A website with training resources on following the example of Jesus in more than 40 languages.
- Simple worksheets which are high quality and easy to multiply
- Overcoming language barriers in outreach and discipleship
- Everything is copyright-free (CC0) so that multiplication can happen
Do you want to teach someone the basics on how to hear from God? Or how to start reading the Bible? Or how to forgive and get free from wounds of the past? And not just some lengthy theory, but one concise lesson that directly leads into the application? And have a quality translation into their native language which happens to be Polish, Czech, German, Arabic, Kyrgyz or Albanian?
Sure. Just go to the website, download the PDFs and off you go.
Or install the app (for Android on Play Store), download the languages you're interested in and have everything offline ready to use and share.
Many volunteers
Dozens of people have already contributed to this vision: Many translators (all volunteers!), feedbackers and some developers. The pandemic brought a big boost for the project. But that also resulted in different bottlenecks surfacing. We need more help with development to be able to provide a good technical basis for so many languages, translators and users.
Development
Website
The website runs with mediawiki (the software that also powers wikipedia, written in PHP/HTML/CSS/JavaScript) together with the Translate extension - a great technical basis for this big vision. Everyone can use the website to view and download the resources. Translators get a login to translate content into their languages.
App
We now have an app to provide easy and offline access to all the resources on smartphones. It is implemented in Dart/Flutter so that development is fast and we only need one codebase and still target two platforms. The app is currently published in the Android Play Store and we plan to have it available for iOS available by the end of 2024 (this is not a technical issue - for that we need to set up an organization as legal entity which takes time...)
The main aim of the app is to serve people who want to disciple others. It is designed to work offline and to be safe to use also for people who are persecuted because they follow Jesus. To ensure that, the app doesn't use any tracking, doesn't need a login and doesn't collect any personal data. It only needs internet access for downloading / updating resources for a language, afterwards they're available offline. The resources are stored in git repositories on github (example: English resources as HTML, English PDFs) so the app only connects to github.com. Additionally this approach improves redundancy and avoids scaling issues as the app is not directly dependent on the 4training.net website.
Python-Tools
MediaWiki has a good API which can be used for automation with "Bots". We use the pywikibot framework to develop helpful tools in Python. They have a lot of functionality, improve the quality and also are the "glue" between different components:
- Consistency checks and automatically correct minor translation errors (syntax issues)
- Generate translated PDF files
- Take the worksheet content, transform it and push it into the git repositories that the app needs
- Embed machine translation to help translators and speed up their work
- Generate overviews over translation progress in individual languages
- ...
Wishes
Besides, there is a number of more wishes and next steps in very different areas from the mediawiki system over Python tools to user experience and design. Some goals are currently being worked on, others are still waiting for someone with the right skills to show up and offer help. For example we would like to have a new skin to finally have a mobile-friendly design for the whole website (based on mustache templates, using the new mediawiki skin development techniques).
Repositories:
https://github.com/4training has several repositories:
- https://github.com/4training/pywikitools for the python tools.
- https://github.com/4training/app4training for the flutter app
- some mediawiki extensions (most of them with only little customizations)
Contributing
Help is appreciated in many different areas: frontend design, dart/flutter, PHP, Python development (also some tasks for beginners). Also we're looking for people who could help with some editing and maintenance tasks (no special development skills necessary!)
For the python tools we have issues directly in the repository and use a public project plan. For the app and other components we use a redmine for project management. That's currently not public but if you're interested in helping out we're happy to give you access!