Each year CITN hosts regional events in the Early Spring which are a 1day roundtable format and hopefully close-ish to your home. We try to have enough sites across the country that attendees don’t have to drive more than 3-4 hrs to attend a regional event.
For 2020, we’d like spring regionals to be the last week of March with a preferred date of Tuesday, March 31st.
CONFIRMED Host SITES to date:
-
Houston’s First Baptist Church - Loop Campus
7401 Katy Freeway
Houston, TX 77024
@John.Gunn + BEMA/@CGreenTX
When: Tuesday, March 31st -
ChapelHill - South Atlanta Campus
4330 Washington Rd
East Point, GA 30344
@iamkarlp
When: Tuesday, March 31st -
Children’s Hunger Fund
13931 Balboa Blvd.
Sylmar, CA 91342
@Grandmofflopez
When: Wednesday, April 1 -
Alderwood Community Church
3403 Alderwood Mall Blvd.
Lynnwood, WA 98036
@Kjellandrew
When: Tuesday, March 31st -
Church on the Rock
900 Birdie Hills Rd.
Saint Peters, MO 63376
@tommyprater
When: Tuesday, March 31 -
Bay Presbyterian Church
25415 Lake Road
Bay Village, Ohio 44140
@tschordock
When: Tuesday, March 31st -
Fellowship Greenville
3161 S. Hwy. 14
Greenville, SC
29615
@iXthus
When: Tuesday, March 31 -
Bridgeway Community Church
Columbia Campus - Charity Auditorium
9189 Red Branch Rd
Columbia MD 21045
@djrock93
When: Monday, March 30th -
Lincoln Berean Church
6400 S 70th St
Lincoln, NE 68516
402-483-6512
@mrock
When: Tuesday, March 31 -
The Moody Church
1635 N LaSalle, Chicago, IL 60614
https://goo.gl/maps/H9Jd3usAvUYNjsBW6
@jonny
When: Tuesday, March 31st -
Stones Crossing Church
7000 W Stones Crossing Road
Greenwood, IN 46143
@asudduth
When: Tuesday, March 31st -
Hope Community Church
Morrisville Campus
1000 Perimeter Park Dr
Morrisville, NC 27560
@Bill_Morrison
When: Tuesday March 31st
Who can host a regional event?
What does it take?
- Host has previously attended at minimum 1) Church IT Network National event and preferably also a regional roundtable.
- Facilities to host 20-30 people (and permission support from your church / organization)
- A Willing Heart
- See 1.
If you can answer YES to all of these questions and would like to be considered as a 2020 host site, please leave a comment below in this thread.
Here’s what a typical regional event looks like …
Schedule
The event itself looks something like this:
Evening before - optional meet-n-greet dinner and hang time.
Day of - 8:30 registration. 9:00 kickoff. Lunch. 5:00 roundtable ends. 6:00 optional dinner.
Promotion
CITN leadership will promote from our venues (This forum, twitter, facebook, insta, mailchipmp, etc), but you’ll need to find ways to reach IT peeps in your area not familiar with CITN. Mailers, personal phone calls, whatever you can do to reach out … do it!
Registration
- CITN will provide centralized online registration for each site.
- To cover your costs but not make it so cheap that its not a “value” that people commit to, we’ve set $35 as the price for a 1-day event.
The Day
Opening
-
Welcome
-
Prayer at some point before discussion starts, and perhaps a brief challenge or devotion time lead by one of your pastors.
-
Capture discussion topics/questions on the fly … spend 10mins max writing down topics/questions from the audience on a whiteboard or whatever so everyone can view. Have people quickly vote for each topic, then work your list from most interest to least.
-
Identify at least one person to take notes, most people get caught up in the conversation and then later ask for links or names of tools or products, it has proven very helpful for one person (or people rotating) to take notes and publish those notes for the entire group to go back to later (also helpful to share those notes with the entire CITN community).
The Moderator’s Job
- Start working through each question/topic. Feel free to merge questions together, address questions out of order when there’s a natural segway … again nothing’s written in stone. Let the discussion be organic vs. mechanical.
- It’s the moderators job to discern which questions are most beneficial for the whole group and which would be best answered by “experts” during a break. For very narrow specific questions ask the audience who has been there, done that and have them pair up with the requester during a break … unless many people are interested in the answer too.
- Try to not let any one topic take up too much time. Some topics could take all day
The moderator will have to, from time to time, ask that the group move on to another topic.
- Stress that people be on time after breaks … you’ll have to be persistent on this as geeks tend to like to yak a lot with each other
Closing
- Take a group photo and tag #citn on social media.
- Push people to connect with other CITN peeps on this forum, as well as our slack channel.
- Invite everyone to the National Event in the Fall.
Door Prizes
- Everyone loves a freebie even if its just some silly swag.
Thanks!