Podcast Episode 215: Episode 188: AI and the Church, Next-Gen Check-In, and the Rock Community

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Updates and features are coming quickly. Join Jon, Emily and Nick as they discuss what what is and is not included in Next-Gen Check-In as well as vision casting the future of AI and church ministry.

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome to another episode of Rockcast. I'm Emily Forman and have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo here with me today so we can talk about everything related to Rock. And there is quite a bit to talk about today. So if you stay with us for the whole episode, you're going to hear a little bit about where we are with our version updates, what's coming, and what versions those things will be in. We're gonna have maybe a general discussion about AI, dive into a couple of features, give some clarification around next gen check-in, and what it does and doesn't include with some of those details for those of you who are testing, and then talk a little bit about some upcoming Rock events for the community. That's what we're doing today. Thanks for joining us. Nick, can you start off with talking through where we are with our next version of Rock that's coming out? Yeah, I'd love to. Let me just touch on the fact that 16.8 has been released January 21. Had just three small fixes, small but important fixes. And then now we are moving to another quick release 16.9 that has a few more fixes that the community is looking for and a SendGrid fix. So for those people using SendGrid, using it a certain way, that fix is in there. And then a handful of other security fixes from our pen test that we recently did and nothing major there, but it'll be a security update release. And then if there's a sixteen ten that would have , our normal set of fixes that we've been working on, the ones that aren't critical. But because v17 is so close, there's the question of whether sixteen ten gets released. So all of those fixes are obviously in 1700, And there's plenty. There's 28 additions, 54 fixes, and 20 improvements, what we've classified as improvements. And among those 28 ads might be some of the bigger features. I just did a really quick scan of what's coming. Yeah. Well, good news is pen test for 2025. Check that Nice. Slug that right in there, right? That's great. That's a big deal. First thing in the year. Nothing there to keep us up at night. Just few what I would call smaller things, improvements, cleanups. So it's always nice to have that done. Yeah. Sounds good. All right. Well, we are marching along and plenty to do. John, you were mentioning some things recently that you've had thoughts around just AI in general. And being in the tech space, it's it's important to be kind of sharing those things with our community. Yeah. So we've been doing a lot. Obviously, most people work with AI. A lot of that has to do with products. So v17 does have some AI based features. Technically, you can do some AI stuff even in 16, but 17 adds capabilities to that. I think we've talked a lot about that at the conference and such. But we're really working now on version 18 type AI features. So a lot of work being done there. But most people, we're obviously using AI ourselves constantly all day. And it's just amazing the productivity level changes. And not just , Hey, make this email sound better. But in terms of actually figuring out how to do things. And even in the terms of writing code and getting suggestions on how to do really difficult things, it's really incredible pivot from the old ways of doing things. So back in the day, when I originally started out as a programmer, we really had manuals. Literally we had these huge manuals on our desk. The internet obviously existed, search engines were very limited in terms of how well they returned results and how much data was actually on the internet. So for most of the products that we have, we had to have these huge sets of manuals that we would just spend our time in, right? just reading and researching and finding what it was. So when Google came and got good, it was just a complete change, right? And then you have things Stack Overflow, complete change in how we wrote code. And here we are standing on that too. So now, most developers are spending almost all their time in a AI platform just asking it for code. And of course, it does lie occasionally, but the benefits far outweigh the when it gets it wrong. So crazy how it's changed, right? We used to use Google and Stack Overflow, but even Stack Overflow, I don't know anybody who just uses Stack Overflow. They Google it, and it's usually the first link on Stack Overflow. I can't tell you the last time I went to Stack Overflow and asked a question in Stack Overflow. Google's become the portal to Stack Overflow. And for those of you don't know Stack Overflow, it's a Q and A developers, but it's pretty much where every developer gets their information about how to do something. So now that's a rapid pivot into now you're spending all this time inside of a chat bot. So, and again, that's good. However, there's some scary stuff to that. Before, because your pattern was Google search, it returns a list of tens of thousands of sites, and then you pick the site and you get your education. Then maybe that's not quite what you want to see. You go back and now you're in a different site getting education. People always talked about fears of Google being a gatekeeper. Because they could suppress, and they do, we know that. But it's really that gatekeeping, yeah, it existed and we were not pleased