Podcast Episode 174: Episode 147: Change is Inevitable, Community is Essential: Navigating Both in Today's World

Description

Join in today as Nick Airdo, Jon Edmiston and Emily Forman keep the community updated on the rapid changes in the technology world, new features coming soon in the next Rock version, and things to look forward to at RX23. Show Notes: AI GPT video : https://www.youtube.com/live/outcGtbnMuQ?feature=share Become a RockStar: https://community.rockrms.com/get-involved Gold Circle awards submissions: https://www.rockrms.com/gold-circle-awards?Year=2023 RX23 Registration: https://rx.rockrms.com/rxregister/rx2023 Don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts. 

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 this edition of Rockcast. This is the podcast that tells you everything about Rock and Spark Development Network. I'm Emily Forman. I have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo here today, and we are gonna catch you up on Rock. So let's start as usual with an update on where we are with the latest releases and what's in development. Nick, fill us in. Yeah, this week was pretty exciting. We had to shift plans a little bit and we decided to move forward with a tiny miniature bug fix. So version 14.2 is now released. And I know we had previously had some GitHub fixes that were labeled in 14.2, but those really are pushed to 14.3 and v15. So if you had your eye on one of those fixes, those are not in 14.2. We decided to make 14.2 very small. So it's super safe to deploy, even if you had to deploy it on a Friday, I might say, with a little bit of risk. I mean, backup your server always, but yeah, the V14.2 was, it addressed a very specific situation that a couple churches ran into. And we got that fixed in , I don't know, twenty four hours, I think, and pushed out the door. Yeah. So you said, it's small, it's safe, but it's also important. for stability of the system, we would recommend that you upgrade as soon as possible. And that's why we made it small and safe. Yeah. Even if you haven't experienced anything, you don't want to experience anything, so just go grab it. It's totally a harmless fix. Yep. And then right after that, within a couple weeks, we're wrapping up internally our own internal testing and UI polish. So v15 will be going to alpha. So I think we might have even told the alpha and beta teams, expect it, it's coming soon, but could be within two weeks. Yeah. So what are the major features we could see in 15? Yeah. Just a little recap. I think we talked about this once, reminders, which is a cool feature. I've been using it on our servers because we have v15, and it's pretty neat to get a reminder every morning of certain things that you want to just remember to go do. Then there's the signups feature. And that is, I think it's just called signups. So it kind of handles very interesting use cases short term serving projects. I know our church did something a couple of years back where we had hundreds of teams out across the valley, and this is the perfect tool to manage that. Back in our day, we had to wire up our own set of Lego blocks, but this comes out of the box ready to do what you want. Or even Easter. Easter's coming up. Yeah. Probably won't be ready for this Easter, but definitely for Easter Christmas, you have extra volunteers needed around your campus. Great idea to use this to sign up. Yeah, special teams, special projects, that perfect example. And then there's some tiny little other features that are cool that you'll get to see our new avatar tool for generating the thumbnails of photos and initials. It's got some color, so I'm excited. Yeah. Nick always likes the color. I do. I don't gray. I would say too that both those two features, signups and reminders, are just the start. We have other visions of where those features will go. So don't think of it as completed feature, think of it as the start of something we can build off of. So, and we're excited to be able to continue on innovating on those two features. Yep. Those are the main things. And again, there's many other little or smaller things and at least 25 bug fixes that we have already worked on for v15. Yes, the team has been very busy, a flurry of activity the last few weeks. Yeah. And it's a little blurry that some features coming in fifteen point one and fifteen point two that are new, so it won't be a change to existing stuff. And we'll talk about that at later podcasts. Definitely. It's always fun to fill everyone in. And speaking of a flurry of activity, there's just been so much interest and progress in general everywhere and in our community on the topic of AI and the progression that we're seeing in some of the tools there and what that might mean. John, what's your take on that? Yeah. So I would say that in the last three months, the state of that technology space has really changed drastically and it's hard to almost keep up. Mean, this week we had the announcement of GPT-four and a lot of new capabilities there. And some really exciting things, I would highly recommend that you go out to OpenAI's YouTube channel and check out the video release they did for this week. It's really short. I think it's only twenty seven minutes, but they really pack it full with a lot of cool examples. Many of those examples you can't actually run yourself today, but they're really showing you