Podcast Episode 65: Episode 38: How the Rock team is like cycling

Description

The speed of Rock development is increasing-- so we need our amazing community more than ever! This episode will bring you the latest with what's going on at Spark, in Rock updates, and even some glimpses at the future.

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 today's episode of Rockcast. We're so happy that you've joined us. We are going to share with you today a little bit about the current status of our updates and the ones coming up and some of our events. And, we're really excited to kick this off. Nick, why don't you share with us where we are right now update wise? Sure. We are, just released 7.4 into beta. That was, I believe, well, this week, yesterday or a few days ago by the time you guys hear this podcast. And, it's a huge release. So John was just saying some some companies might consider this to be their release for the whole year, but this is just a dot release for us. I say it's a two for one. So definitely read the release notes. The release notes are gonna, give you all those things that are new and in there. And we've also updated the documentation, the live documentation. So if you're wondering about a feature, just search for 7.4 in the documentation and you should be able to spot those. Some of the exciting features that the community is apparently talking about are the data automation feature, which can help clean up and set values on records. That's a pretty big feature. And I believe that came from the consulting arm of Sparkability, right? Yep, with the Cray's fellowship and NewSpring. There's even more coming. That's just the start of that feature. Oh, that's exciting. I love when the churches we work with are interested in helping fund things and give them back to all churches. It's exciting. Sometimes it actually means paying more because Mhmm. To to automate some of that stuff in a very customized way to their needs would , there's cheaper ways to do that that are just more efficient for them. But they've said no. , we want this to be reusable. We want this to be scalable, and that sometimes costs more money. Well, that's a ministry. Mean, they're really investing in a ministry that doesn't get a lot of attention or promotion, but that's really exciting. We love that our church community of Rock churches is full of people who do that. Exactly. So beta testers, get going. And if you are hearing this and you're not a beta tester and you want a beta test, let us know. And, we'd be happy to sign you up and kind of bring you into that process. And I think we don't have a timeline, do we, for how many weeks this will be in beta? Well, our goal is always two weeks. And barring any kind of surprise, , I think we're I I think we're on track for two weeks. I mean, the alpha went very smooth. We found a few bugs. We got those fixed into the beta. But, again, these usually take as long as the testing takes. So the more active testing, the faster it goes. Right. I mean, we need confidence and assurance that it's getting tested. That date could slip if the community, if the beta testers don't do their thing. So we kind of rely on you guys to make that happen. Right and they usually do a really great job. We have a good community and we have a really great process too that includes a public checklist so we can see how far people have gotten. We know if anyone's tested certain features and that helps us have visibility into it. But it does sometimes mean that we have to hold something up because we know the testing hasn't been able to progress at the right rate yet. Right. And that's a challenge as we're developing. We don't have access to all these different kind of use cases in in the data. And you guys do. Your databases are rich, , playgrounds of different ways of using Rock. And having that beta testing is so powerful to us. I mean, there's only so many different things that we can test internally. Right. There's, , there's the beta test where you you set it up on a brand new empty system. There's value there. But there's even more value when you're beta testing on a copy of your production dataset. Because John just said, you'll run into scenarios that we just don't have. And those are very small edge cases. And and another thing we really appreciate is there there are a couple churches that will install the beta into production at the the end of the beta process. Right? They'll they'll do what Nick described, run that beta in their dev environment. But then some will actually put it into production right before we go to to live with it. And that is super helpful to get that scalability and and all that edge case testing. Mhmm. In and in those cases, what would happen is if there was a critical bug that we found and they just rolled it out to production, we would probably drop what we're doing and get a seven five going and get that out pretty quickly. We we've done that sort of thing. Right. Or a custom seven four just fix it immediately in the moment. Mhmm. But usually when the when we've had those things, , that come up in production, they're really just teeny tiny edge cases. It's , oh, yeah. When this person in their role does this crazy thing in this block. They get a little bit of an issue. And then we're critical. Right, and we're quick to fix those. So Nick, if somebody does want to sign up for beta testing, do you recommend that they join the beta testing Slack channel and drop a note there? Or what would be the best way to do that? Yeah, I think that's public still. And that's definitely one way. I will publish in the notes of this podcast a link you could just go sign up too. We do