LDSTech is dead?

[mevans]

I think another problem is that many active church members with the skills are already so busy serving in their callings (on top of work and raising a family) that finding extra time to contribute may be quite difficult. In the day when the church was rolling out all kinds of technology tools (most of which have now been discontinued), I saw there were some projects to which I might be able to contribute, but I had no time. What I did find was that I could help test some of the tools and provide helpful feedback, as I understand what kind of information a developer needs to fix a problem, such as a reproducible scenario, but that's about all I could find time to do. Right now for me to make any contributions, I'd probably need to be retired or independently wealthy.

I remember a few years back, I thought it could be an interesting option if the church had "technical missions" where full-time missionaries with some pre-mission coding, QA, tech writing, etc. skills could serve a hybrid technical/proselyting mission. For example, they could spend 6 hours during the less productive daytime, Monday through Friday, working at the Riverton office building and then go to their areas in the afternoon / evening for proselyting duties. People could come out of this program with valuable work skills from an internship as well as the spiritual benefit of a regular mission. They might also have a better understanding of the connection that can exist between the spiritual and technical. I wouldn't start such a program with a lot of participants, but the church needs more technical people than the budget permits and this could be a way to help. It would also depend on how many church employees could be mentors, and it seems there aren't too many to begin with, so that might be a problem. But if that got the Notes/Journal feature fixed and kept much-missed tools like Lesson Schedules and Newsletter going (and getting improved), or helped keep Gospel Library for Windows going, it would be a really good thing. You could likely put interns on such projects.

Oh well, it's a thought, but, I'm not the church's CTO/CIO, and it's time to go to my day job

[sbradshaw]

The Church did have LDSTech service missions for a while. I served a 6-month LDSTech mission, 3 or 4 years ago. My name tag had "LDSTech Mission" as a subtitle.

[stevenhaddox]

I'm incredibly late to this thread, but I also am sad to have seen LDSTech fade away over the years. One of my favorite moments of serving the church was the opportunity to take my skills as a Ruby on Rails developer to update the Washington DC's temple visitor's website for their Christmas lights invitation application. Shortly after that I was asked if I'd like to volunteer as an LDSTech missionary, but unfortunately I wasn't eligible at that time. I looked forward to the day when I could, but I believe it had already died off prior to that. It feels like we've taken a massive step backwards in utilizing all of these incredible technological advancements we've made. I believe firmly in the capabilities and contributions of OSS, but it requires there be a steward to own each project that is endorsed for official support, IMHO. That way you can avoid a project that has some success from simply dying off if someone's life gets too busy, they stop believing, etc. All that said, I look forward to seeing what the church can bring about in the future along similar paths of allowing our members to give back with the talents the Lord has blessed us with. I'm confident the spirit of LDSTech won't be benched forever - someday we'll be able to help again when the Lord says the time is right.