So titled because, God will­ing, there will be more sur­veys to come.

Went down pretty well methinks. Praise God! I man­aged not to talk too long or gar­ble words too much, as evi­denced by the fact that peo­ple man­aged to write down what “CYIADA” stood for when I explained it was noth­ing to do with cryp­tosporid­ium or Syd­ney Water — some sur­veys had “Chris­t­ian Youth in a Dig­i­tal Age” neatly penned across the top next to my cryp­tic “CYIADA” acronym, which brought great joy! Obscure acronyms worked well because the pre­vi­ous spot had opened with “What does CMS mean?” (no, not the web developer’s idea of a CMS), so I was able to fol­low that up with some­thing no-one would guess, and use that as an excuse to launch into a lit­tle rant about what it was. I’m pretty sure I took under three minutes.

That three min­utes was basi­cally: for peo­ple like you (youth lead­ers); early next year (2007); gives blog, pod­cast, email & SMS tools; lets you get resources you need online instantly; best used to link back to real world ministry/promoted in real world min­istry; we want to know what you think about it/how you’d use it.

I had planned to read from a script but kinda got up and changed my mind, for what­ever rea­son — we were run­ning a cou­ple of min­utes behind, the audi­ence seemed more inti­mate than I’d thought (hadn’t seen the venue before), and I didn’t really like what I’d already writ­ten, any­way. So yes. Punchy appar­ently worked well enough.

Enough peo­ple were excited about it to make me immensely happy, and I got more than 50 sur­vey responses (from 130 print­outs, prob­a­bly 120 par­tic­i­pants as pre­dicted, but it let me cover empty seats when paper­ing the room before the ses­sion) which is so so use­ful. A few seemed very dis­in­ter­ested or gen­er­ally neg­a­tive about it, which did hurt a bit but really, there’s no way I was going to get 100% pos­i­tive feedback.

By pos­i­tive I mean sup­port­ive rather than “yes, we would use some­thing like this” — I got a lot of pos­i­tive responses that even fall out­side the product’s scope, which is frus­trat­ing in an entirely dif­fer­ent way — I’d not even con­sid­ered there might be peo­ple who only did kids min­istry at the con­fer­ence, but dis­cov­ered two lovely responses from peo­ple that had added pri­mary school years to my ques­tion, “Lead­ing kids in school years…” and cir­cled them, instead. They were inter­ested in none of the con­tact func­tion­al­ity, but were keen on per­haps start­ing to use video to sup­port what they were doing. Of course, that’s out­side the scope of what CYIADA is try­ing to do, but there’s no where else for them to get that in the same way (there are DVD-based resources for this, but not any videos avail­able online under a micro­pay­ment model).

Aggre­gate results might get pub­lished some­time. Not tonight, I think the last week has just set in (or maybe I drank a bot­tle of V this after­noon and it’s worn off? Shrug.) Either way, I’m sit­ting at work com­pletely exhausted and need to go home and sleep muchly.

(Still need to setup cyiada.com domain name quickly, before any­one sees it! Sigh… I’m so organised…)