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“MyChurch”:http://www.mychurch.org is a social network for local churches to outreach and build community by networking their congregation. Joseph & Carol Suh are a husband and wife team, both UC Berkeley Computer Science grads, who have a passion for meaningful technology. |
What do you hope that people will get out of MyChurch?
Joe: Our hope is that MyChurch will be a useful tool for strengthening existing relationships within the church body as well as providing an authentic glimpse of the community and an interactive way for people to “visit” the church online.
Carol: Sometimes there are inaccurate notions of what a church is (old, smelly, dark buildings with scary statues, etc), but in reality a lot of churches are awesome, supportive, and vibrant communities. Additionally, many church websites are woefully stuck in Web 1.0 and can’t really convey the fun and the meaningful relationships they provide for a lot of people. We hope MyChurch can help highlight what a church community is really about, all the while, giving churches a collaborative voice on the web.
What has been the best thing about getting everything set up for the site? How long has it taken you?
Carol: We started design and development just over a year ago and then launched MyChurch in Public Beta this past September. The best thing about the whole process was releasing it and getting the responses that we did from individuals and churches all over the world saying they’ve been waiting for a tool like this to come along. We were contacted by a number of large organizations even while we were in Private Beta, that really encouraged us and validated the vision of MyChurch.
Joe: Recently a pastor called MyChurch “an answer to our prayers”, and another member said it was a “God-send”. We’re very fortunate to be working on something we’re excited about and gets others excited too! We also love to see people using MyChurch to look for churches and people in their area to connect with.
I see that you’re setting up a google mash-up to make a church search map. How did you approach them for that collaboration and what has been your biggest challenge in setting that up?
Carol: We actually used the Google API for our church map, which was released about a month ago. The biggest challenge in getting that set up was making sure the data calls were optimized. Because our database is getting bigger and bigger everyday, we really couldn’t show all the active churches for the entire US at once. You’ll notice you are first zoomed into your location (based on a reverse IP lookup if you’re not logged-in. You can then jump to other cities or zips to see churches in that area.
Joe: We’re big fans of google map mashups and thus really enjoyed building in the church map. We’ll soon be updating the display of the map to highlight more relevant information about each church on there as well as adding in a google map mashup of church events!
Bonus: What’s your favorite thing about your church?
Joe: My favorite thing about our church (”The River”:http://www.the-river.org) is the authenticity. The leaders make themselves transparent and approachable and the community is diverse and vibrant. The River, which often times draws from the members to help shape the worship and different events, had actually gone against our original ideas of what church is and in lots of ways become a real inspiration for what MyChurch.org is today.
Carol: I’m drawn to the interactive-ness of the services, as well as the awesome worship music. But what I love most is our weekly small group fellowship.
Copyright © 2006 by Sonia Aggarwal
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