Podcast Episode 15: Episode 203: Inside Rock’s Funding & Release Strategy

Description

Jon, Emily, and Nick discuss Rock's unique funding model and the special advantage of giving at the updated rate. Tune in to hear them share where your giving goes and how it's affecting our new testing and release strategy.

Transcribed Content

What to Rockcast. I'm Emily Forman. I have with me here today Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo, and we are going to talk about Rock. Topics that we've been hearing about in the community recently, and we'd to update you on some new processes around our releases and around our community testing. So it's gonna be a good ride today. What is early access? Why is it important? And, , that's an important thing to understand when you move to Rock, and it's also one of the really unique aspects about our model. So as most of , Rock is entirely funded by the church. We're a group of people over here that have worked in service of the church or are really called and committed to doing that, that are building a platform in community to meet the needs of today's church. And there are a few ways you can do something that, but they all require funding because we have salaries to pay, bills to pay, and initiatives to meet. The interesting thing about Rock is that we we create these initiatives. They're really driven by the needs of the church directly. So we work very closely with the churches that are running on the platform. And our funding has to reflect that because we don't want that to change. We don't we have options, of course. Funding, we elected to do that as a donation based model. But another option would be really to get our funding from outside sources third party equity or various investors. And that's just something we've elected not to do. In looking into those kind of models, you can see that typically the goals and initiatives of the organization are largely driven by where their funding comes from. And so if you go the investment route, there's a possibility that the goals, the pace, the speed, the priorities can really be driven by wherever you're getting your source of funding. And I think the big one, you mentioned, is the feature set. The feature set's gonna be selected not necessarily based on church need, but what is the most profitable. Lucrative, yep. I mean, we see that. It's not a conjecture that we'd be giving. Yeah, it would be. And we choose to do it the other way, which is , Hey, what do you need? Let's work on that. And when it's funded by the church, then there's no other profit going out of it. It's completely all monies are held within the entity, the nonprofit. And I think it also drives the speed and pace that we move at. The innovation levels that we bring to things. If you're being funded by an outside source, those things may be less important than if you're serving real immediate developing needs, and your funding comes from that. Yeah. I was , even as you're talking, was , kind of wondering to myself, , why is it that churches even have to have their own software? Why don't we just use commercial packages? And , was doing the analysis in my head going , there's nothing, everything that is so different, what and the church it just doesn't match. I think those who have tried, there's some churches who have tried Salesforce for that. And again, what do you do for check-in? What about giving? Giving is very different than almost anything else. So unfortunately, I mean, I think it'd actually be beneficial if we could, but there's just the Venn diagrams don't align. There's touch points, there's slight overlaps, but not much. But I often think it's technology for the church by the church. And why should we wait for secular money to come in and solve the problem knowing that in a sense, then it's a slave collar of profit? That is. I would much rather work within the church. And I think that's what spark came from. Spark came from within the church. That's it. And protected by our nonprofit status and open source. I mean, there's so much protection if there's layers of protection to the church. That's right. It's interesting you mentioned using a commercial package a Salesforce. I know of a church right now moving to Rock from Salesforce. But interestingly, they also have yet another platform that they're running their check-in in groups in because they can't get everything they need in one place. Doesn't surprise me. And so that's the kind of thing we're trying to provide. But honestly, we can't do it without the funding of the churches that use and love Rock. So if Rock is working for them, that funding helps us continue to grow. It helps us invest in new technologies. It helps us do things upgrade our platform to next gen, which is critical, but it also helps us bring in new features and enhance those that are currently existing. We spoke about a lot of those things at the conference, And it's important to recognize that all of that is literally being funded by the church. And the alternative, if the church can't provide that funding, would be external sources. And that's just not something that we want to introduce the extra complication of of priorities on. Yeah. And, , we understand that not every ministry is in a position to be able to Exactly. Have early access to those options for that. That's right. We've created a grant program. There are churches that are really small, ministries that are new. There are churches that go through hard times, and that can happen to a church of any size. And so we've created a grant program that allows them to have what we call early access without being at that early access level. So just a quick catch up, if you're not familiar