Podcast Episode 41: Episode 15: The Big One

Description

Lot's to talk about in this episode as we cover the roll-out at Central Christian Church, what we're working on, road maps, the state of the ChMS world and how things are going in 2016.

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. Hey, guys. Welcome to today's Rockcast. Emily's out, so I'm filling in. Sorry. All you get is me. Could you talk Emily maybe? No. No. Sorry. But we do wanna start by thanking everyone for their podcast ideas that you guys submitted on the Slack channel. So we're gonna base some of today's discussion around, those ideas. I guess I'm introducing myself for the next section. So Nick, tell us about how we roll out Win Essential and actually I'm really excited because I actually haven't heard any of this yet. So this is all gonna be new to me. Yeah. So last week, we we cut over our website which once you cut your web website over, you're cutting over lots of infrastructure. All of our small groups, connections and involvement, all of that got cut over. Basically everything got cut over into Rock. So it was both exciting and we got to relearn a lot of things about DNS and certificates and SSL certs and whatnot. I'd say though for the most part, it was a huge success. Everyone loves working in Rock. The thing that hasn't yet cut over is check-in. So we're still using our legacy system for check-in. So if you went to our website and noticed there was a big check-in button, that will redirect you back to our old system still. That we're working on that right now, and we're hoping to roll it out quickly. Did you have questions about anything? Well, think, especially in Slack, a lot of people had interest in the website portion. Could you unpack that part and how's that running? How'd you guys get to that? Great question. Because what we did was we kinda did what maybe isn't isn't recommended. We didn't start with a a given stark theme. Yeah. So we wanted to push the envelope and say, what kind of problems do you run into if you just try to do this on your own? So I will caution you that it will take significantly longer if you just kinda go flying by the seat of your pants and building one from scratch. Did you start from a bootstrap kind of concept or is it even not even bootstrap when you started from there? Yeah. There was bootstrap in there. Yeah. It it does. But again, it's it was all really a % custom. It's all essentially the work of Creston Lee. He he got the original template from a design. It was mostly the Photoshop slice up. Mhmm. And then a lot of understanding on how Rock works and, , putting things in and then restyling the Rock pieces. So I know some of you guys have looked on our GitHub, our central GitHub for his stuff, but it's the stuff that's out there is kind of old. So we'll get him to push the latest bits up to our GitHub. So if you go looking, just realize that's old stuff. Cool. Looks it looks really good. Thanks. Yeah. He's he did a great job. So let me mention that NewSpring is rolling out their Rock on March 13. So if everyone would keep them in their prayers and hope for a successful rollout, that would be fantastic. So what about you guys? What have you been working on? David, why don't you go first? Sure. Probably one of the big things is a new financial gateway. Know, Rock right now in the core has PayFlow Pro and CyberSource, I think is a plugin, but we are working on a gateway from NMI. And what's exciting about that is that it kind of changes the whole PCI footprint a little bit. So currently with Payflow Pro and the other ones, your credit card is posted back to our server. We're not storing it at all, but just the fact that it's posted back to the Rock server ups your PCI requirements. This actually is with the NMI Gateway, you're actually never posting any of that sensitive data back to the Rock server, so it reduces what you need to do to be PCI compliant. But it's also not some of the other gateways where you actually a user is redirected and sees another form that may look a little bit your site, but you can tell you're on a different site. It avoids that too. So a user would never even be able to tell that they're leaving your site because they really aren't as far as what they see in their browser. So we have the the capability to download transactions from that done now, and we're working on getting that working with giving and event registration. And are those things that would be in five o? Yes. Okay. We're we're , Nick, when you mentioned NewSpring's rollout, so we're helping them with with different features they need. And when you say we, you're talking about Minecart basically. Right. Right. That's kind of the consulting part of Okay. What we're doing. Right. At the same time, we're finding time to do some four o fixes. We've , we've done an update, so we keep coming back to that. Probably another big thing that we're looking at is we're really trying to become better experts on SQL and performance tuning SQL, we've even actually invested in some literature and online classes to kind of get really tune how Rock performs. We'll probably be changing a lot of what we're doing with indexes. We've learned we've done a little bit of an overkill there. And just becoming a little bit more of an expert on how we can make Rock run faster and perform better using SQL. And from what I understand, we actually spent money to buy some tools and whatnot so that we're spending money centrally so that everyone who uses Rock is gonna gain from that. So everyone doesn't have to run out and do their own research in this area. I think that's one of the whole concepts behind Rock is exactly that. Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's we hope to, , as we figure things out and as we figure them out for the, I mean, the larger churches with huge databases, they're gonna see performance issues before the majority of churches using Rock, but that investment done to make everything run awesome for them is gonna benefit small churches too. Okay, yeah, so I've been working on a few projects. One is I've been working with Willow Creek. They have a care center, and I've got to go out and visit that. And they wanna start using Rock in the care center. Of course, they're already using it inside the church for several different things, but they wanna start using it within their care center. And I have to say their care center is amazing. It's an amazing place where every day hundreds of people get helped and get served, those who are least fortunate. And it is quite an operation. I mean, they do a great job of making sure that people have access to this help, but they also give a good balance to make sure that there's there's it's appropriately given out, but also it's given out in a way that it maximizes dignity and maximizes, the care that's provided. So we're working with them to try to bring, some of the features of of Rock into their system. They're heavily used, , will heavily use workflows to make sure that these care cases get pushed through. But there's a lot of amazing new challenges how would you use Rock in terms of how how to track cars that are getting repaired? It's almost a a mechanics bay. I mean, they have a huge mechanics area, , multiple car bay, -huh. Just you'd walk into, , Brakes Plus or some place. I mean, it's it's amazing. But how would you use Rock in the in the process of fixing people's cars and scheduling that and the clothing center and the food area and the dentist? Wow. It's it's truly amazing. So it's really cool to work when the output of the work is gonna be so closely tied to actually helping people. Also working with CCV on some projects, they have a really neat dashboard that they're working on to track people's next steps. And they also have a really cool badge bar that shows in detail what steps have you taken, allows you to sign up right from the badge bar. So I'll be kind of posting some of the details on that. Will some of the effort from there regarding the dashboard, will that get folded back into Rock? Is it something that has to do with metrics? , that's a that's a good question. And and the unfortunate answer is no. That a lot of that is just really custom stuff. It's this it's good, but it's custom to to to the unique requirements. And, unfortunately, that's just the way it has to be on that project. There's just not a lot of reuse. It's an interesting project. It's a fun project, but it's one of those projects it's , because it doesn't have that much reuse or that much putting in the core, it it's, , I wish it could be shared more. But, yeah, I think with the the cool thing that can be shared is just the the ideas and the and of the the best practices that they're doing. I mean, those can definitely be shared and, , I'd love to just show a few screenshots of what, , what we did for that so that you guys could get some ideas. So indirectly, the lessons learned might get put into Rock somehow in some places. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, anytime you we work on any project, always come out a little bit sharper. , there's some things that I did with in that one on the badges that you can have rollovers and popovers at the same time, and it's kinda neat. So I think those things I'll I'll definitely be using in in other projects. It's every project grows you in some way. Also, I've been working off and on. This has actually been for probably, , six months on on playing with Power BI and other BI tools. The BI market is an amazing market right now that's really taking off. And there's, , Tableau is doing a great job and it's it's an amazing product. And Microsoft Power BI is is also an amazing tool. And I think the difference that how I kinda portray it, , using both and researching both is Tableau right now is definitely the market leader in terms of capabilities, and they can do some things very, very easily. I think Microsoft Power BI is really winning on price. The price is incredible. , it's free and and, , for for a lot of things. And if you do wanna pay for it, it's it's $9 per user per month, which is amazing. And I think they do a really good job making charts visually appealing in in an in an easy way. I think a lot of the high features and power, , they don't really have as much as Tableau has, but they're they're ramping that up. , every month there's a new release, and the new release has, amazing features. And a lot of the, , research groups Gartner and Forrester are giving them very high marks on what their capabilities are. And again, this goes back to what David talks about. we're trying to research these tools and implement these tools and understand them so that we can get them to you in a way that's even easier. , we already have charted the course of what's the best practice. , I have some thoughts about creating some blocks that will help you make, some of the models a lot easier. I think the data model in Rock is super powerful, but it can be a little bit complex around concepts person aliases, and and there's a lot of denormalization that needs to be there, but it can be tricky when you get to reporting. So we wanna write some blocks, , have a vision to write some blocks that would actually kinda fix that. So, again, really cool. I I wish I had more time to, , just show you some of the stuff that we've done with Power BI. But Yeah. I mean, I've been able to see a little bit of it, and it's just exciting. Just a whole new interface for just viewing your data, things that you wouldn't expect to be able to pull out of your data. Yeah. I wish I wish my day honestly was being able to play with these tools and then half a day half the other half a day just doing videos to show you how to do it so you can you can do it too. Right. And and the hope is that day will come. Yeah. , we're we're slowly getting there. Giving has been steadily increasing or I should say increasing. Yeah. And most of the viewers, I'm guessing on that listen to this podcast get it and are doing a great job. So we wanna thank you guys, but keep getting the word out. Yeah. We got a long ways to go. So that we can do what John just said. Yeah. We got a long ways to go, but things are are on a trajectory where, , it's it's there's encouragement, God's providing, but we got a long ways to go. And then also I've been working in in my free time on some, , new features for version five and some, , minor stuff and some big stuff for version five. We'll we'll talk about that a little bit later. Maybe, , we did talk about David, you mentioned