Diocese of Newark Technology Committee
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - Agenda and Notes
Skype Conference Meeting

Logged On: Jan Paxton, John Rollins, Russ Worthington, Steve Boston, Peter Katzenbach, Nina Nicholson

Next Meeting: Skype Conference Call after Russ has talked to Michael

Agenda: Technology Committee Meeting
Technology committee e-mail list is:
technology@email.dioceseofnewark.org

The Agenda and Notes:

John opened with prayer at 8:02.

1. Churches without Websites
   • Which churches want to use Nina's Template - There are 3 websites up that Nina has done sites for. There are 9 sites she has that have not responded to the contact from Michael. She will send the list to Russ and he will see about following up more directly. Nina is good to go - it takes her about an hour to do one. Nina could just go ahead and make the sites, since Louie has photos of all the churches and the diocese has all the information except the service times. John asked if most of those are small and from hearing the list, we identified 2 that have sites with other providers and the rest are marginal or very small congregations.
   • Which churches need a tutorial or Mentor in establishing a website - Lincoln Park could use some help. There may be others. Russ will see about getting together with Peter. Russ is going to St. Peter's, Washington tomorrow. John suggested that Michael put something out on the weekly update. Peter suggested that maybe it's time to go to the next level. Nina has had a request from Prison Ministry for a web page.
     Russ will follow up with that.
2. Purchase of Educational License for Dreamweaver - Is it time to purchase another license for Dreamweaver. Steve says that now that Dreamweaver is owned by Adobe, it may be a problem to split it off. John says you can still buy the package itself. Peter just did some training on the system. John says to give out-of-date software is not good and Steve says we'd have to go to minimium of 20, which would not be inexpensive. Jan suggested that perhaps we can point to freeware. The list she found will be linked to these notes. Russ asked about looking at Contribute. John says, not in his opinion. Each person that uses it must have it on their machine - don't need dreamweaver, but has some limitations. It is a product that uses the dreamweaver interface and allows you to update pages after someone else sets them up.
3. Communications Summit - Follow Up - John, Nina, and Jan were there. It seemed to be primarily concerned with the print - the Voice. They mentioned the weekly update and a new format. The website was mentioned as needing some update. There was no continuity with any of the work done by the groups that originally met with Carter. Nothing, as far as we know, has been done toward updating the website. Michael may have information for us. Russ will follow up with him. There may be some budgetary implecations. If they want some redesign they should ask some of the folks on this committee that are adept, for example Nina, and explore it from there. Russ felt that the drive on the website was coming from Denise.
4. Online Registration (Status from Episcopal House) - Without Michael it is hard to know what exactly is going on. John has some information. They now have, through PNC the ability to take a credit card charge by telephone or by mail. The real goal, however, is to have a shopping cart on line, but PNC directed them to the first level and they need the second level, but no arrangements have been made yet. Russ says that Shelby has registration software and did the stewardship workshop and convention, but he found some serious problems with that, because Shelby won't report out until everything is done. There doesn't seem to be any link between credit card and Shelby. Every time there is a discussion of online registration at Episcopal House they aren't willing to discuss the details involved. Shelby does have a web interface. John thinks that on-line registration to them means just getting an e-mail registration of the details and the money would go throught the PNC interface. Russ will take back to Michael that Shelby will probably do what they need it to do.
5. This format seems to be good. It keeps us from traveling the lengths of the diocese! We might recommend that this would work for other diocesan meetings. Perhaps something into the digest. The max is 24 people and it was easy for Russ to do once he had our ids.