September Newsletter from the YWAM KnowledgeBase

Dear Infonauts,

Welcome to the autumn term after a wild and/or restful summer (maybe both?).

I am very much overdue to write this little newsletter for the KB. It has been an interesting few months recently where we have made some jumps forward and a few leaps backward too.

Arnoud (or Little Eagle) has been doing a superb job of pulling the community side of the KB together. He has organised the recent Cleaning Days and been active on the Facebook group. The Cleaning Days have been good and certainly help me to focus time on the KB, knowing others are hard at work too. One of the great things about working together at the same time is that one sparks off another. Also mutual appreciation flows. After all, it is hard to know if someone values an edit you made to the KB if you don’t get feedback.

Recently I have been having a lot of positive collaboration time with PitPat who has been using a tool I created to evaluate websites. Through evaluating the KnowledgeBase (and it failed 3 out of the 4 tests!) we learnt a lot about what is important in an evaluation and have radically improved the tool. I recommend having a look at Evaluate your YWAM website and then the evaluation of the KB too. Massive thanks to PitPat.

Anyway I have since then implemented a number of improvements we identified that could be quickly achieved (or I alone could do) such as upgrading the MediaWiki software and some server tweaks and administrative procedures to reduce the bus factor (number of people critical to the long term management of the site).

You may notice no difference, or quite a lot of difference as upgrading usually breaks a few custom extensions to the wiki as well as fix the security holes (very important). Please report anything that is troubling you as this is a large project and it is hard to see all the less common faults.

Sharing Knowledge I was following the GLT meetings recently in Switzerland and I noticed the following paragraph in one report about communication:

“Finally, the GLT have had communicators writing their internal minutes, and producing short videos and these written reports for the wider YWAM body. Knowledge is power, and good leadership seeks to empower people through sharing knowledge. Wherever security allows, it is good to communicate appropriately. Many leadership teams have followed the GLT’s example and invite communicators to observe and serve them…”

I was thrilled that GLT members see this value that the KB has been striving to achieve! Now, where you can play your part is getting those who lead you to take this word from the GLT and start applying it to the KB. Surprisingly there is only ONE GLT leader who has made any direct contribution, and that is Steve Goode. Others have material on the KB (put there often by me). Very few leaders at National or Base level have contributed either. Anyway, it is time to remind them of their responsibility to train and develop others and to maximise that contribution via the KnowledgeBase! So please pester your leaders, ask them what they could contribute, and teach them how to do it! That we all might grow! They may prefer face to face encounters but let’s remember the Apostles Paul, Peter and John (et al!) all thought the written word an appropriate way to develop and nurture those they were responsible for!

Cheers,

Kevin

YWAM KnowledgeBase news June 2009

Dear All,

Last month was an exciting month for me and I hope for all in the KB community! The Sprint meeting was a very key event and an unusual one too.

I’ve been to quite a few YWAM events but this was the first where we actively invited non-physically present participants to engage with us. Each day at 4pm it was a lot of fun connecting to YWAMers from different continents making friends and talking KB. I think the two key outcomes of the Sprint were the creation of KB community and start of more systematic training using the KB.

It has been a surprise to me how the Facebook group has been developing and the types of discussion and connections made there. It seems we need a place where we can generally chat – perhaps the discussion tools on the KB itself are not suited to the sort of conversations folks are wanting to hold! Arnoud has a passion to make this community a cosy space. We also think that having a regular time slot online that the community can come and chat in and ask help from each other would be beneficial. So listen out for Arnoud’s invitations (coming soon!). We also started a mailing list that many people are receiving this message through right now! This is for the community – please use it, call for help on it, ask questions, make suggestions, send insults, jokes etc. If you are not on it you can simply join it from here: http://groups.ywamnetworks.com/listinfo.cgi/ywamkb-ywamnetworks.com. We have links now from the front page of the KB to both the Facebook group and the KB Mailing list.

