Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Genealogy Q&A Site Proposal Needs Support

Louis Kessler, the creator of the Behold! genealogy software and author of the Behold Genealogy blog, has a proposal for a Genealogy Question and Answer website on the StackExchange network.  He needs at least 200 persons willing to add questions and give answers during a Beta phase are needed for the proposal to progress.  

Here is the press release from Louis:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 26, 2012

Genealogists always have had questions on how to do their genealogy, how to find certain records, and whether there is any information available on the family lines they are researching. To date, there has not been one specific place they could go to ask their questions and get answers.

A new proposal for a Question and Answer site for genealogy is now underway at the StackExchange network. They are looking for genealogists interested in signing up and participating to help give the site the momentum it needs to get through the Beta phase. Once it meets the StackExchange network's required activity level, it will be added permanently onto the StackExchange network.

"This would be a Q&A site for genealogy, run independently of the interests of any genealogy company. It would be completely free for anybody to use." says Louis Kessler, one of the proponents of the proposal.

The StackExchange network current hosts 88 Q&A sites on a diverse range of topics ranging from Programming to Photography to Personal Finance to Homebrewing. 

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About Louis Kessler

Louis Kessler has been a genealogist and programmer for over 30 years. He maintains the GenSoftReviews site where people rate and review their genealogy software. He is also the developer of the genealogy software named Behold.


I signed up for this months ago, and I urge my readers to do the same. 

The proposed Genealogy Q&A site is at http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/43502/genealogy?referrer=qjatnaq2vn0ajxi9mkpxvq2.  You can register using your Google, Facebook, Yahoo or other OpenID account.


Once you've registered, you can Vote on 5 of the proposed questions.  Don't answer any of them...the site requirement is creating sample questions and having 200 persons registered.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/08/genealogy-q-site-proposal-needs-support.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Done and cast my votes as well. Hope it helps.

Louis Kessler said...

Randy,

Thanks for helping out again and posting this for us. In the 4 hours since you posted this, the site has had 70 visits and 14 more people signed up.

What I should also have mentioned is that we had 150 people, including yourself Randy, sign up for it before. But that proposal was closed because it didn't get the required number of participants within the 2 year timeframe.

Unfortunately, what that means is that you, and those other 150 people who signed up previously will have to sign up again to this new initiative. But that should be easy, since you already have your account at StackExchange and only have to login and click on the button at the left of the page.

This time, we are restarting this and trying to get a big blast of people sign up right away and see if we can get it going into Beta as fast as possible.

I'm really hoping we can get to Beta and then meet the traffic requirements to make the site permanent. The StackExchange network is probably the best system available for any Q&A site - it can handle any level of traffic - it will be run by our genealogy community - and is 100% free.

Louis

Louis Kessler said...

We need to keep up the interest. I have a new post at Google+ with step by step instructions, since some people found it confusing: https://plus.google.com/106257958448273208907/posts/GAYKVrtMWGH

Randy. You signed up to the original proposal. But that didn't carry forward and you'll have to sign up again.

Thanks,

Louis