[Ldsoss] Home and Visiting Teaching Tool

[Greg Hart]

Hi All-

I understand the Church may be planning to develop an official online  
system for tracking/reporting Home and Visiting Teaching, integrated  
into MLS and the local unit web sites?  Below is a pointer to an  
unofficial one that has been in use in my stake for a few years now.   
It has proven itself simple but effective.  I was not the original  
developer of it, nor do I have his OK right now to offer the code.  
The system was originally designed as a *temporary* solution until  
the Church released an even better, official version, which we were  
told was slated for late 2006 or 2007.

I'm sharing it here as a proof-of-concept, just to encourage  
discussion from those of you who have also put your head around this  
problem, have maybe seen an even better implementation, and may have  
some "lessons learned" to share with any listening ears at the Church.

I work for a tech/entertainment company where developers are  
constantly being reminded to involve the end-users early-on in the  
specification and design of a tool, rather that just asking users for  
their feedback after their done (or worse, releasing and not  
asking).  I think it's an invaluable lesson.  I suspect, though maybe  
others can confirmed, that not many ward and stake clerks were  
involved in the design of MLS, which is unfortunate, though I am  
grateful for MLS for what it is.

Here's a mock ward.  Go ahead and submit reports and generate summaries.

1) Go to: http://www.queezy.com/ht/
2) Submit an bogus report for a companionship,
3) Lastly, go here: http://www.queezy.com/ht/admin/ and view your  
comments you just submitted at "Generate a Report".  The admin  
password is
"LDSOSS".  If you look at Septembers report, most of the comments are  
copied and pasted from actual reports from my ward (of course,  
changing the names to protect the innocent).

How it works:
Companionships and assignments are made in MLS, and exported once per  
month via the standard "HomeTeaching.csv" and "VisitingTeaching.csv"  
files.  The CSV file is uploaded once per month to the system through  
the admin page.  Admin's can enable or disable reporting for each  
month.  Users have until the 10th of the month before the "default"  
month switches to the current month (although you can still report  
for any month that is "enabled").  It tracks visit history, very  
similar to MLS, only leaders don't have to manually do it like in  
MLS.  (The demo only has two months of historical data!)  The  
confidential month-end report gets passed on to the Bishop.

I believe the strength of the system is the month-end report that you  
can generate on the Admin page which includes home or visiting  
teachers' comments.  In addition, presidencies like it because  
gathering reports is much less time consuming and the usefulness of  
the reports is much higher.

It could sure use tighter integration into MLS and the ward web  
sites.  Because of the bottle-neck that the ward computer tends to be,
companionships and assignments should really be made editable via the  
ward website in addition to MLS, sync'ed.

Also, right now the assignments are viewable to the entire quorum/ 
group.  It would be better if the web site knew who you were when you  
logged in and gave you access only to your assignment.  Unless that  
is, you've been given privilages to edit companionships and  
assignments, but currently, levels of privilages based on one's  
Church calling, is a concept missing from the ward websites.

Maybe others have ideas as well.

Let me know if this raises any questions or I can help explain  
anything further,

-Greg