Global Technology Consulting for Missionaries and Churches

From 21-29 October, 2007, Kerry Hassler visited Sofia, Bulgaria to meet with Pastor Teodor Oprenov, Zdravko Yovnov, and members of the Sofia Baptist Church to finalize the project details for implementing a Training Center to educate young unemployed Bulgarian adults about computers and applications. The Training Center will also be used to provide theological training for pastors and lay people in Bulgaria.

Good Samaritan Technologies will provide the website software to allow Training Center students to sign up and take self-teaching courses on-line. A future Training Center goal is to connect the Sofia Baptist Church’s Training Center to on-line degree programs provided by Bularian and/or U.S. universities. Zdravko will provide consulting for the Training Center’s networks, servers, and PC equipment, as well as locating computer-related training applications and other resources that can be used with the PC learning-stations. Laptops will be used for the Training Center learning-stations to allow it to be used in the current Sofia Baptist Church facility until the new building’s Training Center room is completed in late 2008 or early 2009. A hardware/software prototype for the final Training Center’s system configuration is targeted for completion in spring 2008.

Starting with a request to Angela Sudermann in the Valley Forge IM-ABC office in February, 2007 from ABC-USA IM missionaries Duane and Ruth Binkley in Ohio, I started working with Duane in early March to design and implement a “Karen Konnection” website and companion Internet “blog” to help Karen refugees who’ve been relocated to America from northern Thailand and Burma by the U.S. government. The Karen Konnection website has information about the Karen culture, language, refugee details, and Karen-related website links for use by church leaders and others in U.S. communities where the Karen have been relocated, and who are now seeing Karen people come to their church for help in adapting to their new surroundings. The Karen Konnection website was designed and implemnted during April, 2007, and can be viewed at — www.karenkonnection.org/.

The Karen Konnection blog was created through the WordPress website by Duane in mid-March, 2007 and later moved to the “tablemesa” server being used for my IM-ABC websites in early May, 2007. This blog allows Duane to create blog “posts” and “pages” for publicizing various Karen issues and topics, where readers of the blog can create comments that are managed by Duane. I made changes to the Karen Konnection “blog presentation” items to remove “Meta” and “Blogroll” items that are not needed. The Karen Konnection blog is located at — www.karenkonnection.org/blog/.

I’m continuing to work with Duane and Marcia to implement enhancements to the Karen Konnection website capabilities, for example adding webpages with text written in the Karen language.