Sunny Skies Forecast for #RootsTech 2015

One week away from the opening day of #RootsTech 2015 finds the weather predicted for Salt Lake City to be warm and sunny. From the online blogging community, there are a few mentions about the upcoming Conference, notably from Randy Seaver on his Genea-Musings blog and Jill Ball on her Geniaus blog. Jill must be pretty close to beginning her long flight to the U.S. and Salt Lake City, Utah from her home in Australia. I have been monitoring the Genealogy Bloggers at RootsTech 2015 Facebook page since it was put online and haven't seen a lot of activity the past week. Everyone must be busy getting prepared to travel.

I will be attending the Brigham Young University (BYU) Family History Technology Workshop on Tuesday, February 10, 2015 before the RootsTech Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Conference Center where this Conference is being held is only 5 minutes from my home. So far I see the following list of Lightning Talks:

1. Wesley Eames, AncestorCloud
2. Jeff Haddon, HistoryLines
3. Charles Knutson, Kinpoint
4. Kent Andersen, A Life Story
5. Steve Pedersen, RootsBid
6. Charles Glancy, Peer Trees
7. Jed Wood, Generasi
8. Kimball Clark, kindex
9. Nathan Brakke, Soal
10. Dan Rodziewicz, BYU Family History Technology Lab
11. Doug Kennard, Historic Journals
12. Aaron Shelley, Family Feats
13. Glen Chidester, ScanStone
14. Jessie Young, One Page Genealogy
15. Bill Harten, Puzilla
16. Robert Ball, Where Am I From? Showing Geospatial Location of Ancestors Through A Generational Perspective
17. Ben Baker and Joel Thornton, Viewing Closest Relatives in the My Relatives View of FamilySearch Family Tree
18. Joohan Lee & Geoffrey Draper, Timeline-Enhanced Portrait Charts
19. Curtis Wigington, William Barrett, Virtual Pedigree
20. Alan Cannaday, Auto-Zoning Newspaper Articles for the Purpose of Corpus Development for Training OCR Systems
21. Peter Ivie, Evan Ivie, Record linkage confidence through top match score analysis
22. Brian Davis, William Barrett, Scott Swingle, 3D graph cut: Extending min-cut segmentation to handle overlap of cursive handwriting in tabular documents

This ought to be very interesting. I know a few of the people on the list and hope to meet more of them during the conference. The Speaker at the the BYU Conference is Curt Witcher of the Allen County Public Library. 

Thursday, February 11, 2015 is the Innovator Summit at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah. There are some other people that I would hope to meet at this conference including the speakers:

• Harrison Tang, cofounder and chief executive officer of Family.me
• Mike Davis, cofounder and chief executive officer of StoryPress
• Robert Charles Anderson, FASG, director of the Great Migration Study Project at the New England Historic Genealogical Society

I have been reading Robert Charles Anderson's recent book, "Anderson, Robert Charles. Elements of Genealogical Analysis. 2014," and will have a lot more to say about the book when I finish it. So far, I have been reading it one paragraph at a time and it has proved to be a source of a lot of thought. 

Of course, RootsTech itself starts on Thursday, February 12, 2015 at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah and I will be there with my laptop clicking away on the keyboard to bring you my impressions of the Conference through its conclusion (and my presentation) on Saturday evening. 

As I usually say, Stay Tuned. I used to say, "write if you get work and hang by your thumbs" in tribute to Bob and Ray, but no one seems to know what that means anymore. So just for today, I will remember my old tribute and say, as did Ray Goulding and Bob Elliott for most of the years I was growing up and listening to the radio, "Write if you get work and hang by your thumbs."