EVIS

The Event Voting Interaction System (EVIS) is a tool to assist various agencies, departments, and boards of the Christian Reformed Church in North America with holding meetings.

EVIS has a few main functions, which were driven by the needs of the CRCNA's annual Synod. The main featues include:

-Yes/No/Abstain voting: This is useful for quick votes, replacing the vocal yey/ney votes

-Speaker Queueing: This maintains a list of members who want to speak, in the order they indicated. There is support for saving and restoring queues (Useful when discussion a motion and someone proposes an ammedment or new motion, and you need to pause the current discussion to start a new one, then return to it later).

-Roll Call (Attendance): A basic attendance feature which reports attendance by group, showing the expected, present, and missing members

-Elections: You can create elections or more complex voting than the Yes/No system provides. You can precreate multiple elections and make them visible to members when needed.

EVIS was created by Lee Schiebel, a member of the CRCNA's IT department, and is the result of many iterations, starting as an addon to a Google sheet, to using a mySQL database, and eventually to use FireBase.  EVIS is written in Google Apps Script, and uses Google's Firebase realtime database to store data. Currently EVIS requires a Google Workspace instance to run on due to how it processes group memberships, but a more portable version using general Google Groups is planned.

If you're interested in using EVIS for your local Church council or Classis meetings, you can email helpdesk@crcna.org to inquire.