have a sign up spot. I just don't remember the URL off the top of my head. Perfect. Okay, good. Well, that kinda leads us up to the next topic, which is our next big version release will be v eight. John, why don't you tell us what that's looking and how that's shaping up? Sure. So you said, that's the next major. We probably are not planning at this point a seven five. You might see areas where we talk start, , our processes that create a seven five, but generally that will be rolled into eight. That's our goal barring any kind of surprises. So eight is coming along very well. Go back and listen to previous podcast where we talk about some of the features that are gonna be in eight and some of the strategies of how we kinda split eight into two pieces, but definitely making huge progress. And so our goal is to have that this is a little bit of a stretch goal, is to have that to alpha testing in four weeks. And as much as we look at seven four and see all those features, eight is the same thing times, , 10, . It's crazy the amount of new capability that's in eight. Also, it supports it has a new UI that's, , really great. I I've been using it for weeks now, and every time I have to go back to an older one, I'm , oh gosh. What a pain. So we're really excited about that. There's so many exciting things in eight that are amazing, and we're already starting to work and and and put time into looking at the nine o features, and there's some really exciting things we'll be talking about in upcoming podcasts. But, yeah, we're very, very close. That's exciting. And because sometimes our our production delays the podcast a little bit, I think that means we're shooting for, , the end of the third week or beginning of the fourth week in June. Does that sound right? Correct. Okay. Now the danger at this point of the process always becomes, yeah. But what about this? What about that? And so we're already and we're always under this pressure, but especially right now in in this in the development cycle. , what about this feature? Can you get this in? Can you get that in? Can you sneak this in? And so we're already in the planning stage two of saying, okay. Well, this is probably not gonna be an eight, but what do we need to do in eight to support that to be able to be rolled out in 8.one, 8 Two, 8 Three? Because we can only make changes to the database model changes in these major releases. In the point releases, we can't add fields to the to the database for technical reasons. So we're already kinda preplanning, , what do we need to have in there so that we can support these things before nine. And do you have any examples you could share with us? Well, that's a good lead in. Yeah. So one of the things that we've been talking about and researching for quite a while, and it's surprising how long some of the the pre thought has to be in some of these features, is digital signatures. Yes. We do have an integration today with SignNow, and several churches are using it. But what we're finding is it's very complex to use. It's very complex to code against, to add and innovate on. It's very expensive. I think that keeps a lot of churches from even considering it. It's not that SignNow is bad. Let me I will put that out there. It's not that SignNow is bad. It's just that all these platforms are very hard to integrate. They're very hard to innovate on. And they're all honestly expensive. , we did a lot of due diligence and a lot churches helped us in that due diligence in in picking SignNow. Great system, great technology. The price was the best of the others at the time. But even then, it's just not it's not the right solution for what we need. So we kinda went back to the drawing board and said, hey. What would we want? We then took that to a couple churches who used digital signatures today and said, hey, if we did this, would that meet your needs? Got that feedback. Then, Emily, you helped us too with engaging our our legal team, our our software attorney to say, hey, this is what we're thinking. Are there any concerns? And he gave us some great feedback. Rolled that all up into a final, , this is what we think we wanna do. Took that back to a couple of the large churches who are actually using this today and got their blessing. And now we're at the point where we're trying to put that into Rock. Now what we're looking to do is to provide a natively hosted digital signature capability within Rock. So you won't need any service. It's all built into Rock. It'll be a new field type slash attribute that you can use in workflows. You can use it in event registrations. So it'll be more of a natural experience for your signing parties. And it should be a lot simpler, and we can innovate with that. That said, that there's some challenges in in getting that to work because most field types and attributes don't actually have access to data. , it's it's they're pretty dumb. And so we're gonna have to kinda add intelligence into our attributes and field types to be able to support some of that. But we have ideas. I think we can make that work. So that's coming. That will not be an eight, but we will be putting the foundation pouring the foundation before we go to eight so that we can have that. But that is coming. So I would say if you if you are considering purchasing an integration that maybe you would pause on that. Otherwise, , you those integrations easier for multi year type periods. Also, our intention is to eventually pull out the the current integrations and to not support them just because it again, it just adds so much complexity to the code. We'd love to be able to remove that. That said, we don't wanna abandon people who are