Podcast Episode 147: Episode 120: 2021 Wrap Up

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The end of the year is always a good time to recognize and celebrate the growth you've made during the year. Join the Rock team as we reflect on some of the highlights of 2021, the journey of Spark, and the great things to come.

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 back to Rockcast, the podcast where we talk all things Rock and Spark Development Network. I'm Emily Forman. We have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo here, and we are going to wrap up the year for you in terms of Rock and look forward to 2022. It has been a big year with a lot of things going on, but we have to, of course, first start out with where are we right now in our Rock versions, Nick? What's going on? We have just moved version 13 to alpha. Actually, it's happening as we're recording this. And we had a pre alpha for version 13, but version 13 has just been, it feels it's been in progress for a long time. So I went back and looked at how many releases we had this year. So if we were to count V13 as being released this year, which I don't think it's going to make it, we have nine, but that would be the tenth. So we've had nine releases this year in between working on version 13. So v 13 has been Wow. Well, those minor releases were really major releases. I mean, the major features in those minor releases. Yeah. And that's why it feels a lot going on. And there's a lot of big changes in version 13. So I wrote down a few things here in my notes. Have 65 editions and those are pretty big additions, which is unreal. And then between there are 55, what we classified as fixes, and 56, what we classified as improvements. And together, those out of there are 64 issues that were publicly reported on GitHub. So there's just a lot of things happening in version 13. And I feel our documentation is probably not quite ready. The beta docs are probably missing a few things that I need to check through that today and tomorrow. Yeah. And even this week, things got added to 13 that were unplanned. I mean, I was in a meeting earlier this week. I'm , Well, that probably won't be in 13. And you're , Oh no, we actually just did it yesterday. I'm , Oh, well, that wasn't Didn't need to be there, but that's great that it is. Some pretty significant things that, know, it's one thing, there's major things, things you mentioned, huge, media, giving overviews and stuff that. Those are ginormous features, giving alerts, giving journeys. Well, we keep going. But there's a lot of other minor major things. We've done some things with the analytics tables that provide some really cool ways to enhance your SQL and your reporting from some of our direct work with churches. And it's just so exciting to see that in there. Yeah, and it's very nerve wracking for me. There's a lot of stress, but the blessing, you just mentioned, we ramped up a few other developers and I feel we're picking up our speed again. And that feels good to be able to get stuff in at the last minute, but it's also stressful because we're trying to put a line in the sand and say, No more for v13. And it's just exciting. Yeah, it's good to have that out. And that'll be a major Hopefully that's our last megalith update. And hopefully we start having big updates, but not megalith updates. Yep. That is our our plan. And I think we'll we're gonna we're gonna get there in 2022. Yeah. These are some pretty incredible numbers related to what has actually gone out this year. And I know sometimes from the community perspective, , I might put an issue in GitHub. You might hear some things at a conference and you're , I wonder what's happening over there. And so it's kind of interesting to hear that conceptualized in actual numbers. , these are the things that we've done and they're pretty there's quite a bit there. Yeah. Maybe I'll throw it together. I'll get my notes and maybe we'll make a blog post if I can get approval to just say for the whole year, how many bug fixes, features, commits, , we kinda do internally. Right. And have some of that, , the conference. Right. Know what to do is tack on the That's right. 15 and maybe twelve, eight, seven. Those were all added. Yep. And Colin on our team is working on a nice what's new in the version 13 video. Oh, good. Mhmm. I was wondering about that. Yep. He's working on it. That's gonna be a challenge though. He's gonna be having to think of a lot of things. Yeah. So we'll probably be starting beta right at the beginning of next year, in a couple weeks. Yeah. Always new that we did do that pre alpha where we're we're some community members gave us access to their own internal systems that we were able to go do some spot checking. Because it's really hard for us to test things giving analytics and giving overviews because we don't have regularly church pattern data. And so that was really nice to have access to that. And the good thing is everything worked, , fairly well. , everything looked right. So but it was nice to be able to see it on real church data. Yeah. And that was another little mini project we slipped in at the end, , hey, let's get that going. Let's get some churches to sign up for that, and we had four very quickly do that. So thank you. But it was nerve wracking