Technical Goals

I want to give some details the technical end of things. The IT team will be especially involved with two aspects of Waterloo project:

1. Movement Tracker
2. Technical back-ends of various web sites

Each of these goals can be broken down into sub-goals.

First, let me explain what the movement tracker is. Over the years in campus ministry I've heard of several software solutions built for tracking the ministry -- things like who's involved in your ministry, their addresses and contact info, responsibilities, Bible study/small groups, tracking other groups, etc. In many ways it's like a "holy grail" of ministry development. At its core many of these features can and have been tracked using a spreadsheet. Unfortunately such solutions don't scale well past a few years of a few hundred participants.

In fact, the idea of a movement tracker is so universal that several countries have started on their own solutions. During January 2008 my boss Russ Martin went to Australia to see what they've been developing as a solution to this problem. Between 2008 and 2009 development was started on a collaborate effort between the US and Australia (done mostly by a US developer in Chicago, the same guy who gave me a code base for the Project Application Tool), and we've joined in with that.

Specifically, we're working the ruby on rails implementation of the Campus Movement Tracker (CMT) stored here on github. It's actually released under the Affero GNU Public License v3. It's actually being used right now on a beta test trial with some campuses in the states.

If you'd like to play around with the CMT, you can do so on a demo install here. Use the username 'test.user@example.com' and password 'testuser'.

One goal for Waterloo project is to get the movement tracker working for our ministry. That will involve making it work with our database schema, finding and fixing any major bugs, and some documentation. One specific deliverable we've identified is making sure our staff and students can use the Bible study scheduler feature, where everyone inputs their schedule and it finds times to meet. (Actually, we've had a tool like that for several years but it needs some work and the CMT version of it is much nicer.)

Another sub-goal with the CMT is to build a stats module. We already have a stats module as well, but it's in php and has some design limitations. We've decided that it makes the most sense in the long term to have our stats system done inside the CMT. The means it will be in rails and in the same spot as the movement tracker features which means one web site to deal with instead of two different ones. The stats module will be a significant deliverable on the international scene where we as Canada can bless the rest of the groups using the CMT with this stats module.

Shifting to the other major goal of web sites, the IT team will be involved in some of the web site design and redesigns. Campusforchrist.org is probably the biggest one here. I'm not as involved in the direction and vision of campusforchrist.org -- but other staff here do have big ideas for that site. It's being hammered out in various meeting groups as to what the goal of campusforchrist.org is, who the audience is, and what should be on there. Once that's ironed out, it will be passed on to the IT and graphics team to make it happen. It will probably look like a lot of research and installation of various blogging/content management system (CMS) tools, for the IT team. We will make the technical side happen.

Other web sites in the works include a soul cravings web site and conference promotion sites. Soul cravings is a book by author Erwin McManis used on many of our campuse ministries. Again, as an IT team our job will be to set up the technical side of these web sites.

So, to put these sub-goals in with the high-level ones:

• Movement Tracker
  
  
  
  • Make it work with our database
  
  
  • Fix any major bugs / security issues
  
  
  • Make sure the Bible study scheduler is usable by students
  
  
  • Build a stats module


• Web Sites - Technical end of ..


• campusforchrist.org


• soulcravings promo site


• winter and fall conferences promo sites

Hopefully that gives you a good idea of what we're aiming for here. I feel like these are specific and focused enough that they're quite achievable, although it will take some work to break down these tasks even further into measurable goals.