Where are all the OpenLP users?

A few days ago, sjpslabbert asked the question in a forum post how many people are using OpenLP? As I said in the reply, it's close to impossible to answer that question. All we know is that we average 100 downloads a day, there were over 16000 downloads of version 1.0.1, this site has over 2500 registered users and we are approaching 200 fans on facebook.

What we don't know is how many of those downloads are new users who go on to use OpenLP regularly.

So I thought perhaps we could add a page to our wiki where users could add their church, if using OpenLP. However since the wiki is currently focused towards v2.0 development it wasn't really appropriate. Also as good as a list is (e.g. see Drupal's) it needs to be maintained and not everyone knows their alphabet. I know this from my churches pre-OpenLP days trying to keep our large box of OHP transparencies in order!

So then I wondered if we could use google maps. I had seen the map of OpenLP developers locations on launchpad and investigated doing the same for OpenLP users.

The keen eyed among you will have spotted the Worldwide Usage on the left hand menu. If you a regular OpenLP user, or hope to be, it would be great if you log into your Google account, head over to the map, click the edit button. Then just drag a placemarker to your churches location (you might want to zoom in a bit) and put a little comment with the name of your church and how you use it.

Over time this will then give us an idea of where the regular users are and perhaps might even help us know which translations or culture specific features will benefit the most people.

And whilst I'm blogging... As some of you know, I maintain a few utilities to help do a few things with openlp which are not currently built in. You'll be pleased to know that the 2.0 team are doing a good job at incorporating some of this functionality into the new version. However a new budding utilityist has wandered onto our shores, cowjam. He has written a web-based OpenSong converter, which I'm sure will be easier to use than mine and helps add functionality to the opensong importer built into 1.2. If you have need to import opensong songs or bibles, please check it out.