(Response to the original post was rapid and filled the posting limit quickly,* so here it is again. Further input welcome):
_____


I was recently approached by a member and employee of the Mormon Church who informed me that they had “a couple of interesting stats” that they were willing to share with me.

In response, I requested some confirming I.D. (this person’s identity will remain confidential for obvious reasons). I then asked the informant if they wished that the data be posted on RfM. The informant said that I would be “welcome to do that.” The informant then sent me the information and told me that I could refer on this site to the informant as "an insider who writes for TSCC [The So-Called Church].”

The information relayed to me included the following:

--The Mormon Church is providing assistance to its “assets” manager in tasking for quality assurance—i.e., data automatically collected on Church assets is in need of cleaning, scrubbing and formatting in order to verify that vendors are in Mormon Church-specified compliance.

--The assets involve 30,000 workstations that are presently being tracked by the Mormon Church.

--The Mormon Church expects these workstation assets to increase in number to 70,000, and to include 4,000 servers and 5,000,000 individual licenses.

The informant urged me to “read between the lines” when reviewing this information. In response, I asked the informant for their interpretation of the information and was given the following assessment:

“It is my understanding that TSCC will grant licenses to members to access TSCC's database. Why the hierarchy feels the need to issue licenses to members is bewildering. Personally, it continues to shelter more of secret society and a possible attempt to make members feel more secure withing their own, cult-subscribed world.

“More importantly, and granted that the majority of members in undeveloped countries don't have access to computers, note that the projection of only 5 million licenses, as opposed to 14 million members, gives reason to believe that TSCC's active membership is only 1/3 of the total membership which coincides with what RfMers have been noting. And again, this is a projection and possibly a lofty one as I think TSCC is on the decline.

“Honesty and integrity appears to be out the door: Requesting members to serve ‘missions’ in lieu of actually paying members, some of whom I am sure could use the money, for their computer, accounting, etc. skills and requiring them to volunteer 20 to 40 hours per week at home (as 'assets') leaves me to question whether these requests are both ethically and morally right. But, they are hopeful!

“Apparently, the data that has been collected by TSCC has a quality issue. Considering the duplication mess specifically within the temple records, I do not doubt that it has.“

******************


--*for the original post along with responses, see:

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,467611

--*see also:

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,468066,468066#msg-468066

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,468228



Edited 10 time(s). Last edit at 04/07/2012 10:22PM by steve benson.

I'm still mulling over what all of this means. At a minimum, the church is acknowledging that active membership is below 5 million (most likely in the 3-4 million range that we have previously estimated.)

A license implies to me that the Mormon church wants to install some sort of software on members' computers. Otherwise, why not just call it a login? It remains to be seen what the church intends to do with this project. I would be suspicious of any software that the church would want individual members to install.

This one will probably be with Intellectual Reserve, Inc. ... or maybe they'll create a new one.

It could be monitoring software to both watch what members view and read online, for discipline, and marketing.

Thanks for posting this, Steve.

Still "reading between the lines" on this one. Keep us posted!

Also, couldn't a TBM (or TBM family) just buy a cheapo laptop dedicated to TSCC crapola and continue to use their personal computer as they wish, i.e. viewing RfM?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/07/2012 11:35PM by FreeRose.

to me it just sounds like another extension of the "every member a janitor" idea. The church needs help "scrubbing" their databases. Hiring more people to "help" them costs the church money. So hey, let's ask the members to pitch in for free! We'll give them the software and they "volunteer" their time. I don't think it's initially intended to be spyware or a netnanny for member computers...but I can see it going there someday as more people get involved. So maybe as an extra option the church creates a special search engine for the "volunteer" members to use while they "scrub." And said search engine just happens to record everything the member looks up etc..just my opinion but that's my best guess as to what this is all about and where it's possibly headed in the future. "every member a janitor AND church IT specialist" woo-hoo!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/07/2012 05:44PM by Tupperwhere.

anyone can scrub a toilet, but if you have data that is actually important, no way would you entrust "scrubbing" it to some senior missionaries. (no ageism intended)

and if it is just something that needs computational resources, then it will happen anyway.

and 5M potential users. that says just one thing to me.

that they want the entire flock grazing on their internets and no where else.

pay no attention to the green field yon side of the fence. It's green here, I tell you.

if you can't control what's on the internets, then you control their access to the internets.

you will soon reach me at my new email address

scooter@tsccmail.con

But here is what *I* would get from the following:

"The assets involve 30,000 work stations that are presently being tracked by the Mormon Church."