and worried about it, but nothing the gatekeeping now in AI. Because now you have a single chatbot that is feeding you all the information. You no longer are getting the diversification of different sites, different links, different voices. Before, even if I went to Stack Overflow every time, I was listening to a different voice inside of Stack Overflow. And people could below it in the comments say, No, I don't believe that. That's not right. This is the right way to do it. And you'd have that. Gone is that. Now you have a single gatekeeper who's the summarization of results. We know that there's bias built into these platforms. Some of it is unintentional bias, but actually a lot of it is intentional. In the training models, can see those biases. Those biases are purposefully being put into it. Now some of it is well intended. Don't want these bots to help us learn to make bombs. So they put protections in place, but there's actually also two biases of thought, of ideology are being put in there. And we know that this isn't conspiracy theory, it's in there. And you can actually see it in some of the open source models, because people then fine tune the models to bring the bias out. And so there are open source models that will let you do dangerous things, which have removed the ideology or inject a different ideology. So we know those things are there. So AI is great. It's a great tool, but I think what we need to be careful about is this huge exponential gatekeeping concept. And if you think about that in terms of the church, then picture in the future, we're all plugged into the AI of our choice. One is always gonna be better, kinda Google, right? Look, how many people don't use Google? Not many. And those that do usually use a search engine that goes through Google and just anonymizes it, right? So picture that in the future, there's gonna be certain AIs are just better than others. And it's interesting to see some competition, especially this week coming. But again, there will be a clear winner or two. So there's only gonna be two rooms that we go into to get all of our information. And it's gonna be summarized, and it's gonna have unintentional and intentional biases. And it's a really scary thought. Because if I'm not a Christian, and I start asking these questions, it's gonna lead people down paths that we'd no longer have any voice into. I mean, I even use it for a lot of non technical things, right? if I'm on Twitter or X, and I don't understand what a group of people is talking about, I go over to Grock and then, Hey, what does this mean when they say this? And it's giving me responses and you start interacting. Okay, well, why did this person say this? And again, if that is one AI bot with its ideology summarizing all this information, it's not too soon where we no longer scroll our feed, but instead the AI just brings us , here's 20 things that you probably are interested in knowing about. Who wouldn't want that? Right. Right? Because as much as I to filter my feed in X, there's still garbage in there. So if someone could promise me to take all the garbage out, I'd be , Heck yeah. So it's really kind of a scary thing. Think it's something that we should be thinking about as a church, not for ourselves, but for those who are unbelievers. how are we going to reach them if they're getting all their content through , a single source of biased? That they believe is neutral. Yeah. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. And just removes sources, right? we all probably learned way back in school, check your sources, cite your sources, sort of removes that. So you don't even know, in addition to the biases, what kind of sources are being Well, some of them will actually show you the sources. They'll show you the 20 sites that they did, and it's , okay, protection. Well, but how did it know how to pick those sources? I look at those and I'm , Really? This is what they sourced? Whereas if I saw it in my Google search, I'd be , Oh, skip that site. Don't trust that Exactly. It's hidden it behind another layer so that the navigation toward it is not readily visible. Yeah. This a topic, this gatekeeping and summarization of results is a topic that is just starting to creep in that people , Hey, wait, maybe this isn't a great idea. Mhmm. And then that leaves the open field of , well, what do we do as churches? Yeah. Because I mean, even those of us who know it's a problem are still , Yeah, now back to my AI, because it's too helpful. I need my AI. Use it for simple things initially. Things that bias won't really matter, removing last names from prayer requests. That's pretty safe. Yeah. It's just when the tool becomes so powerful and so helpful. Yeah. As a research tool. It's almost telling someone , don't use Google to help try to understand, theology. Maybe you should always go to the library to do that. Right. Yeah, that's a good idea. Wink, wink, back to It's going to become that And we're not going to understand the bias until it's too late. Could you imagine not using Google at all? No. I couldn't. No. There's no way I could change. And I think we will become that dependent on it. That when we say that we will understand what the person's saying. Yeah, I get these problems now back to my AI, because it's just too It's not something we're gonna have to really wrestle with. I don't know what the right answer is. Yeah. And again, as it comes to how we live our corporate lives, it's probably not a big deal. Mhmm. But it's more a problem for non believers, and for the believers to see how am I going to reach these, through these biases, through these