The church doesn't need to understand open source methodology in
order to take advantage of it, but they do have to be open to the
idea of people writing whatever they believe is helpful, rather than
controlling what the end results are. At present, the preference is
to tell us what information we need and how we should update it.
For example, if the format of the MLS database were published so that
we could write third party programs to extract information and create
whatever reports, various people feel they need, that would be a
great help. By providing an import feature that makes it easy for
people to work on their PCs at home and then apply a series of
changes would make life easier for EQ, HP, and RS presidents to
maintain their HT/VT lists. Last Sunday we had a line waiting to get
into the MLS system to update/print whatever people wanted, but
somebody was updating their HT assignments, which used up most of the
available time.
I rewrote my wardlist program (that worked with MIS) to handle the
exports from MLS, and renamed it MLSRpt. It provides a number of
reports that you can't get from MLS, but I need to extract the
information, take it home, run my program, and then distribute the
reports. This is because the export information contains sensitive
information (e.g., ages for adults) that can't be distributed to the
general congregation. If I knew the format of the MLS database, I
could provide some programs that members could run to get the
information they need without revealing any information they shouldn't have.
Although the old MIS system was a clunker, it was easy to write
screen-scraping software to extract all the information and reformat
it. With MLS that is much harder to do. While the Export feature
made much of my life easier, the fact that some helpful information
isn't available via export (like HT/VT visits) means that some
information is much harder to get now.
When I was exec sec, I had most of the information that was needed
for Bishopric, Welfare, etc. When a name came up, people would look
to me to tell them what callings they had, who their HT/VT are, how
much they have been visited, who they HT/VT and how often they
visited their people, etc. This kind of information was very helpful
to determine how best to serve that person and/or address any
problem. I made these reports available to those who were authorized
and interested in text or PDA forms (using MMS).
---
Bill Pringle
work: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.unisysfsp.com
http://www.unisys.com
home/school: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.personal.psu.edu/~wrp103
http://CherylWheeler.com
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