Mr. Karl Hofmann and Chris Pollock held this rather interactive, open session that started off with Karl asking the crowd how the Bible is technology. There was lots of input from the audience including thoughts that the Bible was meant to be heard, it is an output, it is in book format, and much more that I couldn’t really capture on paper. Karl said we may want to check out a couple of books by Ivan Illich, titled Vineyard of the Text and ABC: Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. Some takeaways from this talk was the need for online communities of Christians to study the Bible and talk about things. I felt it was an interesting way to think about the Bible and prompted me to start thinking more about the balance between moving from a hard copy of the Bible to an all electronic version of the Word of God.

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…in a Consumer-Driven Digital and Print-On-Demand Environment. I think this session wins for having the longest title of the conference. BTW, each session is 45 minutes in length and there are two separate tracts/choices available for each session. Most of the sessions in room 1 are very technical in nature and are focused on the development and inner workings of Bible study tools. The sessions in room 2 deal more with the end user and discuss applying the tools for biblical studies or other Christian life issues.

This session was led by Todd Tillinghast from Snowfall Software. He had some very detailed slides discuss the different forms of content (professional and consumer) and where we are today. Todd said that the integration of professional and consumer content is what is missing today and is an area that should be addressed. One of the methods to bring in syndicated content and share that with people is through a community site. He demonstrated an example of 7 Porches and how that can serve as a community experience.

Todd also spent some time on printing options and had some printed samples of content created or shared online. He also talked a bit about standardizing using something like OSIS. This was actually the first time I have heard of this initiative. OSIS stands for Open Scriptural Information Standard and its purpose is to research, identify, and develop organizational processes and technical basis that will produce markup standards for biblical and related texts. It will enable encoding of Bibles and text in XML format.

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I checked and mapped out what sessions I plan to attend the next couple of days here at the Hilton. There are no tables, only chairs, so the N810 with thumb keyboard would be much more useful for me now than the N800 and BT keyboard.

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