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Powerpwned

Thursday 11th January, 2007 @ 3:25 am

Powerpoint Edinburgh, the Christian youth event I am involved with attracts around 400 young people once a month.

I remember last year wanting to check the dates of this months Powerpoint, and searched the web for a bit. In the end, all I could find was Gareth’s blog. I asked Gareth and some others about this, and it turns out that Powerpoint didn’t have a website. As a budding geek, and a passionate web user for 11 years (at the time), I thought I’d offer my services to make Powerpoint a website for free.

Time passed, I had a little look at what needed doing, web software etc, and in the end, they decided to get someone else to do it. Slightly disappointed, but I understood that they might want someone outside of the team to do the site. This was in July.

Fast forward to Monday night. Was talking to a friend’s flatmate in the pub, a youthworker for a church in Edinburgh.
Her: “I spent ages last week trying to find the details for Powerpoint on the web. I just couldn’t find their site on Google, and in the end had to call someone instead.”
Me: “There is no site. It’s in development but not ready yet”
Her: “Surely they have a website?”
Me: “Nope.”
Her: “That’s surprising….”

Anyway, went home, talked to Gareth and had a think. It’s been six months since I was told they were getting someone else to do it. Someone who makes web sites for a living. I offered to get the website done for September, before my term and Powerpoint started.

It takes 5 minutes to set up a basic informational page with the times and location for Powerpoint. So Gareth and I did it. We spent about an hour, in total, and set up a page at http://powerpointedinburgh.wordpress.com, entitled “Powerpoint Edinburgh: the unoffical blog…“.

Finally, Powerpoint has a presence on the internet.
The thing that annoys me about this situation is that its fairly typical in Christian circles. Someone offers to do a job, and their timetable changes or they lose interest, so they don’t have time to do a task, in this case the Powerpoint website. Whereas in the Open Source community or in business these tasks would get delegated, they instead get clung onto, for reasons unknown to me. In business, this could happen, but people have bosses who will reassign these tasks to others. However, for an unknown reason to me, this doesn’t seem to happen in Christian circles. Maybe it’s trying to be nice to people, who knows, but it means things don’t get done, and perfectly qualified people with the time and passion for these projects (i.e. Gareth and I in this case) just get increasingly frustrated with the situation, and have to resort to setting up an “unofficial” site instead.

Thankfully, the internet is full of “unofficial” sites, frequently of better quality and more informative than the “official” site.

Perhaps we’ll step on people’s toes by doing this, but I hope not. Information that was not available before on the internet is now available, and to me, this is a good thing, regardless of motives, officiality and location. It’s 2007, and everywhere and everyone has websites, and 98% of youth today use the internet regularly. Powerpoint needed a website. It now has one.
Powerpwned.

Posted in Christianity, Software Development