It can be difficult to tell people what my typical day looks like. This video is meant to clarify this some for people. Admittedly, we crammed a lot into my day. The video captures some of the highlights of a few different days over the course of a week. Missionary visits, website work, fixing copiers and answering various missionary questions through the use of email, skype, bomgar and face to face pretty well sums up the majority of my tasks in a day.

Rachel did a great job photographing the stair sequences and some other things. We hope you enjoy it.

A Day in the Life of Josiah from Josiah Ritchie on Vimeo.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the discipline in website maintenance that handles how you look to search engines. It is important because it directly translates to where you show up in a search engine when a person searches for something your site offers.

We had a warm welcome by the Church of the Open Door Youth Group yesterday. I almost felt like I was at home as words like python, iMovie and Ubuntu were used. :-) The fashionable MacBook Pro also drew some attention. The FIM Idiom Skit went over quite well. Pastor Brett jumped trustingly into the role of an American Pastor in a foreign country. The translator (me) had to figure out what these strange phrases like "tickled pink" meant in order to translate them. We eventually determined that Brett had a rash all over his body.

I've been meaning to blog about this for a couple weeks now. I think I have just enough time between things that I can't accomplish other items on my plate effectively, but can accomplish this, so here goes!

The first thing you should know, Centrallix has the potential to replace the thousands of dollars that any one mission agency spends today on management software. In many ways, the continued success of this project is an issue of financial stewardship within the Christian community at large. Yeah, that's a huge statement. The continued success of this software, meaning involvement among the Christian IT community, will save millions of dollars. This software is being positioned to replace software that has, in some larger organizations, cost over $1 million dollars. How I wish that $1 million from just one of these orgs had been put into an open source project so that all mission agencies could benefit and I know many other mission IT guys feel the same.

What Is Centrallix Really?

I'm not sure I clearly understand how to answer this question, but I'm going to give it a shot. Perhaps some others will chime in and correct or clarify for me.

Centrallix made the long-awaited release of their software to 0.9.0, skipping over the 0.8 series entirely. This is the first release in a couple years. I've been getting to know the developers of the software and am impressed with the thoughtful, prayerful and patient way they've been working on the project despite some set backs in resources.

Centrallix' "goal ... is to be a platform for applications for the missions & nonprofit context, catering to the distinctions that these types of organizations have." It is not an application itself, but the foundational parts of other applications. Kardia is the only application running on it now, but there is wide potential for more. Centrallix is the package that only the geeks in a non-profit would see or care to understand. Centrallix is a database abstraction layer, a reporting platform, UI builder and really the glue to many potentially exciting things. However, it needs apps like Kardia to be built on top of it.

Centrallix has been using DHTML/AJAX technology for the last 10 years, long before AJAX was given such a spiffy name. It has been around long enough to have screenshots that include the old Netscape Navigator browser. (remember that?) It uses this technology to build applications that run inside a browser, but it also provides a database abstraction layer. Any potential storage method (file systems, CSV files, databases, email and more) can have a driver built for it and become the means of storing data in the back end of Centrallix. Because of this flexibility and other intentional development, Centrallix becomes a powerful and flexible reporting platform, potentially pulling data together from anywhere to present in a single report.

It is fully open source, developed on sourceforge which include the typical mailing lists and other community development tools, as difficult as they may be at times to use effectively. I'm sure the developers would be wide-open to the idea of patches and other interested developers.

Who is Responsible for Centrallix?

The main developers work for LightSys, an organization focused on supporting missions in the area of technology. Those who know me won't be surprised that I have a certain significant bond with these guys. I guess we have the same perspective on the world. I've been most privileged to join them in their prayer meetings that span the country via the use of TeamSpeak.

Taylor University has also supported the development through internships given to students students on several occasions. The developers include Taylor graduates as well. Taylor is also sponsoring the ICCM conference and is considered to be a hot point for the union of Christian cross-cultural missions and IT. In fact, Taylor's IT guys have a website dedicated to Missions Computing.

What Makes Centrallix Weak?

Weaknesses are opportunities to support this project.

Centrallix' chief weakness is the lack of community around it. This results in slow development and defuses passion among the community. I hope (and pray) that Centrallix will attract the attention of competent developers who see and are excited about the potential of Centrallix so that it can be infused with activity and resulting applications.

This project could benefit from the infusion of funds. Although I haven't heard this from LightSys and wouldn't consider it a weakness, it is a common element of open source to fund further development. The gift of funds to a project means helping someone who is skilled in development to focus his time on advancing the goals of Centrallix. If the funds were available for one new developer to spend a month in further development of Centrallix, we would undoubtedly see many benefits.