that you are working on some fixes for v four. Do you want to just give us a quick update on what's the update plan for v four? Sure. , 4.14 went out at the same time, which included event registration. So as people start to use that, discovered a few issues. So we've addressed those and fixed those in 4.2, which will go out actually today. We're going to release it today. And that mainly has some fixes around a little bit better air handling with registration and what happens if somebody, their credit card doesn't work or they cancel the registration half through just handling those situations a little bit better. We fixed a bug with the statement generators and some edge cases where someone may have given to two different funds. It's some of some is Non cash? Not non cash, where they can report it. Tax deductible? Thank you, tax deductible. Where they split it between a tax deductible fund and a non tax deductible. So that goes out today and we've already actually started working on the four three update which we hope to get out next week. So that Right. So this is a note to all of our alpha testers and beta testers. You'll notice the cycle is gonna be increasing here because we wanna be able to get these things out the door as quick as possible. Right. Right. So 4.3, what it includes is some check-in. There was an issue with four point zero that with check-in current start times. We made some caching changes that were to improve performance, but that had a little bit of a side effect. They were fixing in four point three. And then there's also some fixes around attendance, manual attendance entry and some group finder, lava debug, time out kind of issues. But that should be we hope to get that released actually the end of next week. Cool. Excellent. Alright. Well, I'm gonna move on and I'll I'll talk about the Rock shop. Some of you guys have noticed and have said, hey, I see the Rock Shop. When is that open? Yes. It is open. So there are a handful of blocks out there at the moment, and we know that there's, been requests for more blocks. So I would just encourage you guys to start writing your your blocks and plugins for this Rock Shop. And, there's documentation under the developer section of the Rock RMS website. If you wanna learn how to package your plug in, that's where you'll go. Currently though, we'll just review a few of these that are out there. There's a storage plug in for Azure and S3, lets you move your files from your web server into the cloud. And if I understand correctly, once you install that, you can have an option to it will literally do that move for you. It does actually do the move. All new files will be created there. Okay. We've we've thought about creating a a plug that would be a storage mover, a storage takes it from here and moves it to there because it could be , oh, yeah, I want an Azure and then two years later, no. That's three is better. Or there's a new one that's created that we don't we haven't heard about because it's not Right. Created created yet. So I think, , a storage mover would be something that would make a great plug in. We thought about doing it, but, honestly, someone else has the time. Go for it. Right. Yeah. Go for it. Just just let us know, , in the plug in channel on Slack so we know we don't get started. So Right. So so this will basically once you put that in place, all new items in that file type will be stored up in that location. Right. Perfect. And then there's a text to workflow which will launch workflows from a text message and jump in at any point here if you want to highlight something more. There's the SendGrid plugin which is just another great delivery network that basically a mandrill, Exactly. what mandrill is doing for Rock today. Very cool. Ideal Postcodes, that's the plugin written by Aaron out in The UK, does address verification. And coming soon, there's the push pay, which is going to be a plugin in the Rock Shop. The exchange contact sync, which will move your contact information for following and selected groups to your Outlook and phone. Do you want to talk about that a little more? Yeah. I mean, I think it's always great to have, , the contacts on your phone. I mean, especially when people call you, you get to see their name and you don't have to enter it. Or their picture. I mean, it syncs their photo and all their contact information. And that's for yeah. you mentioned, following any groups you subscribe to or if you just wanna do all staff members. And so that's the beauty. It just gets to your phone. So it's really complementing a great mobile experience, but it's doing things that your mobile web page can't do with your contacts. And then there's many more when we're basically kind of deciding that we'll probably be tweeting as new items are added or released into the Rock shop as you guys create them, we'll tweet them so that you'll you'll all know that they're out there. Yeah. I know there's several churches working on some plug ins to add that they wanna share. Mean, just if you if you have one of those, just make a goal, two weeks, get it in. , I know we're all super busy, but I know there's a lot of people who are really looking forward to that. Right. And if you have questions about, , the creation process, by all means, go into that plug in channel on Slack and ask us. Don't be afraid to ask. We understand that no one other than a handful of people have gone through that. So please ask questions. Alright. Let's transition and talk about the road map. Let's talk about the future. John, what do you what would you to say about the future? I wish I could predict it. So when it comes to the road map, a lot of the road map is is really limited by how much time do we have to work on these core features. Now some of the stuff that we're working on through our consulting isn't core. , I'd I'd say at least half of it is, a lot of it isn't. So but I think when we look at the road map, we really wanna make sure that we have smaller releases in 04/00/2004 o was that huge monster's hamburger. If you went to the conference, you saw a big picture of that. We don't wanna have those. Those are big, huge. They're hard to package or hard to debug. There's just a lot of reasons why we don't want to do that. We'd rather have smaller