what's coming. I think the hard part is twofold. One is to fully understand what do these things do, but the harder one is the ideation of how would you apply that into certain use cases and probably certain technology areas church, because they're not really giving you a lot of church examples from the stage. In the pets school, that's our job. So it's been fun. I think there's some people in the community who are getting ahead and really prototyping, and I think that's awesome. As you fight any war, we're fighting a spiritual war here, it's good to have scouts and recons who are out there scouting areas, having some successes, learning from some trip hazards, reporting back. We're certainly doing that ourselves too. We're doing a lot of examination about how we could use this. Where is there low hanging fruit? Where is there high hanging fruit? I think a lot of the ideas we generate are high hanging fruits. Okay, well, let's look at that. Let's keep researching that, but that's really hard to do today. But there's a lot of low hanging fruit that's really easy and insignificant. We're spending time on both of those avenues. I think one of the quick eases is how could AI be used in prayer requests in terms of moderation, in terms of cleaning up prayer requests. A lot of churches spend a lot of time cleaning up names out of prayer requests. The AI could ease I mean, it's piece of cake for it to do that. It can fix poorly formatted prayer requests, fix spell checking. Because I think it's important as we put prayer requests further and further out into platforms web, mobile TV, people don't want to see poorly formatted, it just looks low quality. To a certain point they understand that someone typed that maybe on their phone, but they don't want to see that. And AI just fixes all that. It's just a natural fix. So that's a really cool polish. And then also to the moderation capabilities of some of these models in terms of detecting self harm, violence, sexual content, pretty easy to put that into play. So you get that and write a few prompts and you get it working and it's , Oh, cool. Awesome. Done. It's , Nope. Now you got to get the technology plugged into Rock in a way that's modular, extensible. Then you have to build the configuration into per request because some people may not want every single feature. You can't just force it on them. And so then it gets to be kind of the Rock curse, which is if we were any other product, we would just say off on or maybe not even off on there. Yeah. But we have to have off on and then we have to have, well, do you want here's here's eight features you could add to prayer requests, but you probably want it by prayer category. Because maybe you don't want your staff internal prayer requests for your staff. You don't want them to sanitize names. , maybe that's a thing. Obviously you probably want that for your public prayer requests. You don't wanna say , please pray for my husband, Bill Marble, who's cheating on me. My gosh. You probably don't want Probably not. Strip Bill Marble. Poor Bill. But you may not want those same configurations on your internal request. So we have to go write all this configuration, this UI. And so that's kind of what we're doing right now is first and foremost, getting the API models built in to Rock. But again, that's not an easy thing because Okay. So obviously the easy one right now, do OpenAI. That's the best API until tomorrow when Google comes out with Bard and now we have a different API that everybody wants to support. So we had to provide, create a provider model so that you can Swap out different Yeah. And basically they think of it as in terms of your mediums, your communication mediums and transports. Some of you use SendGrid, some of you use Mailgun. We have to do that same thing within Rock because we can't just go around hard coding things. That's not the Rock way. Unfortunately, that's the hard way. And then trying to abstract out some of these things , okay, we have one API to look at today and say, okay, now abstract that so it works across anybody's API who could be coming in the future. That doesn't currently exist. With features that we don't even know about. Right. Or just even, maybe they have the same features, but how do they call things? What are the configuration parameters? OpenAI has a parameter called temperature, which is , Hey, how much can I let down my hair when I give you a creative response? That's a measure you can say, hey, don't be creative or be very creative. Well, is Bard gonna have that? If so, what's it called? So I've been spending a lot of time in a chat GPT saying, what exactly is temperature mean? And is it specific to OpenAI or is it a general AI term? And it turns out that one's very general that, or at least it says it is. But until we get two or three other APIs, we don't really know. But at the same time, we also know that whatever we make, someone else might start using and then we can't go back and break it. But we might, at some point, have to put some limitations , hey, this is coming off hot and fast, so maybe don't go create a provider yet. Or if you do, we might change half the Yeah, there's certain ways that we can't. We can say it, but people will still do it and then we'll still get In trouble. In trouble when we break it. It's kind of saying don't paint yourself into a corner, oh by the way, I'm