Hello all,

I have a few ideas, and maybe these fall outside of the current scope of the project, but I think they should be considered.

The church, for centuries has played the role of a social network for communities and countries, helping peopler make contact with other people who can help them that they may never have met otherwise.  In the modern church, one equipped with software and computers, you would imagine that the single greatest tool to a church would be social-networking and event planning software.

Personally, I have been pampered by the solution offered in Apple’s OS X for about a year now, but there is nothing that Apple has produced that doesn’t already currently exist in the open-source world, all it needs is to be configured to operate and integrate to the same extent to be as useful.

The three main parts to this software suite would be an Address Book, a Calendar application, and an Email client.

With the Address book, you could not only maintain information for a great number of people without relying on print directories.  You could also add and change job positions and titles for the people for further sorting later, as well as their contact information.

With the Calendar Application you could schedule events in multiple ‘layers’ sorted by which ongoing events happen, perhaps more than once a week, and easily sort event based on type.  There could be alarms set that would allow you to automatically have something happen, as well as output to print for wall-mounting or distribution, people added from the address book as attendees, and maybe an out-put to online as well for viewing on the church website.

The Final crucial piece of software is an Email client that is configured to talk to both of the previous apps in a smart and searchable way.


Here are a few of the applications that show how such a configuration could benefit or provide a measurable advantage over current software configurations.


To create a new Board Meeting:

Go into the Calendar and create a new Board Meeting event at the time and date.  Add all contacts tagged with ‘Board Member’ as attendees.  Set alarm for the event to send out an email to all contact tagged with ‘Board Member’ the day before with the following message: “Don’t forget the board meeting at (time), (day), the topics we will be covering will be topic1, topic2, topic3.  Hope to see you there!”


To send out a letter to all Sunday School Teachers:

Go into the mail program and in the ‘to:’ field type in ‘Sunday School Teachers’ and it will automatically add all contacts tagged with Sunday School Teacher in the address book, so you don’t have to manually add them and risk forgetting somebody, or maintain separate lists of your contacts and diligently maintain the lists.

Find all events to which one contact is attending:

Go into the Calendar app, and type in the contact’s name in the search field, only those event to which the contact is invited will display.  This output can be saved, printed or otherwise emailed to the individual, along with the information and times of the events.



So what does this software allow you to do that’s that much better than the current solutions?

It’s dead simple, with one weekly event, to automatically find all congregation members, send them each a detailed list of this week’s involvements in their email, and it takes the same amount of time if you have 20 contacts, or 20,000.  Imagine doing 20,000 manually!

It’s easy to print out Calendars that only deal with one schedule or one event, or for families who are involved in multiple recurring events, to print out only their family’s involvements and leave the seniors brunches off of their family calendar.

To easily share contact information to those who need it by simply typing the individual’s name.