gatekeepers. Guess it's sort of going to be kind of what the pastors have always said. It's really not about the technology. It's really about knocking on the door of your neighbor and building a relationship and building community. Maybe another great example of why in person community has to be our top priority. These tools are great and they can help reach people, but the end result always has to be in person community. I don't know. I really do think evil brings us these great tools just to nefariously get us off track. Distraction's pretty helpful in redirection. Yeah. Yeah. That's really good thoughts. At some point, that's going to be so ingrained in what we do that people won't even think about it anymore. It's still new right now to us in this current generation. So we should apply intentionality there. Yeah. Think it's especially Maybe it's a little bit more obvious when for for those who maybe a little bit older who had who went through that with search engines Mhmm. Who had to convince people , just Google it. I mean, that was a whole web there's a whole website for that. Just Google it. And we had to do that with our parents, with our neighbors, oh, just Google it. And so we're , oh, yeah, we remember the day when it didn't seem incredibly obvious. And now we cannot not stop. If you were to meet someone in the street and they're , yeah, I don't know how to do this. I would never know how to do this. Well, just Google it. That doesn't happen anymore. But it's gonna happen the same thing's gonna happen with AI. And unfortunately, the gatekeeping there is exponentially worse. Worse. And the summarization and the ideology exponentially worse. So don't let it just happen. Apply some intentionality and be thinking. And I think you're right, John. It's the person to person relationship that is the ultimate way the church is supposed to exist. Or created for community. And again, I think evil does help build some of these tools. And at the end, it's , gotcha. And it could even bring spiritual improvements and productivity. But what? Evil is way smart. They're very strategic. Lose a few small battles to win the ultimate battle. So they think. For individual souls. They're not Right. We know they don't Evil doesn't win. I think they're playing the long game for individual souls. To have a few things be a little bit more productive, sure, go ahead. But just be careful for the gotcha at the end. Yeah. Some good thoughts on that. Let's pivot back to some Rock features. More tangible. Yes. So with v17 coming close, very close, we've talked about a lot of features communication wizards and LMS and continue, we'll talk about that. But there's some other ones I just wanna throw out. One is Pure Networks. We have mentioned that. Pure Networks has always been something that we've wanted. In fact, it's been in the products since V1. Just was an empty little panel that did nothing. It's amazing we got to V16 and We left it there for so long. It's just been hanging out there. I think I can count on one hand, how many people have asked me what that is. And I'm , yeah, don't. What peer network? And now it's here. Yeah. So it's basically a way for us. We have this, we've always said it, the database of Rock is a gold mine of data. It's amazing how much data is in there. And we're just starting to glean and turn that data into information. And so this is another way to say, hey, these relationships exist in the database. We're just trying to bubble them up for you. The tools will let you initially, and this is just We're just getting started in v17. Initially say, hey, if I follow people in Rock, well, means I have a special relationship with them. Let's bubble that up so people can see those relationships. Also, if I'm in groups of certain types, there's a relationship there. If you're serving with somebody side by side every weekend, wow, that's probably a relationship you have. If you're in a small group, that's a relationship that you're in. So let's show you those. And so when things happen, we can go find people who have those relationships. And technically you could say, yeah, I could do that today. I could just go look over here and then look over here. And true. But we're gonna make that even synthesize that so it's very easy to see. And not only that, but to be able to show you the depth and level of that relationship. So if I'm in a group with someone for a month, yeah, we have a relationship. If I've been in the group with someone for five years, woah, that's going to be a much different relationship. It's going to show you that. So you'll be able to go into your group types and say, do these people here have a relationship? Now, you'd say, is our group's relationship? Not necessarily. Sometimes people are in groups and they have no idea of anybody else in that group. It's people who registered for a t shirt, ? Yeah. No relationship. So you can go into each group type and say, Hey, this is a strong relationship. The people in these groups have strong relationships. And then it will show those relationships and then grow them over time. Beyond that, there's even more tools. So if you wanna go That's the basics, the essentials version of the toolset. The Pathfinder features are more , okay, but the relationship is stronger to the leaders of the group than it is to the members of the church. So maybe it's a serving opportunity where the people don't really know each other, but they work with the leader. But they have no other idea about the other Maybe you have to come into the office and you work with someone on the office, but you never see the other servant