putting a mask over your head, and you can't see the room ahead of time. Yeah. I mean, we're not complaining, it's just we have to be very careful, and what sounds easy, and it's fun to go prototype and go, Oh, this works. But then you get back and you're looking at, Okay, well that was not even the tip of the iceberg. That was the little slushie on top of the iceberg that now you have to make the whole iceberg, it gets a little tedious. It's the equivalent of manufacturing in the auto industry. That's always said that it's really hard. Manufacturing is hard. And that's what it is for us. Coming up with a prototype is not hard, but then you actually put it into a repeatable design with architecture and that's the hard part. Yeah. And at the same time, we're trying to add a few new technologies to the provider model to make it a little bit more robust for the future. So at a certain point, , there's just a lot of change on this one. But it's exciting. I think this week was an exciting week because we got to see GPT-four, but at the same time it was a little overwhelming because you're , haven't fully swallowed GPT-three 0.5. And I don't think anybody has. I think even the people on the internet who say they know everything about it, could chewed on that thing for another two years before we really got bored. But now we have this new one that's even crazier. And at the same time we have to be careful too because these models have biases and we've seen those biases. It's not hard to see the bias. Even on Twitter, I posted something where I was trying to take a person's name off a prayer request. Well, prayer request was, it was a real prayer request. It was entered in by probably a 12 year old boy, and he was praying for, think his name is Steve Purdy, the quarterback for the 49ers. I'm not a sports guy. But he was praying specifically for Steve Purdy that he would have a good season next year and would win the Super Bowl. And so I ran it through just as a good test to strip out the name. And it came back and said that, Sorry, it's not appropriate to pray for people to win national championships. I'm , Who are you, the Pope? Mean, have heard people on both sides saying whether you should pray for individual sports teams. But I don't see why it's AI's opinion that way. And then to stop it, it was just kind of crazy. So if you want to see more of those weird fun things, on Twitter I post some of the fun things we run into with AI. And a lot of times even some fairly easy things write me some content, It's really good at that, but not good enough that you can just automate it and send it out. I've been doing a lot of experimenting with having it rewrite content for different personality styles that we might know about through personalization. It does an amazing job, but I would never want to, at this point, just do it straight out without someone just reviewing it. But that's certainly a time saver right there. I mean, it's not something to say, Don't do it, just be careful. And I've even played with it from just trying to understand the limits of its bias around even political topics and it definitely shows clear bias in political topics. And, , that's one of the topics that people make the whole topic of AI and GPT not a pleasing one to some people, but just realize we're being responsible. Aware of those things and we're not gonna obviously run down that path. Yeah, think it's creating a path of moderation. Yeah. Because there are people that I talk to and highly respect who have very poor beliefs about the use of AI in spiritual areas. I think that's a good warning. Think that's , we need to listen and fully understand that. Because while, yeah, today it's a neutral technology. It's kind of money. Money is neither good nor bad. It's neutral. It's what you do with it. You can make the same case with AI until though the bias becomes so strong that it does, It is no longer neutral. In fact, feel today it's not fully neutral. Don't know, do they call it? They live chaotic good. Oh, right. It's not evil, but it's a little chaotic. Yeah. But I do think, I mean, there's headlines this week. You don't know all the facts, but there's headlines this week that Microsoft laid off their AI Ethics team. Yeah. And on the same week that TBD four comes out, poor communication planning. But and we don't know what that means. Right. Hopefully, they didn't outsource it all to AI, which would be ironic. Don't you think? So you gotta be careful. And, , I think we think through things too, , well, perhaps there's a self hosted version at some point that Mhmm. You can have all the power, but you can control the moderation. Bias it back to neutral. Yeah. The only fear there is someone takes in unbiased it in a crazy way and sets it loose. Mean, right. There's some protections today, and everybody says, Well, we should have these rules about protection. It's , cool, but how do you enforce that? All it takes is one person to plug it into the internet and have it run wild, then you're done. But also, think interesting too, if you really want to get deep into that, I was reading some articles last night about OpenAI. OpenAI started as a nonprofit. People donated, Elon, I think donated a hundred million dollars to the nonprofit. Yep. Well shoot, now it's a for profit, , with the market cap of 30,000,000,000. And he's even, I think it was last night, he was even