RootsTech 2013 - Day Two - Episode Three

I had some interesting discussions with a great variety of different organizations and companies. Right now, I am sitting in a class with Daniel Horowitz of MyHeritage.com. His presentation is on Crowdsourcing. This subject has the goal of reducing the time involved in building complex or very large projects.  Example from Lego

• Create a project, share your concept, see what other people think.
• Get supporters for a chance to become a product developer
• Pay the developer and percentage of the profits

Many genealogical projects can benefit from crowdsourcing, such as the current Indexing project. Another example of crowdsourcing is the navigation system called Waze.com. The common factor is a gain for the person who is volunteering to help with the project.

Genealogy is particularly susceptible to this with its own Indexing program. The best recent example is the indexing done with the 1940 U.S. Census records.

MyHeritage.com uses crowdsourcing in its Smart Matching program. Smart matches compare the information in the user's family tree with all of the other family trees in entire data base.

I had the experience of sitting next to the winner of the annual Developer's Award. She is Tammy Hepps who won the award for her program, Treelines.com. More about this later, but this a very interesting new idea about how to display and gather genealogical data, stories, photos and other information.

I also had a very productive discussion but short discussion with Dovy Paukstys of Real-Time Collaboration the developer of RecordSeek.com. This is also a topic for a later post.