Check this out - I was encouraged. The day of outreach at winter conference:
Winter Conference 2011 Summary from Power to Change - Students on Vimeo.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Monday, December 26, 2011
Translating the pulse
My latest work with Campus for Christ is to translate our primary student web site, the Pulse, into French. Each term, hundreds of students use the pulse to get connected into Discipleship Groups (similar to Bible studies). The Francophone Quebec campuses, however, haven't really adopted the pulse because of the language barrier.
The pulse really needs to be in French to have credibility and adoption on French-speaking campuses.
After a skype chat with a coworker who works on a Francophone campus, we decided to focus on translating all pages that a student who is signing up for a Discipleship Groups would see. This includes the group signup, personal info input, timetable input and of course the main landing page. It does mean a number of pages that staff or higher-access students use won't be translated, but that's an acceptable trade-off. Translating all the pages would take too long and we want it ready by the January launch. Focusing on the new student signup process means we get the most benefit for the cost.
We decided to use the mygengo online transation tool. It provides a nice interface for translators, where they can see the English terms and corresponding French translations side by side. Work is progressing slowly as translation is a lot of manual labor -- I have to go through all the HTML and extract the text into a single translation file -- but I'm making steady progress. The landing page is a bit difficult as well because of the images involved. We have to track down the original image files and generate new French ones. As for the actual text translations, my coworker is hoping to grab some students during Winter Conference this week and distribute the translation workload to have it ready by the January launch when classes start.
The pulse in French will enable our staff and students to make more use of it and have more people in DGs and discovering Jesus and growing in their faith.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Staff Conference
Late July I had the privilege of going to the Canadian staff conference in Ottawa. I drove up with my housemates Sheldon and Hobbe and stayed at my parent's place for a the evening -- my mom cooked up quite the meal for us!
Early the next day we took a bus in to the Mariott in downtown Ottawa to join the conference. This was the first year of a new conference format, where we meet in a more local region rather than all Power to Change staff. It felt more like a series of large meetings than a conference, but that was conducive to having the many ministries collaborate and learn from each other.
The Canadian ministry is changing their name to Power to Change, Students. There's more info here. Overall, I like the new name and think it will help align the Campus Ministry with the parent organization, Power to Change.
A staff member from the business ministry presented a series on some practical ways to develop a healthy team dynamic. He showed a clip from the business "guru" Adizes who talked about how important trust is in any team, and that the only way to get to the point of trust (and thus peak productivity) is through willingness. You can't force it - people have to be willing to work through the issues. I also remember a handout the presenter gave that had a number of questions about how you're doing with building trust. Things like.. do you keep your promises? Do you only promise vague things that absolves you from real responsibility or are your promises clear and measurable? Do you feel hurt "for" other people? That can be damaging to trust and lead to bitterness because it's much harder to resolve -- the person who did the hurt doesn't even know someone else was hurt so they don't know to go to apologize and resolve it. It's also a bit controlling because it's not their position to feel hurt for someone else. I appreciated this section because it was so generally applicable - I could apply it in any team, whether work-related or in my personal life.
After conference, the operations team had their own huddle. We had some of our own meetings and even had a few "work" hours to get some tasks done since we could collaborate face-to-face. Overall a useful, productive and enjoyable staff conference.
Early the next day we took a bus in to the Mariott in downtown Ottawa to join the conference. This was the first year of a new conference format, where we meet in a more local region rather than all Power to Change staff. It felt more like a series of large meetings than a conference, but that was conducive to having the many ministries collaborate and learn from each other.
The Canadian ministry is changing their name to Power to Change, Students. There's more info here. Overall, I like the new name and think it will help align the Campus Ministry with the parent organization, Power to Change.
A staff member from the business ministry presented a series on some practical ways to develop a healthy team dynamic. He showed a clip from the business "guru" Adizes who talked about how important trust is in any team, and that the only way to get to the point of trust (and thus peak productivity) is through willingness. You can't force it - people have to be willing to work through the issues. I also remember a handout the presenter gave that had a number of questions about how you're doing with building trust. Things like.. do you keep your promises? Do you only promise vague things that absolves you from real responsibility or are your promises clear and measurable? Do you feel hurt "for" other people? That can be damaging to trust and lead to bitterness because it's much harder to resolve -- the person who did the hurt doesn't even know someone else was hurt so they don't know to go to apologize and resolve it. It's also a bit controlling because it's not their position to feel hurt for someone else. I appreciated this section because it was so generally applicable - I could apply it in any team, whether work-related or in my personal life.
After conference, the operations team had their own huddle. We had some of our own meetings and even had a few "work" hours to get some tasks done since we could collaborate face-to-face. Overall a useful, productive and enjoyable staff conference.
Monday, June 20, 2011
June 2011 Update
During my last update, I stated that I was working on support raising and considering a change of status. After a fair bit of praying and reflection, I decided to switch to associate staff with Campus for Christ in a role that would allow me to work for both Campus for Christ and take external contracts. I did this for a number of reasons.
Except from my latest newsletter.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
New newsletter update
When I'm on the Project Application Tool (PAT) web site, I regularly see this piece of text: "UK Spring Break" project (mission trip). I decided to ask staff member Beth, who led the UK trip about it so that I could move beyond seeing some text to something tangible.
