Caught this a little bit ago from The Living Labs Global Mobility Report:

…The website is the front end of an impressive back end algorithm. Geo-tagged photos of particular city scapes are presented to visitors of the site in pairs. Users are asked to click which place looks safer, more unique, or more upper-class. The algorithm uses the resulting binary data to classify places into these three categories.

That may not seem impressive, but check out the results. Among all cities surveyed (Boston, New York, Vienna, Salzberg, and Linz), Boston and New York have the most unsafe-looking places, while the Austrian cities have the top 10 safe-looking places. Just quickly looking at the photos categorized this way provides amazing insight into particular characteristics that draw people to, or send them running from, a public place. A sense of enclosure, vegetation, street-level retail, and other human beings are common characteristics among the safe-looking places…

Read the rest of the post at Living Labs Global and the full report of Place Pulse at MIT Media Lab.

For as much as we would like to believe in the perception of our churches and faith communities as being beneficial to our surrounding communities, the truth is that we don’t really know about what people think until we ask them, legislation provokes our response, or disaster happens and we aren’t asked for assistance. In a recent conversation, a musician told me how he didn’t care for many people of faith because he found them to be hypocrites, liars, and in denial of the day-to-day issues in which some go through – in a sense, he called the church “disconnected from the real world.” That was a scathing assessment of things, especially in a city like Charlotte which is (a) in the Bible Belt” and (b) has over 1000 registered churches by some accounts.

Could your church or community therefore stand up to a system such as what’s described in the MIT project? No, not are you preaching the Gospel, but what is the intensity of living the Gospel (James 1:20-21) that your surrounding communities can see, or even measure. And if your reputation was more public ally known, how would you change? Could your church/community culture change? Or, will such information cause such the kind of breaking down of things that the only way to rebuild would be to have an effort very similar to Jesus resurrecting?

This is another side of mobile ministry that has to be considered. Its not just the channel or the technology that you need to address, but the perception of the faith that people already have. If a project came like this to put your efforts on a heat-map, would your faith be hot or not?