If you're new here, read more about the More Good Foundation. We help members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon church) share their beliefs on the Internet. Learn more about what Mormons believe or talk with Mormons at LDS.net.

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)

• “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.

Last week I attended the Mormon church’s Tech Talks in Salt Lake City. They offered eight presentations from which everyone could choose three. Tonight the Church’s tech staff will present another round of “talks” — this time in Provo. I recommend them for anyone interested in technology:

LDS Church Tech Talks in Provo
January 23rd, 6:30 P.M.
BYU 8th Stake Center (1021 South 500 West, Provo, UT)

After tonight’s tech talks I’ll post my notes on both sessions.

Announced at the LDS Tech Talks last night, the Church has just launched a new site for anyone interested in technology: LDS Tech. The site will allow Church members to communicate with technology employees at Church headquarters and each other, to discuss technology problems and solutions the Church faces. The site includes a discussion forum, the first forum ever on an official Church site.

Link: LDS Tech

This spring PBS will air a 4-hour special on “The Mormons”. Award-winning filmmaker Helen Whitney spent 3 years creating this program, “interviewing ‘hundreds and hundreds of people’ ranging from LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley to everyday church members to those who are openly antagonistic toward the church.” She hopes it will dispel a variety of stereotypes and misconceptions about the Mormon church.

Set your calendars and recorders:

“The Mormons” on PBS
Apr 30 - May 1 on PBS

Via: LDSNewsWatch.com

Joel Dehlin, Church CIO, has announced times and locations for “tech talks”. These are informal meetings in which Joel and other Church employees will explain how the Mormon church uses technology. All interested persons are invited to attend.

Salt Lake City
January 18th, 6:30pm
Joseph Smith Memorial Building, 10th Floor

Provo
January 23rd, 6:30pm
BYU 8th Stake Center (1021 South 500 West)

Source: ldscio.org

The LDS church recently hired two talented people to join its top-notch technology staff:

• Joel Dehlin is the new Chief Information Officer (CIO). He worked previously at Microsoft, Novell, and Arthur Andersen and will now head up the Church’s technology efforts. Find his new blog at LDSCIO.org. For more information, read: I Work at my Church
• Cameron Moll is Principle Interaction Designer. He’ll join the talented team that hangs out at NorthTemple.com. Cameron’s personal blog, already a popular destination for design talent, can be found at CameronMoll.com. For more information, read Working for the Man Ain’t No Crime, Yo.

I say “hires” but these are no hirelings.

Newsweek and the Washington Post have just launched a new multi-faith blog to promote “respectful conversation” among religions and “constructive conversation about the things that matter most”. The blog, entitled On Faith, will be staffed by a variety of world religious leaders, scholars, and journalists.

How can people engage in a conversation about faith and its implications in a way that sheds light rather than generates heat? …we believe the first step is conversation–intelligent, informed, eclectic, respectful conversation–among specialists and generalists who devote a good part of their lives to understanding and delineating religion’s influence on the life of the world. The point of our new online religion feature is to provide a forum for such sane and spirited talk, drawing on a remarkable panel of distinguished figures from the academy, the faith traditions, and journalism. (About “On Faith”)

The Mormon church has selected director of media relations Michael Otterson to represent the Church on this blog. Alongside the other On Faith panelists, he will discuss various aspects of his faith — his first article is entitled Engaging Without Rancor — in a group blog that’s bound to be a powerful instrument for promoting religious tolerance and a great read.

David of MormonConverts.com recently shared with me a good idea: Ward Bloggers.

The Church already allows ward members to share a (private) site with the news and members of their ward. If (public) blogging software were added, each bishop in the Church could call a local person to be responsible for writing about happenings in the ward — upcoming Sunday School topics, with links to the readings for that week, or who spoke in sacrament meeting and what they spoke about.

I’d love to read the ward blogs of areas in my mission — to know that someone I taught had spoken in Church, or that a member I knew had sent a son on a mission. I’d also want to read the blog of my “home ward” to stay connected with the many good people that influenced me as a youth.

The Church has just released a beta version of its new online Gospel Library. To try it, visit beta.lds.org and click on Gospel Library. It provides easy access to the scriptures, General Conference addresses, magazines, and lesson manuals. It no longer uses frames and each article has its own URL, which will be important for linking and search engine visibility. The site also highlights a powerful search feature that can search across all content and then filter by type.

Congrats to everyone at the Church who helped in the release of this new Gospel Library. This will be a powerful addition to lds.org when it goes live.

Aaron Curtis has created a Google Custom Search Engine for searching official LDS Church web sites. It includes lds.org, mormon.org, josephsmith.net, familysearch.org, providentliving.org, and international Church websites (like the site for the Mormon church in Australia, for example).

Also, the More Good Foundation operates a search engine called LDSsearch.com, which indexes pages that are faithful to the Church. It should be a “safe” place to search when looking for information about the Church.

It would be great to get Firefox search plugins for both of these search engines.

Link: Aaron’s LDS search