pastor.”

I called it that because it has built-in Twitter and Subscriptions options to get things started really easily.

Check it out, and don’t forget to Tweet this on Twitter and get a Discount Code for more than 50% off!

This is a Guest Post by Joseph Cole.

Have you ever organized a prayer meeting or other type of intercessory prayer event at your church, showed up and then wondered where all of your people were?

It’s amazing how many believers suddenly get very busy whenever a prayer meeting is called because–let’s face it–prayer is not the hottest event going down in the community.

However, this does not have to be the case if you take your prayer event to the next level: Social Media. I want to tell you how the Web 2.0 experience turned our prayer vigil into a hub of epic excitement and adventure that left our participants begging for more.

More thoughts after the jump:

Last Friday, Tabernacle of Praise, a rural church of about 100 members, co-sponsored a 24 hour City Wide Prayer Vigil in Crestline, OH. The event was hosted in the Crestline House of Prayer by the Peacemakers International starting 9 am Friday and ended 9 am on Saturday morning. Friday morning saw a variety of denominational representatives come through the door: Church of God people, Foursquare people, United Methodist people and independents like me. All of them came to support the city in prayer, and they came expecting to be greeted by a list of prayer needs. Instead, they saw laptops.

Arriving early, I had set up my Airport Base Station Extreme (an awesome piece of powerful connectivity) in the building, set up my MacBook, opened up Seesmic Desktop (my desktop Twitter client) and began to Twitter the event using the hashtag #24hrprayer. My Facebook account is set to import my Twitter updates and so all of my Facebook friends received the updates as well. Most of the participants from our rustic community had never heard of Twitter, yet within minutes they began to see the power of this new social technology as we began to receive prayer requests from a variety of Twitter users all over the U.S. and the world.

As the event went on, we received Twitter prayer requests from people like @gailhyatt, @ronedmondson, @travisthrasher, @human3rror, @flowerdust, @imarkbailey and @carece. Despite all the Twitter activity, we receieved the majority of our requests from Facebook. Through Facebook, we were connected to believers in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Spain (It helps to speak Spanish.), India, and Kenya. We were able to pray for them all in real time as they sent in their requests.

The power of social media in prayer is that it brings your prayer event to the online community, which knows no geographical boundaries. My people here from a relatively small church in the country of Ohio were exhilarated by praying for people in far away places who are doing great things for God.

Twitter and Facebook took our prayer vigil to the next level by connecting us to the global Body of Christ.

This is a Guest Post by Nathan Beaird.

Like many of you, I’ve been on a mission trip.  And like many of you, I needed financial assistance. I wrote the letter, inserted the appropriate name, and sent it off. However, with the advance of computers, “going green”, mobile phones, and social networking sites, physical hand-written letters have become endangered.

I think the last time I got a hand-written letter I panicked thinking someone had been kidnapped. Now that people can do almost everything online, anything that requires them to return a check in the “snail-mail” seems too tedious, and may result in nothing for you. I believe I’ve found something that will change the art of fund-raising and empower Missionaries, as well as churches forever.

I wanted to find a way to embed something similar to a PayPal account on a website, or create and email a link to a savings account on the web. I thought if someone could just get to that account in the least amount of clicks possible, and contribute with a credit or debit card- I could raise this money pretty fast!

Then I found out about SmartyPig.com.  Open an account with them, set up a savings goal, and SmartyPig tracks how long it will take you to reach that goal.

Now I know what you’re thinking, “I can do this through my bank.” Well that may be, but I doubt very much that your bank creates a widget that you can embed on your blog, webpage, Facebook profile, MySpace, or any other social networking site. Your friends and family that want to contribute to your savings goal, can do so in two clicks of the mouse and they didn’t even have time to complain about stamp prices.  I’m not saying to scrap the idea of the letter, it’s raised a lot of money for people to take the gospel all around the Earth.  You could even include the link in the letter!

Although SmartyPig is great for missions giving, I’d like to outline several other helpful uses for churches:

Scenario #1- The Need

Maybe your church is raising money for a new soundboard for the auditorium. Of course you have a presentation to the congregation initially, maybe a “thermometer” chart in the bulletin that shows how close you are to your goal, and most certainly a bake sale or staff vs. youth basketball game of which all proceeds go to the new soundboard. All these things are great, but they only reach the people that come to your church, and only the ones that come on a regular basis.

There’s millions of people that use Facebook and email, to not utilize the widget feature seems crazy! You could send out an email with the link to the savings goal that you’ve set up for the new soundboard and they can give right there. They, in turn, can email it to their friends and so on.  Your soundboard goal has now become viral and people who are “Kingdom Minded” all over the world are giving you $10 out of their pocket because it’s easy, and they don’t mind helping out a fellow ministry. Also, because the site is FDIC Insured, they know it’s not a scam.

Scenario #2- The Event

Youth Groups and Children departments in every church attend or host summer camps or special events for the kids. Again, the announcement is made from the pulpit, and reminders in the bulletins. However, with the same viral effect as the last scenario, friends, relatives, and co-workers are able to help financially support these kids. Just set a goal, (i.e. We want to send 50 kids to Camp this year!) and send the link out. In your email you could breakdown the cost per child and let them know that they could send 1 child to camp for X-amount of dollars. Don’t forget to embed the widget to the church website or any Facebook, MySpace, or blog page!

Scenario #3- The Disaster

Unfortunately, bad things happen to good people. Hurricane Katrina left thousand homeless and still rebuilding their lives. We as the “Global Church” are commanded to help victims of disasters like these. With SmartyPig.com, you would be able to set up a goal to buy food, water, sandbags, tarps, or anything else that’s of need. Set the goal, breakdown how much it is to sponsor X-amount of items.  Email the link or embed the widget on your social networking site.

These of course are only four ways to utilize and leverage this technology for Christ, but as you get into it, I’m sure you will find several more uses for this tool.

Remember– make it easy for people to help you, and they will!

Google Maps is awesome. It wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that I use it every single day, for some reason or another. And the fact that they’ve opened up their API for use in other creative applications sometimes simply boggles my mind.

Mapspread, a new service leveraging Google Maps, is one of those new (and very useful) creative applications. From their own lips, “Mapspread is perfectly suited to organizations and businesses that need to centrally manage geodata. No database needed, no setup cost, no overly complex GIS.”

I like that.

You can quickly get up and running and after about 5 minutes of time I had my first location plotted and was adding a second and third.

As you can see, you can eventually embed this map into any page that you’d like. Just think, you could use this for your own ministry/church locations if you’d like, or even small groups, or something creative. Who knows?

Go ahead and try it out. What do you think?