Off To Gaenovium - Thu, 24 Jul 2014

The official announcement is out. And I now can announce that I’ll be flying to the city of Leiden, Netherlands in early October.

Gaenovium will be a small one day conference on October 7 for genealogy technology creators, so it will give me a wonderful opportunity to meet, share, discuss and argue with other developers. I love these opportunities to expand and consider what others are doing and use them to make improvements to what I am doing and even possibly to change my future plans for the better.

I’m slated to be one of the five speakers and I’ll be putting together a talk called “Reading Wrong GEDCOM Right” with many examples of the multitude of non-standard GEDCOM variations that I’ve had to handle in Behold. This will be a technical talk for developers, and I’m looking very forward to presenting this to a distinct group of people that will be able to appreciate it. 

The conference is being organized by Tamura Jones of Leiden, Netherlands and Bob Coret of The Hague, Netherlands.

Tamura has done much to improve the quality of genealogy software as he provides likely the most brutally honest assessments of programs he reviews, and smart developers will heed what he says. His previous assessments of Behold: Behold release disappoints (0.98.9.90), Behold 0.99.2 Beta, and Behold 1.0 all provided me with great feedback and areas where it needed to improve.

Bob is the creator of the genealogieonline website which is just one of many initiatives he has taken over the years to innovate and improve the technology used for Dutch genealogical research.

Tamura and Bob have both worked very hard to organize this first ever Gaenovium conference and I’m looking forward to meeting them both.

Another person that I’ve corresponded with who is also speaking at the conference is Tony Proctor of Ireland. Tony was very involved with Better GEDCOM and FHISO and I had several conversations with him through those venues. I’ve not looked too closely yet at his STEMMA data model, designed to be a possible replacement for GEDCOM and more, so I’m interested in hearing what he has to say.

The last item on the Gaenovium schedule is a Panel Discussion on Current and Future Genealogical Exchange Standards, so this could be the most interesting session of them all.

*Pavilion photo by Tamura Jones, copyright © 2014, used by kind permission.

The event will take place in a building called The Pavilion, and looks like a lovely venue. The capacity is only about 50, so if you are at all interested in coming, be sure to register as soon as possible or you may be disappointed.