Could your Internet evangelism, online ministry, or mobile ministry efforts fare well in a spatial computing environment:

Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry: Unveiling the “Sixth Sense” – TED Talk

So much of the efforts are about bringing your message to people,or broadcasting to their spaces. But, what if it were flipped. What if your message couldn’t stand in the spaces they interact with? Or, what if your message, no matter how appropriate, had the digital fingerprints of people who have other characteristics which might diminish the quality or validity of your message? And then, as the above video shows, what if tech opened all of that (for an off-the-shelf cost of $350USD)?

Can your digital ministry efforts act in any kind of digital space? Or, just the ones you can control?

There’s some sense of disbelief across mobilists, developers, theologists, and just about anyone else when I describe to them how I live/work solely from mobile devices (seriously, I only need a conventional PC when doing a SharePoint virtual training class). Its normal for me to live like this. To hear those who ddeal and work with mobile not work/live like this does tend to get to me a bit. Nevertheless, there are moments when others get a chance to poke at life via mobile that’s different than their normal contexts.

Such was the case at Unwired View. In a recent article, there was such an exploration of mobile and life brought about because of work/productivity needs. Here’s a snippet:

All together I can say that all the (mobile) technology made the trip to Angola very easy for me and my family. It helped me to get my work done there, it entertained me in the evening and it kept me connected to my local colleagues, my friends and my family. Don’t know how generations before us did the same without these little helpers but I don’t want to miss this kind of mobile technology in my life anymore.

Read the rest of Unwired Thought’s Back from Angola – Back on Duty.

Notable to that article, and personal experience, being productivty with such an arrangement means dealing with certain compromises and advantages. You have to know not just your device, but the advantages and limitations of all potential viewing windows for whatever it is that you are producing. For example, living such a way has meant for the complete removal of MS Office from my computing devices. Documents that won’t be seen by others sit in Evernote or are self-generated HTML documents; collaborative documents migrate to Google Docs or task/project management solutions (SharePoint, Basecamp, etc.).

Another note from that piece, do you see how he had to adapt his personal mobile tech to the contexts of the culture. Needing a torch, FM radio, and using a device that iis easy to be repaired were common to where he was. The Internet was so new, and expensive, that outside of a company-supplied SIM it wasn’t going to happen as often unless through a Wi-Fi hotspot or cafe. Knowing mobile means that you have to understand these aspects of your environment before you get there, while being open and versatile enough to change when teh situations warrant.

Many of you might have stories of such challenges and opportunities. You should be open about those items, and help others online and around you prepare adequately for such variances in technical environments.

We’ve not talked about The Phones Show in sometime, yet this excellent video news/editorial program – and its accompaying audio-only Phones Show Chat – are great for getting some insight about mobile devices and perspectives from a UK-English perspective

Take a look at Episode 154:

One of the best parts about The Phones Show is that its recorded using mobile phones such as the Apple iPhone 4S, Nokia N8, and Samsung i8910 HD as they offer an impressive amount of video and audio quality.

Catch up with this and other episodes of The Phones Show (video) or The Phones Show Chat (audio). You can subscribe to this weekly broadcast via iTunes, or your podcast/RSS reader.

This past week, I was asked to be a guest on the No Ties Allowed podcast. I was introduced to the hosts behind this podcast from the ICCM 2011 Conference we attended earlier in the year, and it was an awesome time to reconnect with these brothers and put things into digital spaces with voice. Besides mobile, we also talk some current news, books being read, and offer some updates on travels, events, and prayer requests.

Check out the No Ties Allowed podcast: How Mobiles Are Being Used to Deliever God’s Word.

You can also subscribe to this podcast via RSS and iTunes.

Just a small reminder that the 2011 Mobile Ministry Forum (MMF) Consultation/Meeting is coming up next week. MMM will be there reconnecting and talking about tablets in ministry and the Kiosk Evangelsim Project.

For more information, see the Mobile Ministry Forum website. If you need just a handy guide to some of the resources and information that’s come out of the MMF in the past year, take a look again at our report from last year’s meeting, read the Executive Summary or bookmark MobMin.Info into your mobile browser.

We often talk about innovative and enterprising uses of mobile tech within faith endeavors, but that’s not the only avenue where someone could get an idea towards doing something a bit different. Take the Jonathan Stark’s Starbuck’s card experiment. Here we had someone who wanted to see how far barcode techologies could be pushed toward enabling the activity we sometimes refer to as “paying it forward.” Radar (O’Reilly Media) recently interviewed Mr. Stark and there are definitily some insights that anyone persuing a mobile-enabled activity that capitalizes on a culture’s behaviors of good will, payments, or activity streams (going to the coffeeshop). Here’s a snippet of that interview:

What surprised you the most about the experiment?
Jonathan Stark: There were a lot of surprises. It’s hard to say what surprised me most. Here’s a list of biggies:

