“Freely you have received. Freely give.” – Jesus

Proponents of “Open Source” ideas get this instinctively, and the far-reaching impacts of their generosity speak for themselves. In the last fifty years, nothing has transformed the world around us more than the Open Source technology that underlies the World Wide Web. How we do just about everything — from bill paying to global financial markets to entertainment to education to communications to social networking to political campaigning to journalism to charitable giving to, well, just about everything — has been irrevocably altered by a technology that embodies this ethic.

Living Free: A Kingdom Value

Crazy thing is, giving freely is a Kingdom value. Not those kingdoms, which generally care more about acquisition, power, and control than benevolent giveaways. That Kingdom, the one Jesus proclaimed.

“Freely give,” Jesus said as he sent his disciples to represent the Gospel, which he defined in the same breath as, “The Kingdom of God is near.” Evidence of the Kingdom’s presence would be needs met by his Kingdom emissaries, who freely gave away what they had first freely received (Matthew 10:7-10).

But even as Open Source technology has redefined how knowledge is shared and services are distributed throughout the world, Christ followers are still employing outdated modes of content sharing forged in an earlier era. A decade into the 21st century, many Christians still produce, market, and package our “Gospel” stuff — CD/MP3s, books, music, training, even iPhone apps — within a self-imposed ghetto using 20th century, profit-oriented distribution models.

Inspired thoughts turn into Christian books, music, movies, and training (as if “Christian” can be an adjective and not a person) that get produced by Christian authors, musicians, filmmakers, and teachers; sold in Christian stores, catalogs, websites, and venues; taught at Christian events, conferences, schools, churches, and concerts; and marketed to Christians as consumers. As a result, the Kingdom message gets repackaged and recycled to Kingdom citizens with little impact on the world around us. But it makes the Christian cottage industry lots of money.

Beyond the Ghetto

At least it used to make lots of money. The changing world being reshaped in part by growing generations weaned on Open Source stuff isn’t buying at the same rates as in decades past.

Why? Just as Jesus didn’t define his disciples as customers or their training as “customer service,” Millennials are maturing in a world where they are assumed and empowered to be producers, not just consumers.

Yet Christian institutions that developed during the Industrial Age of necessity embraced the paradigm of churchgoers as “customers” and church service as “customer service.” The onset of the Information Age has changed the landscape. Our church-based service delivery models must change with the times to stay contextually relevant.

So what’s a Kingdom Christian to do? Especially those who exist to connect, train, and mentor leaders who care about young people living in a Open world?

Adapt, adjust, and embrace the Kingdom values embodied by the new technology.

What does this look like?

A Case Study for Training Innovation 

In February 2010, Urban Youth Workers Institute (UYWI) reshaped the landscape of youth ministry training in collaboration with faith-filled technology innovators TechMission.

UYWI has been training leaders of young people in America’s largest cities since 1997. Birthed by Boomer and Gen X youth workers convened at a series of summits in the mid-90s, the early days of UYWI looked programmatically like most other youth ministry training organizations except packaged and formatted for a distinctly “urban” audience. Conferences and training events defined UYWI’s program model. Excellent production and reliable content, combined with subsidized pricing that considered the economic realities of largely volunteer youth leaders, quickly propelled UYWI as the leading brand for urban youth ministry training.

But youth ministry is an inherently transitory profession, so Millenials began swelling the ranks of youth workers in the early 2000s. Combined with the economic downturn that began in 2008, UYWI embraced the need to innovate a low-cost, scalable training delivery system once again.

Enter TechMission, a Boston-based technology firm that exists to unite “Jesus, Justice, and Technology” since 2000. At first their mission focused on overcoming the digital divide that existed through the first several decades of personal computing and throughout the 90s. But as technology became cheaper and more accessible in the early 2000s, they turned their attention to building a low-cost platform to connect like-minded urban leaders to share resources, ideas, and best practices for scalable Kingdom results. To that end, they launched UrbanMinistry.org in 2008. 

Over the last two years, UrbanMinistry.org has grown into the largest digital library of holistic ministry training content anywhere in the world. With TechMission’s leadership, partners such as Christian Community Development Association, Salvation Army, World Vision, and others have emptied their shelves of formerly proprietary content to build a 70,000 volume (and growing) library of resources freely received and freely given for Kingdom impact.

This week, UYWI became the first urban youth ministry training brand to invest in TechMission’s open source training delivery system, digitizing all available content dating back to 2001 as part of the UrbanMinistry.org library. Their shared conviction: Why leave the content packaged in obsolete formats and mostly unused in archived storage facilities when it could be digitized and utilized at relatively low-cost for generations to come?

For those who worry that freely giving away the goods is not financially sustainable, consider Google, iTunes, Facebook, YouTube, and thousands of Web 2.0 business models that give freely far more content than they sell. Quality services freely distributed to meet felt needs generates credibility that allows providers to monetize specialized services.

Kudos to Larry Acosta of UYWI and Andrew Sears of TechMission and their teams for pioneering what it means to share ideas and training resources in the Information Economy. Here’s to hoping other youth ministry trainers follow their lead.

