I’ll Be At RootsTech - Mon, 16 Jan 2012

Yesterday, I registered and finalized my arrangements to go to RootsTech 2012 from Feb 2 to 4 in Salt Lake City. If there are any Behold users going there, please let me know. I’d love to get together with you and maybe we can have a lunch or supper together.

If there’s enough interest, I can put on an unconferencing session and demo Behold giving some inside hints and tips, Q and A, and a bit more of my roadmap for the future. I mentioned in an earlier blog post that Behold is entered in the RootsTech Developer Challange, so we’ll see how that goes.

I’m going to be attending mostly Developer sessions. My current plans are to see:

Thu 11am - A New GEDCOM - Ryan Heaton
Thu 1:45pm - A New GEDCOM (part 2) - Ryan Heaton
I want to hear what FamilySearch is attempting to put into their GEDCOM X and Ryan Heaton is the guy behind it.

Thu 3:00pm - Creating One Step Search Tools - Stephen Morse.
I’ve followed Stephen Morse for as long as I can remember. He was the architect of the 8086 chip. He then migrated to being intently interested in genealogy and applying his unique ability to making tools no one else could have thought of. I’m looking forward to meeting him.

Thu 4:15pm - Several possibilities for this time slot but I think I’d like to hear Daniel Horowitz of MyHeritage talk about MyHeritage’s Family Graph API.

Fri 9:45am - HTML5 and Ajax - Dovy Paukstys of Real-Time Collaboration, the developers of (AncestorSync. I’ve had several wonderful conversations with Dovy in my involvement with BetterGEDCOM and I’m looking forward to meeting him in person. Learning a bit more about Ajax would also be beneficial to me. Lets see how easy Dovy can make it.

Fri 11am - Citation Principles for Tech Creators - Robert Raymond. There’s no way I’m missing this.

Fri 1:45pm - A Report Card for the Genealogy Software Industry - Ron Tanner. Maybe I can get a midterm mark for Behold. (Also see below: Sat 11am)

Fri 3pm - Nothing tickles my fancy here. So this will be free time for me. We’ll play it by ear.

Sat 9:45am - Phonetic Matching Algorithm - Stephen Morse. I may want to implement this or something like this in Behold as part of virtual merging. … and this is another opportunity to hear Steve.

Sat 11am - Future of FamilySearch Family Tree - Ron Tanner. Some of their ideas (Conclusion Model, SourceCentric, sources are used as evidence) sounds a lot like what I’m planning to implement in Behold. I’m looking forward to seeing how far they’ve come in their ideas and whether they’ve actually created anything yet.

Sat 1:45pm - Software Forecast 2.0: What Genealogists Need for the future - D. Joshua Taylor. Mr. Taylor is said to be a bit of a “visionary in the world of genealogy”. This will be an interesting way to finish the week. We’ll see if something like Behold has a place in what will likely be a web-based / mobile app / in the cloud future. But maybe I’ll be surprised.

I’m also planning to be at the Friday 4:15pm Panel Discussion on “Sources, Citations and Meta Data” moderated by Ancestry Insider.

And I’m registered for the Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter dinner on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

Amongst others mentioned above, I’m looking forward to meeting Gordon Clarke, Dick Eastman, Randy Seaver, Dear Myrtle, all the BetterGEDCOM members in attendance, other developers, and all other users of genealogy software (i.e. everyone).