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Open source matters. I really believe that to be true. Now before you starting thinking that I’m one of those guys who only uses open source software because I never want to pay for licensing… well, that’s simply not true. At Watermark we do use a lot of open source software such as Wordpress, Typo3, and countless others. At the same time, we license a lot of software. Fair enough? Ok, moving on.

Watermark is currently in the middle of a new open source project called Shadetree. Essentially this is a tool that is customized to our needs as a church and encapsulates targeted communications, spiritual formation, group formation, volunteer management, online learning, social connection, and other items important to the intersection of life and church. Understand that we aren’t trying to replace the church management systems of today, but rather fill the gaps that exist by integrating with them and other tools in use already.

With Shadetree, we feel that it will be a great product in the end. So why not bundle it up and sell it to other churches? Because Christ never called his disciples to sell things.

Ok did I hit a hot button? Maybe, but keep reading. Over the last decade I have noticed a trend to “build and sell to the church.” In addition, I’ve noticed a trend that products that are “built and sold” are dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. In other words, these products contain the base functionality that works for most churches, but at the same time really doesn’t meet the specific needs of anyone.

Isn’t it about time that churches came together and stopped spending money on solutions that don’t really work, don’t integrate with other tools, and leave ministries sitting in silos that restrict their growth? Wouldn’t it be powerful if churches collaborated together on tools and shared openly their learnings to help the Church at large?

Maybe the term open source scares you, or maybe you don’t really know what that means… Think for a minute about Wordpress. It’s arguably the most popular blogging software on the planet. And it’s free. It’s open source and it has a HUGE community of developers around it. If you want certain functionality, just go look, because it’s probably already been written. There is POWER in community.

So why not the church? Why are we settling for buying tools from other churches and vendors when we have the talent to build and redeploy tools “by the church and for the church”? If you think about the early church in Acts, this was normal for them.

“All who believed were together and held everything in common, and they began selling their property and possessions and distributing the proceeds to everyone, as anyone had need. Every day they continued to gather together by common consent in the temple courts, breaking bread from house to house, sharing their food with glad and humble hearts, praising God and having the good will of all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number every day those who were being saved.” Acts 2:44-47

So why does open source matter? Because it’s our chance to live out our gathering together with a common goal, distributing our proceeds together, sharing with glad and humble hearts and trusting God to use us today by adding to our number daily those who are being saved.

I could have titled this post “Why my brain is full”, or “My experiences drinking from a firehose”. That’s how I feel after yesterday. Day two of the EqualLogic user conference was wall-to-wall information overload.
As I have said before, I am usually underwhelmed by conferences. All smoke and no fire. But this was NOT the case here.
We started the day hearing from Dell’s leader in enterprise strategy, followed by sessions on networking, VMware integration, Dell’s HIT kit, ASM for Windows, ASM/VMware edition, MPIO, solid state drives, and many others.
The only complaint I heard from attendees was that the sessions were so back-to-back that we didn’t have time for a deep breath (or brain reboot) before running to the next topic. Crazy good stuff.
A highlight for me was my final session covering the top 10 questions that come up in EqualLogic support and how to solve them, led by Vernon Miller. He’s a great teacher in my opinion and it reminded me of sitting in a college classroom. We covered a lot of ground on what might seem like basic topics, but things we’re all likely to encounter at some point.
The only area for improvement could have been the lunch session led by an outside storage consulting firm. Really good, brilliant guys, but the topic of iscsi trends was too heavy for a lunch session and was telling most of us what we already know to be true… that is “iSCSI can be fraught with pitfalls if you make bad choices.” But most of us haven’t experienced that BECAUSE we are already on EqualLogic.
To conclude, day two was a big success. Dell has done a great job and continues to confirm what we already know to be true, that we made the right choice on storage. So now my brain is still full and we still have another day to go. Time to get off this Dart train and get educated. Wish me luck.

Sitting on the train into Dallas this morning for the second day of the EqualLogic conference. An unusual experience for me to be blogging from a train. Actually rather unusual to BE on a train in the first place. Usually my five mile commute by car to the office is just to my liking.
Here are a few thoughts about my experience at the conference kickoff yesterday.
1) Dell has done a great job with making this about the customer. They are obviously here to listen and learn.
2) Dell is passionate about their products. This is huge in my book. They love what they produce and want us to be successful and feel the same way.
3) The ratio of Dell employees to customers at this conference is amazing. They have made a huge investment in the number of people here. Probably 100 customers and 60 Dell employees. Greatness.
4) We are being challenged. Many conferences feel like a waste of time. This one doesn’t. I plan to learn a ton today.

Well, the train is almost to my destination, so time to wrap up this post. More posts later today.