The second important development is what we are calling “Threads” (for want of a better name). When we surveyed people about the KB it seemed there were a variety of different ways people used it to get answers to their questions. But there were many people not having a clue what to do with it at all. The strength of the KB is that you can just stick in a page. Searching will pull it out. However, when you want to learn a set of skills or gain a broader understanding of a subject (e.g. starting a new team or becoming a dts staff member) it makes sense to have a pathway through those pages, systematically pulling together the key topics and skills needed.

So we created these pathways or threads (if you have a better name please suggest it!). They appear on the front page. We started with some classic roles and questions and provided the initial links to category pages etc. But some are now sporting the initials WIP (Work In Progress) and a little spanner. These are the new thread pages and this is where we think we need some extra input.

The WIP’s need developing and expanding. They need each skill-set breaking down, then pages or sections of the KB matched to them with links. Where there are gaps in the KB (and there will be lots) we can create the article title we want and seek people to write them. (links to pages that don’t exist are called Wanted Pages and you can get a list at any time here: http://ywamkb.net/kb/index.php/Special:Wantedpages)

Exciting times. I hope you are as pleased as we are.

The next time to connect will be Monday 8th June (http://ywamkb.net/kb/index.php/YWAMKnowledgeBase:Meeting_20090608)

Regards,

Kevin Colyer

YWAM KB Sprint is nearly here!

Dear All,

The quiet season for the KB is due to end soon as the Sprint meeting will be taking place May 11-15 here in Brussels.

I am excited to host this meeting as I rarely have set aside quality time to work in depth on the KB. Rather a quick 30 mins here or hour there as an idea strikes or someone says “Is there anything on the KB about…” and I have a little something to do!

But we are going to take this whole week to WORK, not just chat about the KB. The aim is that we will improve the structure of the data, write new articles, work on the presentation and generally the usefulness of the whole site. There may be some back end performance/server things we can work on also.

I really would love those who can’t make it in person to think about what they can communicate from afar and perhaps set an afternoon or morning aside to work on something. We don’t have to be physically present to work together! It could be very exciting.

Firstly, please have a look at the Sprint pages and the timetable. (Sprint 2009) Remember all times are BRUSSELS times (GMT+1). We will be using these pages a lot and so please check there. We will post where we can be found on line too. If all else fails please pick up a phone and call the Brussels office and we can talk in person!

Secondly, please LET US KNOW what you consider important to be worked on and your recommendations. For example, Saulo Xavier in Brasil, sent me very interesting thoughts on the promotion and look of the KB site. (Not forgotten or ignored Saulo!) We need more concrete things like this. It could be articles, promotional material, ideas for structures, new concepts for the front page or your own observations, feedback of problems faced by users etc. I await your emails!

I look forward to your presence physically, virtually or in spirit!

Cheers,

Kevin

YWAM KnowledgeBase – May 11-16 in Brussels!

Dear All,

I want to announce that we will be having a YWAMKB Sprint meeting here in Brussels May 11-15. You are all welcome to come!

What is a Sprint you may ask? Well, it is a time to meet and talk and WORK hard at improving the KB. As the KB contributers are a virtual team having some good face to face time should give us all some encouragement to keep developing the KB.

So who is it for?

• Writers, who want to develop articles and learn how to use the KB better. We will write lots of new articles in the Sprint
• Organisers, who are good at bringing sensible structure to the KB. We need to work on making the structure clearer in order to bring the articles closer to those looking for them.
• Artists, who can improve the look and feel of the site
• Educators, who can help to improve articles, find the gaps in the knowledge and help people to really learn well with the KB.
• System-admins, who can keep the underlying code in good order, the system secure and the data backed-up.
• ANYONE, who cares about using the KB to pass on to others the wisdom and practical advise you have gained.

The cost will be low! As low as I can make it. Food and a small daily charge for a bed in the YWAM Base here in Brussels. Don’t let finances be a hurdle – if you want to come we will see what we can do.

More details will appear soon, but please email me  (kevin@ywambrussels.be) to confirm your interest.

If the dates do not fall in happy places for you or travel would be ridiculously expensive don’t fret as we will try to have Skype participation available and also an open Instant Messaging channel that you can drop in and out of during the sprint! Your virtual participation is welcomed and encouraged. But sadly you can’t drink the Belgium beer online so personal presence is preferred!