saying , Hey, what happened to my hundred million that I donated to this nonprofit? Now it's a for profit, how'd that happen? And it kind of reminded me of Spark, I was , I wonder how they did that. Now we're not interested in that. But it's just interesting how that happened. And I think that is kind of a key reminder of why it is a good thing that sparks a nonprofit and that doesn't have that profit incentive and doesn't have that market cap. That's not a term we have ever No, we don't use There are external pressures that want you to go that way. Oh, right. We felt that years ago. And so we held it off and we put protection in place. And there's been, not formal buyout offers, what we call them shark bumps. The shark will come bump you and , hey, you guys think about selling out? Well, they can't. How do you sell a nonprofit? It's nice to have that as a back pocket answer because it's the only answer, but it's a protection that I think God wanted in this to protect ourselves from ourselves because future motivations. I mean, it's hard that someone came to you and said 30,000,000,000. Right. Well, B is a pretty amazing You could do a lot of good with that. And I'm sure that's what enticed Now we can hire even better engineers. Andrew Carpathi, I'm sure that's why he ended up going there. Because they were able to pay him gobs of money. Yeah, commas. It's all about the commas. But I think it's just a good You can see those patterns and sometimes you're , I wonder how they did that. And then it reminds you, oh, that's a good that's a good example of why not to do that. I'm still curious how they how they actually pulled that off. It seems kinda nefarious, but I don't know. It's an interesting world. This is moving too fast. I feel very overwhelmed right now. Trying to keep up with the administrative features which we need. Trying to keep up with the roadmap that still has good features that have to be done, and then it's a whole new world, and this is crazy. And RX. Four months away. Hey, I'm glad you mentioned that. Four months, eight It's coming sooner. Yeah. Okay. Eight days. We got a whole extra week. This is the wake up call for the whole community. I think we're all kind of on this track of RX happens at the August or maybe early September, and it is not true. So get those tickets booked. There's gonna be a lot of really interesting stuff we're able to talk about at the conference this year that just won't be available in general until that point. So it's not something you'll wanna miss. Plus, we all know if we've been before that the connections that are made there are absolutely incredible. It's not something you can replicate. It's not something you can duplicate. And taking a year off from that is, , it's just a setback for your progress in Rock and for those relationships that kind of drive that experience all year. I was talking to someone at a church. That church is on Rock, but they're not super plugged into the community. I was just talking with him and he was asking, Well, how do we get more about topics digital strategy? Kind of was , look, in my head I was , What? Oh wait, you're not plugged into the community. You haven't been to a conference. And he was asking, Who can I talk to to find out more in the church space? And I'm , Hello, come to the conference, dude. It's packed full of people who are thinking through these same things. I think we have the advantage of talking to a lot of people every week and every day. We're hearing that everybody's talking about the same things. God has aligned everybody a strategy, I think. To me, it's you're missing on the biggest education. And it's not coming from Spark. Right. It's coming from the community. Yeah, there's going be some cool Spark things and we're going to show you some things that we've been working on that are done, that are going blow your mind, that we want to talk about right now, but we can't because we're under NDA for the conference NDA. We'll have to cut this podcast right now. So you're going to want to see them. But even if there was none of that content, it's still the greatest thing on the greatest show on earth if you're in church technology because you get to be around these people. Yeah. And you can rub shoulders and change ideas and cross pollinate. It's the cross pollination. You don't have to sit in a corner and reinvent the wheel by yourself. You can work together to elevate your ideas to a new level and then ideate for your own spheres there. Yeah. It's almost everybody's little bumblebees out there, pollinating the flowers. And at some point we had to come back to the hive and share, hey, found really good flowers over there, or , don't touch that flower. It's really nasty. But you come back and you learn all those things and get inspired and build connections and relationships. So if you don't do it, I feel you're missing out on a great investment. Little bit of money, but you're going to get a ton of rich insights, time saving recipes, and relationships to help you get encouraged. Because I think it get easy, you get discouraged, especially with the rapid change of everything. I was talking to someone just the other day who felt really discouraged about where he is at and what he's able to work on. It's we just need to get picked up by others and say, Hey, we all have that bad day, that bad season, but what we do matters. And