Open Source the platform?

[Samuel_Loy]

In this week's staff meeting, to explain why we weren't getting accurate attendance data, I mentioned the e-mail that was sent out about how in 2017 the open church platform grew in usage larger than it could sustain. Our Pastor suggested that maybe in order to be able to continue to improve the platform without having to worry about the size of the platform, that maybe a model like Wordpress could be implemented. Where individual tech savvy churches could download the source and host their own church online page. Not every church would do this or would have to do this, but larger and more tech savvy churches surely could, I know ours probably would. This would take some of the pressure off of life.church, and would allow considerable growth with out much greater overhead.

[phill_tran]

I think that is a great idea!

[Tim_Nolte]

I would start by putting out the platform code on public GitHub repositories. At that point you can begin setting things up for community contributions and public releases for download.

[Bradley_Miller]

Putting my programming/hosting hat on for a minute here, it would be extremely challenging to do something like the church online platform as a stand alone plug in for a site. Even if the basics of just dropping in files were handled, you are not allowing for growth with load balanced multi-geographic diverse sites. You also would need stable content delivery networks that would be able to withstand things like denial of service attacks. You would then have the church online experience being represented by the widest range of hosting systems, from "we have $10 month to do this" to actual services that would be capable of doing the site. If the issues that are. happening now were split up across hundreds of individuals hosting it it wouldn't solve the problem.- it would just change the rate at which it happened. If your site went from 10 views a month to 10K views, you might hit the same problem and have zero resources to fix it.

TLDR; - They have found the issues because of greater weekly usage (Praise God!) and have found solutions to help alleviate downtime and issues.

[Curtis_Fonger]

+1 to making the platform open source and putting it on GitHub! For our church, we have some volunteer software dev capacity so having access to the source would allow us to give back by contributing features.