I look forward to hearing from you!

Kevin

YWAM Knowledge Base News

Greetings Infonauts!

Life Chez Kevin has been busier than ever last month with 3 trips away from Brussels and the ever gorgeous twins to look after. Sorry for the lack of communication – I just got snowed under.

I have been reading the excellent “The Starfish and the Spider” which is all about the power of leaderless movements of people. It is a great read. Getting so snowed under made me realise that a project like YWAMKB really does not want me as a spider-like leader – I will get so bogged down with work the project could stall. Plus if I go away or forget to pay the domain fees so will the KB. That must not happen! Of course I can also slow innovation too. For example, I would have never thought of having a Facebook group for the YWAMKB but Arnoud did and just… did it! (In fact I really don’t hang out on Facebook at all – I must be getting old!) He had 65 members in a week (now 73). He has something to develop now. That is the power of leaderless organisations. You can sign up here: http://www.facebook.com/inbox/?ref=mb#/group.php?gid=46220161302

So in our future meetings we should really look at how we can set the KB free so that if I am ever out of the picture the whole project can continue. The next YWAM KB meeting will be at 16h00 GMT+1 on 10 November, 2008. Please see YWAMKnowledgeBase:Meeting 20081110 for agenda and add your thoughts. Why not join in?

That’s all for now. Keep telling everyone you know about the KB. Please write articles. Please correct all my bad spelling and make my articles look the best!

Cheers,

Kevin

A useful tip for WordPress users…

I really like WordPress. I have used Blogger, use Typepad regularly and tried other systems but WordPress seems to do all I want quickly, easily, slickly and for free!

Now I love the RSS technology that enables a website to publish a series of articles or pages so that other sites can syndicate them and make use of them. I set up planetYWAM.net to captialise this as it sucks in the RSS feeds from websites and then re-publishes them on one page. It makes an auto-matic newspaper that publishes once an hour. Only with out editorial control. But it does have its own RSS feed too!

Anyway I wanted to set up this blog so that only articles that I place in the YWAM category are published on planetYWAM. It turns out this is quite easy to do. WordPress allows you to add a /feed to the end of the blog url or the category url or comments url with provides a feed to that subset of articles.

e.g. http://kevincolyer.wordpress.com/category/ywam/feed will give me an RSS link to a series of articles I have placed in the YWAM category. I have added this link to the planetYWAM engine and so it should publish this article presently!

Very cool eh? And all for free! Actually, something this good is worth paying for as if it ever goes away I will be sad!

90 Days to read the Bible

I have joined with a whole host of folks at the Link to read the Bible through in 90 days. It is quite a tought target taking 30 minutes of reading each day.

So far I am doing well with the discipline of reading. I am not aiming for depth in this exercise but the benefit of a spitiual disciple as well as the washing of the water of the word that reading the Bible like this grants.

So far the speed of reading makes the tough books like Numbers and Leviticus a much more interesting read! It is interesting the way the holiness and dedication for the people of Isreal is worked out. In our individualist society these rules would be anathema but in a collective responsibility mindset like the ancient nation of Isreal it must have worked better!

It is still early days for the reading but it is good fun.

Kevin

September letter from the YWAMKB

Greetings all Infonauts!

After a very long break for my furlough and the successful birth of my twin boys, Luc and Joshua, I am now back to work. In between quick naps and nappy changes I have chance to write a letter on the KB, so I am taking it!

I was thrilled to be away this summer and leave the admin of the YWAM KB in the hands of Little Eagle, Neo, Crashsystems and others. It shows that the team behind the KB is growing plus the hardware and software is robust and healthy. I am glad this project is growing beyond me and my domain and becoming our thing; something that belongs to us and we can work on together. Giving away knowledge is absolutely vital. The alternative of which is to hold on to it and creating a little kingdom of our own. And that is so unhealthy. Especially when you consider our calling is to make God known and anything that hinders the increase of effectiveness in making God known in YWAM is not from the Lord!

