This is the hard one,  because it is the most difficult to articulate.  We all know what a developer is.  It’s someone who “codes”, right?  Perhaps many will go beyond that and say that a developer “writes applications”.  They have a lot of influence,  if given the chance,  on the way an application is conceived and shaped, since they know the tools.  This opens the door to the problems that church organizations (and other organizations,  including large companies) have:  staying “boxed in” by their disjointed view that separates development from the kind of content they produce and the audience which they supposedly serve.

Church organizations seem particularly susceptible to this problem.  Since the content producers are church/theological thinkers and writers,  they have a harder time breaking out of the habit of publishers:  One way communication.  To “submit” to the “desires” and “shape” of the Web and its users is to give up much of that “control”. This is especially true on the production end of the process.  No longer can content producers handle ALL of the process of production prior to “printing” and then just hand  it off for the “print and ship”.  The producers have to,  if they are to become effective Web communicators,  have the knowledge of the tools in order to allow their message and content to “speak the language  of the Web.”  The church organization has the task of testing the waters for how theology can be done as a Web community and begin to loose themselves from the speaker/listener model.  For this,  it takes a knowledge of the tools,  and this makes it somewhat important  for developers to be able to serve as liaisons  to the Web application world.  To be a liaison,  some “cross-training” is necessary.  In other  words,  developers that are also theological/church people,  and have the ability to think about their development work as it relates  to the purposes  of the church.  It is very much like the point that Leo Laporte has made on  various Webcasts in his  network,  when talking about Google’s attempts to “go social” to compete in what has come to be seen as “Facebook’s space”:

Google doesn’t need more “computer scientists” as much as it  needs more “social scientists”.  So too does the church, in this age of the Web and now "age of Social Media” need “social scientists”;  specifically,  a specialized branch of social science that is also theological.  A “socio-theological” perspective on Web development.  If the “non-theological” developer is kept out of the process of initial conception of strategy,  then the Web apps tend to consist of the very same approaches to nay kind of content,  and the process also tends to be  dominated by secular marketing and its concepts.  “Social Media” looks and smells like advertising and marketing and self-promotion that is about as effective as “your call is important to us” on the automated voice lines we inevitably get when calling organizations.

It’s like this:  “We’ve got really good developers,  we’ve got marketers,  and we’ve got writers.  Why do we need people who are  developers who know something  of what the Web means and what Social Media means?  (Actually,  no one asks that last question because  it never occurs to them,  since these departments of production has  always separated them).

Nowhere is this more important than in database development.  It is  the backbone of the process,  because it is the stuff from which we can measure and recognize audience characteristics.   Facebook has recognized this and leveraged that insight into a humongous business.  They call it “the Social Graph”.  And Facebook has done the best leveraging of that kind  of database leveraging to date.  But they are limited.  They cannot,  as a secular organization,  have any concept of what kinds  of “Social Graph” data we need in the church.  They have no concepts of theological meaning,  and the VARIOUS meanings that particular “keywords” have across diverse theological communities.  They have no idea about how to relate “likes” in one area to probable or potential “likes” in another.

There needs to be in church organizations a person who can sit with the writers and marketers and planners and think  with them about intentions and mission and desired effects,  and have that foot in the developer’s world that can match up desired effects with appropriate and effective applications,  and also introduce apps that stretch the imaginations of the planning team and free them from old models.  And then the development team needs to have someone who can tell them about the plans and what apps could do that (and explore additional apps that other developers have seen or used that could do the job)  and then turn the team loose on it. 

Of course,  I have myself in mind when I envision the kind of developer needed by church organizations.  I have the “geekiness” (the insatiable desire to adopt early,  tinker,  experiment,  troubleshoot,  build,  customize,  research what’s new and what’s coming) and the theological training and the “social scientist” training to be the robustly cross-trained developer I think is necessary for the kind of creative use of Social Media needed if the church is to best leverage these tools.

The best Web tools have been re-shaped and optimized (tweaked) by their users (or a responsive development process).  The Church has the opportunity here to develop distinct tools from technological templates given to us by various “open sourcey” communities of developers.  And this is fitting for a people that is called to be  distinct.