with early access, that's just donating at the recommended rate. The recommended rate is what's established to really support and develop this community and platform at the size that it currently is in the economy that we currently exist in. That's something we evaluate annually and try to keep as reduced and fair as possible. And and then we publish that rate and ask churches to donate at a certain dollar amount based on the average number of weekend attendees that they have. And that's called our early access rate. If a church donates at that level, then they have access to the latest updates as they come out. So as v 18 comes out the door, they have access to that as soon as they want to upgrade, as soon as they feel they've done the testing they need. Without early access, Rock is still free to use, but it's a year delay. And there are a lot of good reasons for that. One of which is the most engaged churches tend to be the donors at the early access level, kind of in your church. That indicates engagement in a lot of areas. And those engaged churches can help become very familiar with the features in a given version. And by about a year end, they're familiar enough to be able to support questions in the community from less engaged churches. But also the usually the larger and more innovative churches are pursuing those innovations faster as well. But with the grant programming, really not having early access is a choice that someone has really decided that I just don't wanna pay. Because again, if you can't, then the grant is Reach out. Right. You're right, and it is a choice. And , if you move from another platform, you might be thinking , how do I maximize what I get for the minimum amount that I put in? And that's a very commercial product type of decision making. But Rock isn't that at all. It's just a group of churches and mission minded people and a platform that sprung out of the church trying to do things together. So here, Spark is in the business of maximizing whatever puts in. Mean, the amount of output per dollar that Spark has received is incredibly higher than anything I can even think of at this point. Right. If we don't do this together, it doesn't work. And the people coming from commercial packages are typically paying way more than they're paying for Rock. I think that just shows when the church creates a technology for itself, it's better in all ways. It is. And if you compare Rock to other church management platforms that are out there, the the feature set, the level of innovation, the pace that it's moving, there's just no comparison. And we're doing a lot more with a lot less, but we rely on churches for that funding. So we try to keep our funding much more affordable than others, but but it has to happen. We have to do it together. Yeah. And so, , as we especially as we get into major releases '18, the topic of early access comes up. Mhmm. But another topic I've heard of recent coming up more and more is the session you did at the conference. Yes. On how to pick products and how to make sure you have a team that is well paid. That's right. It's all about stewardship on both cases. And that session at Rx, I've continued to get requests for some of the handouts that I made available. There've been a 100 or so, maybe a little more than that, that have been requested. So I know people are kind of paying attention to that. And it's really an important topic. Making product decisions is very different than making other types of organizational decisions. A lot of times, especially in the church space, we make decisions based off of the relationships that we have and the people that we know. That is maybe not the best approach when it comes to making technology decisions. But it can be hard for church leadership to understand that because their context is very relational. So this is just a session that kind of unpacks that and additionally unpacks a different subject of how should the church approach paying its technical staff. Because the primary business of the church is not technology. These are too complicated areas for leaders of churches sometimes to to know what what makes sense. So we provide some guidelines around that and actually had some numbers in there based off of research with ChatGPT and looking at published statistics in various markets of various sizes and different locations and just a lot of good solid research went into that. And of course, someone working for the church might expect a slightly less than the average standard in their area because they're working for a nonprofit doing ministry work. And that's that's given. But being significantly off from that, wow, that can really damage the the mission of the church in in a few ways. One of which is staff turnover or morale. And in the technology space, getting someone up to speed on what happens in the tech department to support what needs to happen for the mission of the church is very complicated, and that loss of context can be detrimental. So just understanding how to dial that in correctly is really helpful. Yeah, and it's another way that SPARC is not just over here thinking about ourselves, right? Not over here thinking about, okay, what do I need to get done this week? We're actually trying to think broader and how do we sort of get the community healthy? And one of the things that we can do is we feel we might have a more of a neutral voice in trying to help encourage and educate pastors, executive pastors on what pay should be. Because again, this is a new technology area. This is a new area of ministry that is unique and different. And I think the skills that are required to do this are very marketable. And I think to your point, yeah, we