After a breakfast and a brief introduction to the day, we each went to our various groups to get started on our projects.
I chose to work on the Digital Area Book Project. Each missionary area in the church has an area book where they keep track of all the people that they visit, how far they progressed in the gospel, and any notes they might have. Those books stay in the area, so that as missionaries come and go there is a record of what has gone on, so that the new missionaries have an idea of what has happened before.
The Digital Area Book project in its first phase is simply taking this work, and putting it into a digital format. Additional phases will look at reporting on this work, and making subsets of the data available to others who might need it, such as the local ecclesiastical unit of the church in the area, i.e. the "regular" members of the church.
Leading this effort were three people who work for the church. In the first picture, I am with Romina Marin, who is the project manager. She is standing next to Todd Ericksen, who is a UI designer and also works for the Church Missionary Department and represents their interest in this project.
And here I am with Nathan Dickamore, the development lead for the project.
It was a long day of work, but much was accomplished. Some people came and helped to figure out how the thing should work. Others came up with ways to test it. One group worked on how it should look. My group worked on implementation, or making it actually happen.
In the end we met for a brief farewell. At that time, I got this nice shot of me with some of the beautiful mountains in the background.
I also got to shake hands with Tom Welch, who is the development manager for the church's internal systems. He has been the one to spearhead the open source development and has put together this conference.
All in all, a wonderful day.
