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Help bring the gospel to everyone in their own language.
Use your time and your skills, even from home.
There are projects for individuals or teams, short termers, hackathons, or longer-term volunteers.
We need need people with a range of skills such as programmers, designers, artists, writers, evangelists, analysts or anyone who is just a bit tech-savvy. Contact us for information or to get involved.
Creative Projects
Virtual Tumi
Turn Tumi Tiger into an online animation – possibly an app.
Tumi is the talking tiger that children love to hear - but Tumi is designed first and foremost for children who face life with illness, trauma, poverty or disability.
Make an interactive animation of Tumi coordinated with recordings (in multiple languages).
Help system for 5fish
Identify and fill in gaps in the 5fish help documentation.
Create some how-to guides for publishing on the GRN and 5fish websites.
Design an onboarding experience.
App loading animations
It would be great to show GRN themed animations in place of generic loading spinners or animations. This would make GRN’s app interfaces more interesting to people. Ideas include:
- Handle turning and record spinning on a wind-up gramophone
- Spinning record
- Sound wave
- Characters from GRN pictures walking, waving or listening to a message
- Recordist with a language helper moving arms illustrating they are telling a dramatic story
- Animated versions of the GRN or 5fish logos
- Five Christian fish symbols swimming in a circle, with heads following tails
- Five Christian fish symbols facing inwards or outwards, spinning around the centre
Technical Projects
Agents for web sites
Create an agent to allow users to chat about information on globalrecordings.net or fivefish.org.
It would need to be trained on the content, languages and programs. It needs to be multilingual.
YouTube Enhancements
Develop ways to promote existing GRN content
Multi lingual support of metadata
Place chapter markings in videos
Add GRN Shorts to existing channels, but drip feed
Shopping Cart for Audio
Customers wanting to order an MP3 player or storage device with audio preloaded can’t select what audio they want on it. They must speak to a GRN representative to clarify the content they want.
This proposal is to add functionality to a WordPress shopping cart to search, listen to and select audio from the GRN library for their order. The audio itself is free, so there are no financial dimensions to this function.
Paratext Plugin
Develop a plugin for Paratext (in Python) to export Bible text for a teleprompter. GRN has a defined set of rules as to how to style headings, and where to insert line breaks etc to make reading easier and more natural sounding.
The plugin needs options as to whether to include Bible references and/or subheadings.
Make the same routine available as a standalone app for Windows and Mac to format text from other sources such as Text, Word and OpenOffice files.
Audacity Development
Some of our recordists use the Audacity audio editor, but it has some limitations over other commercial software. It’s open source, so anyone can contribute to its development. Features that would help GRN include:
- Open wav files that have markings in them and display them in audacity.
- Open append option, so that multiple files appear in the one line (not multiple tracks).
Audio Analysis
Develop AI tools to help analyse and document existing recordings, such as:
- Break an input audio file into segments to see if the same segment exists in other files in other folders.
- Use Meta LLM or equivalent speech-to-text to obtain transcriptions for recordings in minority languages not covered by the major models.
Software Loudness Meter
Create an open-source loudness meter that runs on Windows and Mac:
- UI component
- Loudness maths
- Audio routing
Resample TIFF files
GRN has nearly 80,000 documents digitized in TIFF format.
Develop a routine to resample these files to PNGs (for single page documents) or PDFs (for multi page documents). This should reduce size considerably and increase compatibility with more apps.
The routine will need to facilitate uploading the files to the audio archive and also submitting the new file metadata to the GRN database, superseding the old files with the new ones.
Analytical Projects
Script Analysis
Create a batch AI process to read all the scripts in GRN’s script library, and for each one:
- Analyse for clarity and theological accuracy
- Analyse for overlap with other scripts
- Produce a summary
- Derive a list of themes
- Suggest improvements
- Rewrite for specific target audiences (eg Muslims, Hindus, Atheists, Buddhists, other)
Promotional Projects
Clothing designs
Create visually engaging graphic designs for clothing that our staff can wear at conferences and public events that effectively showcases the ministry of GRN and represents who GRN is.
Historic visual display for the GRN office
Create engaging 2D or 3D visual display artwork that explores the history and impact of GRN since 1939, which will be installed within the GRN building at our Australian headquarters for visitors and tour groups to see.
