Here is an interesting article on the use of technology by American “Megachurches”. Props to Candidasa for the heads-up. Here’s another related article from the Sitapati.info archives.

If you read the section “Towards Network Centric Preaching: Vision 2011″ from the “Operations Manual for World Domination” that I published in December last year, you’d have read my analysis of how information technology enables massive increases in scalability and speed - exactly what Srila Prabhupada had in mind when he talked of the “lame man and the blind man”.

(btw - I submitted that article as part of my CV for my current job)

One example that is given in the Megachurch article is that of using management software to deal with a huge number of people.

While I was in South America I was involved in the Bhakti-vrksa program there, and I noticed something. Part of the Bhakti-vrksa program is reporting. Every week each group leader needs to make a report about his group and its members. These reports then go up the network to the area commanders, whatever they’re called in the Bhakti-vrksa model (sorry, I’m a little out of touch with the terminology - and yes, I know he’s an area servant, but this is Lord Caitanya’s Sankirtan Army on a mission of digvijay - world conquering, so please let me indulge in some bombastic rhetoric), who can then make informed decisions about what’s going on.

Theoretically, and this was my point the other day, these reports could go higher and higher, until the heads at namahatta.org could produce classified reports detailing the exact situation worldwide, which could then be summarized, sanitized (to protect preaching in countries where it’s banned), and published periodically.

Now in practice what happens is that coordinating the movement of paper is practically impossible, even at the local level. For the group leaders to fill out a report is sometimes too much to ask. Getting it from them takes more time. By the time you get everyone’s reports, it’s already the next week, and you spent so much time and energy just getting them that you don’t have time to do anything with the data.

Unless you have a secretary you now have to sit down and enter all that data into a spreadsheet to get it in a useable form. God help you if your Bhakti-vrksa is actually successful, because you’ll be swamped under the paperwork.

What happens in practice, in my experience, is that reporting is simply discarded as too much trouble. The lack of reports coming out of the ministry tend to support my supposition that this is a widespread phenomenon.

I don’t have to keep harping on the point, but I am. A lot of the systems involved in Bhakti-vrksa currently just can’t scale to support the kind of growth that it is potentially capable of. It’s a system that is currently destined to fail because success will kill it. It is self-limiting.

Here’s an idea for a solution:

First the caveat: this will only work initially in developed countries, but if you build it, they will come…

There is an online system where the group leader, after the meeting, the next day, whatever, logs in and fills out the report online.

Bada bing.

Now the area commander does not have to deal with massive amounts of paperwork, and neither does the group leader. The area commander doesn’t have to chase all the group leaders, and they don’t have to add finding the area commander to hand in their paper work to their duties of maintaining contact with their group members.

The area commander doesn’t have to convert the data from paper to electronic form, and as you get more groups and group leaders, the work automatically redistributes. Ladies and Gentlemen, can you say “Scalability”.

Now here’s the kicker. You use one central database, and the namahatta.org heads can run global reports on it.

That’s what I thought when I saw what happens when the theory of the BV Manual (on reporting) meets the real world.

Now we just need to build an IT capability to build and maintain such a solution, and we’ll be there. More on that in the next post.