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2023-12-31-accounts

STEPBible AGM reports, 20[th] August 2024

STEPBible Trustees Report 2024 – David Instone-Brewer

The charity’s trustees are David Instone-Brewer, Patrick Tang, and Darcy McKinnon (treasurer).

The trustees seek to support the members in furthering the stated object of STEPBible, which is to provide cost-free education concerning the Bible, for the public benefit. They have established a set of aims to maintain the quality and integrity of the charity’s offering:

  1. Enable electronic access to Bibles and commentaries that do not promote non-trinitarian theology

  2. Prioritise access to academically reliable translations and information

  3. Avoid denominational or doctrinal bias in information accompanying Bibles and commentaries.

  4. Allow cost-free access for all facilities, books and information sources that are obtained freely

  5. Provide open source access to all code, data and texts created for STEPBible, excepting security details.

The trustees facilitate two-weekly online meetings of the members and developers to maintain contact between the sections of STEPBible and promote a consistent approach to the project.

It was agreed at the last AGM that the trustees should attempt to open a bank account to manage the charity’s finances. Barclays Bank, which is based in the UK, was the best option because they offer free banking for registered charities. However banking will only remain free so long as the charity has no more than three trustees. At the last AGM the trustees were listed as David InstoneBrewer, Patrick Tang, Dan Bennett, Kevin Weeks, and Mark Cannon; and during the course of that meeting Darcy McKinnon was also appointed trustee. Dan Bennett, Kevin Weeks, and Mark Cannon all agreed to step down as trustees which was documented by email, leaving the three trustees as listed above. Barclays Bank required a high level of identity checking for Patrick and Darcy who are not UK residents which caused some delay in opening the account. The account is now open, plus an attached PayPal account that is managed by Darcy and overseen by the other two trustees, to enable the collection of membership subscriptions and donations.

Kevin Weeks has sadly concluded that he has not had time to spend on helping with STEPBible for many months, and this is unlikely to change. He has therefore stepped down as Head of User Interface (UI).

Daicy Hexiao Yu has been helping with regard to User Experience (UX) over the last few months, and has proved to have clear insight into problems, and good proposals for solutions. We have asked if she might head up this section of the work. Changes to the interface would remain under the Programming section, so Daicy’s expertise in the concepts and imagining of UX rather than UI is ideal. We are delighted to welcome her onto the team.

2023 Financial Report – Darcy McKinnon

2023 Financial Activities

2023 Financial Summary

USD GBP
Load balancing 335 271
Annual Pro Plan
(Nov '23 – Oct '24)		 240 195
Total 575 466

2024 Financial Activities

2024 Projected Income & Expenses

USD GBP
Cloudflare 290 230
Sectigo 930 740
Total 1220 970

Data development - David Instone-Brewer

This last year there has been a lot of work in:

Disambiguation

Andrew is helping me finish this long project to make Strong numbers more useful. James Strong made numbers for a paper concordance, so sometimes he merged similar words together or had separate entries for common forms such as ‘he was’ and ‘they were’. He also had a single entry for all 24 people called Azariah, but two entries for the single person called Daniel because in Hebrew he was called Daniel and in Aramaic he was called Daniel - yep, exactly the same! Some words also have two or more meanings, like Hebrew Ish and Greek Aner which are translated both ‘man’ and ‘husband’. Modern languages have different words for these, so to help tie the translation to the text we need to disambiguate them.

Andrew is finishing the work of dividing up the lexicon entries. While doing so, he is greatly improving them by adding illustrative references.

Amalgamation

Different Bibles use different manuscripts. The biggest difference lies between traditional Bibles (like the KJV) which rely on 10th century Masoretic Hebrew and Byzantine Greek. Modern Bibles add information from ancient translations of the Hebrew Bible and a few older manuscripts, and they use NT manuscripts spanning from the 2nd to 4th century. Some modern translators continue to rely on only traditional manuscripts becasue some think they existed before the older ones but the copies were lost.

STEPBible wants to provide study tools for every Bible. The Amalgamated Hebrew and Greek data merges together the words and phrases from all manuscript traditions (not just the two mentioned). When you exclude spelling differences, the remaining significant differences are not too many. The Amalgamated data marks every such word which is found in only some manuscripts, or is different in others.

Jeff and others have been helping to check this data which is now the basis for our tagging work. We'll bring it out as two STEPBible modules: a Hebrew+Greek Bible and a word-by-word English translation both marked and noted with details of additions and variants. These should align with every tagged Bible, whatever manuscripts they are based on.

Meaning & Manuscripts

For several years volunteers have been recording translation differences between major Bibles. Those still working this year are Andy, Brandon, Dale, Charles & esp Steve. They’ve been checking and adding to the work of Galen who already went through the whole Bible. We are almost ready to apply the OT data.

