[bt-devel] Questions about BibleTime for Project Leaders

[Joachim Ansorg]

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Hi,
thank you very much for your eMail and your time and work you put into your 
writing.
If you need more detailed answers to some of the questions please let me know. 
Feel free to fix my wrong spelling :)

> 1. When did you start your project?  (how long have you been around?)

Version 0.1 of BibleTime was released at  1999-08-27. As far as I remember we 
started working on BibleTime in June 1999.
I'm in the project since the beginning.

> 2. Who are the key players in your project?

Martin Gruner is a developer who is also involved with the project management 
stuff.
James Ots does a great job with the icons and our other graphics stuff.
Brook Humphrey, Daniel Glassey and Lamar Owen are our brave packagers.
Without our translators we could not reach people who don't know English.

> 3. What is your project's goal/mission? (What is your product or service?)

Our aim is to make good Bible study software for Linux systems.

> 4. Can you give me a rough estimate of the number of people (or
> organizations) using or  participating in your project?

That's hard to guess because there are mirrors of our downloads, packages in 
Linux distributions and so on. And the download statistics may include 
multiple downloads of the same users.
I guess we have less then 10.000 users (probably about 5.000). 

Developers: Two in project management and coding, around 15 translators, 3-5 
packagers, one artist working on our graphics (icons, ...).

> 5. What are the key features of your project?

BibleTime is an easy to use Bible study tool.
In my opinion it does provide enough functionality to help christians to study 
the Bible. 
BibleTime offers easy access to Bibles, Commentaries, Lexicons and more 
general books. It offers an easy to use bookmark system, searching, printing, 
limited export capatibilities to the clipboard or to disk, a personal 
commentary editor and some more features.

> 6. Who will benefit most from your project?  (individuals? churches?
> large? small? etc.)

Individuals, I guess.

> 7. Have you seen any increase in activity in the last two months? (in
> terms of  the number of users or downloads)  Can you explain the reason
> for the increase?

No, I don't think activity increased in the last two months. In times without 
new releases users and downloads stay at the same level.

> 8. Have you taken on any new developers/users (recently) to help with
> your project?

Some new volunteers stepped up to help with our documentation.
- From time to time we get new translations.

> 9. How can people get involved with your project?  What do you need most?

Most of the volunteers just email us and ask how they could help us.
We most urgently need developers/coders familiar with Qt/KDE who are brave 
enough to dig into our code :)

> 10. Are you aware of churches that already use FOSS?  Are you aware of
> any that are considering using FOSS solutions? (consider the OS and the
> apps separately, as some may use a proprietary OS and FOSS apps.)

We don't get much feedback about this.
I don't know of churches using FOSS, but I know that the Sword project is used 
in poorer countries, although I don't know if churches use the software 
there.
But I do know of some christian missionaries using the Sword project.

> 11. Would you be interested in meeting and/or working with other
> Christian admins/consultants/developers?

Yes, we are. But that depends on the aims which should be reached.

> 12. Anything else you feel is important to mention?

Without God nothing like this is possible. We don't want to do BibleTime for 
ourselfs but for his glory.


Joachim
- --
<>< Re: deemed!

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