YWAM Information Technology

You obviously have some experience with using Drupal. Have you taken a look at the social networking modules for it yet? They're pretty extensive.

Here's some thoughts I've been thinking over.

Social networking can be a huge benefit to ywam. It gives the possibility of groups being able to connect up with teams, schools.

Hypothesis on how it can benefit a school.

As an applicant is accepted onto a school they can given an invitation to a social site (and group specifically for the school). This gives the applicants opportunity to know each make contacts if some are traveling on the same flights and want a travel buddy. It also gives school leaders the opportunity to use the group as way of sharing information. They can post encouragements to the students about the upcoming school, give necessary information for students about preparing for coming to the school.
It also gives school staff the opportunity to get to know the students a bit before they arrive through message boards on the site giving the possibility to even encourage and disciple students before they even arrive.

Hypothesis on how this can serve a ywam centre or team.

This gives a great way to build relationship within a team through sharing content, thoughts comments but keeping it in a public space rather than through e-mail. This can be beneficial in a team where a message to one person but having it done in an open forum creates openness within the team and an understanding of where people are at and what they are connecting about. This can be very beneficial with teams that are displaced and working from different locations.

As a ywam centre it can give opportunity for building relationships outside of the community with guests visitors, those who want to stay connected with friends and the community. It gives openness and opportunity to members of the community and the social group that a ywam centre web-site cannot completely create where by it can allow group members to create events, share thoughts and messages, etc.

What is the best model for YWAM?
How we use social networking within YWAM can potentially be approached on different levels. This could be something started from an international level, regional, national, omega zone or local (there are probably many other possible levels a social site could be started and administrated).

It could be built upon a current system such as facebook or new systems could be used such as boonex's dolphin www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/ which can be installed on your own server. Or online hosted systems like Ning www.ning.com/ which requires no hosting setup but a personal domain can be used.

With how YWAM works one of the most likely ways social networking will begin is through different ywam communities starting their own. There won't be one model. Some will use facebook, some will use a customizable system. To run this from an international level will require a great amount of effort to see the different ywam centre's choosing to use it. There will also be a greater amount of administration and requirement to provide features, etc.

Social Graph and Open Social

Google's api's for social graph and open social can provide a huge resource from an international level.

Building system's using open social that can be distributed to ywam centre's around the globe giving them the opportunity to have the same system for inputting information into multiple social networking system's can be highly usable for creating ways of connecting with different groups on different social sites all at once.

The social graph can have the potential of finding friends and connections that are located on different social site's, blogs, etc. This could potentially be used to create a new layer to a network of viewing who you friends are and where they are located. One personal hypothesis would be that a personal profile page could be quickly and simply created that would be populated with data from multiple different sources. It could show the persons connections with friends on myspace, orkut, through personal blogs, etc. This in effect would create a whole new social network platform that would be built as a layer on top of the other sites. The more connections some one has the greater the potential of the social graph.

*Google have just announced friendconnect, it is currently in private beta. This gives the ability to add social networking to any site. It connects people in from different social networks to be able to share, comment, etc on a site. This looks like it's all built using the opensocial and social graph api's but they've now made it an easy to use simple system which anyone can use (as long as you know where to copy some code).

Daniel Snell
YWAM Harpenden Communications