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.