Ran across this article from Collide magazine. The author asks a lot of good introspective questions about church services and what that means about priorities. Of course, why limit that to only your church services? Why not ask that about other parts of the church including your IT strategy? About the type of computers and software you use? What do you elevate? And what does that say about your church? Does it say exclusion or inclusion? Does it say selfishness or sharing? Once you know what it does say about your church, it then follows on to ask the original authors question: what should we be elevating? When you ask and answer those questions, my guess would be that more Christians and churches would be using (and creating too) more open source software and sharing more of their content with Creative Commons licensing. But that’s just a guess. 
What Do We Elevate?
June 16th, 2011
Creating Title Animations In Blender
June 2nd, 2011Hey everyone, I haven’t been posting much lately as we’ve been busy getting my wife back to health. For those interested, she has been responding very well to treatment. Thanks for your prayers!
Every once and a while I come across a post that is just good to pass along without much commentary. Here’s one by BlenderGuru about creating title animations in Blender. If nothing else, it will show you a glimpse into the huge feature set and completely reworked user interface of Blender 2.5. Multimedia has become an integral part of many churches, so why not try out Blender and save your church some dollars by avoiding expensive production software (and hardware)?
Use Blender To Add Effects To Your Videos
January 12th, 2011Just saw this pointer to a couple video compilations showing some of what is possible these days with Blender 2.55, the open source animation, compositing, and many-other-things-multimedia software. If you’ve been wanting to do some more advanced stuff, but can’t take the financial hit of After Effects or Cinema 4D (or anything else really) it would be worth it to try out the latest Blender. It’s not for the faint of heart though, it’s a serious program with serious power. Take a look!
What Wikileaks Means About Ethics in a Digital World
January 4th, 2011As one of the originators of the free software movement, Richard Stallman has an interesting analysis of the current WikiLeaks situation. Since this is very related to my series on Rethinking Ethics in a Digital World, I encourage you to seriously consider some of the points Stallman brings up. While some would write him off as an extremist, I believe it’s hard to argue with the analogy he plays out showing how much privacy, control and freedom we have given up in our society as a result of the move into the digital age. When it comes down to it, these become ethical issues about censorship and human rights in a digital world which have always related directly to our God-given rights and freedoms as an individual creation of God.
What are your thoughts on Stallman’s argument?
The League Of Moveable Type – Open Source Fonts For You
December 7th, 2010Several weeks ago, someone at the ChurchCreate blog sent out a link to free and good commercial use fonts. One of the main sites they referenced was The League of Moveable Type where you can download several high quality and completely open source fonts. Very cool!
Post back here and let me know if you use them in a project…
Welcome Lightworks to the Open Source Family – a Professional Non-Linear Video Editor
November 30th, 2010I just wanted to welcome Lightworks into the open source family of software. It is still in process of being fully open-sourced, but the first step has happened and you may now freely download the same application used to edit Pulp Fiction, The Departed, Centurion and Shutter Island. Not a bad resume, I think. Right now, Lightworks is Windows-only, but since there isn’t an easy to use non-linear video editor on Windows in the open source world, it’ll be great to add that support.
Let me know your thoughts if you end up checking it out. I will be waiting until Linux is supported which will hopefully end up on their road map eventually. But, still a really great addition to the suite of tools of pro video editing. Thanks, Lightworks!
Using HDDSLR Footage With Kdenlive
November 15th, 2010The Kdenlive team recently posted with tips on using your HDDSLR footage with Kdenlive. I know a lot of the church community is using DSLRs in their video workflow because of the high quality and low price point compared to anything else. Kdenlive is a very capable (but still maturing) non-linear video editor that compares to FinalCut Pro, Vegas, Premiere, etc. Hope this helps!
As We Open Source, So We Believe
November 3rd, 2010I enjoyed this short post entitled, “As We Worship, So We Believe.” I thought it encapsulated why I encourage the use of open source software verses proprietary software. It’s not about the details of feature set or which software is really better. It’s about the concepts of sharing, inclusion, and helping others that the use of free and open source software embodies that show as a tangible example that we support those positive values. Of course, the opposite is also true whether people would like to admit it or not. When we use closed, exclusive, expensive software that only serves our own needs, it says something about the type of Christians we are: exclusive and selfish. Our choices in worship, in personal interactions, in the software we support show things about our beliefs. It’s just that simple.
Jokosher – Simple Multitrack Audio Production
October 22nd, 2010As I was reading a review of the latest Ubuntu, I noticed a reference to Jokosher.
Jokosher is a simple and powerful multi-track studio. Jokosher provides a complete application for recording, editing, mixing and exporting audio, and has been specifically designed with usability in mind. The developers behind Jokosher have re-thought audio production at every level, and created something devilishly simple to use.
I haven’t had a chance to check it out myself, but if it’s included in Ubuntu then it’s normally pretty stable and ready to go. The good news is that it also supports Windows (I can’t tell about Mac support) for those that haven’t started drinking the Linux kool-aid yet.
For those that try it out, please let me know what you think good and/or bad, so we can help make the project better or let people know about a great cross-platform, free and open source audio application.
Over the next few months, I’ll try to carve out some time to pull it down and look at it to do a more detailed review.
10 Free (and usually open source) Desktop Productivity Apps
October 4th, 2010Just a quick post to let you know about 10 free desktop productivity apps that aren’t OpenOffice. Most of them are open source and have been mentioned here, but all of them are free as in $$$ (not free as in freedom). Hope it helps you see what great tools are out there for you.
![[FSF Associate Member]](http://opensourcechurch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/fsfmember.png){kind=small}
