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The Mormon church recently held “tech talks”, a series of talks on how the Church uses technology. By attending both the Salt Lake City and Provo events, I was able to hear 6 of the 8 talks and meet many employees. I thought both events were excellent. My notes follow.
CIO Presentation (Keynote) — Joel Dehlin
- Our Vision:
1. High quality content (message) to all corners of the earth, in native languages, in multiple formats, on multiple devices
2. Decrease administration and increase ministratrion
3. Bring souls to Christ
- Now: Mormon.org is testing live chats with investigators. The Helsinki temple dedication was broadcast by satellite to all of the former Soviet Union. Church operates several websites. 50M page views/month, 5M uniques, 61 country sites, 42 languages (on the Web.) New missionary web app that streamlines calls.
- Future: 150 languages on the Web. One search for all Church websites and BYU properties. Leader portals with online stats and callings. Member portals with targeted info on callings. Online training. Missionary tools.
- Challenges: scale, languages, complexity (languages w/o infrastructure), spending the Lord’s money wisely. The widow’s mite is on Joel’s mind when he is negotiating or hiring.
- How you can help: 1. tech.lds.org 2. develop things on your own and donate them 3. work at the Church (work on the design team)
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“We are confident that as the work of the Lord expands, he will inspire men to develop the means whereby the membership of the Church, wherever they may be, can be counseled in an intimate and personal way by his chosen prophet. Communication is the sinew that binds the Church as one great family. Between those facilities which are now available and those which are on the horizon, we shall be able to converse one with another according to the needs and circumstances of the time.” — Gordon B. Hinckley, 1981
- There’s been a “gathering” of highly intelligent, talented folks at the Church.
- Q&A: Largest challenge? Deciding which “horse to ride” among options like Java, .Net, PHP, Ruby, etc.
LDS Technology Community — Tom Welch
- Launching tech.lds.org, a community site for Church members interested in technology.
- Will 1. share 2. engage 3. enlist (ideas, testing help) 4. encourage (development, creativity)
- Brethren support of Tech Talks
- Want to continue to encourage development of projects by members (as has been done in the past)
- Idea: audio transmittal of sacrament mtg talks to shut-ins
Family History — Gordon Clarke & Kevin Ward
- New Family Search to launch soon, 3 years in the making, a web services platform
- “Master collaborative online family tree” — genealogy contributors can merge data or agree to disagree (wiki style)
- Print temple ordinance cards at home
- Real time live data on marriages, deaths
- Online image archives
- Client to be released under open source license (not GPL compatible)
Interaction Design — Tadd Giles
- Very talented team, started as skunkworks project, now very popular internally
- Our designers do it all — customer interaction, analysis, graphics design, coding, etc.
- Follow principles of Getting Real from 37Signals — prototype in high fidelity
- Tools: Mac OS X, TextMate, Yahoo UI, Prototype, Scriptaculous, some agile processes, some pair programming
- Challenges: Demand exceeds supply, consistency across sites, globalization, accessibility (“we should be the most accessible site on the planet”), mobility, learning the “Lord’s Way” (Dallin H. Oaks’s book)
Infrastructure — Dave Prestwich
- 1600 servers for Church sites + 2000 for FamilySearch
- 36 TB of Oracle, 200 TB SAN, 400 megabits bandwidth, 115 temples with satellite links
- Use open source like Nagios and have contributed back to the project
- NOC on BYU campus
- Must have awesome spam filtering for General Authorities and full-time missionaries, 1 M emails/day
- All new phone deployments using Cisco VOIP
- “Still more cost effective to use Windows on the desktop right now” but “OpenOffice.org on the 26,000 clerk computers”
Solutions Delivery — Rich Farr
- What gets me up in the morning: Oct 1981 talk from Gordon B. Hinckley
- What keeps me up at night: global Church, some ward clerks have never used a calculator, a chapel in Papa New Guinea is 6 bamboos and a tarp
- We use existing business apps for non-unique functions (accounting), build our own for unique functions (missionary management) or when licensing would be too expensive (fleet management)
- Missionary app supports 19,000 business rules (e.g. this missionary can’t receive a visa to this country) but Apostles still make the call
Cutting edge governance: 13 portfolios with own mini-CIO and staff, Brethren set priorities and budget so we don’t have to
Read more notes on the Tech Talks from Connor Boyack, Gary Thornock, Nic Johnson, J. Max Wilson, A Random John, and Matt Harrison.
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