Ostiary
I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God.
Ostiary is free software for the ministers of hospitality: formation, Mass-by-Mass rosters, and team meetings for parish ushers. (Psalm 84)
The doorkeeper
For most of the Church’s history the man at the door held an order of his own. The ostiarius, the porter, was the first of the minor orders of the Latin Church: he kept the keys, opened the church, and rang the bells. Paul VI reordered the ministries in 1972, and the minor orders as such came to an end.1 The work did not. In nearly every parish it belongs now to the ushers: the ones who arrive before the first Mass, greet whoever comes, find a seat for the family that arrives at the Gospel, take up the collection, and know what to do when someone faints in the fourth pew.
That ministry is usually organized on a paper sign-up sheet and a group text. Ostiary is a small, careful tool for it instead.
What it does
Eight formation modules with progress kept for each usher, so the coordinator can see who has been trained before handing anyone a collection basket. Mass-by-Mass rosters that ushers sign up for themselves, with sub requests when a Sunday goes wrong. Team meetings with agendas, minutes, and attendance. A parish that connects a Google account can send meeting invitations on Google Calendar with a Meet link attached, and keep a Google Group reconciled to the roster; a parish that does not connect one loses nothing.
Four of the eight modules describe general practice only and say so on their face, because the local specifics belong to the parish and the diocese: where the offering is secured, where the defibrillator hangs, and whom to call. The coordinator fills those in, and the software refuses to pretend it knows them.
Free, and free
Ostiary costs nothing and hides nothing. The code is published under the Apache License as a project of the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation, so any parish, diocese, or developer may read it, run it, and improve it.
Begin at ostiary.pages.dev, or read the code at github.com/CatholicOS/ostiary. A parish that would like a roster of its own may ask here.