Some church go-ers are excellent at writing these dates in their diary and then showing up dutifully when they are rostered on. If they can’t make it, they arrange a swap with someone else well in advance and then let the right person know.

The problem is, not everyone is like this.

For some people, rosters never make it home- they leave them on their seat at church, or under the seat of their car. Some people don’t have diaries. Some people don’t look at their diaries. This means many ministers or service leaders spend a chunk of time every Friday doing the ring around making sure everybody has remembered.

There must be a better way.

I have long dreamed of creating a web based thingo that would store the rosters so that they could be looked up anytime. Perhaps supply a unique calendar feed for each person so that their week automatically pops up in their iPhone. And crucially, each person would get an automatic email or SMS reminder on Friday arvo telling them to be there or be square.

But there are lots of challenges to designing a system like this so that it would work well and be used. For example:

Entering all that data through a web form would be painful – probably too painful for anyone to be bothered, especially someone who is used to knocking these things up in Excel. But the alternatives might be a bit too high tech.

Secondly, the thing would need a whole lot of data that a simple spreadsheet-in-the-hand doesn’t, like it would need to know everyone’s name, email’s and mobile numbers. It wouldn’t be enough just to say Bob is on guitar or Jan is on flowers. This is a whole lot of extra tedious data entry for some one to remember to keep up to date, and find the time to do.

Thirdly, The Excel file is a handy thing, for the people who need the big picture, and to stick on the notice board etc etc…

So, has anyone found a solution to this problem? Does anyone have a system in place that puts rosters on the web with notifications – that is a good servant and not a master? Once I’ve heard your ideas, I’ll give you my latest one and we can keep the dream alive.