using it. I mean, obviously, even right now camp season is going if we were to pull it out now, Yeah. There would be a well deserved revolt. And so we don't wanna do that. We wanna be respectful of that. So that will be a very, , two major releases type type thing. I will say too, I want I kinda missed on the last one, , the speed that we're going is picking up. , I thought we've always worked kinda fast, but but it's it's picking up. And as I was listening to a podcast just the other night and they were saying it was a quote from Greg Lamond who is probably America's premier was America's America's premier cyclist. We all hear about Lance Armstrong, but Greg Lamond was before him and his history was a little cleaner. But he's a great cyclist. And one of the things they they asked him, says, , cycling is actually really hard. I mean, it's terrible on your body, and it's so hard. And they said, hey, Greg, does it ever get easier as you get up to those pro levels? And he said, what? It never gets easier. You only get faster. And so I think that's kinda what we're experiencing. It's the more people you add to the team, it doesn't get any easier. , it's still so hard and there's still so much effort to push this. But we get faster. , now code is coming out, , where it might have taken us several months, it's coming out in several weeks. And I would say that the the new hires that have have joined our team are are incredible. Yep. It always takes time to ramp up, to learn the team, to learn the code, to learn the all the intricacies of Mhmm. Of the code base. But we have a solid team. And it's just it's amazing to see how fast some of them are picking it up and then adding things and then and also bringing in their own seasoning to it. Right? So they all have their own experiences and , , my last job we did something this. Oh, that's that's really cool that. , let's do that. And and each have their own personalities and development. Some are a little bit more they're a little slower but more careful. And that combination is actually very fast. , it's slow and careful is is very fast versus, , quick and and and maybe not pre thinking. That sounds fast and it looks fast until you till you're doing the full life cycle management on on that. So, , it's just amazing that the team that God's providing and the God's kind of orchestrating, and there's still more to come. , we have some some plans for bringing people from the bench to the team over the next couple months, and that's it's super exciting to see what God's lined up and and where we're going. Yeah. I always try to visualize what will the team look next year? Oh my goodness. You never can do it. You can try, but it's hard. Yeah, we never would have thought this, right? No, no. Throwback to last year, and it's a drastically different scenario. But it's a good exercise to try. It is. It is, yeah. Yeah, it's good comedy for God I think. He's , Yeah, that's really funny. We just don't get the punchline till the next year. Right. He's , Wait till you see this. That's right. I'll second that pace comment that you made John. It does seem it's constantly picking up. It's all with really good things but it's quite a bit different of a scenario right now than it was last year and Nick I have no idea where it will be next year. I'm excited to see what that looks . One of the things that goes along with the the growth of our team and the pace and the health of our team is our funding and so we haven't talked about that in a little while. Thought I'd give a quick update. We have seen so many churches come online in first quarter this year. It's incredible and the number of churches reporting that they're working on an implementation right now too is huge and it's moving very quickly and all of these churches have certain needs for customization or for training or understanding and these are all great things. Can I give a shout out to the community too? Our Slack community you guys are doing an incredible job and I know a lot of you are also podcast listeners which we appreciate and you have stepped up in some incredible ways that have freed up our team to be able to put their energy and attention into core development when otherwise there would be a lot more moderating needed and you are really really Rock stars and we appreciate it And the number of you that are then taking the time and making the investment to come to Masterclass to extend your knowledge in ways that benefit your organization, but then to turn around when you get back home and start investing your personal time into the Slack community to help move everyone forward, that just moves the whole bar of excellence in our community. It's incredible. And we brag about you guys all the time. I do. We've been in so many meetings this week talking to more traditional type organizations and they don't get it. They just think we're an open source product and we're , no no no no. We're community. And the community is our not so secret weapon Mhmm. Against for support and for all these other things. And we're it's not a product. It's a community that is centered and and working on a product, but it's a community first. Right. It's and it's not just support. It's accelerate they're accelerators for everyone Yes, good point. They can help you ramp up. And one point about coming back from a master class and then investing into the community, there's a selfishness part of that too because as you train someone else, you're reinforcing what you just learned. So you're, you're really letting that sink in and it stretches you when you have to teach someone else. So it's, there's a, a self selfish on purpose point to that, but