Presbyterian Church U.S.A. - 219th General Assembly

General Assembly 219 - Web site Phase 1

I work full-time at the Presbyterian Church USA in Louisville and created the Web site for the General Assembly meeting to take place July 3-10, 2010. The Office of the General Assembly department in which I’m employed serves as a business arm, of sorts, for the national church. The General Assembly is a meeting, held every 2 years, that operates much like a congressional session. Rules are proposed and voted on by representatives from churches and collective groups representing clusters of churches around the country. Presbyterians operate under the guidance of a constitution that requires votes from representatives for every adjustment regardless of size. Tens of thousands of Presbyterians gather to discuss issues faced by the church. This year the meeting is in Minneapolis.

The 3 phases of releasing the site.

The site is going to be released in 3 phases. The screen shots below are from the first phase which is designed to present introductory information and training for participants called commissioners and advisory delegates. Phase 2 will require regular and timely updates of assembly business. The plan is to create 3 blogs that populate defined areas about the business, have a running news feed, a running Twitter feed (@presbyGA), ongoing photo galleries and anything else we can think of before then to keep members that aren’t in attendance abreast of what’s going on. A third party is responsible for supplying a window to be placed on the site with streaming live coverage of the event. Phase 3 is the aftermath where the results of everyone’s hard work will be made available for review until the next meeting in 2012.

The things I used to create the site

I am using HTML 4.01 Transitional for basic content and a CSS layout design. Any interactivity on the site was created with JavaScript or jQuery. Most all of the interactive bits were jQuery. Thanks to the hundreds of developers out there that have made getting started with jQuery a snap through documentation and tutorials online. Some of the highlights are the accordion menu, the video players, the Twitter feed and a page that recognizes the height of each column and automatically adjusts the columns to match when menus expand or a browser renders it differently. Thanks Greg Ferrell for helping me make that happen. There are presentations on the site for education that were created using the Articulate software. That is a plug-in that converts PowerPoint slideshows into Flash online courseware. Using this I can let the other office staff create their own educational materials without the use of an LMS or a team of developers to make it function like a proper course. I said proper course but in reality one can easily make very impressive courses with advanced functionality that are also attractive with this software and it’s relatively inexpensive. Some of the training videos were created using Screenr. Screenr is a great tool that connects with your Twitter account and uses a widow to record what happens on your desktop. We used it to train commissioners on using an online database that tracks the business of the assembly. You are allowed to record 5 minutes of on-screen action and record audio at the same time. The hard part is doing it in one take. I’m also using an AddThis toolbar at the top of many of the pages to make sharing and social networking as easy as it could possibly be.  Oh yeah, I probably subconsciously left this out on purpose. I made a tiny slideshow of images from the previous assembly in Flash. It will be replaced with a more accessible jQuery image gallery at some point. We are discussing a mobile version of the site during the actual Assembly for phase 2 of the site to make following the business easier for everyone. God’s will manifested through the wonders of technology… sweet.