Social media campaign
Produce a social media campaign to engage young Christians in the work of GRN. Generate videos, memes and ideas that will appeal to young age groups and capture their hearts, so they want to be involved in cross-cultural mission and see the value of GRN’s ministry of recordings and distributing the Gospel in al the languages of the world.
Interactive digital display
Design a guided interactive touch screen display, for use in churches that takes people on a self-guided tour of the work of GRN, the need for audio Bible resources and the task remaining to reach the lost with the story of Jesus in all the languages of the world.
Promotional display materials
Design the artwork for a suite of promotional display items, including a range of promotional banners of various sizes, that showcases the ministry of GRN for use at churches, missions conferences, schools and other public events.
Social Media Evangelism
Develop and implement an evangelism campaign on social media using GRN audio visuals. The new GRN Shorts are particularly derived for this purpose. This could be in any majority or minority languages.
Artistic Projects
Darken the skin tones in the Sweet Publishing pictures
Many of the existing pictures are a bit too white-skinned to properly represent people of Biblical times, and they are not even uniform with each other. So, select an appropriate range of skin tones and modify every picture to use them.
Expand Sweet Publishing pictures to 16x9
They currently have an aspect ratio around 7x5 or 4x3, so significant extra background needs to be added to each side so we can generate proper 16x9 videos. This also opens more options for pans and zooms if we want to do that.
Expand GRN pictures to 16x9
They currently have an aspect ratio of about 3x2, so a little extra background needs to be added to each side so we can generate proper 16x9 videos. This also opens more options for pans and zooms if we want to do that.
Identify crop points to create vertical 9x16 pictures
YouTube “shorts” and videos on some other social media platforms use vertical layouts, to accommodate phone cameras held vertically rather that sideways. So, identify appropriate cropping points for existing images so they work in 9x16 format. The default may be to crop evenly on both sides, but this will not be ideal for some pictures.
Create a GRN style of every picture in the Sweet Publishing set
The GRN style works much better in Africa, for example, but we currently don’t have nearly enough pictures to use them for Scripture programs. Converting the Sweet Publishing pictures to the GRN style would extend the GRN set with lots of new pictures
Create new pictures for other Scripture sections
Even the Sweet Publishing set does not cover every part of the Bible, it mainly focuses on the narrative parts. There are very few pictures that cover the psalms, wisdom literature, prophetic books and epistles. Many books do not have a single picture to go with them. Some existing pictures could be reused for different parts of scripture, but other parts would require new pictures or significant adaptations.
Create new pictures for non-Scripture recordings
Many Words of Life scripts are not taken directly from scripture, so we have no suitable pictures for them. They require different types of pictures, which may be things like people walking or talking together, people doing ordinary every-day tasks, people expressing joy or sorrow or worry or fear, or pictures of scenery, homes or animals for example. These would not necessarily have to be in the same style as the GRN pictures – they could perhaps be more photo-realistic.
Create intermediate pictures
Make additional pictures as transitions or intermediate steps between existing pictures, so that the slideshows are more interesting by having the pictures change more frequently. This could include pictures that zoom in or out, show from a different angle, or change some detail. It will remain important that the faces and dress of existing characters remain consistent.
Create variations for specific cultures
Some pictures would benefit from minor changes to reflect specific cultures. For example, in Muslim contexts the women should not show hair underneath their headscarves. In Hindi contexts it’s better if the men do not have beards. We have already created an Indianized version of the Good News pictures, so this style could be used for other scripts and a similar approach used for other cultures.
Investigate other picture styles
Some cultures may be better served with other styles of pictures, such as being more photo-realistic, or adopting the styles of their local artwork. This is a huge task, but there may be a few variations that would work for many cultures. This needs to be done cautiously however – the Good News pictures were once redrawn in a very Hindu style, but opinions were divided as to whether this would help make the message more useful to Hindus or whether it would actually undermine the Christian message, so the pictures have not been used by GRN.
Split images into layers
Separate foreground and background components of each picture into different layers to enable 3D pans, zooms or parallax effects.
Add simple animations
Using the existing pictures, create video clips that add simple animation, such as gentle movements, waving arms, blinking eyes, moving clouds, flying birds etc.
Create whole animation sequences for non-Scripture recordings
For some of our newer and more unusual scripts, we could animate whole scenes for use in other recordings.
Develop new icons
Make a wider range of more intricate and interesting icons to represent the broad categories of programs.