• That Starbucks let the experiment go on for as long as it did. Sharing the card goes against the company’s terms of use, and it could have been killed right away.
• I was surprised how many people were perfectly comfortable with the concept of buying things with their phones. It seems to me that the average smartphone user is more willing to accept the “mobile wallet” concept than industry analysts would lead you to believe. I expected more people to have security concerns. I think I only got two questions about that.
• How fast and huge something gets when it goes viral. I was getting contacted by network TV producers within days once the experiment took on a life of its own.
• How addictive the Twitter feed was. By the end, @jonathanscard had more than 9,000 followers, many of whom later told me that they were watching it like TV, cheering when someone would make a big donation, booing when someone would spend $100 at a pop.
• How generous most people are. I was amazed how many people were willing to throw $10, $20, even $50 into the pool to buy a coffee for some anonymous stranger. In one week, more than $19,000 went through the card.
• How accommodating Starbucks baristas are. We heard stories about people bringing all sorts of wacky stuff up to be scanned: digital cameras, laptops, iPads, and so on. People who didn’t have any mobile devices even took to printing the barcode out and scanning it like a coupon.

So, the lessons from here? There are many, but here are a few just from what we’ve quoted.

First: don’t be afraid to lose control for a little while. As Jonathan states, it could have been very easy for Starbucks to turn away his card as it was against the terms of service. However, this provided cheap and easy research for them towards mobile, loyality cards, and the organic nature of gifting that is very hard to reproduce inside of a testing lab. They let it go for a good while, and from that a service platform is most probably under development for wider use.

Second: people are more tuned to mobile than you think. There really doesn’t need to be a concerted effot to “teach” anyone about mobile. That’s one of the reasons that its as ubuquious as it is. The medium and the media are as close to what we are built to do (communicate) as anything man has ever made. And because of that, activites on a mobile need more of an instigation than they do a teaching. That’s not to say that there aren’t features on a mobile or in using a mobile that don’t need instruction, but that you will be surprised at how much people already know. Now, those folks who don’t know mobile in that respect will have a problem, hence sites like MMM pulling these moments out for experimentation, use, and discussion.

Third: social media isn’t everything, and it could actually be nothing, but there are some for whom Twitter (or any short social media channe) is the best way to get their immediate attention towards an action. Take a look at what Blake Caterbury and BeRemedy have been able to accomplish with simply engaging Twitter and Facebook audiences to simply repeat a message about a need on a local level. There are moments and opportunities for social media to work, and work well. Take advantage of them when possible, don’t push them to hard when they aren’t working as well. When it does work well, the attetnion comes.

Fourth: don’t underestimate the goodnees of others. I mentioned on Twitter some time back that the term “unchurched” was already a setup for failure by ministries who use it because it implies that people want to be in (a) church. That in turn drives the messages from those ministries towards confrontational, divisive, or exclusionary messages which make their job harder. Now, if they started with a different perspective (“disassociated from religious fellowships” would be a long one), then their messages and opportunities become a good deal clearer. Same here, the goodness of others might not come in them walking to your offering basket. That doesn’t mean they aren’t obedient, good, faithful, etc., but that your message needs fine tuning. Be faster to change your perspective than to interpret failure from your message.

Lastly: people are inventive and willing to reward one another towards inventiveness. It didn’t matter that the code came in on a mobile or a print-out, it was left to the baristas serving whether they would take it. And I’m sure presentation of the code had a lot to do with it. Are you limiting the expression of your community’s faith by only receiving them in a manner that is cut from what you can process? Shame if you are. Let go and let your message be redesigned and redeveloped so that the product of creation (you know, that piece that comes with the “image of God”), can come to the front. Your message is important. But, its more important for your message if it can be translated into whatever form that works best for the sender, rather than simply just the form that works for the receiver.

Lessons from buying a cup of coffee? You bet. Why do you think we spend so much time in coffeeshops (understand context, then apply mobile). There’s always something brewing if you are willing to just grab and cup and allow for God to pour something in.

While putting a vote in for the Mobile Media Kit on an SD Card for the Ashoka Changemakers competition, I also saw these projects noted on that page which might prove as avenues for applying mobile to your efforts:

Serval Project: Serval lets mobile phones work without infrastructure, such as during disasters or in times of internal crisis, by using your existing phone number. The group created open-source software that uses the WiFi radio in cell phones to create a P2P telephony and data service that behaves just like a regular cellular network, including using existing phone numbers.
 
CGNet Swara: CGNet Swara is a voice-based portal, accessible by mobile phone, that allows anyone to report and listen to stories of local interest. Reported stories are moderated by trained journalists and made available for playback online as well as over the phone. Check out our case study on CGNet Swara. 
 
Global Participatory Journalism with FrontlineSMS: This project uses FrontlineSMS software to aggregate messages that are sent to a newsroom or other hub. Hosts and journalists will be able to sort through, curate, and verify primary sources, and can send selections of this content to mobile devices.

Mobile Journalist on an SD Card: Most citizen journalists and reporters already use mobiles phones, but the sheer number of tools available makes it difficult to know the best way to use them. Mobile Journalist on an SD Card tests and makes accessible the best of the tools for journalists and citizen journalists, downloadable and on SD cards ready to plug into any phone. Tools will span from basic feature phone to smartphones, and will be selected to work in varying situations, including low-resource reporting environments where Internet access is unreliable. 

The text for these projects is taken verbatium from the Mobile Medita Kit’s article on being one of the 11 finalists for the competition.