The Information & Communication Systems department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wishes to invite local Church units familiar with webcasting to participate in the beta test of Meetinghouse Webcast 2.0 software. Webcast technology provides an alternative to travel for stake conferences, regional conferences, firesides, and training meetings by allowing local units of the Church to webcast these meetings over the internet to other locations.

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I recently attended a keynote presentation given by Michael Tiemann, Red Hat’s Vice President of Open Source Affairs (listen to Michael Tiemann’s presentation here). Michael's talk focuses on "exonovation" (a word he made up), or innovation from an open community, and how it can make a product even better than a closed, controlled, proprietary effort. Exonovation involves creating a more open, positive, and productive environment, leveraging the innovation of people external to your organization and is a common practice used in the open source development community.

Listening to this presentation as a software engineer for the LDS Church, I could see how exonovation and the community could really benefit the work here at the Church. We have found that as an organization we have many software dependencies, yet we do not have the funds or resources necessary to meet all of these dependencies. Exonovation provides a way for us to extend our resource cap to a possibly unlimited amount.

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The Mormon Channel iPhone App is now available for free in the iTunes store. This is the first LDSTech community collaboration project to be released.

Community collaboration is ongoing at the LDSTech Wiki. The purpose of the wiki is for Church employees and community members to collaborate on various documents and technology projects sponsored by the Church. We invite all to participate. New users, please review the Requirements for Participation and wiki Guidelines pages.

We can still improve the Mormon Channel iPhone Application. There is immediate need for quality assurance to find and fix bugs. You can suggest new features and report bugs in Jira.

To learn more about helping out with community collaboration projects on the LDSTech wiki, read about getting started.

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Looking to the work of the Master can help enhance our own creativity.

Everything Was Created Spiritually Before It Was Created Physically

And I, the Lord God, formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul, the first flesh upon the earth, the first man also; nevertheless, all things were before created; but spiritually were they created and made according to my word. (Moses 3:7)

There are many scriptural sources of the initial spiritual creation of all things. The importance of a plan is apparent in this fact. Nothing was thrown together haphazardly. Every blade of grass, every insect, every tree and flower, and every one of us were fully realized first in spirit and then in flesh.

In our own creative works, taking the time to plan allows us to test ideas, work out the kinks, and define the best solution before we begin the actual creation. We save time, energy, and money—and end up with a better product. Planning allows us to make mistakes without fear and to refine the best ideas while letting the weak ones fade away.

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When someone thinks of IT and the Church, they probably think of the large, complex environment at the Church’s downtown SLC campus, with a staff of dedicated IT professionals in many different specialties. Or perhaps they would think of the more modest technical needs of local units, area and mission offices, seminaries and institutes, MTCs, or temples. Indeed, the Church has technical needs wherever it has a presence. Those needs vary according to the function and size of the particular location.

I am privileged to have worked at LDS Philanthropies (formerly LDS Foundation) for the last 18 years, first as a Technical Service Representative (TSR) and now as a software engineer. I have seen this department grow in size and change in technology. LDS Philanthropies (LDSP) is a department of the Office of the Presiding Bishopric and is responsible for philanthropic donations to the Church and its affiliated charities, including the Church’s educational institutions. We maintain the donor records for these charities, as well as the alumni databases (but not educational records) of BYU, BYU-Idaho, BYU-Hawaii, and LDS Business College. The database resides on an IBM System i (AS/400) located in the BYU Data Center. The AS/400, along with the Ascend database, was chosen in 1990 because it was the best system then available to support the needs of LDS Foundation.

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When I was a kid, I watched a cartoon called The Jetsons. The futuristic family had a robotic maid named Rosie who took care of the household chores. To make things interesting, she was given a personality, and occasionally she demonstrated emotions. After watching this show, I would think about the future and imagine robots doing the majority of our work for us while we sat back and did more important things. Although many of these imaginings have not materialized, I often think of this when I am writing test automation as a QA engineer for the Church.

Even a simple application can have a large number of test cases that need to be verified. Let’s pretend we have an application with 100 test cases. The sooner we realize a given test case is failing, the better off we will be. Accordingly, we would want to test after each successful build. Let’s suppose that ten new builds are created each day. If we tested all of this functionality with each new build, we would be testing 1,000 (100 X 10) cases day in and day out. Umm . . . I think we need a Rosie!

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