A Survey on Collaborative Working and Sharing in Church Communities

Thanks for coming to look at the survey! The form can be very easily completed online and should only take a minute or two.

The main survey questionnaire is here

The purpose of the main survey, part of my sabbatical, is to establish in what ways Churches at present manage the pastoral administration of the life of their Churches. The survey also seeks to gain an insight into desirable developments in this area, facilitated by technology.

I have tried to make the questions as generic as possible, with no particular denominational emphasis, consequently some questions may not perfectly fit your situation.

If you're interested to know what I'm specifically interested in developing with this piece of work have a look at this post.

A second questionnaire for those interested in being part of a team to work on a project to develop software is here. This is not just for those with IT software development skills, the input of end users/practitioners will be important as well.

Moving from eGroupWare?

Will it really be possible to make an easy transition from eGroupware?

One problem is that Felamimail is proving difficult to use because of it's slowness.

I'm drawn to using google apps as it works nicely with my iphone. I never got a mobile solution that worked with egw. eg caledar sharing is working well, with multiple calendars.

The important issue centres around migrating the addressbook. At present, by using different eGw addressbooks we have grouped contacts for different Churches in the Circuit, and also for some departmental groups at The Crossing Church & Centre eg 'cafe contacts', 'mark's work contacts' etc etc. By doing this we have been able to control which eGw users see which contacts. By also using categories we have been able to sub-sort groups of contacts.

Even if we import all users into our google domain as shared contacts using the shared contacts API I don't see how we can replicate the granular control we previously had? Does the API work with the free (standard) version of google apps? (This program only works with pro/education versions. This is an example of the kind of software application that can be developed using the API.)

In the short term perhaps this is not an issue. In reality the eGw addressbook is rarely used for creating printed lists of members etc, as they can only be printed from the web application in a basic form. Accessing the SQL database directly for the purposes of creating reports has proved tricky as well, although in theory that should be quite possible.

I found importing the vcf export of the eGw addressbook into my google account worked very well (with the exception of the birthday field). This does not make the contacts shared however, that needs doing by the API.

A quick and dirty short-term solution could be to let every user import their own contact list using the the vcf? These lists would soon be come unsyncronised of course. Would that matter as long as someone held the master one which records Church membership?

Interesting example of what someone in another profession (legal) to achieve many of things above here
hmm

setting up google apps for domain

As suggested by google I'm creating a CSV for importing the accounts.

here's where you'll find them on a linux machine:

/etc/passwd - Where the user's name, and other pertinent information are stored. This includes the password unless your system is using shadow passwords.

Tip: copy the text into a wp, change the ':' for ',' ; save the file as a csv then you can open the file in calc, columns are sorted for you to drop into the google-formatted csv

Project Outcomes?

I'm particularly keen to develop the ability to achieve the following in ways which could be easily implemented in any number of Church situations:

email

• shared address book for all those working in a team
• email lists for contacting groups, available to those given permission

calendars

• shared and personal calendars available from a variety of locations including mobile, all synchronised
• calendars for Church groups, which notify/invite group members
• good granular control of views and editing

contact lists

• lists which are accesible to a wide area network, with granular control
• ability to produce membership lists, directoryies etc in an easy manner
• categorise entries to create groups and teams of contacts
• track pastoral need and requests
• lists which can work in a hierarchy eg parish/diocese, church/circuit, church/synod, etc
  

tasks

• create and share tasks and jobs with the groups above, including tracking etc
• ability to create taks from mobile device and keep synced