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History of Tech
The Tech community consists of hundreds of Church employees, members, and volunteers that come together to discuss, learn about, or work on Church technology. The Tech site has a discussion forum, and a wiki. Each is used for a different purpose:
- Forum: Allows members to ask questions and exchange ideas about technology.
- Wiki: Hosts instructional articles and other technical information.
Despite the different uses, the common theme of the Tech site is Church technology.
How Tech Began
Tech was launched in February 2007 as "LDSTech". The goal of the site was to leverage volunteer efforts for the technical needs of the Church. However, security concerns and other constraints, such as source code that resided only in internal networks, prevented ICS from making any projects available to volunteers.
Even though ICS had to wait to implement its initial vision for Tech, it launched a peer-to-peer forum where clerks and other members could help each other. The forum quickly became a popular resource, with hundreds of posts and dedicated community moderators. As of August 2011, the forum has 63,454 posts, with 16,633 total members and 868 active members (active members have participated in the forum in the last 30 days). The forum remains the most widely used part of the site.
A year and a half later, a wiki was added. Whereas the forum provides mostly question-and-answer threads, the wiki provides a knowledge base of content that the community can continually edit and shape. Much of the wiki content addresses clerk and meetinghouse technology needs. As of August, the wiki has 975 content pages, with 14,197 registered users and 30 active users (active users have edited a page on the wiki within the last 7 days).*
From Forums and Wikis to Projects
In 2009, a number of official projects became available to the Tech community. A Java-Integrated Development Environment (IDE) was made available to community developers, as well as a Java Stack library that includes code snippets that can be used to build applications. A bug-tracking tool (JIRA), a source code repository (SVN), and a project management framework were also added to Tech.
At one point there were over 100 projects available for community volunteers to join. Most of the projects had an average of about 35 volunteers each, some on multiple projects. Not accounting for members on multiple projects, there are more than 1,800 volunteers spread across the Tech community projects (as of August 2011).
Some of the completed projects include Clean Water Application, Gospel Library for Windows, Child Protection Services Act application, and Bishops Storehouse Inventory and Reporting.
All of the Project resources except the Forum and Wiki have been shut down.
For the latest forum statistics, see the "Tech Technology Forums Statistics" section at the bottom of the Forum. For the latest wiki statistics, see the wiki's Statistics page.