leaders, or servant workers. So you can pattern that. Or it might be the opposite. Well, well, we all know each other, but that leader, we don't really know him very much. And so you can pattern all that. You can opt out. you can say, well, this specific group, the relationship is stronger for some reason or weaker. So lots of different features. In Rock, we probably have too many little dials to dial it But only because you've insisted on them. We try to We're trying to add less and less of those, but honestly, we're trying to also give you the most powerful tool that you guys can do whatever you want with. So super powerful. And then over time, those relationships will grow. And so you'll start to see a higher connected point value with with certain people. And then it was cool as you can also map the opposite. So if I leave my small group and I've been there for three years, should I just delete all those pure relationships? No. I still know them. If I bump into them on the street, we're still gonna have a great talk. We're still gonna have a deep connection. But over time, it's probably gonna, , wane. Mhmm. So again, there's an algorithm that says, how fast should that unwinding happen? And so over time, if people leave those groups, their relationships will start to drop. And you'll see that in the UI, there'll be a little down arrow that's saying, hey, that relationship is actually, , weakening. So that's pretty cool. And we're just getting started there. And then there's a nice little force directed graph, of all the relationship. That's gonna be really interesting to see over time because people are gonna have a lot of relationships and it's gonna be interesting to see what that looks . But all of this, would say is this is an amazing powerful feature, but we're just getting started. So there's already things in, as we add chat to Rock, boy, we'll know relationships there too, right? That'll be interesting. You just DM'd him the other day. You must have some kind of relationship, even if it's a weak one. Right? But we should map that. Now, ironically, had this When I worked at CCV, we had this fifteen years ago. And I used it a lot. if someone called and needed something or reached out for a family issue, I would just go to their peer network. I'd go find the person who on staff, maybe who had the strongest connection and just pass it off as a director of communication there for several years. That's, know, Oh, hey, I don't know this person. Can you follow-up with them? Or if they want to volunteer in the ministry, I'd be , Oh, wow. I don't know. They seem to know this person. I'll go ask them, Hey, would this person make a good candidate? So tons of ways we can use this. And again, there's just so many ways that we could leverage the data that's in Rock. And this is just a way that we've been wanting for, again, since the beginning. It's just that sometimes we're so quick to follow what the community is requesting that we don't get back to some of the dream features that we've always wanted. We always talk about, especially in the early days, the black book. Actually have a black book where I keep some of these ideas in there. What's in the black book? I don't wanna tell you because I know we don't have time to do it. So I don't know. Sometimes ideas can unintentionally become weapons and we don't have enough time. Then it's , Do you want to see the baseball bat I have? Great. I didn't mean for you to hit me with it. And it was unintentional. We're not trying to hurt each other, it's just , I think ideas generate excitement. Absolutely. And when you can't meet all of the demands, sometimes you just wanna kinda keep them stifled a little bit. And there have been some very high priority things that we've had to shuffle around. I mean, that's kind of what the history of our roadmap looks , is juggling high priority needs of various churches for various reasons. Yeah. I can say though, if eighteen turns out the way we want it to be, it's gonna be filled with new frontiers of features. And I think people are gonna be super excited. So stay tuned. Yes. Another one I just wanna kinda touch on too is the v two API. I'll go this one a little bit quick quicker because a lot of people are probably , technical, I don't wanna know about that. So we have a new version of the API. Why did we have to do that? Because of next gen, our current API can't run-in the next generation of dot net framework. And so we had to rewrite that. And that was not easy because we wanna make it really fast and we wanted to make it powerful. But it wasn't that hard. What was harder is about this new search API that we added. So we know people are doing some pretty creative things with the API. And in the old days, they used a a technology called OData, which is very powerful. If you're familiar with GraphQL, it was kind of a precursor to GraphQL. Very powerful. Slight bit of wonkiness to it. But we wrote one, a search API that's really powerful. And if Lava, and you've used some of the dynamic features of Lava in the entity command that we've added a couple years ago, and using selects and anonymous types inside of that, It's super powerful. And we put that into the search API and then secured it really, really well. You can do some really cool things with the security on it. So that's gonna be in 17, that's done. Check the box on that. I will say though that our v1 API is ten years old. There's a lot of purpose built actions in there that are not in version two. And then we didn't forget them. We're gonna be adding those back. But right now you have all the basic, what we call