That many workstations would normally be tracked by automated software, such as Salt Lake's own Landesk and literally hundreds of others.

"The Mormon Church expects these work station assets to increase in number to 70,000, and to include 4,000 servers and 5,000,000 individual licenses."

Software is licensed, so the 5 million could be the number of COTS (Commercial, Off-The-Shelf) software that LD$, Inc. expects to have on its computers.

Granted, all the licensing information provided could be for licensing members but it sounded to me like it was just a huge number of licenses for COTS software.

I could be wrong because I'm trying to read between the lines here, but I hope it's something other than what I just came up with and includes MormonAdware, porn monitors and other forms of making Mormons more enslaved to their cult.

(Preface: I'm an ex-church IT employee who quit just over a year ago.)

I don't know if some of that was jumbled in translation or what, but I'm having a hard time parsing some of that, and can't get a very good idea of what that is for or what the implications might be. I wonder if this is related to their Vineyard (https://vineyard.lds.org/) initiative?

From what I saw, there was always an interest in pushing off as much paid work as possible to member volunteers (which is kind of unsettling if you are a paid employee). In a lot of cases, they end up being kind of tone-deaf. One example:

IT employees cost a ton of money - even in Utah and even if you are working at a slight discount for the church - and leaders were trying to figure out ways to reduce that cost or at least reign in the growth of that cost. So they decided to try to treat some of their software development projects like open source projects and recruit members to help out.

This was fine, except the projects weren't open source at all, the projects were still managed like internal projects with hard deadlines, and it wasn't very well managed. Last I'd heard, most of the "community volunteers" (or at least most of the ones actually doing regular work) were actually paid contractors.

yikes! Maybe my assessment about the situation wasn't so far "off" after all! Thanks for your insight.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/07/2012 10:25PM by Susan I/S.

I had the benefit of being able to construct my report from emails sent to me by the informant, which allowed me to be precise.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 04/07/2012 06:16PM by steve benson.

Perhaps the church will be able to get rid of local ward buildings and have all members log in on Sunday (or every day). For sure they will be able to monitor members' computer use. Filters can block any offensive realities, and webcams can even look into members' houses, reducing the need for home teaching.

Tithing payments can be automatically deducted from bank accounts. You could print out your own virtual temple recommend. Discipline might be done through the software. In addition, every member could be given a mandatory GPS tracker to keep 'em all honest.

As for the church leaders, I recommend a long, rod-like instrument that could be forced into places unblessed with sunshine.

they're planning to scrub the existing data before offering some kind of paid subscription to the membership. No doubt this will include a monthly email that says, "Your bill is now available for viewing online."

They're doing what a lot of companies are doing, reinventing their so-called services. Oh, how I wish for them to pay taxes.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/07/2012 10:30PM by munchybotaz.

Membership records, for purposes of identifying subscribers? You know they're not going to provide the members access to anything informative.

The additional 40,000 workstations and X number of servers to get to 4,000 are the added, or possibly outsourced or conscripted infrastructure they need to support the subscription service.



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 04/08/2012 12:28AM by munchybotaz.

I should know better than to underestimate the stupidity of the suits (remember Prop 8), but if they ever actually starting calling members in a disciplining them because of what the Strengthening the Members Committee found out from Spyware, word would spread like wildfire, and even hard-core TBMs might be shaken out of their stupor of thought.


This is yet another indication that active church membership is a third of what the reported membership is. Cumorah.com activity numbers for LDS Inc also comes up with a similar number. Jim Huston's graphs of the statistical report given at April GC give a similar number. Specifically, he reported that the average ward has about 150 members, and the average branch about 75, yet if you divide the 14 million figure by the total number of wards and branches, you get about 500 members per ward. The only reasonable explanation is that on average just under a third of ward members are active.

Yeah, this + absurdly high cost + liability + navigating all of the privacy laws (especially in the EU) makes me really seriously doubt the church will ever try any sort of mass organized spying on its members' internet activity - not that the idea of it doesn't give a bunch of its leaders (at all levels) a massive erection.

Their existing methods of using ward and family members to keep an eye on (and turn in, if necessary) other members of the church is cheaper, incurs less legal and PR risk, and is almost as effective overall.

It could be something far simpler. I work in IT in Salt Lake City. One of the companies that sells products to us was hinting that they were working on signing a deal with TSCC. They are an internet security appliance manufacturer. They produce firewalls that also can act as content filters and such. They were hinting that the church is evaluating a distributed installation of their product, a firewall at every church building. This would allow the church to require signons to access the wireless network at church. This sign-on would track all internet usage while connected to the internet at church. It wouldn't be that hard for them to integrate the wireless internet access system with the lds.org username's and passwords. It would mean that you could only join the wireless internet with an lds.org username and password.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/07/2012 11:02PM by lazarus.