This tool will mark places where translators disagree on the meaning, either because the Hebrew is ambiguous or because they follow different manuscript evidence. It will answer the question: why does my Bible say something different?

Encyclopaedia articles

Deborah is working with me on articles about every person, place and concept in the Bible. This apparently impossible task is achieved by feeding an AI with our accurate disambiguated data. We've used the Claude AI from Anthropic who designed it with an emphasis on accuracy. It has already created amazing entries for all the names in the Bible.

We are still preparing the data for the Concepts by linking together words with similar meanings - eg “redemption”, “rescue” and “salvation”. The articles will list all the Hebrew and Greek words in the group, describing their differences. So we'll not only know what the specific word in a verse means, but we’ll also know what alternate words the author could have used. This helps us understand the emphasis of that particular verse.

Bespoke Versification

Different Bibles have different versification. That is, in very many places, verse numbers and even chapter numbers are different. Even different editions of the same translation can differ. This makes it difficult to align one Bible with another.

Jamie and I have created about 30,000 data lines to automatically work out which verse is which, in any translation. Sami has created code to make this work in STEPBible so that it works in the background so Users may never notice it.

This year we started applying this system to every new module, so these problems will gradually disappear.

Similar Syntactic Phrases

Chris has been working on an AI tool that identifies similar passages based on syntax and semantics rather than just vocabulary. STEPBible already finds related words, and finds verses using similar vocabulary, but sometimes you need an AI to spot similarities. For example, if you wanted to know what Psalm 1 means by “the seat of scoffers” you could look up other places where the same Hebrew word translated “scoffers” is used - but most don’t help. Or use the “related verses” tool to find places where three or more identical words are used - there are none. Or use Chris’ tool - go to Psalm 1.1 at biblesearch.dev/contextsearch/hebrewot and click on “scoffers”. This does a word search based on the meaning of the word in the verse you are searching from - so you don’t have to wade through irrelevant results. There’s much more power behind this tool, but we aren’t sure yet how to apply it.

Software development - Patrick Tang

2023 Web servers enhancements

2024 Activities

Other activities wish-list

User Interface/Experience - Daicy Hexiao Yu

Our team implemented several design improvements to enhance user experience across various features.

Word Analysis Panel

Bible Picker

Welcome Panel

Search Modal

Ongoing Work

We continue to refine the search modal to address usability issues identified by participants, with further discussions in progress to optimize the advanced search feature.

User Engagement – Mark Cannon

Overview

User Interaction at STEPBible functions as the the first point of contact for user inquiries and technical issues. It is the technical support arm of STEPBible receiving feedback reports to solve basic problems immediately or forward them with reproducible steps to higher levels of support if needed. User Interaction also involves administering social media platforms, and training users through documentation, video and other means.

User Feedback and Engagement

Social Media and Community Interaction

Recording Fruits of User Interaction: Known Issues and Improvements

User Interaction: Outside Email and Social Media

Goals for the Coming Year

1 Develop a Resource, FAQ or Guide page on how to cite STEPBible in a paper.

2 Complete Gospels section.

3 including Bible Mapper Atlas Maps links to Chronology, Verse Vocabulary opens Atlas to chapter, Date opens to Bible Mapper Timeglider, Atlas links for Bible Mapper cities in Map tab from Locations in STEPBible Places in the Bible Resource, free Tutku links to Levant city maps.

4 Permission secured for Hebrew audio files, Greek are in production.

Mobile app report - Dan Bennett

In 2024, on the native mobile side, Troy Honegger and I focused on updating the app to support Android 14, which is the latest version of Android.

On April 11, 2024, we updated the Expo SDK to version 49, which unlocked support for Android 14.

Thank you Mark Cannon for responding to the large influx of customer support emails around this!

What’s Next

The STEPBible.org website has come a long way since 2018, the year we published the mobile app. It’s now very mobile friendly and easier to use.

Currently, the main advantage of the mobile app is that it operates 100% offline, which is important for our mission of reaching underserved communities with free Bible software.

Maintaining a separate native mobile app is time consuming, and the architecture is hard to scale to accommodate more Bible versions than the 3 we have now (ESV, CUV, and Reina Valera), so our focus is to keep the app running while we search for alternatives.

We are exploring ways to offer Bible modules offline from mobile web by compiling our Java backend code to WebAssembly. The tooling is not quite ready, but the Google Chrome team rolled out WebAssembly Garbage Collection (WasmGC) on October 2023, which is important since Java as a language requires garbage collection.

2024 Module Activity – Darcy McKinnon

Approx 140 modules (Bibles and commentaries) uploaded, including new and updated modules:

There are 650 modules on STEPBible as of 20[th] August 2024

We will make public modules available to others via FTP site