Did you know we have passed 200,000 page views? These are views as counted by the wiki software so if you take all the caching that happens on the internet that means we have probably had many more views of the pages. It is great progress and a consistent growth curve. Already over 1% of YWAM staff are registered users; I presume the unregistered users are many more than this. When we reach 340 registered users we will have 2% of all YWAMers!

What encourages me about all this is that we are helping our fellow missionaries make a difference where they are. And we need to keep working at it! We currently have a DTS outreach team here in Brussels from Byron Bay in Australia. I had never heard of the place but as we chatted I realised it is a place of world pilgrimage for back-packers! It is a small town of 9,000 people but 1.3 million back-packers turn up there each year for the sand and the surf (and etc.) What a place to be YWAMers and do outreach! So I begged them to write about how they do what they do so that those of us who reach similar people groups can be inspired to reach out too. Ibiza probably is very similar to Byron Bay, so YWAM Australia has much to offer YWAM Europe… but only if we take the time to communicate!

So please try to set aside just half an hour this month to write about something you are doing, no matter how dull or obvious it may appear to you – it will help others to grow in their effectiveness in making the knowledge of Christ known in the world!

Cheers,

Kevin

YWAM Knowledge Base News April 2008

Dear All,

There is a bumper crop of news this month, as I really did not have time to write anything for the last couple of months!

The good news is that the KB is enjoying record popularity! The last month has seen the number of page reads go up by 30,000! This is quite a lot. In fact it is 1/3 of all page hits ever since we started in one month. Looking at the other log files it looks genuine, although I am not sure who in Spain is looking at the KB but the single largest group of hits come from there! Anyway we will see. But good news!

Talking of records I have added a league table of contributers. At the moment Steve and myself rest on top by an embarrassingly large lead. However the Top Twelve are:

1. Kevin: (too many to make it fair)
2. Steve: (too many to make it fair)
3. Adelaartjes: (65 Edits on 9 pages)
4. Flyingkiwi: (44 Edits on 13 pages)
5. Cforbes: (22 Edits on 5 pages)
6. Belindaloo: (13 Edits on 9 pages)
7. Bob: (11 Edits on 3 pages)
8. Keever: (11 Edits on 7 pages)
9. Crashsystems: (11 Edits on 7 pages)
10. Groove1950: (9 Edits on 7 pages)
11. Neo: (9 Edits on 6 pages)
12. Robzilla: (9 Edits on 4 pages)

Congratulations to all on the Top Twelve. I will continue to publish the league table as a motivation for all! This also means I don’t have to remember your names and logins and can merely refer to you as No. 3 or No. 27! (You know who you are!)

We have also received a donation of a dot com domain! Thanks Mike. People can now put www.ywamkb.com in their browser and find us. New users can’t actually register like this – you can only register at ywamkb.net.

The KB is getting out and about. We were are the Western European Leaders Consultation last week and the word got out there. CRIT is happening just now. look out for Rodney Blevins (27) and Steve Keever (8) at CRIT. I hope they get the chance to present. Go for it you two! If anyone else reading this is there please meet up and take a photo of yourselves for us here.

If you get the chance to talk about the KB you might like to know there is a Presentation on the KB. Just to avoid the “Death by 1000 Powerpoints”, I made a Presentation on the KB and there is a little tour too. It is always best to tweak the presentation for yourself and check all the links work! Beware some joker in the audience changes your last slide before you get there! (The power of wiki’s!) Presentation is here.

One thing people often ask about when you chat about the KB is support for other languages. Internationalisation has not been forgotten – we are not an Anglophone mission! But if you have seen my written French you will know why I am not racing into writing French articles. The preferred solution for the KB is to do what Wikipedia does: It has parallel wiki’s with each article written independently. Inter-wiki links are added when there is a clear pairing of articles. But generally it grows organically like that. We are not ready to launch another wiki for a language. As a medium term proposal I would like to suggest that if you write an article in another language you make the article name like this:

DE/Meine Atikal
FR/Mon Prémiere Article
FR/Mon Deuxième Article etc.


Please put the language code in capitals followed by a forward slash. You can see that sometimes this technique elsewhere in the wiki like the notes from the WELC conference Steve put up.

That’s it for this month! Have fun.

