Government Certifications in an API

[ryuunohono]

Hi Everyone,

I am an assistant stake clerk and part of my work is making sure everyone has the the correct government certification up to date. I have been looking at automating notifications or emails to the ward/branch clerks if they give someone a calling that requires the certification and they don't have it. Currently this information is not easily accessible in LCR without significant manual effort. I have some software knowledge so I have been looking at the available API endpoints but haven't found anything which makes government certification information available. The other thing I would be interested in automating is notifying people if they need to complete the Protecting Children and Youth training. I could potentially scrape the data but it isn't my first preference.

If anybody has any helpful suggestions I would be grateful.

Regards,
Christian

[russellhltn]

Looking at Feature Access by Calling, "Stake Assistant Clerk" has the ability to "Create Reports" which I assume means what we typically call custom reports. However, "Stake Assistant Clerk -- Membership" does not. I'd think a custom report would be your best chance at easing the retrieving of information from LCR. Due to the liability of personal information, most methods of exporting data have been removed from LCR. There are no APIs for members or third parties. Attempts to reverse engineer LCR is likely to get a phone call from church security.

Since it sounds like LCR does support the recording of government certifications, you could submit feedback asking for the report as a standard report. It might even be added before you're released from the calling.

I do wonder how tracking this has fallen on the stake. I don't think there's anything in the Handbook about it, so I can't look it up. I can understand the job of monitoring for compliance, but I'm surprised if the stake has the lead on this. That may simplify your role to printing out a report and passing it to the stake president to chew on the wards that fall behind.

[BrianEdwards]

From your post, I couldn't quite determine if this was solely a concern when issuing callings, or also during the lifetime of a calling. You mentioned both "up-to-date" certifications, and also ensuring people being called having certification. I would be (pleasantly) surprised if LCR had the ability to register when a certification becomes out-of-date, and then flag that expiration as part of a report. The Protecting Children and Youth is internal to the Church so it can be accounted for natively in the programming. But perhaps this "custom capability" was embedded in the functionality, to account for different expiration timelines for different national/state/local certifications. We never have to worry about this, so it's unknown to me.

[Biggles]

In the UK there is a specific page, in LCR, under Membership/Supporting Youth - Government Certifications which lists the expiry dates of each member with a certificate.

[ryuunohono]

Thanks for your comments, I thought I should answer your questions and provide more information.

1. This is in Australia. The church has (presumably hired) two people who make and distribute reports for the whole country which identify any members in callings that interact with children and youth who don't have the appropriate government certification. This is forwarded to me and I then forward it to the Wards and continue to follow up until it is resolved.
2. The reason for all the layers is because non-compliance can result in harsh penalties.
2. As was correctly surmised this is primarily a Ward/Branch responsibility. My role is as a middle-man of sorts. That is why I think it should be possible to automate my role.
3. Government certification information is retained in LCR. It is not available in the "Create a Report" function. The church hosted protecting children and youth training information is also not available in the "Create a Report" function.
4. The problem with grabbing the information from LCR is that it is not well represented. It shows all historical expired certifications for Auditing reasons so you cannot just filter by expired certifications.
5. I also think that the information is not retained in LCR the same as other records as it is likely different for different countries/regions.

In response to your comments russellhltn
The information is available, it is just the same info you get from LCR in a structure which makes it easy to use for programming. As you identified it isn't really an API but still useful. If you aren't familiar with this you can use the below link while signed in to get an idea of the information available. Just add your unit number and you can see all the callings in your unit.
https://lcr.churchofjesuschrist.org/api ... mber={unit}

Unfortunately I couldn't find anything similar which had government certification info.

[caillines]

Another voice from Australia here. The weekly email report from Brother R is critical.

Stake callings don't show up on the "Government Certifications" report in LCR. The members do if they have one, but their calling isn't. (At least in my state, there are several stake callings that require government certification). So if a member in a stake calling doesn't have a government certification, there is no way for us to check without manually going through every person.

[russellhltn]

You're going to have to escalate this to your area office. No one here is a decision maker for those kinds of things.

[caillines]

You're going to have to escalate this to your area office. No one here is a decision maker for those kinds of things.

Interestingly enough, almost a year ago (Feb 2024), the local A70 exec sec and I were chatting about this and he asked me to forward him some info. It got passed on to him and the Area child protection people, and from there was going to be sent to Area proper and Salt lake.

Given it's been nearly a year, I'm not expecting any changes to be forthcoming.

Just another frustrating part of LCR that we all (including the devs in admin type positions) need to deal with.