Friday, February 9, 2007

A note on Blogging for future teams

Reflections on blogging

When the Laurier Heights Baptist Church advance team arrived in Bolivia, only a couple of people on the team knew that Brian Wiens had the foresight to set up a blogspot. No one anticipated it would prove as valuable as it did. It helped our church feel part of the mission and the advance team looked forward every morning to reading the comments from church members.

Nevertheless, there are consequences when a major element of a trip is spontaneously inserted. Why didn’t we plan? For one thing, we expected to stay in hotels and have limited access to computers. The demonstrations by the camposinos forced us into quarters at the CBM/BBU compound. However there was a big benefit! When Emigdio and Ivan went home for the evening, we had three computers to work with. An unexpected opportunity presented itself.

Should any other church wish to follow our lead, we suggest it plan better than we did. How will you get computer access? We needed a least two computers and internet access. One evening Sue, Norma and Isabelle were each on separate computers, working on contributions. Future teams need to decide who will do the work and what skills are necessary. The computer network and internet service in Bolivia were not as stable as we were used to and the instructions and "help" were in Spanish. Ray Johnson and Daniel Johns worked as a team, staying up after midnight to publish something new most evenings. Ray was photographer, copy editor and technical support. Dan was principal writer and publisher/editor. We had fun, but we were sleep deprived.
We suggest anyone wishing to have a blog site identify who will do the work and set aside time during the day for the writing and publishing. If a large team goes, it might wish to select a principal blogger and create time and space for that person to report for the team. I think, however, that back home church members will want to see contributions from all team members.

Blogs are a powerful tool than can bring the daily activities and news into the homes of all those back home and provides an ecouraging connection back to the on-site team. Our advice is that before you leave, set it up and try it out to get familiar with all the nuaces of the blog tool set.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

People should read this.