I've read this several times, and it just doesn't make any sense to me. I'm concerned that someone at the church may be trying to pull our chain.

I wouldn't be surprised to later learn this was just a late delivery of an April Fool's joke.

Steve - what is it YOU think this is about?

. . . a matter of the informant's personal opinion.

That said, the informant's personal opinion may be a knowledgeble one, given who they say they work for. (There are more details about the the informant's work situation, as the informant passed them on to me, but the informant requested that only minimal information be publicly shared on that score).



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 04/08/2012 02:20AM by steve benson.

just thinking.....salt lake just came up with a new lds. org in Feb.that has a new sign in, with a new read all disclaimer.....wouldn't be the dumbest way to get eyes on the members' computers, just illegal and corrupt!

This sounds to me like gobbledygook that's part of a hoax.
"Let's feed those RFMers some nonsense and watch 'em try to make sense out of it. Ha! ha!"

Just what sort of data do they want members to scrub? Genology? Membership data?

Honestly, if this IS true, you'd think the church would be leary of having volunteers do this.

It looks as if the TSCC is gearing up for a massive blogging campaign. Considering the millions they poured into regular ads, this one will seem more "grass roots". They buy the members computers and expect that they spend some time blogging about how great the church, and mitt romney are.

Just my 2 cents.

Still several years ago with another "church insider" you strung us along for several weeks; "FCI"or Former Church Insider. Eventually his story, that you believed, became more improbable than the Book of Mormon with his claim that there is an underground tunnel from church hq in Salt Lake to the granite vaults in little Cottonwood Canyon.


As a professional who is familiar with enterprise systems, accounting and supplier chains the "business terms" being thrown about in your original post sound like someone who is trying to sound like an corporate "insider" but isn't. It appears that once again Steve Benson is be strung along by someone with limited imagination or perhaps a low level church employee who is speculating about something that he or she overheard in the Sanka room.

Nobody being string along. He shared the info like he generously has about so many conversations with folks ranging from President Benson to Orin Hatch. Maybe something comes of it. Maybe not.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/08/2012 11:37AM by thingsithink.

P.S.--As to "Former Church Insider," myself and Cabbie met in Salt Lake City with him (along with another RfM poster of some prominence here), and we all vouched for his general credibility, given his personal familiarity with certain particulars (excepting his later speculations regarding those alleged tunnels about which, by the way, he openly acknowledged his error).

If you wish to grump from afar, feel free to do so, given that you are, as you say, "a professional who is familiar with enterprise systems" (whatever that is supposed to mean) and who, interestingly enough, refuses to provide your identity. Yet, we are to believe you.

Got it. We await further light and knowledge as you, um, string us along.

:)



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 04/08/2012 12:47PM by steve benson.

I might find some inspiration in this Linkedin profile from a banker with experience in Leasing Delivery Services (LDS): http://www.linkedin.com/in/brandojo This proves nothing, but does feed my innate skepticism:

"Responsible for task prioritization, overall quality assurance, and partner reconciliations. Works in a team environment and collaborates with Asset Management"

"Completes dispositions and partial dispositions per LDS policies"

"Performed quality assurance functions. Worked with LDS team to ensure that high quality standards are achieved."

"Actively engaged with LDS team contributing to fulfillment of overall partner and customer origination commitments and issue resolution."

This might be a TBM's idea of having some good-natured fun with us.

"--The Mormon Church expects these workstation assets to increase in number to 70,000, and to include 4,000 servers and 5,000,000 individual licenses.


“Honesty and integrity appears to be out the door: Requesting members to serve ‘missions’ in lieu of actually paying members, some of whom I am sure could use the money, for their computer, accounting, etc. skills and requiring them to volunteer 20 to 40 hours per week at home (as 'assets') leaves me to question whether these requests are both ethically and morally right. But, they are hopeful!"

Holy sh1t...I thought you were talking computers and stuff. "Assets" are volunteers/senior missionaries????

And this is how TSCC views members of its flock donating their time and resources/skills????

An ant colony is coming to my mind now....

I knew this before, but your post brings home the fact that churchco thinks they own the members. Lock stock and barrel. And now the added pressure of having to spend however many hours of free labor promoting the cult? WTF? Seriously, the lights are on, but no one is home at the cob. What the hell is going on behind the scenes there? Wow.