While I don't think he needs to sell it, the hosted option is definitely something to look into. I saw the "Install in the Cloud" option and thought "Oh cool, they'll provision a DO droplet and install this for you!" Unfortunately any church that wants to use this is going to need someone technical enough to handle the installation themselves.
That said, it's open source - so anyone (including me!) is free to set this up.
> I saw the "Install in the Cloud" option
> ...
> Unfortunately any church that wants to use this is going to need
> someone technical enough to handle the installation themselves.
I thought it would be awesome if that button would actually (eventually) result in setting up a droplet and installing the software for me. I think sandstorm[0] is going into that direction.
I guess one tricky part of such infrastructure would be maintenance. Optimally, a user could spin up a "church.io"-drop (or e.g. "smtp/imap stack + $antispam + mailpile"-drop) and never have to care about any updates. providers can offer subscriptions for regular (curated) updates of each "drop".
With such infrastructure in place, the curch-community could click said button, follow through some dialogs, enter a CC and 5 minutes later have their own instance + domain. timmorgan gets paid per install by the infrastructure provider (who profits on the long run through subscription-fees).
I think the concepts of unikernels and clive[1] fit well into this picture, by exposing a more concise resource/environment API to the developer and easing deployment (which would be a nice thing, even without the picture painted above).
I strongly considered building on DigitalOcean API and doing some sort of pre-built image where I transfer it to the customer or something. I'm interested in Sandstorm -- will check it out!
Hey Tim, love your work on this. I started something called The Sunday Assembly - which is church for the not religious (though plenty of religious folk come too) - and we are in the process of building software which is so similar.
I also looked through the current offerings and thought the market was just not well served. It seems like a huge mistake on someone's part.
Do you have anyone using the software yet? I would be interested in finding out if we could. Super great work!
That said, it's open source - so anyone (including me!) is free to set this up.
edit: apparently at least someone is doing this: http://www.powerchurch.com/products/onebody/