CRUD, create, read, update, delete of all the entities, and then you have this new search. So that's now CRUD's. Yes. Search. But we need to go back and add some of those purpose built actions and we'll be working on that. We we have a task to do that in post 17. So the search API. Also just wanna talk about quickly about check-in. So check-in has been released in a very beta format in '16, '7, '8. And we continue to add minor little fixes to it. It's not done. So we know there's some stings we want to keep adding to it. But the biggest one is that under the not done is the check-in manager. So the process of checking in is done, but the check-in manager is not in next gen. And so that's that's what we're moving to next. The roster, that's gonna be the biggest part, and some of the charts. And I think the biggest addition is, of course it's, give it a little UI polish, but the biggest addition will be the real timeness. So as you're sitting there, your roster, people will start popping into the roster as they check-in. And so you probably think, oh, that's really cool. And it is, but it brings other challenges. If you're looking at a roster and you're about to mark someone as present, and you push the button, and if another person pops in right when you do it, oops, you might have marked the wrong person present. We have some UI and UX things to fix that. It's just not everything that sounds easy, as soon as you start getting, dude, that's gonna be hard, or harder than we thought. So we're working through that. But I just wanted to alert people , Hey, you start to hear v check-in is done. V2 is done. Kind of, yes. Check-in V2 is done. We'll continue to add new features and support new options. But we still have portions of it that we're still getting to the Check-in Manager. Yep. Great. So just wanted to clarify that just a little bit. Good. Well, exciting things on the horizon, and that does include some Rock events coming up in 2025. And the primary one we are getting so many questions about and would love to give you all the information on is RX25. We are very close. We should be rolling out enough information for you to register here in the next few weeks. The reason for the delay on this year's Rx registration is simple. We're not recreating Rx twenty four for Rx twenty five. So we're taking a lot of feedback into consideration. We're looking at ways to make some adjustments that we think are gonna be very exciting, and we'll make it easier for you to include your leadership in a portion of this event, just help them understand what this Rock thing is really all about and why it's beneficial to them as well. So we're very excited for some of the brand new aspects of Rx this year. And we're so close to having the details nailed out in a way that will allow us to open registration. So we know it's late coming this year. We appreciate your patience. It is absolutely the top priority, and and we'll have more information for you very soon. So stay tuned for that as well. Additionally, here we are at the beginning of the year. Although, we're about a twelfth of the way through already. Has anyone else calculated that? Yeah. John told me, hey, we're x percent done with 20 20 I have a chart that tells me how far we're through the day Yeah. How far we're through the month, and how far we're through the year. I think it's 9%. That sounds anxiety inducing. Terrible. Well, they had a countdown clock for Rx but I had to take it off. Because it just Yeah. It's , no. Yeah. Yes. So but we do have a lot of things on the horizon and we're really excited about our road shows this year. A new presentation, lots of great opportunities. I think we we have over 20 regional community hubs that will each be helping to push out road shows. So this is an opportunity for you to be a part of sharing and growing the Rock community right where you're located. Whether you're part of a hub or not a part of a hub, it's very simple to get involved. We have a presentation for you and you just invite people to come to your space, provide a presentation that you don't have to write, and do a little bit of q and a with them to share about your experience. Great way to build local relationships and kind of share some of the things you love about Rock and grow the community. So reach out if you are interested in doing that, and we will help get that coordinated with you at a time and location that works well for you. Finally, we have a lot of classes open for this year. If Rock training is on your agenda, check out the classes page on our community site. There are multiple instances of nearly every class available there and some good opportunities to just get that locked in. Well, we have covered a lot of ground today. And as usual, it is not boring over here. So we appreciate your tuning in. Love this community and the ways that we can interact with you from GitHub to chat channels, to documentation suggestions, and all the ways you get involved. Don't forget to check that page out on our community site if that's something you're looking to do more of this year. We're excited to continue growing our rockstar team and celebrate that every year at RX as well. Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe for the next podcast so that you can get those updates we're telling you to stay tuned for. Thanks for joining us. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's amazing technology, hassle free. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. Churches get the ease of a SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's powerful features. 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