Some time ago Kaunteya prabhu sent me an article from CIO Insight, an online-magazine offering "Strategies for IT Business Leaders". I quickly glanced over the article and wrote back, saying I didn't think it was particularly relevant to our mission.

In the beginning the author elaborates on the use of fancy high-tech gadgets by mega-churches, christian community-churches that attract an audience of more than 2,000 per week, to produce sermons that remind you of the presentation of rap-, pop-, or rock-superstars, depending on your age.

I don't like all that show-biz and think that if you took away the glamour from these mega-churches, there would remain very little of substance. But reading Sita-pati prabhu's article on the subject, and some of his earlier, related writings, I started to think again.

I'm still not comfortable with too much show and glamour, but nobody suggested we copy their whole act, down to emotional performances instead of the presentation of a supreme philosophy and authentic kirtan and bhajan.

There are some lessons we can and should learn from these mega-churches who seem to develop faster today than ISKCON at its peak. They themselves say that their rapid progress is due mainly to the use of modern technology; not only to produce professional stage performances, but to track and manage their churches and congregation.

ISKCON isn't all that famous for being superbly organized or able to use the latest technology (or even the second- or third-latest) for anything but typing up reports and designing invitations for the next sunday feast on isolated desktop-PCs, including those concerned with congregational development and the Bhakti-vriksha program, which should have the potential to grow as fast - at least - as those mega-churches do. Sita-pati prabhu says in his above mentioned, recent article:

" 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-vriksha 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-vriksha 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. "

Here at namahatta.org we have at least part of the infrastructure in place to start development on those lines. Through our web server we are able to reach pretty much every corner of the world, and to implement a simple database application that's able to keep track of reports submitted by local groups isn't a problem either. I'm not a DB-expert and what I start to develop now will have to be streamlined and upgraded later on, but again: no problem. The know-how and technology is available, it just takes a little effort and vision to go into the right direction, I believe.

Thanks a lot to Sita-pati prabhu for shaking me awake in this regard, and if you don't see any development in this direction very soon, I would appreciate if someone could get into my case, or better perhaps, replace me in my job.

Your servant, phanisvara das.