it will help you if you pour into others. That is so true and we need to constantly be bringing more people up because back to the point I was making, there's so many churches coming online right now where having one or two people that were investing in the knowledge base of the other churches used to be a great sustainable thing. It's not anymore. We need more. So to see so many people working on what it takes personally to invest in yourself to get to the level that you can do that. And then also, I think there's this mental block, at least for myself, where sometimes I'll feel , oh, I don't know all the answers, which makes me a little nervous about saying I know that particular answer. So I'll say oh wait I'll wait for the expert on everything to step in and answer that and I think we've seen a lot of people overcome that this year which I think is really exciting. Have a lot of people come to the master class and say Oh, I have gained confidence in the fact that I did know some things, and now I know more. But people overcoming that in order to help others is really cool. I think days someone will do a case study on Rock, and I think when they do the case study, it's not going to be on the technology or the product, it's going to be on the community. That is the huge differentiator. It is. And you mentioned the not so secret weapon. Think that's a great phrase because it maybe originally was the secret weapon that we knew about and the churches that were really deep into Rock knew about. There's no way it could be a secret now. I mean, is the thing. It is Rock. So that's what we're most proud of. Excuse me. That's what we're most proud of is our community. But as we're growing and our team demands pick up, the community demands pick up, we have to come up with a way to fund all of that because as we're open source, we're non profit for the right reasons because we want what the community needs to really drive what we're doing but that does require investment to to keep everything moving and keep those wheels turning and that is still one of our biggest challenges because of the pace of growth that we're seeing. So we have seen our donations pick up but the rate is really what puts the ceiling on our growth and our capacity and our ability to keep up with community demands. And we're still at about 45% of churches that have reported that they're running Live on Rock that are donating. And we are so thankful for those churches that are. In fact many of them donate above the suggested amount that we have put out of 1.5 per attendee per year. And if you go to our Rock page slash organizations you can see a list of those churches and there's a big list of those that support us above that amount but 45% is is not enough for us to keep pace with the growth so we are constantly lagging and our team has grown which is great. We need it to be larger than it is now because our community is so much larger and there are so many good things that we want to do. So I do just want to encourage you a couple things. I know some churches that I'll connect with will say, Oh yeah, absolutely. We have plans to donate. And they're right. Here, I can tell you what they are because we've worked on that in our implementation plan. And I want to say thank you for thinking of that. A lot of churches are planning that in. But if we don't know about it, then we can't plan for it. And we have to plan all of our recruiting, all of our hires based on what we know responsibly. So do communicate that back to us if when you'll be able to start donating or what that amount looks for the year. That information is really crucial to the whole community because that's how we build the foundation and the strength of the core team. If you've not yet begun to donate to Rock and you paid for a system before Rock, you probably are a church that should be donating to the core development. We did not create the system in order to be the free system. We created it so that small churches that couldn't have excellent technology that helped them reach people and invest in those relationships wouldn't be hung up because of the budget. So what we're all doing is a ministry and that requires us to work together kind of the early church did in Acts. So if you used to pay for a system, you're on Rock, you have not donated to the core development, and you don't have a plan in place to continue to do so on a regular basis, I would ask that you revisit your budget, have another conversation with your leadership, or put them in touch with us to get some questions answered. Because that really is a detriment to the entire community and a detriment to the development of the core team. And you said it. It's a word that I think they need to take back to their leadership and say, hey, Brock is a ministry. This isn't just a free open source system. It's a ministry and we're trying to help the big C church as well. And it can be bit of a mental adjustment to think about it because if you came from another system that was your vendor and you had this vendor relationship with them. We don't have vendor relationships with our churches. I mean you guys are our friends, you're our colleagues, You're collaborators with us. It's not the same thing at all. The church leadership may have a difficult time understanding what it looks because right now in the industry, we're really the only ones that are doing that. But I think it's an excellent thing and it's in your best interest. So here's one suggestion I have. If you're having trouble communicating this to your leadership in a way that they can resonate with it, bring them to our conference. This is what we do for our