should all have a humble heart and understand that we're not gonna get the same as if we were in corporate. But it shouldn't be you said, also drastically lower. Mean, it's just not gonna work. It's in their best interest to have continuity. They'd actually save money by having good retainment. And so we wanna a help to be a voice with that. And if there's other ways we can do that, please let us know. Let us know. Let us help be an advocate for your positions and , your roles. And speaking of advocacy, we are actually gonna make this session free. So right now it's only been available through the content subscription previously, but we're gonna mark that as free. And by the time this podcast publishes, we'll put a link in our show notes on our Rock community blog. So if you need to look for that, you can go there. And we will have it freely available to everyone. So it might be a great time to forward this to your leadership to talk about product decisions. We're getting ready to go into a new year. There are probably some new initiatives next year that may involve some technology decisions. So it's key time to discuss that. And while they're getting that great information about how to approach some of those decisions next year, there's also gonna be some great content about staff paying as well in that compensation. So pitch it as discernment. Yeah. And they'll also get that other thing. And I think it's just to kind of tack onto that too, think what you were talking about, yeah, it was talking about technology decisions, it could the same rubrics are used for picking the next landscaping service. That's right. So it really is something that you can just forward to them and say, Hey, this was good content, I'm making discernment decisions about services. And at the end, they'll get a little bit about making sure that staffing salaries are considered well too. And again, this is all really rooted in stewardship, and and trying to help churches make the best choices because it's important to have quality staff, quality platforms, and to understand what you're investing in and what the true output of that is. And and as you're talking, reminded me, I was fortunate enough to be at an event this week, which I wanna come back to and talk about a little bit, but it's a huge event, right? And so I'm sitting there, of course, I'm in Edmundston, so I'm always gonna be there early. And I'm sitting there and some people walked in and sat in front of me and they're having a discussion. Turns out they work in this kind of more of a secular company servicing the church. And you were saying, they were talking about their marketing and sales methodologies, kind of made me wanna throw up in my mouth, if I'm being honest. I'd wanna be , That's the bride of Christ you're talking about. And I think it's interesting because I think we have an opportunity to sit in a different vantage point. Think of it as an NFL game, The two teams are on the field, and we're kind of sometimes the referee on the sidelines. And so we have a different vantage point. And sometimes we can see fouls that maybe aren't so easily seen when you're in the middle of the field. That's a great point. And it's just, sometimes we just need to throw the flag. Now you can't throw always to the flag because , there's always gonna be something, right? we're imperfect people and there's levels of greatness, right? But man, sometimes we see some dark gray, some really dark gray. And as you're talking about that, it kinda reminded me of that conversation. I almost wanted to be Throw the flag? I almost wanna be , , you're talking about the bride of Christ, right? Of course, that would have been inappropriate. And , I'm somewhat probably shouldn't have been listening in on someone's conversation, but , you're there thirty minutes early, there's Not much going on. They're talking loudly, how are you, what are you supposed to do? But anyways. Yeah, those are the kinds of things. Are you making decisions based off of the data that you need to to make them well? And relationship driven decision making may not always deliver the results that you're looking for. And sometimes again, you're having that relationship and they're talking to you, it's one thing. When you hear them talking, and I think I've relayed this, it's they're talking about your sister. And you happen to be standing right behind them and you want to be , that's my sister, right? And so the way they talk behind the church is what, I don't know, it Infuriates me sometimes. Something to make sure you're aware of and consider. Right. And if you're in a public event, maybe you should be careful about what you talk about. I actually had a funny story, get off on a random topic, but when I worked in the corporate world, I was at a meeting once, again, at Edmiston is always early. So I was early to this meeting, this big corporate meeting, and I think it was gonna be about 30 of us. And I walk into the hotel where this meeting was supposed to be held, and there's a big U shaped table structure. So I sit down and I'm the first one, maybe it's a little too early. Second person walks in, not too much further after us. He goes to the other side of the U and sits down. I'm , Okay, well, cool. We're here early. This is unlike me, but I'm gonna go talk to this person. I'm an introvert. So I go over and talk to him. I'm , Hey, I'm Judd Anderson. I'm here from the engines division. Where are you from? He's , Oh, I'm with RSA, which is an encryption company, it still is. And I'm , Oh, you are? Wow, that's amazing. Help me out. I've always wondered, what's difference between RSA and VeriSign, which is another company? He's , Well, I started VeriSign in Oh. And