It’s been an interesting transition for us as we’ve made out move to Calgary. Not only have we been settling into our new home, but we have also been working on defining our new role as we continue our work with YWAM.

Working on a YWAM base back in Australia with over 100 staff meant that most of my time was spent doing tech support and network management. Now working from home has opened up all sorts of other possibilities.

At the moment there are four main projects that I am working on within my role on the YWAM International Chairman’s Team:

1. The new YWAM International Web-Site (the current site is at www.ywam.org)
2. Capturing, editing and distributing leadership training videos by Lynn Green from his visit to Calgary a few months ago
3. Developing a new web-site for YWAM Resources (www.ywamlife.com)
4. YWAM “Social Media” Interaction (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

In addition to this I’m also toying around with creating an on-line radio show (audio podcast) out of the news and content developed within YWAM. Each week I usually see dozens of stories from around YWAM about upcoming conferences, schools, outreaches and more. I try to document some of them at YWAM News that Bill finds Interesting.

As I continue to connect with the YWAM ICT I’m finding more and more opportunities and needs presenting themselves. The problem certainly isn’t going to be finding stuff to do, the challenge will be finding where to best spend my time and effort …

One of the things that the YWAM International Chairman’s Team is working on is to improve the communication inside and outside YWAM. It is a part of the mandate to “heal the nevous system” of YWAM.

After a disussion I had with some other members of the YWAM ICT I setup a simple YWAM news site. The goal for the site is to help communicate what is happening around YWAM to anyone who is interested.

The site is built on WordPress, a free open source CMS / blog engine. I used Google Feedburner to deliver the news via email because it was easy and free. There are many different free themes available for use with WordPress, so I played around with a few and finally settled on the one that is currently running on the site.

To help with the functionality of the news site I added a few WordPress plugins to it. Most are available for free (all the plugins I used were free) and are easy to install on the site. I’ll put a list of my current plugins, the template and the other resources used for the site at the end of this post.

Right now the site is really more of a prototype or proof of concept news site. Trying to gather stories by myself is a very time consuming job (hence why there is not too much up there). To really make the site or concept work would require either a lot more time on my part, or more people doing it. I would also want the site to do more than just aggrigate the news (Planet YWAM already does some of that), there needs to be some editorial work involved, and a simple script or plugin can not do that.

Have a look at the YWAM News site and tell me what you think.

Here is the list of resources, plugins and the template that I used:

CMS / Blog Engine

• WordPress

Template

• WP Premium theme by WP Remix – Nice and clean theme with the e-mail subscription built right in. Available in three different colour variations.

Plugins:

• Contact Form 7 – for contact, feeback and submit story form
• Dragon Design Sitemap Generator – Generate sitemap
• Digg Digg – The Digg button on each post to submit the story to Digg
• Google Analyticator – Plugin used to tie in with Google Analytics, which allows me to see the stats for the site (about 10 visits a day right now)
• Google XML Sitemaps – Create an XML sitemap for submission to the search engines
• Redirection – Mostly for when I mispell something in the URL and then change it. This plugin lets the old URL still work
• Social Bookmarking RELOADED – Makes it easier for readers to submit the stories to social networks and bookmarking sites
• WordPress Database Backup – Allows automated backups of the database to be e-mailed to me every day or week
• WP-SpamFree – Eliminate annoying spam comments
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Adds related stories that are already on the site to the individual stories, and the RSS feed and daily news e-mail

Other Resources

• Feedburner – Used for the e-mail function to send out the stories daily to anyone who subscribes in the top right of the page
• Google Analytics – Package for the web-site to help me see the stats about what’s happening on the site
• Host Gator – My web-site hosting, which is the only thing that I pay for on the site

I was watching this video of Seth Godin speaking about Tribes, and how they are and can be used to influence the world and create movements. It thought that it was a great talk, and a fantastic thing for us to think about for YWAM and how YWAM is, and can be a tribe.

Seth asked a few good questions, and made some good points, and I have a few of them below:

1. Who are you upsetting (if you aren’t upsetting someone you are not challenging the status quo)?
2. Who are you connecting?
3. Who are you leading?

He also made some good points about leaders within the tribe and what they do:

1. Tribe leaders challenge the status quo
2. They build a culture
3. They have curiosity about people inside and outside the crowd
4. They connect people
5. They are committed to the cause / tribe / people

YWAM has often been referred to as a tribe of people, and I reckon that Seth’s talk about it gives a great discussion point as we look at how we can as a mission continue to draw people to us who have a passion “To Know God and to Make Him Known”.