Manifesto

1. Practicality is key

• ‘Scrambling’ happens far too often at the church AV desk, and so we want to address this by making it easier for users to do tasks easily, effeciently and flexibly.
  • Example: Importing slides should not lock up the UI from live slides navigation, rather the importing should be done in the background in async.
• The app also needs to be flexible enough to accomodate the practical needs of ‘modern day church’.
  • Example: Sending lyrics to a livestream video feed.
  • Example: Supporting PDF format for slide decks import (i.e. from Google Slides/Canva) so that custom fonts won’t get lost.

2. The software we build has to be reliable

• Minimise stress caused on the church tech volunteers and teams.
  • Example: Not having DRM and software licensing, which could cause undue stress when the DRM fails or computer hardware fails at a remote site without internet access for software activation.
• The app also needs to be stable and as bug-free as possible.
• Provide ways to quickly and easily recover in the event of crash or error.
  • Example: Auto-save document changes for fast recovery, maybe slides navigation state too.

3. Volunteer friendly

• An easy experience for volunteers that reduces friction, handling and time spent week-on-week.
• Are there things we can automate? Simplify?
• Volunteers and users could be anyone; we cannot assume tech literacy - so app functionality and UI patterns used need to be designed to be easily picked up by anyone.
• Files should be portable across machines, so that a volunteer can edit from elsewhere.

4. Freely given

• We’re here to serve local churches and gospel/evangelism activities. Cost should not be a barrier to the least of our users.