then I started RSA. I'm , I'm now talking to one of the principal architects of the internet. Wow. And anyways, we got to talking and he was , Yeah, , was freaking out the other day because I was at an NFL game. And I was talking to a colleague about some work items. And later that night, I had this voicemail or this voice memo on my phone of my conversation. He's , I thought it was hacked. I thought someone was recording me behind. Wow. He goes, It turns out it was my friend's phone. But he goes, I learned, you gotta be so careful in this world. Privacy and encryption is 100% needed, but it's often the things that are not encrypted that we forget about. So just knowing what you're talking about in public is kind of a big thing. Oh, super interesting. Yeah. Also one of those moments you're just , woah, I just got to meet someone famous who I never would have known. Just sitting across, Also you had no arrives early at meetings. That's right. Yeah, well, that's what successful people do, I guess. But back to that event. The event was beyond a billion. It was the version subway in the billionth download of the app. Incredible. Yeah, amazing, amazing event. I would highly recommend people go watch it. It's still available online. It is a long event, but it is worth it. The production quality of it was off the chart, Good. Here's I think the takeaways of why you should. First of all, there's great worship. Had who's who of worship was there, and they did an amazing job. Production quality, amazing. Second, story. They had so many stories of how God's Word changes lives, and you can chalk it up to a couple stories, but , those are just the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg of that. And the third reason, maybe the most important, is it just cements in the point in time that we're living at. This possibly could be one of the biggest revivals of all time. We don't know that, right? It's we can't say we're in revival, but this sure seems to be precursor. You're starting to feel the vibrations, and they had numbers that really significantly showed that. So I would highly recommend, , it's one of those things you could probably have off on your second monitor and while you're working and hear some great worship, maybe pause at few of the stories. I think the way they unpacked the stories was pretty clever. , it's very emotional. So just sometimes feel honored to be able to attend things that, have those opportunities. But anyways, sorry off the topic, but No, that's an important topic. And speaking of important topics, one thing that we don't put a lot of public discussion about but is a big deal here is the release process itself for Rock. We talk a little bit about what's coming, but not necessarily how it works. And we've been discussing some process changes on that front lately, that it would probably be good to talk about, because I think this one will be a little bit more visible publicly. Yeah, this will be a huge one. All of it in the name of improving quality Mhmm. And making it less anxiety around updates. And so our first thought, which I think is a great thought, we can immediately improve quality and reduce anxiety is, we're not gonna ever release another update to Rock. That was a thought, but we That's one option. We quickly rolled that out as probably not getting a lot of community support. That's right, that's gonna make our funding model very difficult. But our lives will be so much easier. Innovation Let's think about tanks, but quality Quality's goes through the roof. Yeah, you can't break without which doesn't change. So here's the real deal. So we're changing our release methodology. Minor releases, dot releases, are purely going to be bug fixes, security updates only. Now, some of you are probably celebrating. Everybody's celebrating. But at the same time, some of you are thinking, But what about that one feature I wanna get immediately? And we kind of teased this a little bit in the Rockstar channel and in Rocket Chat, and it was funny how people already knew, I love this, except when it's gonna be my feature that has to wait. And I love the transparency that we all have. And I get it, we feel the same way. And sometimes it's really hard. So yeah, minor releases, bug fixes, security updates, because we wanna have peace of mind Mhmm. For the for the upgrade. So you when you hit the upgrade on a a dot release, you're gonna be , okay, this is gonna be fairly fairly easy, fairly low risk. We wanna derisk dot releases. So it sounds a different approach for the church as they're going through their how do I update, when do I update, what's my update cadence in a year? Yeah. Do you should know that a dot release should be very low risk. This will also make it minor releases, dot releases faster to alpha and beta test. So this will reduce some of the pressure, some of the time it takes our alpha and beta testers. It currently takes a lot of time to go through our alpha checklist. Our checklist of all the things to test. When we go to just bug fixes and security updates, they don't have to test every little piece, right? They can just test the things that have changed, and maybe the touch points around those things. So that should significantly reduce alpha and beta testing time. So what does that mean for major releases? Yeah, so major releases then will be features, new features, performance improvements. We will only do a performance improvement in a minor release if that performance is more of a bug. you just can't get it done. Now this is a stopping point for ministry. Yeah, we might have to put that in a minor release. But we're working on some performance improvements for communications. These are additive, they're