[Ldsoss] Open Source projects and the Church

[Tom Welch]

Bill, I've been meeting with the team in charge of the MLS to see what 
exactly we can open up to the community for development.  Good ideas!

Tom

Bill Pringle wrote:
> The church doesn't need to understand open source methodology in order 
> to take advantage of it, but they do have to be open to the idea of 
> people writing whatever they believe is helpful, rather than 
> controlling what the end results are.  At present, the preference is 
> to tell us what information we need and how we should update it.
>
> For example, if the format of the MLS database were published so that 
> we could write third party programs to extract information and create 
> whatever reports, various people feel they need, that would be a great 
> help.  By providing an import feature that makes it easy for people to 
> work on their PCs at home and then apply a series of changes would 
> make life easier for EQ, HP, and RS presidents to maintain their HT/VT 
> lists.  Last Sunday we had a line waiting to get into the MLS system 
> to update/print whatever people wanted, but somebody was updating 
> their HT assignments, which used up most of the available time.
>
> I rewrote my wardlist program (that worked with MIS)  to handle the 
> exports from MLS, and renamed it MLSRpt.  It provides a number of 
> reports that you can't get from MLS, but I need to extract the 
> information, take it home, run my program, and then distribute the 
> reports.  This is because the export information contains sensitive 
> information (e.g., ages for adults) that can't be distributed to the 
> general congregation.  If I knew the format of the MLS database, I 
> could provide some programs that members could run to get the 
> information they need without revealing any information they shouldn't 
> have.
>
> Although the old MIS system was a clunker, it was easy to write 
> screen-scraping software to extract all the information and reformat 
> it.  With MLS that is much harder to do.  While the Export feature 
> made much of my life easier, the fact that some helpful information 
> isn't available via export (like HT/VT visits) means that some 
> information is much harder to get now.
>
> When I was exec sec, I had most of the information that was needed for 
> Bishopric, Welfare, etc.  When a name came up, people would look to me 
> to tell them what callings they had, who their HT/VT are, how much 
> they have been visited, who they HT/VT and how often they visited 
> their people, etc.  This kind of information was very helpful to 
> determine how best to serve that person and/or address any problem.  I 
> made these reports available to those who were authorized and 
> interested in text or PDA forms (using MMS).
>
>
>
>
> ---
> Bill Pringle
> work: Bill.Pringle at unisys.com   http://www.unisysfsp.com
> http://www.unisys.com
> home/school: wrp103 at psu.edu http://www.personal.psu.edu/~wrp103
> http://CherylWheeler.com
>
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>

-- 
Tom Welch
welchtc at ldschurch.org
(801) 240-1609
(858) 829-4614 - Cell


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