Additional Online References

+ “Open Source Open World”
+ “Proposal for a “Digital Second Harvest” to Help the Poor and End Piracy”

_________________________

Jeremy Del Rio co-founded and directs 20/20 Vision for Schools in New York City. Visit him online at JeremyDelRio.com or 2020Schools.net.

• 93% of American adults own a cell phone.
• The avg American teen sends 2,272 txt msgs evry mo
• In Feb 2008, John McCain raised $11M for his Presidential campaign the traditional way. Barack Obama attended 0 fundraisers, yet raised $55M online.
• The computer in your cell phone is one million times cheaper, one thousand times more powerful, and about one hundred thousand times smaller than the ONE computer at MIT in 1965.

This is another official update to the original “Shift Happens” video. This completely new Fall 2009 version includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology, and was developed in partnership with The Economist. For more information, or to join the conversation, please visit http://mediaconvergence.economist.com and http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com.

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+ Web Tools for Your Youth Ministry (By Tim Schmoyer)

HT: Ralph Castillo

Busines/internet/marketing gurus and best-selling authors Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki and others all weighed in today on a debate about Free on the day before we celebrate political freedom.

Fascinating timing, but I suspect the release of Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price was connected somehow to Independence Day. That’s too obvious a marketing ploy to miss. Despite the title, the book is not free, and it’s ironic that the likes of Gladwell and Godin so readily chimed in on the debate that’s sure to generate more book sales.

Notwithstanding the irony, the debate is notable because it should fundamentally alter the way we think about distributing ideas, publishing content, and organizing communities. This article at Wired magazine (where Chris Anderson serves as editor-in-chief) introduces the idea brilliantly and frames it as the difference between managing scarcity and managing abundance.

What this boils down to is the difference between abundance- and scarcity-based business models. If you’re controlling a scarce resource, like the prime-time broadcast schedule, you have to be discriminating. There are real costs associated with those half-hour chunks of network time, and the penalty for failing to reach tens of millions of viewers with them is calculated in red ink and lost careers. No wonder TV executives fall back on sitcom formulas and celebrities—they’re safe bets in an expensive game.

But if you’re tapping into an abundant resource, you can afford to take chances, since the cost of failure is so low. Nobody gets fired when your YouTube video is viewed only by your mom.

Gladwell critiques it similarly brilliantly, to which Godin, Anderson, and others offer compelling replies.

If you find it hard to keep up with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, Youtube, Vimeo, Myspace, and all the other web 2.0 social networking sites sprouting up, this site will make you feel even more overwhelmed.

And what’s the point of engaging all these spaces anyway? Beyond personal reasons like reuniting with friends, nurturing hobbies, or other interests, Brian Carter of Fuel Interactive suggests a framework for thinking about the value of internet marketing for businesses and non-profits alike.

HT (both links): Jen Howver via Twitter

Great insights from all purpose web/technology/entrepreneurship/marketing guru Guy Kawasaki in this month’s Entrepreneur magazine.

Here’s a compilation of 13 silly and even stupid ways some companies are hindering adoption of their products and services. So if you are doing any of them, don’t.

1. Forcing immediate registration: Requiring a new user to register is a reasonable request—after you’ve sucked him in. The sites that require registration as the first step are putting a barrier in front of adoption.

3. Windows that don’t generate URLs: Have you ever wanted to point people to a page, but the page has no URL? Did the company decide it didn’t want referrals, links and additional traffic?

4. The unsearchable website: Some sites don’t offer a search option. If your site goes deeper than one level, it needs a search box.

5. Sites without Delicious, Digg and Fark bookmarks: There’s no reason why a company wouldn’t want its fans to bookmark its pages. When my blog hits the front page of Digg, page views typically increase six or seven times.

Full article here.

From the Turbocharge your Blog files.

40 WordPress Optimisation Tips in 40 Minutes

Christian Social Justice Widgets: More resources to enhance the functionality of your urban ministry website, from the good people at UrbanMinistry.org. You can bet I’ll be using (at least) a few (of the 20 available).

Change has come to America. The new White House has a blog and RSS feed. Do you?

From Mashable:

WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg turned 25 [Sunday]. In addition to his work building the massively popular blogging platform, Mullenweg was named among the 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008 and one of the Top 30 Under 30.

Mullenweg writes: “If you had asked me 7 years ago where I would be today I couldn’t have imagined all of the amazing things that have happened, the incredible people I’ve met, and the communities that I’ve become a part of.”

As a satisfied WordPress user and a cheerleader for innovative young people who change the world, I’d like to thank Matt for his imagination, open-source generosity, and leadership, and wish him a happy belated Birthday.

Besides serving this blog as its back-end architecture and content management system, more well-known WordPress users include giants of journalism like New York Times, CNN, Fox News, Financial Times, Dow Jones, Yahoo, Reuters, and many more. That’s correct; you can harness the exact same technology that powers the blogs of industry giants, for free, because of visionary leadership by young men like Matt Mullenweg.

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+ Paging DJ, Ben, Adam, Marko, CB, Rudy, Kekoa, Tony, Andrew, Jordon, Jamie, Neil, and any other techies who care about reaching youth
+ Turbocharge Your Blog