really nice, but they do have a little bit of risk to them. we had to move, the more lines of code or where those lines of codes are inside the framework can make it risky or not risky. So we've just deemed this to be somewhat risky. So they're in '19. Good news, because they had a little bit of points that we are finding ourselves. Because we're, , Spark is already running 19. Right, we do eat our own dog food, as And I there's another production instance also who runs our pre alpha, which is 19. So we we're using those performance improvements in in sanding out the the rough edges. Also, major releases then our goal is going to be and this is gonna be really tough. So you're gonna have to have some grace. We wanna have two per year, a spring release and a fall release. That's gonna be hard to get onto that cadence, because design and requirements should be working on version 20 right now, while development is working on 19. Yes. So how do you get to that? we're already behind the eight ball. We're still trying to get 18 out, our whole team is, and we're under resourced right now. we're looking to hire right now some other people. So getting on the cadence is gonna be very hard, because design and requirements should be working on 20, they're not. They're working on the design requirements for 19. So So it takes a little working toward this process. Yeah, the best thing we could do is just not do anything until fall. Ouch. Yeah, that's not going to work because we have some major improvements to connections that we want to get out. It sounds that'll be a great cadence once it's up and running. Yes. Getting there. Gonna be a little bit of a struggle. But we just want to share it and be transparent But to all of it, 'nineteen, we talked about, we'll have some major connection updates. Not done though, connections, we're gonna have a lot of updates in '20 too. So don't feel , Oh, these '19 ones are great, but what about this, this? Yeah, don't worry, twenty's coming too, we'll have more there. So that's gonna be a huge change. I think it's gonna be a very positive change. Again, we're trying to increase quality, and also reduce the amount of effort needed on our alpha and beta testing teams. And speaking of alpha and beta testing teams and what they have to go through, there are a few changes on that front to go along with this as well. Yep, blew up that whole process too. Our first thought was not to do any alpha and beta testing because it'd be a lot easier. Okay, so no features, no testing. Well, we decided, again, we already changed. The features are gonna be there. Just not gonna test them. We're not gonna test Why test them? So quality went from top, because we weren't gonna do any features, to bottom, because now we're doing them and not testing. If Jesus was a programmer, we wouldn't need QA. Amen. Amen. That sounds a bumper sticker. Can we have something about that for the conference next year? I don't know, but since Jesus said we should work together on this, then we're gonna have some problems. So yeah, we completely are changing alpha and beta. And we've been lightly low key, I guess is a new term. Yeah, low We've been low key doing it in '18 without really telling anybody. Just not fully, but low key. So alpha testing. This will be community testing on copies of their production systems. So if you're alpha tester, you're pretty much gonna have to have a copy, be able to clone your production system and run it. You do not want to run this on production. No, absolutely don't do that. But there's quite a few that people who can do that, and some of them can do it fairly easily. Here's the biggest change to alpha. Less emphasis on the speed of getting alpha done. I feel in the past, maybe there's a little bit of a challenge that we wanted to get through this in a specific timeframe. And no, we do want to get through this. We're not gonna be lollygagging. Sure. But it's gonna be driven on when are the tests done? And when have we fixed the findings? So less emphasis on speed, higher emphasis on thorough community testing. So we have these checklists of everything that needs to be tested. We're gonna make sure every one of those checkboxes is checked. And so that's gonna be super important. Also rapid bug fixing. If you're paying attention to the GitHub issues, you probably saw that. We crushed a ton of findings in alpha. I think I have whiplash from watching those bug fixes get reported and fixed. Yeah, and a lot of things in 18 is challenging, because dark mode is in the styling. There's just been a lot of small refactors that are very important. One of those needed to be reported and needed to be addressed. But I don't think quantity on 18 was high because of a lot of those moving pieces. And we saw some beta ones that are coming in now too, which is good. So we're gonna rapidly quash those bug fixes, and we'll have at least two rounds of alpha testing. The first round will be our full initial checklist run list. Subsequent ones, probably at least one, will be just testing what we fixed. Oh, so a retest of the areas where something was found and addressed. And we did that in 18. So, , hay off, testers, test everything. Here's the checklists. Now, we fixed everything you found, can you just test to make sure that the fixes are all fine? Despite having a lot of issues, all fixes were fine. So that was great. , sometimes you fix it, but then regressions happen. Right. I was pretty impressed though that all tests passed. So That's in one swipe. Okay, another thing that's going to be changing, we did not change this yet in 'eighteen, is currently our checklist of all the things that you need to test. We've been using this tool called