wondering what it was gonna look on real shaped data. So that's all behind us now moving forward. Well, while we're talking numbers, let's look at some of the other numbers that might be interesting in the Rock community to the people who've been around or joined us in the course of the last year. So we are so close to having 600 churches running live on Rock right now. We saw a little adjustment over the course of the last probably two years as some churches that had been the some of the very small churches that had been using Rock had some staff turnover. And with that staff turnover, the one person on their team who'd been their Rock advocate and gotten them up and running may have moved off. And those churches, we've seen a little bit. If someone leaves the Rock community, that might be why. We've seen a little of that, not too much, but we've seen a lot of growth as well. And we're right on the cusp of almost 600 churches that are running live on Rock right now. I think we'll we'll surpass that number at some point next year. So we'll keep an eye on that. But it is fun to see what the growth of the community looks . As far as class attendance this year, this was the first full calendar year where we ran three different levels of classes for those in the Rock community. We have the Rock one hundred series, which is a one week of one zero one and one week of one zero two. And we also have the master class, which has been our longest running, most popular class. And by request, we added a SQL for Rock class for those who wanted who know Rock, but not SQL and wanted to go deeper into the data structure and learn some more reporting level skills. And so between all those classes this year, we broke 200 attendees. We had 204 people taking some kind of continuing ed kind of courses inside Rock and gaining and upping their skill set as well. And you can see that starting to take place in the community as well, our community involvement. Now that we have some of the COVID restraints behind us, community involvement's ticking up. Rocket chat members have increased by over 400 in the last year. We had a total of 318 organizations participate in our conference this year. So that is between in person and online, two thirds in person and another third online. We have 12 regional communities in the Rock community right now. And those are areas where regionally inside The US, there is a group of churches that has come together. And so there's a concentration of Rock churches that kind of share best practices and connect. And we do help facilitate those. So if you're in a region, look for one of those. You can find a connection inside Rocket Chat. And if you don't have one yet and there's a solid group of churches in your area, reach out to us and let us know. We can help get that set up in a way that facilitates local connection, but doesn't silo all the best practices and good things that come along with that Rock knowledge from the rest of the community. In the alpha and beta testing world, Nick, we have 28 alpha testers and 74 beta testers. Yeah. And that's gonna flip flop a little bit. We're gonna move a lot of those beta testers to alpha testing. We I think we've been communicating with them last week and the week before. So Yep. So that's exciting news. There's a lot of movement there, and it's great to have depth and breadth in those categories because we know different people have different cycles of involvement. And so sometimes they're really heavy and unable to be involved, and sometimes they're more free. So don't feel that bandwagon is full. You can still jump into that. We always need more. Rockstars, eighty eight this year. I know we talked about that at the conference, but that's a great group and something to shoot for. So if you're planning what you wanna do in the Rock community in 2022, , consider how upping your game and then investing that back in the community could be a benefit to everyone. We had four new members of the one thousand point club, speaking of. Wow. So that's exciting. And don't forget to the you can find out how you can get points by going to get involved and looking at the ways you can give back to the community. We had over 6,200 podcast downloads, and this one hasn't even been released yet. So that's exciting. Wow. And as of right now, we are projecting that for the 2021 commitments to donate and support Spark that will come in just over 98%. So that's looking great. A huge thank you to those who have made the effort to let us know what your commitment to donate is because that's what our planning and budgeting can be based around. And then to come through, we know life throws curveballs all the time, but this is a community that's committed to to funding and moving this initiative forward, and we're extremely grateful for that. Now we know we have adjusted the funding model starting in 2022 to make it something that's more sustainable and more appropriate to the current breadth of what we're working with here in Rock. And we're in the process of helping to convert commitments to the new funding model level, and we're about a third of the way through right now. So we expect to continue that into the first months of the year. So there are some additional numbers for the Rock community for this year. Don't they say