gosh, I mean, look at this world. It it matters so much. Definitely. And as you're preparing for that conference, don't forget that this is a great time. We introduced a whole new award concept last year, our community awards, that come out at the conference and really celebrate the innovations, the designs, and the work that the community is doing in several different spaces. So this is your opportunity to share the things you've been working on and submit them for an award. So you can submit something that you've been a part of or someone else on your team has been a part of in the categories of mobile apps, of websites, Apple TV apps, and ministry innovations that you've built right inside your Rock instance. So this is an excellent time to be able to share that and celebrate some of those wins. We're now taking applications for that. So the link will be in the show notes and we'll be promoting it in quite a few places, but jump in there and share those ideas because we'd love to be able to celebrate those wins as well, right from the stage at the conference. And you get a golden record. Mean, it's really cool. You do. It's super cool to get those. We thought it went out so well, we went out and bought a whole bunch of golden records. We have a couple hundred golden records. So we have a decade's worth of awards. That's right. So we wanna keep them all the same. Are we announcing the other word thing today? Is that the dance awards? Are we Is that under NDA? That was still under the NDA. What? Okay. Yeah. John's gonna be leading the dance award competition. He's been choreographing his own work for a bit now. Been interested in learning how to crip walk. Crip. I don't think I'm there yet. Ouch. So we said, lots of new and exciting interesting things coming at this upcoming event. K. So I was under NDA. Wow. You just never know what's gonna happen around here on any given morning. Truth. Alright. So, we also don't forget to announce our Rock stars for the year at the conference. So that's coming a little bit early too. And our Rock star positions are ones that are earned on a regular basis. So it's not something that you're granted or grandfathered into for life because it is really recognizing a year's worth of really incredible working contribution by the members of our community. So don't forget if you're currently a Rock star, that the investments that you made last year are important, and the community continues to need you and your investments. And there are lots of ways that you can do that. So make sure that you get involved. And if you've been kind of paying attention to that Rock star crowd over there and kind of flirting around the edge of it, this is the time to get involved. There's still time. And it doesn't require any certain set of skills, any certain angle to things. There is something for everyone that you can do to help contribute. So we do have the get involved page on our community site that will give you lots of opportunities and options for how you can use your skill set and your wiring to contribute to the community in a way that makes a big impact. So jump in there. Let's start getting some extra momentum behind that as we move toward the conference this year. Yeah. And and the Rockstar group is our leadership group within the It is. And they have access to more content, they have access to, we have quarterly meetings with them and we share what's coming on. There's encouragement, there's leadership talk in that. And it's just so good. You get more insight, but you also get to level up. And you said, it's not a participation trophy. So you get it once, you don't always get it. We want to make sure that's a high bar. And if you're curious what the experience is , that's badged in the community chat, right? So reach out to someone in a DM who is a rockstar today and say, Hey, what's it to be a rockstar? What's the experience? How does that feel different than just being a member of the community that's not in the rockstar group? Yeah, or just find one and say, Help me be a rockstar, because they're all helping, they're looking for people to mentor. They are, We talk about that all the time. Don't be awkward that you're actually doing them a favor too, because you're helping them see someone who wants to be that and help them pour into them. Yeah, that's an excellent point. They're looking for those opportunities. They are open. Okay, well, we have appreciated the ability to share all of our thoughts and things that are just emerging with you through this podcast. We wanna continue to do that. So wherever you listen to podcasts, be sure to subscribe to Rockcast so you can get the latest updates as they come out. We typically try to have two podcasts a month or so, and that keeps you up to date on not only what our team is working on, but what some members of the community are doing as well. It's a great way to stay connected and to get the latest information as soon as it's available. So take a minute, subscribe, and leave us a review if you've enjoyed it. And smash that button. Wow. Thanks, Nick. And you never know what you're gonna hear around here. So don't miss out on your opportunity. Give us a subscription, and we appreciate it. Thanks so much for joining us for another episode of Rockcast. 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. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.