Process Street, which is a good tool. It's basically a tool that basically just helps you do checklists. We're going to be moving that over to use our LMS tool. Oh, that's exciting. Yeah. Eat your own dog food. Yep. I think it's gonna be way easier for the community to use. And it's also gonna be easier for us to ensure test coverage. How's that? While we're in process tree, there's really no feature in there to say, Hey, did someone check every one of the You kind of have to do it manually. That's a lot. Yeah, that's not. Whereas with the LMS, we can just write some SQL statements and be , bing, done. And once we write that once, it's used in all cases. So I think it's gonna be a really great thing. Plus you can I mean, it's actually a really good use for LMS? So that would be helpful. The other thing that we're gonna do too in the alpha testing area is just make sure that there's more community recognition for the effort. Alpha testers are really heroes. They're in the trenches with us over here. Yep. And they spend a lot of time. And They I mean, they make Rock better, and we wanna make sure that they're recognized for that. So if you're looking to become a Rock star, alpha testing is a guaranteed Rock star creation. Unfortunately, it's behind a need that you have to be able to make a copy of your production instance. But for many of you, that's not a huge deal. And it's not the only path to rockstardom. No, there's lots of them. Okay, so that's our alpha testing. A little slower, very rigorous. Already, the best feedback you can get is when you change something and you don't tell them you changed it, And already in '18, we've gotten feedback, unsolicited feedback that says, Oh, this has been way better than any other that we've ever done, way better. No, that's great. I'm , Yes, that's great. And we don't have all of our changes yet, even in there. So that's reassuring. Okay, so let's talk about beta. Before beta was a little alpha for take two. Beta is not going to be alpha take two. Beta is changing to be a short initial testing period for churches, running that version on the production systems. Don't just make a clone of your system and then run the checklist. we're not even running that checklist. It's , Hey, we've already run the checklist. We spent a lot of rigor in alpha. we were pretty sure this is good. Can you go run it in production? Because there's certain things you just have to run under scale, check-in is one Sure, of real data on different system configurations and So that could be a little scary. But here's what's gonna change, is that churches signing up for beta testing are going to have priority support from Spark. If they find a problem Great. And this is only on the major releases, minor releases are gonna be so quick easy that, I don't think that support is gonna be needed. But when we do these huge major releases, if you run this on your production system, if you have a problem, we will get on your system with you and figure this out. If it's show stopping, if it's a small thing, we still help, but , we're not gonna . That sounds a huge safety net. Yes. So that is going to be a big difference. Now, we don't want to have a 100 beta test churches. we couldn't even do that, but we want to find, a handful of key churches that are willing to take that step. And the other thing that we're gonna change is that people who are willing to do this are gonna receive even more recognition, special recognition to the community for doing this really huge act of service. That's incredible. So if you John, if you had to summarize the difference between alpha and beta in one sentence each, what would you say? The difference between alpha and beta? And beta testing groups as we're going forward. Yeah. So alpha will be the testing. Yes. And beta will be the first one to take the arrow. That's it. Okay. And how many are you looking for in each category? Alpha testing as many as as as wanted. Beta testing, I don't know if I can give you a number, less than 10. And do you currently have churches signed up for Currently have both less of than 10. Yeah, okay. Great. If someone's doing We do this and interested have some, and I think, when I say take an arrow, that's bad marketing, right? I think the alpha testing has already shown that the new changes are, that we're having a higher quality product. Yeah, and it's going through multiple rounds to confirm the things that were found were fixed. And so it's coming to the beta testing team in a different quality level and really looking for validation on a live system with live data that's set up in the way you need That's unique to that church. Because Rock's so configurable. Yeah. I think in the past it might've been , okay, take the era we, , we squinted at it, we think it's fine. Squinted at it. This is gonna be much more , hey, it's been under our microscope, think it's I'm sure you're gonna find some other things. And just in case, if you run into something that's a weekend stopper, we'll we'll back you up. Yeah. And think about the assurance you have of being in that position. that's that's safer than just taking a release. That's exactly what I was thinking, Nick. You're gonna get your issues fixed. Yep. You're gonna be good. You're solid. So it's a huge opportunity. If you wanna get ahead and know how that version's gonna work in your system with the support of the core team, that sounds the way to go. Yeah. That's what I would be doing. I would think more than 10 would be clamoring for that. Yeah. Well, again, we can't take too many, because we want to give them the attention. So we would probably want some of all varying sizes, probably could be have some good small churches, meme