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Comment by BrainScraps | Hacker News Reader

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There are thousands of volunteers doing this "mechanical Turk"-like work at a pretty impressive pace. http://www.lds.org/church/news/volunteers-make-record-progre...

Also, the tools created to index these records are created mainly by Mormon developers who donate their time.

Interesting story about Mobile apps for indexing: http://tech.lds.org/blog/455-new-familysearch-indexing-app-n...

Disclaimer: I'm a big fan and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon)

Mormon developers do not donate their time. https://www.lds.org/church/employment?lang=eng (Must be LDS to browse and apply for jobs, but you can see the heading on the linked page indicating Information Technology jobs are available).

The LDS Church does employ many developers, but they also benefit from a lot of volunteer contributions.

They have a neat program for organizing volunteer efforts:

https://vineyard.lds.org/

See also: http://tech.lds.org/contribute

Is the data available to outside organizations or is it kept internally with the church?

Yes, see https://familysearch.org

Yeah, they have no reason to keep it secret. They are gathering it for their own odd purpose but that doesn't preclude sharing it.

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