A question for the community

[CMonson]

So, I have been contemplating something for a while and thought I'd post here and get some feedback.

First of all, introductions. My name is Chris Monson, I am the Production Director at Faith Chapel in Billings, MT (a church of about 5000 members) as well as a freelance software developer. Over the past 4 years or so I have developed a piece of software that we have used in house to plan our services, and really to automate a lot of the technical details related to service planning. It has been a huge turning point in how we organize our services. Here is a short list of what this system does currently.

Allows quick and easy editing of service orders
Keeps all information related to services located in one place
Automatically creates slides for worship songs
Manages volunteers and staff for services
Archives your services

There is also slideshow software, video playback software, and a variety of widgets I've developed to go along with the system.

This spring I converted this system to run entirely online and made it possible for multiple sites and organizations to use it. I got it probably to 90% completed and just got burnt out on the whole project as it was just such a huge undertaking in addition to my normal job. At any rate, I'm getting to the point now where I am wanting to pick it up again and finish it, and in doing this I am re-evaluating the direction I am going with this.

My hope previously was to open this up to the community in hopes of providing a service that churches everywhere could benefit from. Feel free to visit the website for more information on where it is currently.

(can't post links yet apparently)
serviceproducer.com

Now here is where things get a little interesting. As it is the system works really well for single churches to plan and run services, however I've recently been thinking about an idea that would broaden the horizons of this system, but would require a community of people working with it actively to make it work well.

The idea I am toying with is to release the system and all additional software related to it as open source, and provide what I guess would best be described as "open source church". All services planned would be able to be viewed and modified by the community (with approval of course). You could borrow part or all of a service from another church, or contribute to the development of future services for other churches. It would always be at the discretion of the original author whether or not contributions would be included. This whole concept has a lot of logistical issues that I'm not going to go into in this post, but I've thought through how to carry this out fairly extensively and I think it is do-able. It seems as though it would be a good way to share resources amongst churches. Basically for the most part you'd just plan your service as you normally would and allow other churches to watch what you are doing and borrow anything from you that they would like to, or borrow the service as a whole if they want to. Ideally it would require very little or no extra effort above and beyond just creating your services in this system.

So the big question. Is this something that you and your church would be interested in? I am willing to go through the effort of creating this, but only if I feel that there are people who would be willing to use it and make it work. Would it be more useful to you with or without the "Open Source Church" concept going on?

Second question. If you have programming experience in PHP, Actionscript 3, MYSQL, VB.net, C#.net, or C++, would you be interested in lightening the load on me by helping out?

Also, I recognize I haven't given a whole lot of information on how the system works, so if there is interest in this I'll open up a dummy account to allow those interested to mess around with it and get a better feel for what this actually is.