CITRT Wrap-Up

October 4, 2007, Fall CITRT wrap-up session

These are my own rough notes from the wrap-up.  Of course, since I was moderating I wasn't actually taking notes at the time, so I may be way off!  This is from memory, and if you know me, that means "don't expect much!"  Please comment with corrections and additions.

First, a huge THANK YOU to Clif and the entire team at COR, with special appreciation to Amy who we know did a lot of behind the scenes work. 

First question: What was the best and worst?  Or, What are your “take-aways?”  What will you tell your manager you gained from being here?

• Some things were tried that didn't work, or didn't work perfectly, but they weren't failures!  Fantastic failures?  Miserable successes?  Steps toward what will work better?  You have to take some risks and try things, and then when they don't work, you make them work anyway
• As with past events, seems that the relationships developed were at the top of the 'best things' list
• Food got high marks
• Worship/communion/prayer was well received
• The Dick Cooper videos "juggling Facilities Manager" were also a big hit.  Hey Clif, how can the rest of us get access to those?

Second question: what about audio or video recording and transcription?

• Most seemed to be in favor [which was a surprise to me]
• Suggestion, as practiced at the GCC roundtable last week, allow for "off the record" comments
• How can we get a transcription of the recording?  (not to read, but to be able to search)

Third Question: What about our vendors?

• Clearly the vendors are appreciated!
• Suggestion: vendors should send their IT people, not sales people
• Let the vendors participate in the technical discussions, as long as they don't go in the sales direction.  If they do, the group can self-police things

Fourth Question: How do we stay connected with each other?

• We have TWO surveys now: Jason's and Jeffrey's.  They capture info, and we expect to be able to pull some sort of summary results
• Do we want a Google group?  [most said 'no']
• We already have a Facebook group
• Justin Moore has put some things on Flickr and suggested some tags
• itDiscuss is yet another connection
• Jason Powell seems to be the cornerstone.

Where we’ve been:

• Late '90s and early '00s, Leadership Network and previous not-quite-IT roundtables, and the Mark Stephenson connections
• Bloggers
• Random visits with each other
• Church IT Roundtable #1, Sept 20, 2006, Granger
• Church IT Roundtable #2, April 17, 2007, Sugar Creek Baptist
• Granger IT Roundtable, Sept 26, 2007
• Church IT Roundtable #3, October 3 & 4, 2007, Church of the Resurrection
• And quite a few local gatherings

On-going:

• Church IT Podcast
• Local gatherings
• itDiscuss
• citrt.org
• Facebook group
• [new] flickr group/tag
• What else?  (there is certainly more!)

What’s next?

• April 3&4, 2008, Oklahoma City: MinistryTECH
• Spring Roundtable as part of, or adjacent to, MinistryTECH (Oklahoma City).  Likely a visit to LifeChurch!
• Consensus: keep doing two a year!  Allows for teams to send different people at different times.  Keep mixing them up, trying new things, going new places
• Granger Roundtable, fall 2008 [limited in size]
• Fall 2008 Roundtable.  Among the possibilities: Northwoods,  Seacoast, Calvary Ft. Lauderdale

That's a wrap.  Now it's back to our regular jobs. 

Comments

[Mark Burleson]

Tony, it was great to get to meet you. I had a tremendous time for the small part of which I was there. The whole group has completely changed my outlook with having a group of like minded, passionate collegues. I'll be making my own post here soon =]

[Tony Dye]

Good meeting you, too, Mark. Sorry it was so brief. Look forward to spending more time with you in April at MinistryTECH. Meanwhile, I'll be following your blog.

[Jeffrey Thompson]

1. What was the best and worst?

It was good to have groups of 15 people for the RoundTable. I think 15 is the right number to allow good interactive discussions. I would like to have each of the sessions with different people however to get more of a feel of the other opinions in the group.

Having the Vendors NOT participate during the RoundTable is good. I wanted to hear from my peers. I can hear from Vendors anytime. CITRT is a RoundTable of Church IT people. These are the ONLY ones I want to hear from during CITRT.

I disagree with allowing vendors to speak during the roundtable. I don't want to hear from vendors during this time. I want to hear from my peers. And believe me my peers have plenty of things to say. Most of the time I can't get a word in :)

Any vedor who is present at CITRT is going to be a sales person.

I think it was very good to have a chat going on during the session that everyone can see. I think it's important to be able to get your point of view across, even if a vendor is taking up all the CITRT time in your session :)

Chat could be improved upon, whereby all sessions can be viewed as Rooms in the chat-space and all of this is logged as well for searching and further review. Having a central chat-space is good too. It would be easy to enable irc-chat for this next time I think.

The video / chat didn't work because of bandwidth issues. I say we just use chat.

Having a session time specifically for vendors and other topics of interest was good. You are not forced to hear from vendors during this time as I held a non-vendor RoundTable during this time. :)

Also I think having two meetings a year, Fall and Spring, in Churches is a good idea.

2. AV recording and transcripting?

I want all session audio recorded (and transcripted if possible). We can upload each of these onto TalkShoe which makes them avaiable on iTunes / iPods. That way we don't miss anything that was said in all sessions.