Friday, February 3, 2012

Day 4 in SLC - RootsTech Day 2 Afternoon/Evening

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I had a nice lunch with Lou Szucs and Matthew Deighton of Ancestry.com to talk about Ancestry initiatives and my blog.  I look forward to seeing them again at the next event.

On my way back to the Media Hub, I stopped at the Mocavo booth and talked to cliff Shaw for awhile.  They have major plans to add free images from the Mocavo app (coming soon) that will then be OCRed and indexed.  Think of what individuals or societies could image from their collections, and then curate them, and have them freely available on the Interweb.  This sounds like a great opportunity for people and societies to share information.  The caution I had for Cliff was about copyright issues. and that's why they need to be curated by the person/society or by a Mocavo person. 

I stopped by the brightsolid booth to ask about my Find My Past family tree and how to navigate it, and Amy told me that they were having trouble with the trees and to contact support services, which I will when I get home.

A visit with FamilySearch provided more information about the GEDCOM X initiative, found at http://www.gedcomx.net/.  That's interesting - after 8 months of going it alone, FamilySearch now wants the community to be involved.  More of this later.

Doing all of the above, I missed Jill, Amy and Audrey's presentation on Genealogy 2.0, drat. 

We had a bit of a hullabaloo before 4 p.m. at the Media Hub when Nick Barratt came along and Paul asked us if we wanted to interview him.  Jill said yes, and quickly pulled some questions together and did a short interview with him.  Here is a picture of Nick and Jill in the glass cage:


Caroline Pointer and Lisa Louise Cooke were also supposed to interview Nick.

I went off at 4:15 p.m. for the UnConference panel discussion on Metadata, GEDCOM and Source Citations hosted by the Ancestry Insider.  There were seven panelists including Dallan Quass (WeRelate.org), Ryan Heaton (FamilySearch GEDCOM X ), Robert Godfrey (Google and Genealogy), John Vilburn (Ohana Software), Louis Lessler (Behold! software), Robert Burkhead (FHISO/BetterGEDCOM) and Bruce Buzbee (RootsMagic).  After an hour of talking about metadata, the questions finally turned to GEDCOM and sources.  Ryan summed up the GEDCOM X initiative saying FamilySearch has developed a model and now wants community involvement.  Robert summed up the BetterGEDCOM effort saying they had good community involvement but had no model work done.  Everyone wants to collaborate ...  I asked if they thought that the historical collection providers, the family tree systems, and the genealogy software companies will all collaborate?  Bruce and John said their companies would, and said that once a standard was announced that they could implement it within one month.  That's a start.  I also asked if Ancestry.com had been approached and Ryan and Robert said yes, but could divulge no information.  Louis said that if the genealogy community wanted the new GEDCOM standard then Ancestry would lose market share and influence if they did not implement it.  Hopefully, someone with better note taking ability will summarize the whole thing. 

My day was over at 5:30, so I went back to the Plaza Hotel and we ate dinner at JBs with the Maness's from the Bay area.  Then it was off to the Family History Library for the Night at the Library.  We managed to squeeze into seats for Who Do You Think You Are? on the main floor at 7 p.m., then went upstairs to the glassed room where the Geneabloggers Radio show had just ended, with Thomas and DearMyrtle hosting.  After the show, there was a one-year birthday cake for the show, which was provided by Myrt and was delicious.  We all talked for awhile, and then Linda and I went back to our room.

One more day, and there are people to talk to and presentations to attend, and blog posts to write.  It's been a fun four days, but exhausting.  Day 5 promises to be more fun and information filled.  I wish I was a better note taker.  I hope that you are also reading the other geneabloggers here that are making frequent reports, like James Tanner on the Genealogy's Star blog; Susan Bankhead on Susan's Genealogy Blog; Jill Ball on the Geniaus blog;  Missy Corley's Bayside Blog; and others.

2 comments:

GeniAus said...

Thanks for the mention and that photo, Randy.

I was having trouble balancing on that stool and interviewing Nick in my starstruck state.

Anonymous said...

Randy,

I'm eagerly awaiting your "More on this later" concerning FamilySearch.