Tech Forum

I'm new, looking for an efficiency.

We have created emergency preparedness zones within our ward. These are geographical zones which were created with the intention of aggregating information locally and then passing it along to the ward leadership in the event usual lines of communication are down.

We've found it difficult to keep the zones current with the frequent ins and outs of the ward. Google earth was used to create the zones and plot the members. What I would like to do is create a macro that will compare the csv of today's ward list with the csv of last month's ward roster. All the additions and the deletions will fall out to separate tabs within my excel file and I'll have my lists for making changes in my google earth files.

Before I put the time into this, I'm wondering if anyone else has put this together? I definitely have other things I'd rather do, but this will be a very useful tool for our ward and so I will build it if it doesn't already exist.

MLS has a move-ins/move-outs report that you can print to get that information.

ryan jones wrote:MLS has a move-ins/move-outs report that you can print to get that information.

Is there a way to catch changes in address for moves within the ward?

RussellHltn wrote:Is there a way to catch changes in address for moves within the ward?

I don't think it showed that. I think the report only showed records that had been moved into or out of the unit.

This is from my experience a few years ago in my calling, not from my work as an employee.

WA LDS Hack wrote:I'm new, looking for an efficiency.

We have created emergency preparedness zones within our ward. These are geographical zones which were created with the intention of aggregating information locally and then passing it along to the ward leadership in the event usual lines of communication are down.

We've found it difficult to keep the zones current with the frequent ins and outs of the ward. Google earth was used to create the zones and plot the members. What I would like to do is create a macro that will compare the csv of today's ward list with the csv of last month's ward roster. All the additions and the deletions will fall out to separate tabs within my excel file and I'll have my lists for making changes in my google earth files.

Before I put the time into this, I'm wondering if anyone else has put this together? I definitely have other things I'd rather do, but this will be a very useful tool for our ward and so I will build it if it doesn't already exist.

How important is it for you to know that an address has changed? Would it be sufficient just to plot the changes?

Which also makes me wonder how you're plotting addresses? Are you doing it manually?

WA LDS Hack wrote:Before I put the time into this, I'm wondering if anyone else has put this together?

You might want to do a search for boomerbubba's posts. He hasn't been as active as he was in the past, but he's put together things such as being able to plot addresses and working with GIS software that can determine who lives within a defined boundary. It's all quite complex, but it works from a fresh ward list each time.

The problem with syncing just changes, is if a change fails to get noticed, then it may be a long time before the discrepancy between the two lists is found.

RussellHltn wrote:You might want to do a search for boomerbubba's posts. He hasn't been as active as he was in the past, but he's put together things such as being able to plot addresses and working with GIS software that can determine who lives within a defined boundary. It's all quite complex, but it works from a fresh ward list each time.

I'm still here

What I would suggest today is that the original poster should look toward building a process around the ward mapping being developed at beta-maps.lds.org. It is not perfected yet, and still a beta, but it is the direction the Church wants to take geocoding. I believe that emergency preparedness is a primary driver for the project. There is an export function available to ward leaders and clerks, but you would be on your own for scripting that to feed KML to Google Earth. (This does presuppose that the clerks do the work to geocode the members by a process that is ultimately manual.) Functionality to group geocoded households into zones does not yet exist in that project, however.

Meanwhile, as far as the task of coding addresses by zones, see HPaulsen's WardMap program. It relies on the Geo Code columns in MLS, which you might use to define your zones.

As for the narrow problem of identifying changes in the ward roster, if it were me I would choose a relational tool rather than Excel for the before-and-after comparisons. (I do have a bit of a relational bias, but if you are at all SQL-handy these problems are more elegantly solved in databases than spreadsheets.) As source data, I recommend the Membership.csv export file, or a sanitized derivative, because it includes unique ID fields for members and households. That way with a few joins you can readily build different queries to detect new records, deleted records and changed records.

boomerbubba wrote:I'm still here
What I would suggest today is that the original poster should look toward building a process around the ward mapping being developed at beta-maps.lds.org. It is not perfected yet, and still a beta, but it is the direction the Church wants to take geocoding. I believe that emergency preparedness is a primary driver for the project.

I echo "boomerbubba" that the beta mapping project could become what you need. They have categories that a user can enter such as "special needs" and "emergency response leader." However, as Boomerbubba mentioned, a big limiting factor is an inabilty for a ward to develop "zones." Perhaps this is in the works?

In my opinion, your efforts to work with a csv and continually update it is heroic, but will be unsustainable. I say this from our efforts to do a similar thing with fast offering routes. (I see great potential in the future with beta-maps.lds.org, when you can begin to enter "user definable" zones- for emergency zones, for fast offering maps, for food drive collections, etc.)

Have you investigated making a "user-defined" category in MLS? I've heard some use this for fast offering routes.

Thanks for the suggestions. After leaving the original post, I stumbled across the beta-maps project and had high hopes that our problem would be solved. It may not be there yet, but I think with some added functionality, it will be a great tool. There is something known as a 'group' within the beta-maps, but it appears that it applies to multiple records at one address and is not something that can be customized or used to create zones.

One of the problems I bump up against is getting to the computer at the church to pull information out of MLS. I'm new here, but I'm assuming that's how you're suggesting we get the information from MLS (exporting to a USB drive), yes? Our ward computer is always occupied...

I'll take some time to try HPaulson's ward map program. that looks promising.

I know SQL about as well as I know reformed Egyptian, so I'll keep plugging away using other methods. (I'm an accountant, so I know my way around excel, thus the reason for the original entry).

Thanks again-

WA LDS Hack wrote:One of the problems I bump up against is getting to the computer at the church to pull information out of MLS. I'm new here, but I'm assuming that's how you're suggesting we get the information from MLS (exporting to a USB drive), yes? Our ward computer is always occupied...

Some solutions can use a feed from LUWS, but I think that's going to miss anyone who has desired to be hidden from the ward website.

For MLS, you'll need a MLS login with admin rights to get the export.