releases. So v five will be significantly smaller than v four. And we want to have a v six also this year, at least a v six this year too. So we're working on the final feature set for V five. It'll be a mixture of a couple of major features and a lot of polish. In fact, there's a lot of stuff already done that we did after four o that's not in the updates. Remember, updates are really for bug fixes, and it's not for new features. It's not for polish. So there's a lot of stuff that's already in the develop branch that won't make it into a a v four dot x. That's there. In fact, sometimes I I find myself going, oh, yeah. Sorry. That's that's not in four o. , there's a lot of giving features, , from the back end, , administration, a lot of little polish put into that. And sometimes I'm correcting myself in the q and a because I'm , oh, yeah. Sorry. That feature actually isn't in v four or v and v five. So a lot of polish. But when we look at, , v five, what what are some of the major features? Actually, , of course, the NMI gateway will be a big one that David already mentioned. Also, dynamic compilation of less on the server will be there, and it'll be have some really cool tools allowing you to adjust a theme without having to know anything about CSS or less. So you'd be able to adjust some theme colors, without having to know that. And a lot of that capability will be dependent upon the theme developer making it that way, but we're working on how to communicate that to them. And also some of the those will be some check-in enhancements to give you a few more options of how check-in might work. Of course, if you it the way it is, it will remain that way. But we also want to kind of polish up how the setup of check-in works to try to make it a little bit easier. And there's a couple of things that might make it on that list, but we're just trying to see on the timing of that. Now we look at six o, what do , whatever we didn't get in the five will kind of push to six. But one of the things we really want to focus on six o is some really cool and some major new enhancements to workflows. I mean, I think that's everybody's favorite thing about Rock once they get it up and running. So we we have some things for workflows that literally will blow your mind. , it's gonna make them so much more powerful and the configuration of them so much easier. So we have some really high level, , ideas, and kind of fleshed them out a little bit in some r and d. I'm not sure we're ready to kind of show them yet because I'm not I never to show anything that I don't know for certain we're gonna be able to get to work. And and would would some of this address the the surprising workflows that we've seen people trying to create, , with 90 plus actions and attributes and activities? For sure. Okay. So that in v six, that the the new the new UI of how you make workflows will will definitely address that. I don't think that honestly that there'll be time for v five to refactor that because that's a pretty major refactor. I don't think it makes sense to put a major refactor in to making the current UI work when we're only just gonna blow that UI away in version six. So yeah. If we can't, there's some small changes we can make to make that work. We'll try to do that. But honestly, don't think those are small changes. I think those are pretty large changes. But I think the v six ideas are gonna blow your mind. So we'll we'll all be wanting to adopt the v six way. Yeah. And and all your workflows and , none of them are gonna break. We're just gonna add some additional capabilities to the workflow. And then the way you configure the work for the UI will be much different. I think, again, , it's it's gonna blow your mind. , it blows my mind. Well, I can't wait to see it. Yeah. And so a lot of that comes down to, , how much time do we have funded to work on these features? Right. Which, , again, we we talked about a little bit earlier and I don't wanna hammer anyone here on this podcast, but, yeah, that that's what really the controlling factor is. How much time, funding is coming in that allows us to on future r and d stuff and features that will blow our minds. Right. And as soon as we get a comfort level with those, we'll, , we'll, of course, share those. We don't wanna be it's not we're trying to hide secrets. I just again, I have a hard time showing somebody something that I don't know for sure if we're gonna be able to get working. You are not an idea where to kinda guy. Yeah. I've I've there's a lot of sense of, , commit , honoring those commitments. , we said we could do this. If it there's a technical reason why we can't, I would feel really bad. So so yeah. So that's kind of the road map. Again, we hope you have the final feature set for version five soon. And there's already a lot of stuff in there. We have to kinda go back in and figure out what what's already in there that we've forgotten. And there may be some HTML email changes in v six possibly? Yeah. We definitely wanna improve the experience of creating HTML email. I think what's in there today rivals that with with some other systems. But to me, it's just not good enough. , it's just not good enough. Right. I guess that is something that I know about you is you are frequently disappointed when we don't hit the mark that we want. And we, , we know that it's just not good enough. And so just to let you guys know out there, we get it. We understand when something isn't polished. Yeah. In fact, I was up last night, , working obviously on the on the outline for the podcast. But then after that, I mean, I was researching HTML email design surfaces and, , who's doing what and how did how can we get that? I mean, it's easy to see what Mailchimp is doing. That's easy. How can we make that happen? , we don't have the UI team that and and the development team that that Mailchimp has. So how do we do that? A similar example is how do we get, , the the workflow editor working? , we know, , what we want to be that. That's kinda the easy part. But it's , okay. Well, how do we actually find the components and the tools that are open source and free to be able to do that? And in that case, we we were able to kinda crack that nut, and I think we kinda figured it out. On the HTML email one, we