GoogleEarth and Membership Data

[daddy-o-p40]

Wow Jason the complexity you went through is way too technical for the guys in our stake.

We have an alternative that we learned of here. It is a browser based vbscript solution that Kevin Ball came up with. People that are looking for info on it can find it here:
http://wardmap.theballfamily.org/map.asp

[JasonG-p40]

Well, that's not the explanation I would give if I was talking to non-techy people. :p

Using the script that Kevin came up with is pretty cool, it's what I'm using right now. It's quick, it's easy, it's free, and there's essentially no work at all required by the user to get it working.

[bhofmann]

Wow Jason the complexity you went through is way too technical for the guys in our stake.

We have an alternative that we learned of here. It is a browser based vbscript solution that Kevin Ball came up with. People that are looking for info on it can find it here:
http://wardmap.theballfamily.org/map.asp

That application Kevin Ball wrote does seem cool but it has already been discussed in this forum. See http://beta.tech.lds.org/forum/showthread.php?t=141. Kevin decided to stop promoting the application because it is against Church policy to place membership information on external servers. He mentions this at the bottom of his web page too

[russellhltn]

Kevin decided to stop promoting the application because it is against Church policy to place membership information on external servers. He mentions this at the bottom of his web page too

Yes, but then he changed it so that it could run on a local machine and be compliant. I think the mention at the bottom of his page only applies to the original one.

[bhofmann]

Yes, but then he changed it so that it could run on a local machine and be compliant. I think the mention at the bottom of his page only applies to the original one.

That would be cool. I'll have to try it out. I saw the notice at the bottom and assumed it was for the whole project. Thanks for the clarification.

[JasonG-p40]

Yes, but then he changed it so that it could run on a local machine and be compliant. I think the mention at the bottom of his page only applies to the original one.

Yeah, I had the original version when he first posted it, but the one that he set up for local use is the one I'm working right now. It gets a little hung up now and then if you're zooming in/out quite a bit, or if you have to do a lot of moving around (I'm in the Texas panhandle where my ward covers about 7 different towns), but it still works nicely otherwise.

[supertitus-p40]

A lot has been made of the fact that members are warned that they should should use membership data responsibly, for church use only, etc. I think that the vast majority of members follow that policy scrupulously. What makes this situation so tricky, is that even educated, savvy members don't realize that by utilizing a third party software, they may be putting the data in jeopardy of non-church or commercial use.
I would agree with JasonG:

Looking at the waning messages you get when you download the .csv though, almost everybody that does it is going to be doing it for church use. Granted, they might be doing it for a personal/church reason, but if it's related to the church, then they are probably going to bypass the warning as they think that it's alright.

I think this misunderstanding is beyond educating members- it is a cultural deficiency; I don't know that we can sufficiently educate members. I know that whenever I have this discussion with even savvy members, their eyes glaze over and they say something like, "but I'm not doing anything wrong- I am using the information for legitimate purposes." Of course it's true, and they (reasonably or unreasonably) believe that since a free online tool is available, it is risk-free.

By the way, I appreciate the discussion. It is refreshing to talk with individuals who will at least take time to understand some of the issues.

-Aaron Titus

[JasonG-p40]

My point exactly, Titus.

There are a lot of people that know a lot about tools that are available out there and nifty things that they can do with them, but they don't actually know exactly how those programs work.

[supertitus-p40]

As a reminder, never upload information that you have downloaded from MLS or LUWS to a 3rd party server (unless it is an official Church server).

Is this a written policy? If so, our members are unaware that it exists. My Stake clerk is unaware that it exists. My Stake President is not aware of a policy against using 3rd party servers. I am unaware of such a policy, and my stake (Suitland, Maryland) has explicitly adopted practices directly contrary to such a policy, if it exists.

And even if it is written somewhere, it is so well hidden as to be of no practical effect, either to prevent members from using third party servers, or probably even to extricate the church from the line of liability (if liability exists).

-Aaron Titus

[WelchTC]

Is this a written policy? If so, our members are unaware that it exists. My Stake clerk is unaware that it exists. My Stake President is not aware of a policy against using 3rd party servers. I am unaware of such a policy, and my stake (Suitland, Maryland) has explicitly adopted practices directly contrary to such a policy, if it exists.

And even if it is written somewhere, it is so well hidden as to be of no practical effect, either to prevent members from using third party servers, or probably even to extricate the church from the line of liability (if liability exists).

-Aaron Titus

You are correct that the policy is not well defined and has not been published properly. We are working on fixing that. A big part of the problem is that when programs were written, we (the Church) did not anticipate all of the ways the data could be used, shared, etc. As a result, we are now trying to think of a more comprehensive policy for data use.

Tom