Hey Tom,
It's good to see you're back in Utah, helping out with the Church's software strategy. It's encouraging to see. I was down there several months ago having lunch with Ben Galbraith, and several architects throughout the group chatting them up on their SOA strategies - it was interesting. Anyway, I hope all is well with you and your family since the last time we spoke during the Axiom days. Take care,
-aaron
On 6/8/06, Tom Welch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
My name is Tom Welch. I was recently recruited by the Church to define an "open source" strategy for the Church. What does this mean? Well, for years the Church has been a heavy user of open source technology. Many of the back-end systems are all based upon open source software. In fact, the Church has contributed to certain open source projects with improvements that it has made. Because of sensitivity issues, the Church has asked the individual developers to submit changes upstream in the developers name instead of the Church's name. My role, however, is not to get the Church to use more open source software but is to figure out how we can leverage the OSS community to help build applications that the Church does not have the resources to do.
A little bit about me:
I am the former chief technology officer of Linspire, Inc. (formally known as Lindows). I resigned my post at Linspire to work on this project as I can see the huge benefit that enlisting the LDS development community can provide to the Church and to Church members. I was with Linspire from the very beginning and have watched that company grow and become a success and am still involved with the leadership board of Freespire.org (a completely free version of Linspire that will be available this summer). I am also the author of the original scriptures reader that ran on the Palm and CE devices (EZ Reader). I also wrote the original Franklin Day Planner software (Ascend) that was sold by Franklin Covey for years. I've been around the "block" for many years and have seen the rise and success of open source software and I am very enthusiastic to be a part of it.
As you think of the Church and the work that they do from a technology front, most of the work is done to benefit the Church as a whole. By this I mean that the Church spends almost all of their technology resources in building programs that run the Church (membership records, financial, assets, missionary, family history, temple, etc). Very little "technology" money is spent benefiting individual members. That is why there are no "Duty to God" tracking software, scouting software, family preparedness software, ward mission software, etc. There are a lot of members that have written programs to help them in their Church callings but the Church has never really looked at or authorized any of these for use by the Church membership as a whole.
My job is to try and change all of this by enlisting the LDS development community. So my first job is to try and build an infrastructure to allow us all to communicate and collaborate on projects. This mailing list (and the ldssoss.org website) is a good starting point but my vision is to take it so much further. In the coming weeks I will share much more of our plans. Please be patient because I have a lot to do to work within the parameters at the Church.
One point of caution, however:
One of the biggest concerns the Church has with endorsing or sponsoring a LDS Developers site is that the content on the site could get out of control. Flame wars, rude behavior, religious debate, or other non-Christlike behavior will not be tolerated by the Church and will get any such endorsed site "unendorsed". So it is up to us to show everyone and prove that we can work as a community to build great software that will benefit users and do all of this in a cooperative and Christlike way. WE need to self moderate.
Please feel free to contact me individually or through this list with ideas, questions, concerns, etc. I'd love to hear all of your thoughts.
Tom
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