Rootstech Panel Info Posted

It's time to nail down my brief talking points for next week, now that the panel bios have been posted for the FHISO at Rootstech panel next Friday. I'll be with an esteemed group. This is a cool opportunity and I'm looking forward to it.

I may share some advance thoughts here on the blog before I head out to SLC for Rootstech. I've been kicking around some ideas about big data and context, and the need for interoperable family history information standards for users. It would be interesting to see numbers on how much data (in petabytes or larger) the big family history players such as Ancestry, FamilySearch & brightsolid have available online. That data is valuable on its own, but when users add context and connections, assuming those are accurate, the data becomes that much more valuable to these entities. And this information also becomes important for cultural and historical preservation.

Some of the bits from my October post on Information Standards in the Family History Space might make it into the talking points. I'll need to weave in references to Open Stand, UNESCO's work on knowledge societies and its Memory of the World project, and the need for collaboration.

In many ways this is a subset of the issues in my primary field related to an Internet ecosystem and fostering a multistakeholder environment. In the family history context, there is also a multistakeholder environment of entities and users, so a collaborative standards model is needed to encourage a sustainable, robust environment for the benefit of all.

I didn't intend to this post to kick start some talking points, but writing it out this way has helped.