In June 2009, Nathan Dickamore wrote an article on this site entitled “Participate in Community Development”. He wrote about open-source advocate Michael Tiemann's theories concerning "exonovation" and how community-driven (and supported) projects yield better products. Similarly, by using the community's time and talents, the Church can better tackle the monumental task of maintaining its legacy data systems, free up developer resources, and utilize the broad range of technical skills available in the larger community.

As an open-source advocate, Tiemann posits that more project contributors lead to fewer outstanding issues. As a software engineer for the LDS Church, I lead the maintenance efforts for a large number of applications within the Supply Chain portfolio. These applications use a diverse set of technologies and require a relatively broad skill set in order to maintain them. Resources are sometimes limited, and we find ourselves supporting and maintaining more products than a few developers can handle. Indeed, often a project’s needs are put on hold as other issues take priority. In addition, it seems that for every issue we resolve, the customer uncovers one or two bugs or makes enhancement requests. As maintenance developers, we sometimes find ourselves sinking as we do our best to keep maintenance applications happy while at the same time developing new software to meet additional needs.

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I work on a fairly large portfolio team within the Information and Communications Systems department—approximately ninety people who are organized into five or six project teams, each focused on delivering products for the Missionary and Public Affairs departments of the Church.

But we have a problem: the project teams have become siloed. This is because we do not have an effective means of cross-portfolio collaboration in real-time.

This problem manifests itself in a number of ways, including the following:

1. When a technical problem is discovered by a team, a cultural boundary causes the team to feel that they’re on their own to solve it.
2. We have no discoverable history of successes and failures, and consequently project teams either re-invent the wheel or repeat the mistakes of other teams.
3. The perception of bureaucracy causes us to be inefficient while we wait for meetings and use the organizational hierarchy to disseminate lessons learned and best practices discovered by project teams.
4. We think and behave in ways that prevent synergy and cause miscommunication, both of which lead us to false thinking. For example, we tend to promote false assumptions such as the following:
   • “My problems are unique.”
   • “Everyone sees my problems.”
   • “Everyone would see the same solutions as I do.”
   • “If I can’t solve it, nobody can.”

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University of Utah (Special Collections Department, J. Willard Marriott Library)

The hearing aid, audiometer, artificial larynx, and stereophonic recording: Harvey Fletcher

This installment of Mormons in Technology discusses some of the contributions of Harvey Fletcher to society and technology. Fletcher is known as the father of stereophonic sound and devoted much of his career to studying the production, transmission, and recording of sound.

Born in 1884 in Provo, Utah, Fletcher graduated from Brigham Young University in 1907. Fletcher then moved his young family to Chicago to pursue a doctoral degree at the University of Chicago. There, Fletcher worked with Dr. Robert Millikan on the famous oil-drop experiments as part of his dissertation work. Millikan won a Nobel Prize for being the first to accurately measure the charge of the electron in these experiments.

After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1911 with a PhD, Fletcher returned to BYU to teach for five years. In 1916, he accepted a job offer from the Western Electric Company, which became Bell Laboratories.

After retirement from Bell Laboratories, Fletcher taught at Columbia University and then returned to BYU to do research. In 1953, Fletcher established the Department of Engineering, which eventually became the College of Physical and Engineering Sciences. Fletcher continued to do research, especially in musical tones, and teach at BYU until his death.

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The Mormon Channel iPhone application is the first software release from the LDSTech community. Not only does it stream the Mormon Channel on the iPhone, it also plays recordings of general conference talks, Church magazine articles, and scriptures. The application was given a four-star rating in iTunes and has been downloaded more than 55,000 times in more than 53 countries.

The Mormon Channel Project will create version 2.0 of the iPhone application and also create applications to stream the Mormon Channel on Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, Android, and BlackBerry devices.

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While serving a mission in South Africa, three missionaries in my district and I decided to go for a scenic bike ride on P-Day. The plan was to visit Cape Point—where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet—and enjoy the natural beauty of the countryside along the way. The isolated road we followed was carved into a steep mountainside that ascended from the ocean below. It was lush and full of trees, vines, and bushes.

While we were riding leisurely, the trees and bushes above the road started to shake and rustle. Loud noises and what sounded like screams came from the dark undergrowth. Almost immediately baboons were running onto the road beside us. Adrenalin kicked in and away we went.

Baboons have long fangs and do not have cute and cuddly dispositions. They can be very dangerous and cause serious injuries.

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In the day-to-day life of a developer there are always new projects to finish, new deadlines to meet, and new challenges to overcome. Sometimes the problems we face are new to us, and sometimes they are similar to ones we’ve solved before. Perhaps someone else has already solved a particular problem, or has a well thought-out approach to solving the same type of problem. We may “spin our wheels” unnecessarily on a particular challenge for days because we didn’t have those already-existing solutions or processes at our fingertips.

An individual developer within an organization can solve many problems alone and learn a lot. A team of developers can work with each other and become even better. To become first-class, though, an organization must enable all developers and teams to take advantage of collective knowledge and solutions already in existence. To be most effective, organizations should spend time, money, and effort creating and collecting those solutions and then disseminating the information.

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