Tech Forum

Hello all,

I was wondering to what extent the church uses GIS. I use the internet mapping maps.lds.org, but GIS potentially has huge benefits to the church in terms of membership, realestate management, farms, and so on. Is anyone interested in this area ? or does anyone have any further info ?

Regards
UKMapper

While I can't answer your question directly there are quite a number threads in the forums related to GIS. The thread GIS Data and Churchdiscusses some of your interest. The thread Summarizing the Myriad Threads About Mapping lists other threads that discuss mapping.

You might be interested in looking through the new beta maps site. Once you log in, households are mapped as GIS dots. It's not perfect, but might do what you are looking for.

Centrally, Church headquarters certainly uses GIS. That is obviously how unit boundary maps are created. The technology also sits behind the web sites such as maps.lds.org and beta-maps.lds.org. (Not sure if these are available in the UK.)

Local units are not yet provided with any GIS software, either standalone or web based. Some individuals and local units have developed their own solutions for particular tasks. For example, as an assistant ward clerk I have used GIS software to create our own boundary and member map layers, including HT/VT routes, and managing fast-offering routes by subdividing the ward into districts.

Eventually, I suspect that limited GIS technology will be provided to units for such purposes as boundary analysis. That could build on what is already being deviloped for beta-maps.lds.org.

Two barriers to rolling out GIS to local leaders are cost and learning curve.

Interesting stuff, thanks for those links.

I agree, a web based Intranet / Extranet GIS would be ideal for local members to define ward and branch boundaries. These systems are easy to use, could use Google or Microsoft just like maps.lds as a base, and are also relatively easy to deploy. This data could also be written back into a central database, and published out to the web to inform new residents and new members of which ward they live in.

Open Source technologies like Geoserver and Openlayers are of course also free to licence, although it would probably make sense to continue on the same development path as maps.lds

Ward staff could also use this environment for creating local maps of where members live, if the mapping was linked to the membership database, and there was a zipcode lookup to place those on the map.

UKMapper