something about don't talk about numbers on podcasts and probably but just jot them down as you're listening. I think that I think what that's telling us is the community is active, the community's growing, and it's really committed to this incredible model where we're all learning and growing somewhat on our own, but also helping the people around us and looking for ways to do that. And I that's really what the point is, and that's really why it matters. , it's it's an unusual model, and it's it's really working in that. There's the sharing going on. The number of features that we have that a church sponsored and said, I wanna contribute this back to the community. Or they would say, well, could build it on our own or we can build it in a way that's shareable and now everyone can use it. And these things are, this is literally happening. It's not the dream. It is the reality here in the Rock community. Yeah, John, you probably touch on that quite a bit, but that has been the primary driver this year is churches that stepped up and helped fund features that the giving alerts feature. Yeah. And some of these features are things we've wanted to work on for a while, this was the year that they got the funding. I think it's interesting too that I was just thinking about this for a different topic that God, in a sense, the model that we'd want is not the model that we have. So we'd want the model , Hey, we just donate and then we'll figure out how to do this. But it's really, the model is , you're gonna get some that way, but you're gonna get some through what is needed by the church. And I feel that's kind of interesting because that actually puts the decision making almost in God's hands. Because if it was all just given to maybe just Spark and Spark gets to figure it out, well then it's in Spark's hands, right? But when when it comes the other way, it allows God to just get to kinda show us the features he wants Mhmm. When he wants them. Sometimes it , giving analytics, maybe we we would have wanted that. We're we're in agreement. God and Spark were in agreement with that. We've That's a good feature, but it wasn't in our timing. Was on his timing because he wanted us to work on other things. And so in some ways, some people might think, that's a negative thing that it's done by funding, but in a sense it's just in time inventory kind of in a sense, it's just in time future It's a good balance for sure. Yeah. But I think sometimes as humans, we want it to be our way, when we want it, how we want it. And the more I look through the story of Spark, it's a story that is based on God's will at God's time. Yeah. And it's not always been the journey that we would have planned and mapped, but thank goodness it's not, right? Thank goodness it's his journey and his time and his map. Yeah, and you could really see that when you reflect back at all the milestones over the past fifteen years, even before Rock, it was all leading up to It just seems super clear when you reflect. When you look backward, right. Yeah. If only we had that same kind of clarity going forward. Yeah, that would be nice. Yeah, but then we'd be scared. I always remind myself that that's why God doesn't show us everything. , because we would never climb the mountain if we knew how tall it was. But if he only shows us a step ahead of the time, it's , well, , what could one more step hurt, ? So And I think we're kind of wired for efficiency, right? If we knew where we were headed, we might try and get there the fastest or most direct route, and we might miss all the things we need to pick up along the way. For sure. So speaking of all the things we need to pick up along the way, don't forget, I know it's Christmas. I know everyone's got a lot on their plates, but we do have a conference coming next year. So don't forget that to put that in your planning and get that booked. We have some really incredible things that we want to do based on your feedback in the day before the conference as well. So that's lightly marked on the website with some information, block your calendars, book your travel accordingly. We're going to have a big fun community get together the night before the conference. So you don't wanna miss the fun there. But even before that, in the day before the conference, we are going to do some additional deeper technical training opportunities, and that's gonna be for free. Mhmm. So that's a great add on. Don't miss it by booking your plane ticket at the wrong time because there's no cost to attend. We will need a head count. We'll have a lunch break in the middle, and the conference location is in an area if you've been before that has lots of great restaurants and things around. So there'll be plenty of time for you and your team to head out and grab some lunch. But in the the morning and afternoon around that, we're gonna have some some incredible content that people have been wanting and hoping might come along as well. So don't miss out on those opportunities. Yeah, I'm excited just to even I'm really excited for the pre day. I think there's some great content I'm looking forward to preparing and putting forth. I know there's other people who are thinking about that too. So it's gonna be a good time. It definitely will. Don't miss it. Now, we'll keep reminding you, so don't