Except from my latest newsletter.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Work continues
February was spent mainly on the infrastructure work mentioned in the previous post. Our intern Sheldon and staff member Jacques from Quebec are doing a great job helping. For the technically inclined, they're writing automated tests and refactoring large pieces of code into a library that we can share amongst all our apps. I continue to oversee the process and help when necessary.
I've learned from this process the benefit of distributing work, and I think gained some experience in how to break down a big job into clear pieces that other people can work on. It came down to about 10-20% of the work being to set up the rest of it, the rest of it being more mechanical and straighforward. Once I worked with Sheldon and Jacques to get that first part down, the rest of it they're continuing without as much direct help, and making good progress.
I've heard some stories about ministry going on at Mac -- mainly, I've heard about lots of spiritual interest and chalking KGP -- "Knowing God Personally" on various classroom chalk boards to gain interest. One of the Mac staff was saying that it's generating some good momentum with the students involved.
I've learned from this process the benefit of distributing work, and I think gained some experience in how to break down a big job into clear pieces that other people can work on. It came down to about 10-20% of the work being to set up the rest of it, the rest of it being more mechanical and straighforward. Once I worked with Sheldon and Jacques to get that first part down, the rest of it they're continuing without as much direct help, and making good progress.
I've heard some stories about ministry going on at Mac -- mainly, I've heard about lots of spiritual interest and chalking KGP -- "Knowing God Personally" on various classroom chalk boards to gain interest. One of the Mac staff was saying that it's generating some good momentum with the students involved.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Server provisioning and other technical infrastructure
One of the other major tasks I've been focusing on the last few weeks is building some infrastructure. As we continue to expand our team, I've realized we need to do some work on our own technology landscape to enable that growth.
Some of the major pieces I see for the technical infrastructure:
Through a series of events I won't go in to, I've ended up doing most of the server administration for the web servers that the project application tool and the pulse run on. As a result, I've learned and experienced some of what it's like to administrate a server that runs ruby on rails, such as managing packages and libraries installed, deploying changes to the server, and doing operating system security updates.
When we had students at Waterloo project, I helped many of them get set up for development. As a result, I learned even more about how to set up a computer for ruby on rails development.
I realized that documenting the setup procedure would save us time and result in cleaner and more consistent development environments. We used a wiki to document the process.
As I kept copying and pasting commands, I figured there was an easier way, and it turns out there's a number of libraries out there that will run the commands you specify to set up an environment. After doing some research, I settled on the moonshine provisioning library, which is used and developed by the commercial hosting site railsmachine. Moonshine is built on another tool called puppet which is an industry standard in the provisioning area.
I've spent quite a bit of time now building a "manifest" that, when run on a compatible base install of debian or ubuntu linux, will set up everything needed to actually server the project application tool and the pulse. I even got to submit a few patches to the open source moonshine library through the process.
The end result is that a new developer can set up their environment in about 45 minutes, after running a single command to start the process. I can also set up a new server in roughly the same time.
Having this server provisioning will save us time in a number of ways. There's the obvious time saved in setting up new systems. Without going in to the technical details why, having this server provisioning set up properly will make it much easier to track down and fix bugs.
I've also built the server provisioning process with the international community in mind. I'm attempting to make it as easy as possible for other countries to adopt our script to their own environment.
More on the rest of the items later.
Some of the major pieces I see for the technical infrastructure:
- Automating the process for building a new server with our major apps installed -- a process called server provisioning.
- Using the same framework for all of our applications.
- Building a library of common code that we will use across all of our apps.
Through a series of events I won't go in to, I've ended up doing most of the server administration for the web servers that the project application tool and the pulse run on. As a result, I've learned and experienced some of what it's like to administrate a server that runs ruby on rails, such as managing packages and libraries installed, deploying changes to the server, and doing operating system security updates.
When we had students at Waterloo project, I helped many of them get set up for development. As a result, I learned even more about how to set up a computer for ruby on rails development.
I realized that documenting the setup procedure would save us time and result in cleaner and more consistent development environments. We used a wiki to document the process.
As I kept copying and pasting commands, I figured there was an easier way, and it turns out there's a number of libraries out there that will run the commands you specify to set up an environment. After doing some research, I settled on the moonshine provisioning library, which is used and developed by the commercial hosting site railsmachine. Moonshine is built on another tool called puppet which is an industry standard in the provisioning area.
I've spent quite a bit of time now building a "manifest" that, when run on a compatible base install of debian or ubuntu linux, will set up everything needed to actually server the project application tool and the pulse. I even got to submit a few patches to the open source moonshine library through the process.
The end result is that a new developer can set up their environment in about 45 minutes, after running a single command to start the process. I can also set up a new server in roughly the same time.
Having this server provisioning will save us time in a number of ways. There's the obvious time saved in setting up new systems. Without going in to the technical details why, having this server provisioning set up properly will make it much easier to track down and fix bugs.
I've also built the server provisioning process with the international community in mind. I'm attempting to make it as easy as possible for other countries to adopt our script to their own environment.
More on the rest of the items later.
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