searches and large churches. So if you want more information, reach out to our info inbox, or DM one of us in Rocket Chat. I'd say too on the beta, it's running your production, but we'd also wanna make sure you have good technical capabilities at your church. , we can't be the only support , need to make sure that , you can get some of the stuff and then we're behind you if you need us. Okay, and that leads us to the third phase of all this, which is the final release. And so in many cases, major releases will will likely, but not always release at a dot one level. So we're still trying to make that determination with 18. There are some things that we found in beta that they're not major, but we might still do a dot one as a release. We'll know more on in about two days. So when you're saying a dot one release, that's where you would put a lot of the fixes that you found. Because once you When you go from alpha to beta, you can make changes inside that dot zero. But once you go to beta and someone's running it on the production system, you can't you can't Just change the game on them. Right. Because now they're in this weird state. I mean, you could do it. It just get a little messy and we'd prefer not to make it messy. So that's why that one might be needed or desired. And so again, on '18, we've been piloting some of these changes, not all of them, but some of them. And again, the feedback has already been noticed, which is great. That is great. Unsolicited notice means that something is going right. And the goals behind all of this is to improve the quality of the feature set, make minor releases quick and less stressful to the community. But I think the other thing that we're gonna do and go back to is , where we're gonna reduce the yearly effort on the alpha and beta teams. the yearly amount of effort is gonna go down. However, the amount of effort per major release is gonna go up. Twice per year. Right. But right now they've been doing a lot of those major checklists on every dot release, which is , I mean needed, had to be because we have features in there and lots of changes. But the dot releases should be much easier, faster to test. So overall per year, they're gonna spend less hours. But in a lot more of those hours are gonna be in the major releases. So John, what would you recommend for a church that's trying to consider how this might impact their current strategy around when and how to update? What should they be considering, or what might you suggest? Absolutely, every doubt released, they should be thinking, When am I installing this? when is the quickest? I don't do it on a Friday, right? That's crazy. But I'd almost say the next Monday is that you can, get pushed out there. I'd also say that the major releases, you might think, Oh, those are gonna be bigger, so I should push those off. they're also gonna be much more well tested, and much more rigor has been put into those. So they should be even safer to go. I'm constantly surprised by how far behind some churches are. That sounds it could be a security issue. Well, we try to make security go back a few levels. we were pretty gracious on our security. I think bug fixes for sure. we don't bug fix back too far. But a query came in this week about a feature change. And I was , What? That was done so long ago. , what are you talking about? And nope, they just updated. Oh, wow. It was kinda , Woah, , I feel we're almost living in two worlds sometimes. The people who are so far behind, it's , I don't know what world you're in. , we made that decision three years ago. Wow. Now it was released two years ago, because , we make the decision But before it gets it's kind of , where have you been? Well, , we have a release roadmap that's public, and we can put a link to that in our show notes. And it shows you where end of life support is Right. For the versions that are available on Rock. So it's probably a good thing just to keep an eye on and make sure you're staying ahead of. Yeah. And I know it takes time. You have to probably work to test your specific things, maybe have customizations. This is a good reason not to have customizations that are not upgrade proof. And then some people have decided not to be in early access. And then of course they're limited. And I'd say again, there's no reason to be on early access. If you have a financial burden, get a grant. And if you don't have financial burden, we can't build the technology for the church if the church does not step up and help. That's right. You're part of this community and part of the responsibility is keeping it funded. Yeah, and if, , think about this, analogy we use in our organization is we're climbing Mount Everest. we're not very far up. We know where we want to go, and what we want to be able to do, and we're doing well, but we still have a long ways to go. But so we talk about from our team perspective, are you carrying your weight? Think of an adverse expedition, you've got to carry your weight. Someone else can't carry the weight for you. And I think if you're not on early access and you don't have a financial issue, get a grant, then in a sense, you're kind of deadweight to the rest of the community. Not to us necessarily, but to the rest of the community. Because if you were pushing and putting your resources into it, everybody could go further, farther, faster. So in a sense, you're kind of putting bricks in other people's backpacks. And you could say, Well, , am I? Because , what's the diff? , well, you ask questions to the community, and your questions are usually older. So now we're , Wait, what? That happened a long time ago. Right. And so that's an impact to the community. Not even just to us, but just