worry. But if you have an opportunity to get that locked in, you've got a few budget dollars left this year, go ahead and make that happen. Just don't book your travel incorrectly. What else do we have coming up next year? Oh, next year's gonna be crazy. I look forward to next year, not looking forward, but looking ahead to next year. And I think it's just gonna be a crazy year. I think especially for the church. I think there's this You don't have to read the tea leaves, you just have to keep your eyes open and you can see that there's a lot of things coming down the pipe that I think the church is gonna need to step up and be prepared for. I think all you have to do is look at the docket of the Supreme Court, and I think there's a lot of things that could be very positive for the church. But if the church is left not prepared, we need to get prepped for some of these things so that the church is gonna have a mission, some new missions in 2022 that we need to be ready for. And I know personally, I'm getting ready for some of those things and helping to support some of those things. And I just think churches need to be, , and I'm sure pastors are hearing their mission orders from God. And when those mission orders come down to the likes of our community in terms of putting the rubber to the road, we need to be ready. Yep. So what I would say is get prepared. You need to be your best self next year and you need to upgrade yourself. You need to be, whoever you are, two point zero, three point zero, four point zero. That's a good way to look at it. I'm already reading books between now and the end of the year too, just to get prepared for some stuff. I think it's gonna be exciting year. I'm not saying that to scare anybody. I think it's gonna be a good thing. It's the church will have a huge opportunities in 2022, if we're ready for them. I also think digital strategy is gonna just accelerate too. One of the things that I've been hearing a lot about is that I've been hearing a lot of opinions on digital strategy lately, and that's good. The one thing I would say that I see that's little bit different than what most people are talking about, it seems many people have an opinion that digital strategy should be x, y, then z. My thinking is, gosh, the one thing I know about God is he's very diverse. He loves diversity. Look around at our planet. We have forests, we have deserts, we have high places, we have low places. Look at our people. We have big ears, small ears, big noses, small ears, hair, no hair, light skin, dark skin. So why would we think that the way that we're all going to be reached is one way? A lot of times we look down upon all the denominational types we have, and maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe the way we treat each other between denominations is a bad thing. But the one thing I'm betting on heaven being is even more diverse. I'm , I can't wait to see the new colors. And I think the digital strategy has to the same way. I think that's why it's so important that we have not That our tools are Legos. We have a full toolkit so that we can be matching the expression that God gives to our senior leaders. And that's the one thing I fear when I hear people talking about digital strategy, it's , it has to be XY and Z. This is the right way. It's , oh gosh, that might be outright way. , I don't disagree, but let's not let's not put the bookends on it. I I I really do think diversity in in how we do this is key. We definitely wanna be keeping options open and adding new opportunities in front of us, narrowing down what's possible. Mhmm. Yeah. And the more we work with churches, the more I'm just impressed with some of the ideas out there. And I was working with the church recently and they do something that's really kind of neat. I don't think it would work for everybody, but it's so neat that they're doing it that way. And it was just really inspiring to hear their ideas. And I know if you shared those ideas with other pastors, they'd probably have four reasons why not to, right? But it seems to be working really well for them. I thought that was really exciting and a cool thing. And it was cool that Rock can support those needs, because it wasn't built for those needs. It wasn't. We think about that, but it's so good that extensibility and the toolkit was able to be assembled and configured to support that. And fairly easily, it was a natural configuration to them. And I'm , I didn't think about that. That's really cool. So just make sure that our skill sets are not limiting the vision that's coming from God to our senior leaders. And if that vision comes down and you're looking at your toolkit and you're not quite sure how to assemble it in the Rock world to meet those needs, we do have churches reach out to us on a regular basis and say, hey, I think I might need some extra extensibility applied in certain areas. Can you help us figure out how to do this right? And we love that. That's where these features that we're talking about are coming from that are being funded. And that's what keeps Rock so relevant is because it's meeting those ministry needs right where they are. And they take your requirements, your vision that's handed down. And then what our team knows about how the product works and how to build something