Open source and Roots
In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage - to know who we are and where we came from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning.I'm sitting in Peter Graf's keynote at the Open Source Business Conference, but can't shake some of the ramifications of yesterday's sessions (almost universally excellent).
Alex Haley, Roots
Perhaps Mitch Kapor's keynote on Wikipedia was most striking to me - talking about community-driven knowledge aggregation and dissemination. I've written on the topic of genealogy before, but I believe today, more than ever before, that genealogy is a massive business opportunity waiting to happen.
There is a company - MyFamily.com - that already pulls in $100M/year providing subscription access to census records and such. But the real opportunity is in providing a platform upon which average people can share their family information, with mash-ups that allow us to drill down onto historical and geographical information surrounding that data. So, I know my family tree back to the 1700s in England and Belgium, but I know very little about the kinds of lives they must have had.
I'd enjoy clicking through to learn that information, and would even appreciate having someone advertise against that interest: travel agencies pitching me on trips to Belgium, as a trivial example, but even more nuanced approaches that could include "olde thyme" advertisements that mimic old products that were available then. Maybe the record labels have listings of songs that were popular at the time, and link me back to their modern libraries. Stuff like that.
It's inefficient to have one company, church, or other organization providing a single source to this data. The human family is too vast. This is a community effort, or it is a fruitless effort. We have the technological tools (wikis, blogs, instant communication, ECM systems, databases, etc.) AND a rising clarity in business models to monetize the "marrow-deep" interest in learning about who we are, based on who we were.
Why isn't someone doing this?
5 comments:
Wow Matt,
I saw your Blog mentioned on Raven Zachary's. Ask him about our coworking discussions. We recently had a great BarCamp in Dallas and I came away thinking about this very topic! I've been wrapping my mind around it for a couple of weeks. I think one of the reasons this hasn't happened yet is that the people doing geneaology are typically older, like my dad. He has gotten into it after 60, not before. The people thinking about social technology are younger. (Apology for the stereotypes, but I'm being very general.) The implications are that the people who can design the solution aren't thinking much about history yet, even their own. They are thinking about the future! There are other usability (low vision, etc.) opportunities to seriously consider as well. I think it's a very exciting opportunity to make a very usable, accessible, community site. Let's start something! jcorkran at innerecho dot com
This topic has also been on my mind for a while. I also agree with Jeff why it probably is difficult when the typical genealogy person is older.
My thinking goes to a global family tree that everybody can append to, e.g. Open Source Genealogy. After all, we are all relatives if we go enough generations back. Ideally It should run non profit/free. The programs/data-model should also be open source. However there are lots of stuff to consider:
Funding (open source development but what about the servers)
Single ownership / multiple ownership of individual persons and relations/ moderators
Wrong information (on purpose/by accident) or different opinions
Upload/merge/download of GEDCOM files
How to get it accepted / would people use it.
Another option (less dramatic) could be to keep the individual GEDCOM files (or a new XML format) for each genealogist personally owned (residing on a common server or a personal server). The common tree should be stored on a central server. It should just hold basic information like Names Birth/Death etc as well as basic relations. All other information should be on linked remote/personal servers. For each person indexed there would be a number of links to personal homepages with additional information.
This way I have full control of the size and contents of my private tree. I can decide to only have ancestors where I personally have verified the primary source or I can decide to have all kinds of unverified secondary (third) sources in my file. I just have to manually or automatically connect my info to the common tree. It could be part of the upload process. If a person in my GEDCOM/XML file is new (not connected directly/indirectly to the common tree) then I should see a list of possible matches and select the correct one or mark my person as a new unconnected person in the common tree. A lot of other "Use Cases" are on my mind...
This upload/link approach could even be supported by the commercial/free genealogy programs. If the common tree gets enough accept it will happen automatically. The big problem is to get the idea accepted. Here Google would definitely be the best driver, but then THEY own the common tree.....
Comments are welcome.
henrik_ls --at-- yahoo --dot-- com
I think the main reason that you haven't seen anything in this area to date is that it's a fair amount of work to put something together. I've been working on WeRelate.org (non-profit genealogy wiki + web search engine) for over a year, and we just barely launched last month. We have wiki's for surnames (100K pages), places (390K soon to grow to over 500K pages), and sources (1.3M pages), and the ability for people to create both personal and community-editable articles. We also have a vertical search engine for genealogy that has around 5M pages. But there's still a ton left to do. We need to allow people to import gedcoms, create wiki pages for their ancestors, identify potential existing matches to their ancestors, and export gedcoms. We need to integrate with an open-source genealogy client so that the import/export is painless. We need to grow the searchable web pages by at least 20-fold. All of this takes time. But I agree it's an idea whose time has come. There's definitely a lot of interest.
A little after the fact with my comment here, but I wanted to point folks to Renee Zamora's blog. She has been involved in beta testing (see some of her earlier posts from this year) of a new system called "Family Tree" that is being built by the LDS Church. This new system has the potential to provide a new community aspect to pedigree data. As one representative from the church said, you can think of it as a Global Ancestral File, as opposed to a Personal Ancestral File. There have been a few words I've heard about this new system providing XML APIs and even being open sourced, but I haven't heard any church representative confirm that at this point. I know it is being talked about though. It will be exciting to see how it all unfolds.
I'll also put in my plug for Dallan Quass' work with WeRelate.org. I see WeRelate becoming the canonical place to link to from any other genealogy site for place, surname, and source data, much as wikipedia is becoming a canonical source to link to for topical data.
Hi,
I like to recommend you to http://www.zamily.com . Its new family site that has cool features like an interactive family tree. Check it out!
~Sam
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