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.

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.

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.