LDS Media Talk

In late 2007, Reuters reported that “worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions reached 3.3 billion.”  This fact has generated a lot of discussion here at the Church on its implications about how cell phones could be used to keep members and church leaders connected and otherwise further the work of the Lord.  Particularly intriguing to the Church is that in many developing countries with little landline telephone infrastructure, mobile phone usage has grown rapidly.  The scene like that in the picture below are common: folks that may not even have electricity in the home, often have cell phone service. 

Photo used by permission from Craig C. Christensen

On the surface, it certainly appears like a golden opportunity to use cell phone technology to reach audiences the Church otherwise could not.  As an analyst, though, my nature is to approach the subject more cautiously and do a little more digging before I jump to such a conclusion. Here’s what my investigation has revealed:

You can’t say that half the world has a cell phone. There are about 6 billion people on the earth, so you might think 3 billion cell phones means 50% of people have cell phones, but this is not the case. The 3.3 billion figure does not take into account people with multiple mobile phones, so the actual number of mobile phone users is less than that. Hong Kong and much of Europe has mobile penetration of around 150%, meaning 1.5 mobile phones per person, on average across those populations. The Reuters report above further states that “59 countries have mobile penetration of over 100 percent.”

Mobile phone access does not equal mobile Internet access. The US has one of the highest rates of mobile Internet access, yet even here the Pew Research center says that only about three fourths of mobile phone users have mobile internet access.  Worldwide the percentage of cell phone users with Internet access is much lower.  Some estimates put it around 800 million, or 25%, of cell phones worldwide have Internet access. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone)

Not all mobile Internet access is a broadband mobile connection. Earlier this year, the GSM Association reported estimates of only 32 million broadband mobile connections worldwide, though it’s increasing at a very fast pace. This means that only a very small fraction, about 10%, of mobile users worldwide have broadband Internet on their phone. This does not prohibit slow-connection mobile Internet users from accessing content on their phones, but studies show much higher usage with broadband mobile connections.

What all this means for the Church’s use of mobile networks to further the Lord’s work is yet to be determined. On the surface, an aggressive mobile strategy seems like a no-brainer, but digging into the analysis reveals a very different story. What do you think the Church’s mobile strategy should be? What direction is your company headed with regard to mobile?

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Crowdsourcing is an innovative business trend that takes collaborative work to a whole new level. Around the world, individuals are using online communities to identify people with similar experiences or interests who can share ideas, offer their expertise, and collectively accomplish work.

A lot of people have never heard of crowdsourcing. But if you’ve ever edited a Wikipedia article, uploaded a video to YouTube, or tried beta software, consider yourself an official participant. Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or a third-party provider and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call. Using the technique, an organization can tap into the collective intelligence and expertise of the public at large to complete the task. Crowdsourcing can include anything from gathering feedback on a new idea, asking for help to solve a problem, or actually accomplishing the task at hand.

Crowdsourcing isn’t a magic tool for solving all problems, but consider the benefits of turning to a larger community to tap into their expertise or get feedback and new ideas. What ideas do you have that could benefit from crowdsourcing?

The Church uses crowdsourcing

The Family History Record Extraction program is an example of crowdsourcing. People around the world contribute their time and talents in a defined process to perform controlled work. The curriculum development process is another example of crowdsourcing. Committees of members are tasked with writing lesson manuals. Before lesson manuals are printed, lessons are sent to teachers in many countries to test the lessons in actual classroom settings and provide feedback.

In what new ways would you suggest the Church consider crowdsourcing?

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The LDS community is vibrant, smart and willing to give. Web 2.0 technologies (and mindsets) are providing opportunities for people to contribute.

“Community tagging” is one example. Unstructured information (blogs, emails, articles, and so forth) is harder to search than structured data like addresses, phone numbers, names, debits, and credits. One way to make unstructured information more searchable (and thus more accessible) is to “tag” it.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say I write a blog post that tells a story of a time when I was young and I learned by watching my father serve a widow on Christmas day, even though he wasn’t sure he’d get done in time to take care of the preparations for the holiday. If someone goes into Google and searches the Internet to find a story for a talk or a lesson then they will likely not come across this story.

However, the Internet (and this blog) allows the author to “tag” articles. Tagging is just assigning words to an article which describe it and thus make the article more likely to show up in searches (whether on a blog or on the Internet).

For the story I listed, I might use tags like faith, story, service, father, dad, christmas, and lesson. Notice that some of these words don’t show up in the story, but they still capture the essence of the story. If people then searched on any of these words, they would be more likely to find the story.

This approach is good, but the problem is that a) it presumes the  author knows the right tags for an article and b) it takes time.

“Community tagging” is a phenomenon where people on the Internet collectively tag other people’s content. This happens on web sites like Flickr and Facebook. People upload pictures and others can tag the pictures. This spreads the workload out and can make it more precise.

How might we use “community tagging” for Church-related content?

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