haven't cracked that nut. , we of course, we know what Mailchimp does. That's easy. Yeah. And if we could do that, we would do it. Yeah. And now we need to figure out how to do that. There is no easy button. You can't just push the easy button. I wish. Yeah. So is there gonna be a RX 2,016? No. What? No. I'm just kidding. When you phrase it that, it's just too easy to say no. Of course, there is. , that's probably one of our highlights of the year. , the the 2015 was a was such an amazing event. Just the people being there and talking amongst each other and sharing ideas and and, , having people present from other churches. And I'm just, , going, I knew you're using that feature. I knew you're doing a good job, but that's amazing. Yeah. We were really impressed. Yeah. And so I can't wait for 2016. That said, , we've we've been putting a lot of effort into it. , we haven't been talking about it. There's a lot of time and effort being put into, , on the on the area selection and and the host location, and we're really close to having that nailed down. So we'll announce that very soon. , we we definitely there's areas of the country we wanna be in, but right now, that some of those areas, we just don't have a a host area that we can go to. Mhmm. So, , it's looking they might be more on the West Coast for 2016. In 2017, we really wanna get to the East Coast. So a lot of a lot of the criteria really is, well, where can we have this? , who has the space, the right space? Right. And at some point, is there still a possibility we might do two in one year? Yeah. Maybe one centrally located, Texas. Yeah. For anyone out there in Texas listening. Oh, there's a lot of them. Yeah. Let us know if you wanna host. Just know that we're open. , we don't have a bias to what side of the country or or where in the country. It's it's more limitation on right now who has a space big enough with the right requirements and Right. , and obviously because we're talking one fifty plus people, 300, somewhere between one fifty and three hundred? Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, we don't know, but, yeah, it could be it could be 300. Right. So And and probably a summer end of summer Yeah. Date? That's kinda where we're looking for. , we're trying to move it slowly backwards Okay. Into the year. But, all that could change depending on final final plans. Okay. Good. But on that note, we're we're not only working on on the location. We're also again, I wish you could see all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes, but we're actually doing a lot of research on the production of it. , we really, really, really wanna capture high quality content from that from that from that conference. And I've already spent a lot of time researching, , the right kind of capture gear and the right and we'll have to make an investment that in that gear to make sure that we have this very simple but high quality. So I think that was a big miss from from the first one. Yeah. There was a lot going on at that first one. Yep. Okay, so let's transition a little bit. You've had the opportunity to have discussions with a large number of technology leaders. You've been out to different large churches as well. So what's your take on the state of church management space? Well, I think it's it's really an interesting time in the church management world. And and you said, just talking with a lot of the vendors, lot of churches, a lot of consultants, just it's funny. The people who find their way to our phone and and we find our way to their phone. It's been fun just meeting people and just learning about, , different perspectives on it. And I think we're really living in an interesting time in the church management world. In my opinion, this is all my opinion, so, we can disagree and still be friends. But I think there's really a dichotomy forming in the church management world. , you have a lot of these established vendors who are becoming more and more closed, especially as they acquire their own tools to to create a a whole package. They're getting more and more closed. And I think if you wanna know that if that's true or not, just ask the giving vendors. , they they can tell you how open this, , the giving world is becoming. In fact, this closed nature really seems to center around a lot of times, I get my opinion, the giving tools. , it seems the having control of what gateway to flow those transactions down. It's a fire hose. , what fire hose am I gonna put these transactions down? Seems to be coming very, very a very tight enclosed community. And there really seems to be a scramble to control the gateway. And I think that's a fire hose that everybody wants to control. And why? Of course, there's there's money there. And, , people need to make a living. People need to pay for the service, so they get that. but I think a closed system is is really a dangerous one. I think those what's interesting in the in the dichotomy of it is that it really stands in stark contrast to the principles of Rock and and and spark, and that we believe in extreme openness. And and I think that's what's best for the church. Choice is what's best for the church, especially around giving. , we shouldn't a group of a couple of us sit in a room and determine, , whose giving tools are better for every church in America. , doesn't make sense. , Rock, we've talked about, has its own giving tools, and we're working on NMI. But push pay is a great solution too. there's that solution makes a lot of sense for a lot of churches and having options, letting the church decide who's best for them is great. Yeah. And what about other systems where people are migrating from one system to another and they've got all their giving data and reoccurring giving on another system. And, , is it right or fair for them to have to try and switch them over? I mean, we'd to solve that problem too. Right? Right. I mean, there's there's cases that are going on, , right now. I mean, not not trying to throw anybody under under a bus, but that's happening. And that's just that's not right. , that's not what's best for the church. And I think you have these closed systems, basically, what you do is you're gonna limit the innovation. , what if there's a giving vendor right now who's working