Morning Star Technical Services
Frequently Asked Questions

What is Morning Star Technical Services?

• Identifies stable, state-of-the-art technology which would be useful to the missions/Christian community.
• Works as an advocate for open, standardized technology which would permit organizations to share data. This is done through active involvement in various electronic mailing lists, offering workshops at conferences like the International Conference on Computing in Missions (ICCM), and in personal consulting.
• Provides free (or travel cost recovery) consulting on computing technology issues to organizations.

Where did Morning Star Technical Services Come From?

The board of directors for Morning Star Technical Services includes:

• Karl Fox

• Steve Neruda

• Bob Sutterfield

Increasingly, the charitable contributions of MST went to mission related organizations. In 1990, employees of MST realized that their company could do more than give money to world missions, that they could also use their professional expertise to assist mission related activities. This involvement started as time donated to organizations like DataServe and Harvest DataLink which help various mission related organizations use computer-based communication. More recently, MST started to offer their products at manufacturing costs to mission related organizations.

What Technologies is Morning Star Advocating?

The public Internet

The Internet (formally called the ARPAnet, or the NSF-Internet) has captured the imagination of the popular press. The Internet was originally a research vehicle for large universities and government contractors. Since 1988 the Internet has become widely available to commercial organizations as well as to private individuals through local public access systems such as the Freenets and pay-for-use services such as America Online (AOL) and DELPHI.

Easy, low cost access to the Internet is now widely available in the USA, and in a growing number of European and Pacific rim nations. The technology base used by the Internet such as the TCP/IP network protocol suite and basic Internet service protocol are proven, reliable technology. Public domain and low cost commercially supported software which makes use of the Internet is available for a wide variety of computers.

Of course, where interactive packet access to the big-I Internet is unavailable or prohibitively expensive, other little-i internetworking technologies are appropriate. Dialup network protocols like UUCP and Fido find wide use for carrying e-mail, discussion forums, and even file transfers in a batch oriented service. MSTS intends that all its activities be accessible in a useful way for users with only batch connectivity to the worldwide networks.

World Wide Web (WWW)

WWW provides a transparent way to present many different services available on the Internet in a coherent and easy to use manner. WWW clients allow a user to access data from a number of different computers, using a variety of different protocols by merely clicking on a portion of their screen. WWW supports hypertext documents. A hypertext document permits a reader to automatically follow references in one document to the contents of another document. Normally hypertext links are indicated by some visual cue: underlining, displayed in a different color, etc.

Hypertext systems are very common in the on-line books that are sold on CD such as the Microsoft Library or the Grolier Electronic Encyclopedia. There are many examples of how hypertext links could be used. An entry on Mozart might have links which point to:

• A timeline of important events in European history during the time Mozart was alive. The timeline would have hypertext links pointing to detailed descriptions of the events.
• Composers who were contemporaries and mentors of Mozart
• Detailed descriptions of the cities where Mozart lived

Using a hypertext system for publishing information has amazing possibilities. An article on the growth of the church in China could have the following links:

• Historical events which are mentioned in passing could have links to more detailed descriptions of the events.
• People who are mentioned could have links to in-depth biographies.
• The author name could be a link to a document which provides a short biographical sketch and hypertext links to other articles written by the same author.
• A link to an online database which has up to the minute information about political prisoners currently held in China.

Here's the point that distinguishes Internet-based hypertext systems from those based on local media: If my computer can reach information at a distance, why must my hypertext information be all stored on my local system? Each segment of information can be maintained by the organization with expertise in that field. Other organizations can conveniently create flexible links to that information, across the Internet.

A number of nice WWW clients are freely available. Mosaic, from the Univerity of Illinois, is by far the most popular. Mosaic runs on the Apple Macintosh, IBM-PCs under MS-Windows 3.1, and on many UNIX workstations which use the X11 window system.

Wide Area Information Services (WAIS)

The original conceptual paper by Brewster Kahle describing WAIS said:

Wide Area Information Servers answer questions over a network feeding information into personal workstations or other servers. As personal workstations become sophisticated computers, much of the role of finding, selecting, and presenting can be done locally to tailor to the users interests and preferences. This paper describes how current technology can be used to open a market of information services that will allow user's workstation to act as librarian and information collection agent from a large number of sources. These ideas form the Technical Services of a joint project between Apple Computer, Thinking Machines, and Dow Jones. This document is intended for those that are interested in the theoretical concepts and implications of a broad-based information system.

WAIS is used to provide full text searches over a collection of documents. The best way to illustrate this would be to provide a number of examples. Say a collection of documents exist which includes sermons from a number of churches and papers from a number of theological journals. An individual could issue a request to WAIS to find all documents which address "TOPIC" and reference "PASSAGE". A response to this query would be the titles of documents which match this query which can be retrieved for reading.

Who is working with Morning Star Technical Services?

USCWM

Robby Butler is Special Projects Assistant to Dr. Ralph Winter, President at William Carey International University/US Center for World Missions in Pasadena CA. We're working with Robby to provide Internet access to USCWM publications like Mission Frontiers, Global Prayer Digest, and Mission Frontiers, along with material from mission agencies and mission support organizations who maintain offices at the Center.

Evangelical Missions Information Service

Jim Reapsome is the editor of Evangelical Missions Quarterly (EMQ), and the biweekly missions newsletter Pulse. If everything works out, EMQ and Pulse will be made freely available for a one year pilot project.

Biblioteca Sacra

The theological journal produced by Dallas Seminary.

Xenos Christian Fellowship

Xenos is a non-denominational house church movement of 3500 people located in Columbus Ohio USA. Documents which will be available from Xenos include sermon outlines, their monthly newsletter, and articles from a scholarly journal published by Xenos. Xenos is also providing a wealth of internally produced documents which are used in discipleship training.

Missiology

A quarterly journal edited by Darryl Whiteman of Asbury Seminary

MSTS expect that charge-back will be possible in the next few years, making it possible to collect money from people who use the data being published electronically.

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