OneBody

@seven1m a few q's - 1) what are the biggest problems churches face? how do you solve them? 2) is this a for-profit? how do you monetize?

@eriktorenberg 1) communication among members and groups. Especially medium to large size churches people get lost in the hugeness -- helping people connect in a home group or small group is important. 2) We're completely open source and it's just me right now. I have a full time job I love, so no need to monetize OneBody. It's just my passion!

@seven1m Great work! How do you see this interfacing with existing church management softwares? Does this augment them or replace them?

@lay2000lbs We have a separate Ruby app called "UpdateAgent" that syncs with external data. At our church, we do an export from ACS (our church management software) to a Comma Separated Values file, then run UpdateAgent to sync that data with OneBody. It is one-way only, though, so no automatic updating back to ACS (by design). Instead, any profile updates are sent to a pending queue where church staff can enter the info back into ACS. Some churches will want to integrate with their existing ChMS, and I hope they will, but it can be a pain in the neck and require a big commitment of time and dev energy. That's why we also offer simple import/export via CSV on the site itself, and have UI for adding people manually on the site too. As for replacing a traditional ChMS, OneBody isn't even close to that, unless you're a fairly small church and willing to be creative :-)

@seven1m Thanks for the insight Tim (sorry for the late response)! I think there's a big need OneBody is filling for a digital church extension / social space. I'm looking forward to seeing it continue to grow. Seems more ChMS integrations are going to be a big part of your growth path. I could see a point where attenders are only integrating with your software which is acting as a user friendly front-end to the church-admin friendly ChMS system.