Kingdom Code

Awesome to have 60 people at Impact Hub last night for the "Kingdom Code" Christians in Tech event #kingdomcodeuk pic.twitter.com/BTZKenssIp
— Andy Geers (@andygeers) June 17, 2014

You can see me on that picture if you look very closely.

Kingdom Code was an event organised by Andy Geers and others:

Are you a Christian in tech? This event is being held to draw together a foundational group of Christians who work as developers, UX / UI designers, data geeks, product manager or entrepreneurs and who are excited to see mobile and tech used to serve Kingdom purposes. One output of this group may be to organise a Code for the Kingdom Christian weekend hackathon in 2015. 

The event was really well organised. After a bit of mingling we moved into a room with chairs. There was a brief introduction from Andy and Rupert Edwards and a big of plugging from the sponsors. We were then told to chat to the person next to us, and a bit later, to the person on the other side. There was a pre-event questionnaire asking about what people hoped to get out of the event and what sort of work they were in. There was a wide variety - not just developers and designers, but digital marketing people, business developments and entrepreneurs. I think I put myself down as jack of all trades. Some people were doing not specifically Christian type jobs (I hate the term "secular job"), but had Christian related side projects, in the way that Andy G does Prayermate on the side. Some people were visionary types who could see potential, e.g. in the internet playing a similar role to Roman roads which enabled the growth of the church after Jesus' death and resurrection.

We then split into 8 groups according to those types - I went with database/IT. After a bit we were then asked to mix about talk about this possible Code for the Kingdom event next year.

There was a plugging spot, where about 20 people got a minute to plug the thing they were involved in and ask for help, mostly volunteers or funding. There was a variety of visions for, say, easy software for administering churches, or helping those turning 18 who are forcibly returned to the country they sought asylum from, or getting the Bible out via mobiles. I plugged the paid job I blogged about recently. There was someone from Scripture Union who won the "oldest organisation" award, in contrast to the new ventures that people were working on. I think we came second.

There's another event planned in October, but I left before the end so I didn't hear much about that. Update: It's Monday 13 October.

Update2: Andy's written a post about it, though I blush to link to it.

I met a couple of people with links to Wycliffe:

• someone who did a short-term placement with us a couple of years who is part-time working on Tyndale House's online scripture tools. Update: they've launched a new version of the site now.
• Jason Ramasami who did this great picture for our magazine:
Post by Wycliffe Bible Translators UK.

It will be interesting to see what this event has started.

Really interesting webby/marketing vacancy

I've heard through a colleague that one of our partner organisations, SIL, is looking for a “Web Channel Manager”. There’s a brief advert on our website for it: Web Channel Manager. I asked the person who’s recruiting, Dave Pearson, for more information and they said:

We’re really good at developing quality language tools and content, but we have no idea how to make money from them. For example we've developed dictionaries for hundreds of languages and we've just started putting them online. We want the speakers of these languages to have free access to their dictionary, but if a linguist from Harvard wants to access it there’s no reason why she shouldn't pay something. We've got a wide range of software products to manage access too. And we’re pretty sure it must be possible to raise support through our impressive frequently-visited website, but we don’t know how. We want our various publics to have a good customer experience but nobody in our organization even uses the word customer! We need to do effective marketing, but we don’t have a marketing department. So if you have marketing skills to bring to our web presence then we’d like to talk to you.

As well as marketing skills it looks like you’d need a good understanding of business models for “content” and software, whilst being mindful of SIL's non-profit status. Fundraising experience would be good too. SIL's staff are scattered around the world, so good cross-cultural skills would be an asset. The position is based in the UK (ignore what the website says), but would involve travel abroad. Unlike many of the vacancies on our list, this position is salaried. If you’re interested in this then contact Dave Pearson:
dave_pearson [at] sil.org
Mobile: +44 7985256581
Skype: dave_pearson_sil

Is it OKto.bike?

I wrote in a previous post about a web thingy so you could find out if it was OK to bike or not? Back then it was basically working, but since then I've added the ability to specify your own preferences, rather than being stuck with mine, or using a really long URL. Now it's got its own domain name and a logo.

(I am not a designer and have no ability in that area.)

So now you can bookmark http://okto.bike and check every day if it's OK to make your regular bike trip.

Next step with this - rewrite it in Ruby on Rails because that's what the cool kids are using.