Serve the Church in Tiny Increments

Ever feel like you’ve got a little time, but don’t know what to do with yourself? Instead of just surfing Facebook or your favorite blogs some more, you can use a few minutes of your time to help the Kingdom roll forth.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has a new website called “Helping in the Vineyard” (or “Vineyard” for short), that is their 2nd attempt at crowdsourcing (if you count FamilySearch’s indexing as the 1st). What does that mean? Well if you sign up for the limited beta right away, you’ll find there are various tasks they need people to do, but which they can slice up into tiny pieces, so you only need a few minutes to complete a few of the tasks. For example, I signed up (using my LDS account) and was soon comparing paragraphs from what I assume was a manual in German. The point was to make sure the punctuation has all translated properly from the print version (image on the left) to the digital text version (text on the right).

Currently there are 4 categories of micro-tasks you can help with:

• Church Publications
• Church Multimedia
• Translation
• Family History

Some micro-tasks I thought sounded fun, and will probably try soon, are: slice and tag videos, spot-check videos, contribute photos, and tag videos (I kinda like video). Check it out right away if you’re interested. The indication of a limited beta may mean they’ll only allow so many people at this time.

Vineyard.LDS.org

What do you think of this new tool?

UPDATE: This is the Church’s official announcement of Vineyard, on LDS.org.