on something that's amazing that we haven't even thought of? Limiting their access to to the market or to the church management space because all the data kind of flows through the church management system, I think is a is a is a huge detriment to the to the church. Know, another good example, Kindred does some pretty amazing innovative stuff with with text to to give. And when you look at it, , the concept seems so simple. That's because they spent so much time making them simple. , isn't easy. ? And I think if someone wants to use their tool for text to give, yeah. , our our our philosophy is sure. Right. ? If you don't our tools for giving yeah. Well, there's Pushpay. That's great. There's Kindred. There's all these tools. And Rock being a % open, any vendor could step in and create a plug in that works with Rock in their system. Right. So in the closest and we talked about it it it limits innovation, but it also it also doesn't there's no pressure to reduce costs. , it's hey. If you use our system, you have to use this. Well, I don't have a choice. I have to use your but when you have all these this openness and this competition for over innovation and also price, who wins? Right. The church does. , we don't win a Spark Development Network. , we're not winning on that. We want people to , the the best thing for us, and people have actually come to us and approached us to do this is to say, hey. We'll fund you a %. Just make us the only giving. No. We can't do that. , that's not in the best interest of the church. Certainly would make our life a little easier, but that's that doesn't matter. Yeah. I think as we talk with vendors, they're very refreshed when they hear, , our vision. I think they think we're slightly nuts. Yeah. But but that's okay. , I think that's the vision God's given us to work on. It seems to be working. So we're gonna keep on that. And kind of the analogy that, , we've been painting, we're gonna be pushing it out into a few blog posts around the tech community is that is a comparison of, , Rock is the Green Bay Packers. And you can love or hate the Packers, and trust me, every one of you either loves them or hates them. But the one thing that's very unique about the packers, and I didn't really fully understand this till recently, is that they're actually a nonprofit, and they're owned by their fans. They're the only NFL team that it doesn't have an owner. The owner is the fans. And that's the way we kinda see Spark. I mean, obviously, we're a nonprofit, but we also , we unlike the Graham Packers, the Graham Packers can sell shares in their nonprofit. We don't live in a state that allows that. But we kinda see it that way. We don't own this. It's a nonprofit. No one can own nonprofit. And we see the community as owning this effort, this vision. And so we see a lot of analogies to that. And we really see that Rock is really what we want to be as an innovation for churches that they can mold and guide and it can be their sandbox of innovation. And when they build something, they can immediately share it. , they don't have to come through us to share it. That's what the Rock stores for. Right. I wonder if that explains why the Green Bay Packers have notably had the best fans. , our passer is constantly talking about how the Green Bay Packer fans are the most, , the best fans of all the NFL. It's definitely you see that here in Phoenix because you you go to the Cardinals versus Green Bay Packers. There's more Packers fans than Cardinals fans. I think when you can have that sense of ownership and you can be the guiding light to that. Yeah. It makes you wanna be more of a fan because you have that sense of stewardship or ownership. And we're actually starting to see that even in our own community of people jumping in and we'll talk about that a little bit later. Well, even this week, I mean, Slack is on fire just with ideas , oh, look at that, look at this. And I think it's even gonna be more powerful when those ideas are in the Rock shop And and you can, , just one click and now you have it. So again, Brock is an innovation platform that allows you to build then share with others. And then and and whether system can you do that? And it and again, Brock isn't ours. It's yours. , that's the way we see it. We're just here to manage and shepherd and, , put some, , guidelines and some boundaries so it doesn't go into a random mess of models and code going all over the place. Right. And so we're, , trying to charter the vision and try to get everybody going in the right direction. But that's what we see our role is is Rock isn't ours. It's yours. Excellent. Alright. So here we are. It's February 12. We're, , a month and a half into the new year. John, in general, how do you feel about the start of 02/2016? It's almost as if you're reading that off a piece of paper. I may have been. I think things are going really well. As I kinda think through, , how are things going, I mean, it kinda comes back and reminds me of that one, that first trailer on on the new Star Wars movie. , it can I I brought it in There's been an awakening? Have you felt it? , as a Star Wars fan, of course, I'm drawn to that. But I really do feel there has been this, , awakening and that people are now, , now finally kinda hearing about Rock and and and wanting to know more about it. And I think that's happening in the churches. I think it's happening definitely in the vendor space. , everybody is has been, , trying to figure out the vision and and and and loves the vision. And so I feel there's this real this ground swell happening. There's a number of churches who are now fully migrated to Rock. A big ones, lot of small ones, a good cross section. I think there's been a lot of, , recently, and this hasn't been super public, but there's been a lot of, , very influential pastors in the country. Some of the most influential pastors in the country have been saying some really crazy cool things about Rock, how it's gonna change the world and and others who have said that, hey, they've invested so much money in trying to do this in the past and it didn't work. And now this is really working. And I, , over time, of that some of that stuff, hopefully, we can we can share, but there's a groundswell there. I think people love the