This community connection problem is aggravated by a significant learning curve. Centrallix is unique in all its ways and requires some real digging to understand. Consequently, Centrallix needs documentation to help smooth that learning curve out some. My time is too limited to make a large dent in this any time soon. I'm also looking at creating .deb packages for Debian and Ubuntu to go along with the RPMs available. This should help increase the availability of Centrallix.

Centrallix has only one real application at this point, Kardia, and this application becomes the visual face of Centrallix. It is a good example, as best I can tell, of what Centrallix can do, but it doesn't reflect the flexibility and potential behind Centrallix to interact between itself and other applications. Developers will need to be motivated some how to dig into the code to see what flexibility is available.

Conclusion

Centrallix has already shown it has the staying power to wait until the non-profit community gets the picture and become excited about its potential. Until then, it will creep onward toward providing a strong solution for the future, but for each moment this or some similar project is not in place at a mission agency, they are paying significant amounts of money to its replacement. The Christian community needs to see projects like this as an opportunity in fiscal stewardship. How can you become a part of this project?

Here's a quick glimpse into the offices of FIM. Our General Director, Steve Wilt, gave me a Dilbert comic in which he likened himself to Dilbert's PHB. I thought you guys might enjoy the laugh so I'll quote it...

PHB: Did you make those changes I asked for?
Dilbert: That depends. Do you remember what you asked me to change?
PHB: No.
Dilbert: Yup. I made the changes.

Steve told me that often when I email him my completion of a request, he's already forgotten what the request was. :-) Anyone know where I can get a tie that points at the ceiling?

I've been given the green light to make plans for ICCM. I'm excited about the opportunity to meet a number of people with passions similar to mine. We'll get together, talk about computers, missions and learn much from each other. The conference is reported to be a great social event; that is, if you can believe that a bunch of introverted geeks can get together and be "social". :-) It is being held at Taylor University, about an hour and a half outside Indianapolis.

I'm looking forward to meeting a number of people I've only seen by email. I'd also like to bring a few friends with me. Consider this YOUR invitation. The expense is extremely reasonable. I'm making the entire trip, flight, conference and food for ~$600. If money is really an issue, there are opportunities for scholarships. You can check out more about the conference at their website or just call, email, IM, jaiku, twitter or whatever and I'll answer questions also.

I woke out of bed about a month ago and got up to start scribbling notes, much to the confusion of my wife who asked several times "What are you doing?". Apparently I never did give her a good answer because she asked the same thing the next morning. :-)

The Dream

I have a dream, or vision if you prefer, of a website where our missionaries can gather and discuss their ministries, encourage, edify and generally benefit from each other. I've spent a lot of time in the last year going over the ideas in my head about how it would look, what way to get it ramped up, how it would affect the FIM culture, what would draw people to the site and about every angle I can think of. I've also spent a lot of time listening to various Geeks and God drupal episodes as well as many Lullabot Podcast episodes to understand how good drupaly minds think. Drupal is my tool of choice for this.

I've come to the conclusion that one of the hardest elements of developing this new community is the first one that must be tackled.

I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I expressed concern over MPower developing a closed community in a previous analysis of the MPower strategy. When I spoke with the VP on the phone before, he mentioned that this is something that had been discussed within the organization and MPower's decision was that they had decided to close it and I was disappointed. I said...

An interesting development in Google Apps makes it trivial to put a little box on the website allowing people to chat with me when I'm logged in. I'm going to try it out for awhile and see if it proves of any great interest. I'd like to be able to style it a bit more. The blue of the chat doesn't mix that well with the rest of the design here. I'd also like to shrink the width just a bit. In any case, on select pages of the site you'll see a box like this...

I just got off the phone with a VP at MPower. I wrote them an email after hearing the news that they've done something that no one else in the industry has had the guts to do yet. They've "open sourced" their fund raising software called MPX. I say it is a gutsy move because it requires a drastically new approach to almost everything they do, but it appears they have managed to convince the VP level, at least, that this is a good idea and I agree. I had some reservations with their exact implementation, but overall I'm excited to see the move. The real name of their game is flexibility. They recognize that in order to succeed in this business where each org has very different needs, they must be infinitely flexible. Open source ideals bring them this flexibility like nothing else can.

For those not associated with open source, it is basically the idea that a community of people who need software can do a better job of solving problems then each individual on their own. (That's really basic, but will suffice for now.)