October news from the YWAM KnowledgeBase
Dear friends,
September has been so intense for me here in Brussels I have not had time to send out a little newsletter for the KB. Anyway here we are!
The Wiki has been experiencing strong growth recently, partly as a result of me announcing it via ywam-base-announce newsletter. It was great to see people signing in daily! We now have over 100 users - that means just over 0.5% of all YWAMers are subscribed! What does it feel like to be a part of an elite club?
I have also started http://www.planetywam.net news site too which I hope will result in cross-pollination of the two projects. Planet YWAM is a good way of keeping up with latest YWAM news from those sites plus the latest changes to YWAMKB! I will also be posting this newsletter on my blog too to see if we can get a wider readership. Please keep doing what you can to encourage people to use the KB.
The Wiki is a powerful tool. I spotted this news story recently http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7015024.stm about the New Zealand police force using a wiki to compose new laws. This is powerful stuff; I wonder what the result will be. I am hopeful this experiment will bear fruit.
New Articles
There have been some interesting new articles this month notably from Steve Goode (thanks):
- http://wiki.ywambrussels.be/kb/index.php/Manila_Covenant - We corrected the spelling to no longer rhyme with “Vanilla”!
- http://wiki.ywambrussels.be/kb/index.php/YWAM_Licensing_MOU - advice on not loosing our right to use the YWAM logo and name YWAM!
- http://wiki.ywambrussels.be/kb/index.php/Jomtien_Statement - YWAM’s important statement on Mercy Ministries
- http://wiki.ywambrussels.be/kb/index.php/Backup_Data - Some ideas on how to protect your data and never loose your important documents and details.
- http://wiki.ywambrussels.be/kb/index.php/Windows_Computer_setup_guide - A helpful list of Free and Open source software that you can install free of charge on a Windows computer to make it a productive tool for your staff. You can click each link to download the latest and greatest versions of software.
- http://wiki.ywambrussels.be/kb/index.php/Why_Leaders_Fail - a very interesting article for leaders!
- http://wiki.ywambrussels.be/kb/index.php/Depression - an article I wrote to help YWAMers support each other and those struggling with depression
- http://wiki.ywambrussels.be/kb/index.php/Category:Business_As_Missions - a whole bunch of documents from the Business as Missions website
I hope you enjoy browsing the KB and seeing what is new!
Every now and then people request articles. Recently Sergio, from Italy asked me if there were any application forms for DTS that embodied the best principles for Data protection/privacy. In the EU the data protection law is very strict and applies to all countries in the EU - thus it makes sense to share the data. YWAM England has a lot of good practice in this area. So can we help Sergio out by writing about what Good Practice is in Application Forms and also giving him source documents that he can adapt for his own use?
Lastly, I recently got a change to present the KB to the National Leaders in Western Europe. I may have bored then to death (not really) but I think it went very well. The proof is in getting people to contribute their knowledge to the heap! I get a lot of positive feeling that this is important to them. I also noticed signs that there is a danger of information overload for some as the mushrooming number of YWAM websites is overwhelming (Have you seen http://wiki.ywambrussels.be/kb/index.php/YWAM Web pages recently? Any ideas on how we can help?
Till next month,
Kevin Colyer
PS For those wanting help to get their documents into the Wikitext used on the site help is coming soon we hope! Until then note that the very latest version of OpenOffice (FREE!) has an export Document as Mediawiki option that converts any document you load (Word .doc’s for example) into wikitext format! See here: (http://wiki.ywambrussels.be/kb/index.php/Help:Converting the Heathen#The Best Conversion Tool)