Kevin

Next meting: Meeting 5th May 2008

This Linux thing

If you are wondering what is all this Linux thing about then perhaps this little explanation will help!

Linux is the core of an operating system, like Windows or Mac OS X, and is a variant of Unix if you have ever heard of that. The Linux kernel is at the heart of the Gnu/Linux Operating system and was started off as a project of a young Finnish, Linus Torvalds, under-graduate in 1991 during his summer holiday break. He started the project just for fun yet the project has mushroomed into a multi-billion dollar software industry.

Where would you find Linux? Pretty much everywhere these days. Due to its open nature it can be taken and modified for many different applications. For example, whenever you watch Shrek, all the animation and rendering was done using computers running Linux. When you buy a book on Amazon (their entire business is built on Linux), when you search Google! Linux runs on nearly all of the fastest 500 supercomputers in the world. It also runs on mobile phones, TV set top boxes and all sorts of electronic gadgets. Where you might not see it is on Desktop computers as only about 1% or 2% of desktop computers run Linux but it is gaining more and more acceptance.

Why would I want to run Linux on my computer? Well, its cheap! Often free. It has a great reputation for being very secure compared to Windows. It has been designed from the start to work on the internet and with multiple users safely and securely. You will not need to run a virus checker as there are not really any serious viruses compared to the tens of thousands of viruses for Windows. It also runs very well on older hardware as it is efficient and fast. It is really stable too. It is very hard to lock up a Linux machine. Programs that break often do not take crash the whole machine along with it! It generally uses less memory than Windows making a struggling computer feel responsive and zippy again. It has tons of great software built in and installing new software and keeping it up to date is really simple and pain free. It is also often easy to install, as there are no license keys to remember and no endless searching for this and that driver you can’t find, plus hours spent in installing and rebooting that you need to add software to make it useful. Linux can be up and running in 20 minutes, and you can be doing useful work straight away. There are even a few powerful office suites right at your finger tips. Linux can save you hundreds of Euros on software and hardware.

Why is it called Free and Open source software? Linux belongs to a class of software called Free and Open source. This is free as in Freedom, and Linux is released under a special free software agreement. This does not always mean zero cost but it means that you will have several freedoms when using the software that you wont get elsewhere. These include the freedom to run the software, examine the code, modify it and improve it and also give those changes away to others (to help you neighbour). You really can share a great game or other program with friends without needing to pirate or pay large fees to do so. What this means is that there has grown a community of people who develop the software. Big business is involved (like IBM and SUN for example) just as much as ordinary people in their spare time. Very often the software is created for, and by the people who use it. That means that the users are the ones who get to dictate the direction of the software and not a corporation for its own profit. This can produce software that is more innovative, easy to use and productive. A good example of this is the Firefox web browser that has revolutionised innovation on the World Wide Web.

Is it hard? Well, yes and no! In many ways it is often very easy and a modern Linux distribution is no harder than Windows. There is much to learn and you can go as deep as you wish in exploring this fascinating system. There are some hard things and not all hardware works straight away. This is often because the manufacturers are unwilling to write the driver software or open up the specifications to allow the Linux community to write their own. However, when hardware works it often does so out of the box. There will be things that wont work but shopping wisely by researching your purchase is the best way to prevent disappointment. Help is often on hand too both on the internet and from enthusiasts who will willingly give you a helping hand.

What can’t it do? Well, it can’t do everything. Some weak areas are: video editing, there might not be a Linux version of your favourite software (games especially), some hardware is difficult including wireless internet cards and some video cards. But it can do everything else including making coffee.

How do I start? Get hold of a Live Linux CD (say Ubuntu, OpenSuse or Fedora) from a Linux Magazine, from a friend or even downloading a CD image and burning it onto a CD. Run that CD and see what happens! Live CD’s run a version of Linux directly from the CD, not touching your other data at all on your hard disk. It will be slower than normal but you will get a good idea if it is likely to work or not on your machine without having install it. Buying a cheap second hand machine and installing Linux on to it is a great learning tool.

What ever you do make sure you enjoy the freedom Linux brings, and spirit of Linux, which is to have a lot of fun!