Tech Forum

Hi people,

One question... The website http://tech.LDS.org is dead? I don't see news updates and others infos. Or the channel is active, but only website tech.lds.org that stoped?

Regards,

I inquired about this recently and received this answer:

There are no longer any employees assigned to LDSTech. As a result, the page hasn't been updated with new articles.

It's been a pattern over the years, it'll dry up, then a service missionary is called, then it dries up

I wonder why they can't at least do a minimal update occasionally. I maintain a few websites, and I can change and add new content in about 15 minutes. I suppose the tech site may be more complex and updating it might be more labor intensive...

zane,

It does seem dead, the excitement around the ramping up, getting internet to all the sites, introducing come, follow me, all the online tools, it's just over, we're on cruise control.... everyone's been assigned to other stuff and the only fun stuff are the couple of mobile developers left doing that work.

johnshaw wrote:It does seem dead, the excitement around the ramping up, getting internet to all the sites, introducing come, follow me, all the online tools, it's just over, we're on cruise control.... everyone's been assigned to other stuff and the only fun stuff are the couple of mobile developers left doing that work.

It's true that the LDSTech site is no longer being updated, but the rest of your speculation is not true. There's lots of work being done on backend services, and we know that at least the Calendar online tool is in the midst of a major overhaul. Here the Calendar product manager said: "We are working on a new major release of the calendar."

This is sad and too bad. I remain hopeful that someday a forward thinking CTO will be hired at the church and make the bulk of all Church software project open source or open source for members. I can't help but think that the failure of the LDS Tech project came from a desire to maintain too much control over the projects and what was even attempted to contribute.

It requires changing how you think about doing work.

If the list of issues was stored on GitHub, and the project allowed Pull Requests, and serious PRs were assigned to full time team members you could make some positive progress in having volunteer programming happen. If there was a promotion process so that people who had contributed multiple times were given more permission or taken more seriously, it would reduce the effort required to maintain. We aren't talking about a huge amount of people to police. Even Gospel Library only has around 1500 registered volunteers, far less than many open source projects.

Don't get me wrong, I know that this isn't as simple as flipping a switch. I just wish there was more emphasis put on this by the tech departments of the church.

For security purposes, I would not make the source code of all church applications open source.

aebrown wrote: It's true that the LDSTech site is no longer being updated, but the rest of your speculation is not true. There's lots of work being done on backend services, and we know that at least the Calendar online tool is in the midst of a major overhaul. Here the Calendar product manager said: "We are working on a new major release of the calendar."

Yet other extremely valuable tools have been eliminated. Oh goody a calendar that has worked great for years is improving. My stake still doesn't use it correctly in any sense of the world. I can rely on it for Ward or stake activities.

What's missing is the last mile effort. SP/Bishop's and the STS helping coordinate adoption. Tool development means less than adoption in my mind and that's what LDSTECH is for.

LDS Music for iOS is struggling for volunteer developers, and Gospel Library for Windows is trudging along slowly. Both of them are still run as public LDSTech projects that anyone can join and contribute code to. Many people have joined the projects, but few actually put in pull requests – and of the few that do, even fewer do so consistently. For example, there are several open issues in GitHub for LDS Music for iOS, but the most recent pull request was about a month ago. This doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in the people who make decisions about where funding and focus should go (for example, towards LDSTech).

I don't blame contributing members entirely for the failure of LDSTech. There is a lot of continual work that needs to be done on the organizational side to keep a volunteer community engaged and provide support, which I think was a cost that was never fully planned for in LDSTech.