to the community. You're probably potentially turning in issues. Some of those issues are probably in older versions that we're not gonna be able to fix. Too many things have changed since then. So I think there is a way. And sometimes there's two things. There's a deadweight, pulling you back, but there's also the missed opportunity to push. That's it. And you have to consider what if everyone took that stance in the community? Yeah. That's that attitude would kill Rock. Yeah. Mean, there's generosity that the whole thing started by very few churches saying, Hey, we'll step into this. And if they hadn't done that, since we're we're Everything kind of hinges on those. And they stepped in and said, what do you need? They didn't step in and say, what's the minimum amount I can put into this? Exactly. And they also stepped in at a time when it was ghost wear, right? It didn't exist. That's right. It's easier to say, well, there it is. I know what I'm gonna get. That's true. But when it's a dream that is several years off, when you start with no lines of code, it's sometimes , yeah, I've had this conversation with Michael Mullican from Newspring. I'm , man, the level of trust you put in us, I'm not sure I would have put that trust in me. Because he didn't know us back then. Right. I remember the first time we met. ? We've been so blessed by that church. Very much. Yeah. We all have. All churches have been blessed by NewSpring's doings. Just incredible generosity. And it continues to stay. And it's influenced the way that we run things too. the influx of that generosity has made such an impact on us that we in turn want to make sure that what we're doing is always generous as well. And there's a great book by Adam Grant called Give and Take that's on the economics of reciprocity. And that's the way this community works. This isn't a vendor situation. This isn't everyone try to get, get, get. This is when everyone is in this cycle of giving and improving together and working together, amazing things happen. And that's the story of Rock. Well, even in our podcast studio, we have a very old laptop that helps occasionally connect to remote guests. And there's a sticker on it says, Go Giver. And we gave those out at Rx, the second Rx, I think, the one at Bel Air Pres. Don't be a go giver or a go getter, be a go giver. I think that term might have come from that book. I think it did. And also props, if we're talking about newsprint, have to say CCB2 in the We second do. I think what was a little bit unique there though is at least we were in known quantity, right? They knew you well. To Michael, was , don't I mean, you look a nice guy, but I don't know. Yep. There are a lot of aspects in early Rock that were, I think, very obviously placed on the hearts of many different people in different ways by God that have come together in a way that uniquely benefits the church. And if your church is newly coming to Rock, that may not be a story that's familiar to you. And our model is probably very unfamiliar. And if you're not new to Rock and you've been around and tracking with our podcast for a long time and you're engaged in the community, let's help make sure this story doesn't die. Let's make sure the unique aspects of the ministry of Rock and of churches really working together to do something valuable for the world is not lost. And that's that's a responsibility of each of us. And I think at this point, it's not necessarily, , might it die, but what could it do that we may not achieve? I mean, to maybe take the Star Wars analogy, are we just gonna blow up the Death Star? Are we gonna take the whole empire down? And what about the speed at which technology is moving in general? Right? Not just the church space, but in general, what's possible in technology. Rock needs to be moving at the same pace. And it needs to be a well funded model to do that. Yeah. I just think of what we could be doing. Yep. And sometimes this brings anxiety because you're , we could be doing so much more, and we need to do so much more, and what's coming is so much different. we talked about the conference, what's coming in AI and the changes that we're gonna see is if you're not prepping for that, it's gonna be a rough ride. That's right. And if you intended to watch that keynote and haven't yet, or intended to forward that on to someone that should watch it and haven't done that yet, this is a great reminder to do that. Yeah. I'd say both the first two keynotes. one is very non Rock, but here's what's coming, here's what we need to prepare for, and the second one is, okay, here's what we're doing in Rock version 18. Both would be Important. So here's your reminder, if that's on your slightly has fallen down your to do list. Wow. We covered a lot of topics today and kinda gave you a peek behind the scenes of some of the processes and things that happen here to bring to life the versions and features that you see coming into your system on a regular basis, just know you're incredibly important as a part of this community. Your impact is is within your own hands. You can do something bigger than yourself here, whether that's through funding, whether that's through testing opportunities, and many other ways to get involved in the community. This is the place for you, and we value your input and your impact. Thank you so much for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you can continue to hear from us in the future and get more interesting updates on Rock. We appreciate this community and really value your listening to the podcast and the ideas and information you share back with us as a result. Thank you, and we will have a wonderful time connecting on our next podcast.