so it is extensible for others and can be used in a diverse number of ways. And that's where the magic happens. So next year you'll probably run across some things that might fall into that category. Let us know if that's the case. Yeah, mean, spent most of A good piece of this week working on the mock ups for pretty big feature set for a church That's very extensible and it's gonna solve and scratch a lot of itches that have already been identified for us in the past that just never could get funded and prioritized. And now, they're asking for something very similar that we can then scratch a whole bunch of other itches with. And it's probably too early to talk about because I'm not sure if it's gonna get funded by that church. I know, I wish we could though. But it's really cool. It's another one of those things that's gonna definitely help them out, but it's gonna help everybody out. And so that's really cool. And if it doesn't go forward, let's just say, I think it will, but if it doesn't go forward, it'll get done. I don't feel that's gonna be wasted time if they say, Yeah, what, that budget got cut for some reason. I don't think that's gonna be a waste of time, because it'll just be a matter of , well, we'll eventually get to it. That's what we've seen happen when you were just talking about in the giving analytics world, , that it's the circle back and the timing that makes sense. It could be too that we're called upon as a church to do a lot of new things and a lot of great things. And it could be and likely will be that budgets may not be super great to do all that stuff. So we need to learn to be very efficient too. And it's something that we're thinking about too is , hey, just because there's all these exciting things doesn't mean there's gonna be exciting amount of budget. So let's stay Frugal and scrappy. Yeah. That's what God is here, right? But when we talk about the skill sets and the upgrading of that and becoming your next best self, I do wanna mention too that it's not always about technical skills. I think those are the examples sometimes we use because we tend to be more technical, but if that's not what God's called you to, just know the strategy skill set, the planning skill set, the leadership skill sets are gonna be just as much in demand in our community too. , just don't think about those skills, grow those skills. That's a great point. I mean, in the same vein where you say, if you don't document it, how will anyone else know how to use it? Why did you write it? If you can't communicate about it, if you can't share it the right way with other people, it could also be a problem in getting the value expressed on that as well. So there are lots of different patterns and places for that growth. Yeah, and I think really one of maybe the biggest gap I see is strategic thinking. I think there's two ways that that doesn't go well sometimes. One is that it's not being done. We just are tactically dissolving these little needs, I'm not saying don't do that, but we need to also just be thinking strategically about that and thinking proactively and such. But then sometimes you have people who do that, but then they pontificate. They just think, say, and move on. And they need to kind of go, I have a gift here, but my gift can't stop at saying, I need to get my hands a little bit further down the track and a little bit more dirty and say, now this is how we're going to do it. Because it's easy to have the ideas, I think. It's harder to get them implemented and to validate them. We talk a lot about that in our team, Hey, a good idea never survives fully through the battle, right? It changes, adjust and gets stretched as you fully consider it. But that takes time and gets a little messy. So I feel there's two problems. One, more people need to be strategic and two, is those who are strategic need to take that down a notch to make it implementable. That's a great point. Well, there's a lot to consider for next year. So let's don't limit ourselves. We can't do it yet, Might be part of our vocabulary, but it doesn't mean that we can't get there by this time next year. Twelve months is a long time. So it's very exciting to consider what might be on the horizon, what opportunities might open up that we have no idea will be in front of us. So let's position ourselves to be our best selves and see what that brings. There's nothing being a part of a great community to do that together. Yeah. And hopefully get some rest. Know, after those Christmas I know it's high time right now. This is , it's not quite the Super Bowl. That's usually Easter, but this is , , the Pro Bowl. So let's get through Christmas, get through those services. And then maybe hopefully between that week and New Year's, you get a little bit of time to relax. In that time of relaxing, just kind of go to God and say, God, what do you have planned? In that time of rest? Prepare me for what's coming next. Wonderful. Well, you so much for joining us today and for another year of podcasts and another year of our community together, where we're doing life together at the intersection of faith and technology, and there's no place we'd rather be. Enjoy your Christmas, enjoy your break, and we will catch up with you next time. 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.