Reliable access to ward coordinate data for Church charity project
Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2022 8:15 am
Hi all,
I developed a software system that is used in Calgary, Alberta for a significant annual food drive effort that is run by the Church. It's big. We have an entry in the Guiness Book of World Records for the most food collected. This system allows food donors to call a number if their food hasn't been picked up by the right time. We listen to the voicemail, look up the ward that the address is in, and dispatch a volunteer driver from the ward to pick up the food. Some years we get over 1500 calls in a Saturday afternoon.
We have call centre volunteers who listen to a sound file from the voicemail. They enter in the address and click a button that automatically assigns a pickup to the ward based on the address. A driver for that ward sees the pickup and goes and gets the food. We do this ourselves in our own system for two reasons: 1. we handle a very large call volume and it's very fast to have this feature available right when they create the food pickup. 2. I'm very nervous that if we use the church's "Find a Meetinghouse" functionality, we might eventually get flagged as being malicious because of all the volume coming from a single IP.
Every year I ask a local ward clerk for ward boundary files for the city. He logs in to the CDOL system and gives me a file for each stake. The file has ward boundary information in KMZ/KML format that I import into our system so we can dispatch the correct driver for that ward. We've been doing this for a few years now. Previously, we relied on the meetinghouse locator.
The problem is that this year the files were no longer available in CDOL. The ward clerk who helps me contacted someone in Salt Lake who was able to find the right file, but the format is totally different. I made it work this year, but I'm curious if anyone here works in the Church's GIS department or maybe has some insight. I'd love to partner with someone at Church HQ who can help me stabilize this. This is an extremely valuable effort, but I'm getting burned out of having to adapt year after year to get the data.
Does anyone know how to contact someone who can help me? Do I go through local leaders? If so, who? Area Authorities? I can talk to the stake president, but who should he ask? Is there a contact in Salt Lake who can help me streamline this?
Ideally our effort becomes recognized by the church so that we can get "official" access to this data. My fantasy scenario would be a GraphQL or REST endpoint that we can use, but I'd be very happy just to get in contact with someone who can talk to me about this and potentially help.
Thank you very much!
I developed a software system that is used in Calgary, Alberta for a significant annual food drive effort that is run by the Church. It's big. We have an entry in the Guiness Book of World Records for the most food collected. This system allows food donors to call a number if their food hasn't been picked up by the right time. We listen to the voicemail, look up the ward that the address is in, and dispatch a volunteer driver from the ward to pick up the food. Some years we get over 1500 calls in a Saturday afternoon.
We have call centre volunteers who listen to a sound file from the voicemail. They enter in the address and click a button that automatically assigns a pickup to the ward based on the address. A driver for that ward sees the pickup and goes and gets the food. We do this ourselves in our own system for two reasons: 1. we handle a very large call volume and it's very fast to have this feature available right when they create the food pickup. 2. I'm very nervous that if we use the church's "Find a Meetinghouse" functionality, we might eventually get flagged as being malicious because of all the volume coming from a single IP.
Every year I ask a local ward clerk for ward boundary files for the city. He logs in to the CDOL system and gives me a file for each stake. The file has ward boundary information in KMZ/KML format that I import into our system so we can dispatch the correct driver for that ward. We've been doing this for a few years now. Previously, we relied on the meetinghouse locator.
The problem is that this year the files were no longer available in CDOL. The ward clerk who helps me contacted someone in Salt Lake who was able to find the right file, but the format is totally different. I made it work this year, but I'm curious if anyone here works in the Church's GIS department or maybe has some insight. I'd love to partner with someone at Church HQ who can help me stabilize this. This is an extremely valuable effort, but I'm getting burned out of having to adapt year after year to get the data.
Does anyone know how to contact someone who can help me? Do I go through local leaders? If so, who? Area Authorities? I can talk to the stake president, but who should he ask? Is there a contact in Salt Lake who can help me streamline this?
Ideally our effort becomes recognized by the church so that we can get "official" access to this data. My fantasy scenario would be a GraphQL or REST endpoint that we can use, but I'd be very happy just to get in contact with someone who can talk to me about this and potentially help.
Thank you very much!