johnshaw wrote:
Steve, we can't trust that members of the church will contain themselves when 'reporting' on their neighbors. The problems area round a private institution collecting data that could be private and protected, from a legal perspective.
Laws come into play about storage and discovery in these cases the church would just rather avoid. Think about the prospect of someone reporting online that Bro. Smith continues to beat is wife, etc.. It's just TOOOOO dangerous. It'll never happen
Oops, I just barely saw this. I understand the problems in having some kind of online reporting where information about families is being stored. I agree that online reporting that involves storing detailed information about families is probably not the best thing to do.
However, I want to be clear that I am NOT requesting a feature where
text would be recorded,
just a simple checkbox or button that indicates that a visit was made. This is already available in MLS, but it is done manually by a leader. All I am suggesting is extending this feature to maybe at least the senior companion so he could report that a visit was made though the system.
Sample implementation
The way this could work is a home/visiting teacher could log into their account or pull up LDS Tools, click on Home/Visiting Teaching and view a tab where they could see both the home and visiting teachers assigned to their household as well as the home and visiting teachers that they are assigned to (This might be helpful for husbands who might not know who their spouse's visiting teachers are since they only visit the women while the home teachers visit the family). On the assigned families page there could be a simple "report visit" button, when clicked, a date is entered for the visit and the system records it (like I mentioned earlier, we are already recording this information). Leaderships could still hold interviews, as they currently do, to understand the specific needs of each family.
This way, home teachers could report their visits immediately and conveniently. Certainly a home teacher could simply lie about visiting a family, but they could just as easily lie by emailing their district supervisor. If we are trusting the well-being of families with these home teachers, couldn't we likewise trust them to push a button indicating they made a visit? I would assume that lying home teachers would be less of a concern than honest home teachers NOT reporting at all because they can't remember who they need to report to (which is
very common from my experience).
In the mean time, I guess we'll keep using ReturnReport.com