staff. This is what we recommend for all churches that are new to Rock or are seriously exploring it. At the conference, that one time a year where everyone comes together, the momentum of the entire community is present and it's palpable. I can feel it when I show up. And pretty much everyone I've ever talked to at one of our conference events walks away feeling empowered, feeling they have the connections and the resources they need for success for the next year. And they walk in and say, Oh gosh, I thought Rock was X and X is a product or this tool that helps the IT team or something this. And they said, Now I realize what it really is. So if you're having trouble making that communication point to your leadership, bring them to the conference. We have a leadership partial track. We have some excellent keynote speakers. Terry Storch with Life Church who runs Open Digirati is one of our keynotes. Don Wilson, the former senior pastor of Christ Church of the Valley, who really invested in the beginning of this entire project and got it off the ground, is another keynote. This is an excellent opportunity for your leadership to interact with Rock. And their eyes will be opened. Yes. They'll be inspired, but their eyes will be opened to the possibilities, and that might help them direct their own internal staffing , if we had these people at our church, we could do even more. That's a great point. Yeah. I actually jumped helping you guys. Yeah. And we've also seen some senior leadership that comes to the conference and says, Oh, wait a minute. I don't need just this custom solution for my church. I see now that this can benefit everyone. There's a whole ministry component here that I didn't get until I showed up today. And we've heard that. So do use the conference as an opportunity to engage your staff and bring your whole staff as many of them as you can to the conference this year. We're up over 60 speakers. We have seven, I think, tracks of content. And the content is going to be about triple what we had last year. The speakers are very high quality it's going be an incredible event. I think right now our registrations are getting close to what they were for the entire conference last year already and so that's that's huge. It's going to be quite the event. We're really excited about it. So if you haven't registered yet, you might want to get on that. Everyone's going to be there, so you don't want to be left out of this event. So although it's not sold out, is there a danger that it could be sold out if you waited too long, at the very end, if you tried to register? Well, let me give you two answers to that. If you're a sponsor, if you're a sponsor of the conference, you want a booth, you're a Rock partner that sponsored last year, the conference, or a vendor that really wants to be sponsoring in this event, don't wait until the same time that you signed up last year because we are running low on spots. We only have a few slots open. So if you haven't actually paid for and completed your registration yet, you are in danger of not having a spot at the conference. So yes, if you're a sponsor or you're friends with a sponsor in our community that is not listed on our website today as a sponsor of the event, they may not be a sponsor of the event if they don't get registered pretty soon. So we do have some limitations on that. But as far as the attendees go, we're at Southeast Christian Church in Kentucky and we've been working with them. They have tons of space. Okay, good. So we're not in danger of people missing out unless they don't register and don't come but we're not going to be kicking people out we won't turn them away at the door. Definitely come join us. We make sure that we host our conferences in places where we can have a really large number of people because we see the benefit of community. We wanna invest in that and we want the whole community to come. We would love it if the entire Rock community dropped what they were doing on August and showed up at Southeast Christian Church to collaborate on moving Rock Forward and the ways that moving Rock forward actually connects with people and changes lives. That's what we would love to see. That would be awesome. That would be incredible. Yeah, we'll find a space. Oh yeah, absolutely. Anything else? I don't think there's anything else. I feel we've done a solid update but I do just want to say if you are in the habit of listening to podcasts stay tuned this summer because I think we'll have some really exciting updates not only about events and things but about our staff and about what's coming next and about the updates that are coming. No spoilers. No spoilers. So do stay tuned and don't forget the master classes. I guess that's my one last announcement. We heard from a lot of people in a survey early in the year that they plan to do a master class this year or would to. We have a couple available open registrations on the site. If you don't actually sign up you don't get to actually hit that goal. So I think sometimes we put the registration off and then we're , oops, we passed our deadline. And then we get to this time next year and we say, I still have the same goal. That's one you can easily check off. So I think that is my last announcement. You guys have anything else? Nope. That's a wrap. All right. Thanks for joining us. And today's show was produced by Emily Forman. And Nick was our audio engineer and does all the post processing. It's putting out a social media. And Jim Michael does all the editing of the audio. And our amazing show notes are typed up and put together by Michael Garrison. 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.