vision. I think we see a spirit of the community in Slack. I mean, that's really going well. I think there's a lot of involvement with the vendors I mentioned, but there's also things what KFS is doing. Kingdom First Solutions is really providing now a hosting platform for Rock and they're continuing to add packages and levels and I think that's a much needed thing and I think there's other vendors who are who are interested in doing the same. And I think that's great. Again, choice is good. And in all of what you've just said has been with almost no marketing. the word is just organically gotten out. Right. And that marketing is about to change. I said, we're working on on some plans on that. There's some blog posts already ready to go out. I think one of the things that we've we've been kinda waiting on is this, okay, we gotta get four row out. We gotta get, , the first updates out there. And then also too, just wanted to make sure that we have , we, on our side, have some work to do just to communicate about some of the services at Kingdom First. , when people know about Rock, the next question is, , how do we get started? Mhmm. I don't think we have quite the content ready yet to divert them to the right places to get help. And so but I've been working on that on weekends, and I I feel we're almost there. I just need maybe a couple more days to get that done. And we'll have that kinda needed and then I'll feel more comfortable about doing the marketing. But that is coming. Yes. So when that marketing starts, that's gonna have an effect. Right. What's gonna happen? I mean, I think there's a tidal wave coming. , even without the marketing, you can feel the wave coming. Yeah. , you can , when there's a The water has receded. Exactly. when the tsunami is about to hit, the water recedes, but we already sense it. , we we're already talking with the vendors. We're talking about a lot of churches. I mean, it's coming. , trust me. , you can feel it. And that's incredibly exciting, but it's also incredibly dangerous Mhmm. Because that's a huge wall of water coming our way and and we can either sink or swim. And so we can see the signs that's coming and and what's gonna be the the the difference between success, , swimming or sinking is really the community. If it's just spark on the beach to to battle this wave, you will find our bodies in a tree up on the mountain. It's that's really what's gonna happen. Yeah. If it's dependent on four, five, six people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You'll find our bodies in a tree. But we we can't survive the wave. We can make the best of this wave. This wave is a great opportunity. But what we really need to do is everybody to lock arms as a community and and step up and and let's channel this wave into into a positive place. And so that might lead you to ask, well, what can I do? And I'm so glad you asked that. So a few things, a few points I just kinda wrote down is, , definitely continue to help those in Slack and on the q and a. Please don't forget the q and a. , I sense I I find myself forgetting about the q and a. Right. I think Slack has kinda sucked some of the energy away from the q and a. We need to be conscious about that and go back to the q and a and realize there's even more newbies out there. Right. There's no history in Slack. Right. I mean, it's not searchable. I can't help anyone two months from now. Yeah. Because I the one thing I put out there is there are people still using the q and a that that we Slack are forgetting about them. Right. And, , there there are some tools for for some of the community leaders that they can notify us of of a q and a post that needs our attention, our core attention. And there are some people doing that, and so so thank you. , keep doing that. I mean, obviously, tackle all the ones you can because, , we can't keep our eyes on all of this. Right. But keep an eye on the community on the Slack community and on the q and a. And and really good props to David Lei this week for for jumping in and helping, , really do some deep level, troubleshooting. That's great to Free tech support. That was amazing, David. Yeah. And that's the kind of help we need people to always be doing, , with each other, with new people. And Derek Ingram is is welcoming people. I mean, we ask people that he's doing it, and and it's having a good response. I've actually gotten some personal feedback from people who were welcomed as it came into the Slack community, and they mentioned it to me. , I didn't ask, hey. How'd to welcome? They they brought it up. Yeah. That's awesome. So that that shows it's having a great impact. So, , step one, help those who need help. Step two, I'd say would be be our eyes and ears. Block and tackle and raise up issues that need addressing. So the more you can be out there, social media, these channels, just helping us block and tackle. Another good one is on the issues. People submit issues. Most issues, they are issues, but a lot of issues, they're not issues. They're just, , pilot error or misunderstanding. The more of you that you can jump on to those and start, , doing the first level debug and, , is this really an issue? , Aaron France has been good about doing stuff that, trying to get more information that's helping us blocking and tackling. Yeah. And it's just it can be just something as simple as going and confirming that that bug. If you can reproduce it, then you can say, yeah, I verified it. Right. It's a two edge sword. We don't want people to feel they shouldn't post an issue unless they know. And we don't want people to be afraid of, , posting a a non issue. That's gonna happen. , that's that's just that's just life. But the more we can have people helping us filter through that and block and tackle, trying to find out what's the real issue and what's not. So please don't be afraid of posting in there. Yeah. And I would just add too that if you do find an issue, if there is an issue, make sure you post it in GitHub. Yes. Mentioning it in Slack, , that's so transient. I mean, Yeah. That river will be gone later that day. , if you wanna post in Slack, hey. Has anybody else seen something this? , you're getting, , the background information. They go post. Yeah. But Right. But do don't don't be