Meros in Ancient Greek means "part or piece." My hope is to see an online resource developed that has the capacity to connect Christians' worldwide to parts or pieces of information that will help them live out the Great Commission powerfully and uniquely.
To this end, I'm hoping that the application will allow Christians to search, preview, and download chunks of content for bible studies, discipleship appointments, seminars, sermons, etc.
The leap forward I'm seeking to make is to help users download content that is both highly specific and popular. By popular I mean used by others and deemed effective. I have also yet to see a site that will allow users a chance to preview the content before downloading to make sure it's something they desire.
I've seen many potential users become frustrated at the many clicks it takes to find a resource, only to discover upon downloading that the content contained only a small percentage of what was hoped for.
The overall problem I believe is connecting those who have the technical abilities to execute such an app with those who know and function on the user side. I believe once we can unite enough people on both ends, we will see some inspiring and dramatic results!
December 20th Update:
At the advice of Daniel Berman, I have started a Tiddlywiki to build a small model for beta testing. I seek to test out the effectiveness of breaking content up into categorized chunks for easier use. At this point I'm working on two general categories: The Gospel of John and Campus Crusade's Leadership Model. John represents the bible study and message prep needs that many staff share, and the Leadership Model represents the developmental or training needs.
I'm hoping to get the wiki hosted in the next week, so that you can try it out, and send in feedback. I'm excited to see where this will go, especially how it will morph to meet the needs of the users.
If you have thoughts, please share them either here in the comments, or on this google document:
- http://tinyurl.com/merosproject
Daniel Berman shares a similar heart and has the technical abilities to actually do this. Here are some of his thoughts...
Much of this sounds similar to a wiki, but with a touch of social networking, combined a semantic database app of some sort. Any ideas for a CMS? This would appear to push drupal(which I am currently using) and wikimedia(which I have considered) to the edge and beyond. oops!
So where are you with your ideas so far? There are a couple of sites you might interesting, www.religion-online.org, www.ccel.org/wwsb, and semanticbible.com. All have various perspectives on taking a set body of knowledge and subdividing it down by topic or Bible verse as the case maybe.
Here were a couple of my thoughts in response to Daniel:
Also, they present documents or resources in full, which often contain many different kinds of chunks of information. Most staff looking for content to fit into a bible study, discipleship appointment, or large group talk (read mini-sermon), do not have the time to comb through one resources, let alone multiple resources.
I'm very much a bridge builder in this whole endeavor. I'm in the user world more, but love thinking about and engaging those in the producer role (like you!).
I see a site divided not so much into topic, bible verse, etc, but more in a google way where the user would type in a key word or phrase and the site would generate 4-5 chunks of information that could be previewed and have some sort of quality rating associated with it.
Please post any thoughts, great web links, or ideas in the comment field below. I will try to manage the page to keep the freshest information up front and archive the discussions via a google doc.
