I’m back to live blogging.  I took a session off just for mental health – apologies to the speakers the tweets say you rocked.  Mark Stephenson is speaking.

Mark started as a hack on web sites, and was doing well before God said to go into full time ministry.

A “web empowered church” is one that notices when the web page goes down.

The Internet is the most powerful communications tool humans have ever created:

• affordable to use
• instant updates
• 24/7 “on”
• distance is erased (truly global)

Read the book.

Mark started at Ginghamsburg.org: They’ve had video since 1997, whoa.

WEC does all open source software – good folks!

Lots of support for “advanced features” (DB driven stuff).

Web empowering is not all about being tricky and cool – sometimes efficiency is the key.

WEC uses Typo3 – and provides free templates.

They created a prayer system for Typo3 (wonder how it compares to Joomla’s prayer center?).

Oh sweet, typo3 prayer center allows you to repond to prayer requests directly!  Oh that’s cool.

People post their own prayer requests, no intermediaries.

Scale down for users – people are still using modems (ummm, I’m not gunning for modem connections, sorry).

I’ll have to check out WEC – it might be a good tool for even our church as we migrate.