afraid of putting it in in there. And part of that is also, if that somebody else in the community is an expert in that area or can address the question, don't be afraid to privately message them and say, hey. Can you go ask, address that question? That actually happened to me. Somebody did that. It was actually you, John. I would have done it publicly. So, yeah, do that for each other. Yeah. And that's not to say we want all these rules. The first and foremost, don't be afraid. Just do whatever you think you need to do. You're not don't worry about, I'm not gonna do it wrong. , we don't want people to be afraid of it. We're just trying to give you some best practices because we're really speaking to you guys as, , speaking to, , the family, the immediate family, family, , the core of all this. So we wanna give you some best practices for that. Third point that how you could help is we definitely need to spend more time on the q and a in the alpha and beta phase. , we're we're still trying to figure this all out. So but I think the more time we can spend in QA, the the releases in alpha and beta, the better the product will be. Yeah. What do you do you mean a longer QA period or more? No. More formal, I think. Right? So More real testing. Yeah. Think we've we've thrown the idea around that we should have a a list of things, really, a a whole laundry list of things that you go through and check off if you can. So if you can create a data view with 30,000 people and you can send an email to those 30,000 test emails, go ahead and do that. And we might have that as one item on that list. Now we'd love for someone in the community to just step up and create , hey, run through this laundry list. But if it doesn't if that doesn't happen, we'll probably end up having to do that. Yeah. I mean, I think in the in the perfect world, we'd have, , a laundry list of those use cases, you said. And then we would we would assign out areas of those to to different organizations, and hopefully, a couple organizations has, , coverage on each area. But that requires tools. That requires, , a lot of work that we we just don't have time to do. , if someone wants to step up and help us with that, that's great. Yeah. That's what needs to be done because I think if there's one thing I I would worry about, , I would wanna improve right now is is this the initial quality after a release. But we're running and gunning right now. Right. And eventually and we are rolling a lot of new functionality, and that happens in new functionality. , David and I were talking this week is , a bug in a new in a new feature is obviously not something we want, but that's better than a bug that we introduced in something that was working in two o or three o. , those are the ones that kill me. It's Right. , again, we're getting much more mature and smarter as we do this. But that said, more QA time in alpha and beta. And and have a conversation in Slack on that. , give us ideas, work together to get ideas. Right. If you're an expert in Selenium and you wanna create a bunch of Selenium UI tests, that would be fantastic. But traditionally up until now, Alpha has been make sure it installs, but we're gonna try and move past that. So it's make sure it installs and run through as many tests as you can. And then beta for sure is supposed to be do as much as you can with that for real. Right. Yeah. Yep. Another thing is that there's a lot of talk about, , the shoulder, the bolder blog. I think the more things we can get on there, the better. And so one of the things I would recommend is the the same thing I do when I think something should be done in my life. I just make a goal and I just do it. , I usually don't make that goal in two weeks. I usually make it, okay. Tonight, I am going to write this. , I had a the Green Bay Packer blog post was an example. , I knew I needed to do that. , so one Friday night, said, okay. Well, when it all goes to bed, I will I will write this blog post. ? I think it's just a matter of just doing it and setting aside, I'm doing it at this exact time. That's how, , you can get things done is to specify the exact time. So and I think that's a very valuable blog. More so right now for, , those who are more involved with Rock, but that's gonna be the recipes and the best practices that everybody eventually is gonna see and and do. And the last thing is just something we always put, is just to continue to pray for funding. I think things are going well there, but we still have a long ways to go. And just simply put, I think what's in the community's best interest is, , David and I and those working in in Spark being able to focus 100% on core. It kinda goes back to some of the consulting work I mentioned. It's, , good stuff. , it's good stuff, but some of it only helps and benefits single church, which is great. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. But it's better when we can be working on things that helps tens of churches, hundreds of churches, who knows? Soon to be, if with with in in God's power, thousands of churches. And and some of the plans that we have in the black book, on the drawing boards, in the Evernote right now in in in a sonnet are just too good to wait. , the sooner we can be working on those, , I really think the better off we all are. Alright. Well, is that a wrap? That is a wrap. Alright. That's a wrap. Let let's end in prayer. Let me do that. Father, we are just so thankful for getting to be part of this team and taking on this task of creating something for free and giving it away. Lord, we just would ask that you would keep inspiring community to step up and playing their part, to give John and David a break. Lord, we'd also ask for increase in funding that just keep coming in. I would ask that people would be reminded of of this, that you just bring it to their mind and they would kind of pray for Rock maybe more regularly. And that, a little praying team would, would form around that. And Lord, help us to see the obstacles that are before us and navigate around them. And Lord, we just ask for all these things in your son's name. Amen. Amen. 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 the SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit Rock r m s dot com slash hosting today.