A friend of mine has a client who’s interested in paying a programmer to put together a genealogy website ala Beyond (as described in these blog posts). I’m too busy with other projects, however, and so I thought I’d cast out the net and see if any of y’all are interested.

Spec-wise, the client wants a web app where users can upload their PAF/GEDCOM files and collaborate. They also want it to be able to generate a number of different charts. (I’m sure there are probably a few other things they want, but these seem to be the core, driving necessities.) Timeframe is 4-6 months and the salary is negotiable (based on experience — and of course you’ll need to be quite experienced since this isn’t a kiddy project). Beyond that, and I say this in all humility :), you’ll need to resonate with a lot of the ideas here on this blog. (In other words, they’re looking for something like Beyond.) It would help if you live in or near Salt Lake City, Utah, but that’s not an absolute necessity.

So, if you’re interested, send me an e-mail (my address is in the sidebar) and I’ll pass your contact information on to them. I’m not really affiliated with them and so I can’t answer any questions beyond what I’ve said here, but I hope somebody’s interested and ends up writing a really cool web app. :)

One of my friends mentioned today that she’d like a Google Docs for genealogy — you know, like a spreadsheet or a document but instead it would be a pedigree. And I thought of Beyond. And I thought, “Gee, I wish I had time and energy to do it.” Because still, nobody’s done it — not done right, at any rate. And when it is done right, it’ll be big. Huge. Phenomenal. Genealogy is one of the most popular hobbies out there.

I don’t think I’ll be the one to pull it off, though. I’m still rather burned out from programming and I don’t see myself starting a massive project like this anytime soon. But I do plan to continue writing on here occasionally, and I hope with all my heart that someone will take the cream of the crop of these ideas here and create something truly beautiful — the Google Docs or Flickr of the genealogy world. I want to be wowed. I want to be thunderstruck. I want to be moved to tears. (Well, perhaps I’m overdramatizing a bit here, but we’ve still got a long way to go.)

I just got an e-mail about how Geni now has what they call family friends. “Make Geni your all-inclusive network for staying in touch with all the people you care about,” they say.

That’s great, I suppose, but my first thought when I read that was, “There’s no way they’re going to be able to compete with Facebook.” As of Tuesday there are 30 million people on Facebook. That’s a juggernaut.

And then my second thought was, “Wait a second. Facebook just launched their application API a few weeks ago.” Now, I haven’t looked into how extensive the API is, so I don’t know how much one could do with it, but Facebook could definitely be the foundation for genealogy social networking — it’s been around long enough, it’s huge, you can already share photos and videos and calendar events and birthdays, and it has an application API that third-party developers can build on. And even though it is massive, it still has a clean, smooth feel to it, unlike many other sites.

A cursory search through the Facebook application directory shows nothing for “genealogy” and only two for “family,” one of which is a fraternity/sorority genealogy. Close, but no cigar. :)

Security would be an issue, of course, but overall Facebook has very good privacy control — you can set it to be whatever you want. I can’t think of many other disadvantages other than that the content frame is relatively small (compared to the full browser width), but I have a feeling that’s actually a good thing. Constraints foster creativity. And if there’s not much room, it’s hard for it to get cluttered. (Not impossible, though. :))

What would such a genealogy application look like? It could either be a full-blown app in itself, or it could pull in data from an external site (the way Facebook imports blog feeds for you). The former is more preferable than the latter, I’d think, but I’m not sure how much data you can store in the Facebook databases.

Interface-wise, there’s not a whole lot of room for a horizontal family tree, but if you limited it to three generations you ought to be fine. And of course there’d need to be a search. Each person’s name would link to a “profile” for them, similar in feel to a normal Facebook user’s profile but with obvious differences. (Similar in that you could rearrange blocks however you want, and tag them in photos and such.) If the person on your tree also happens to be on Facebook, then it would link to their real profile instead. And you would absolutely have to be able to set controls on how much of this is viewable and by whom, particularly with living people. (It’d be nice to have parts of the profile visible to others and parts not, the way you can do with your own profile.) You’d also want to be able to group other Facebook users together and give them access as a group (”Immediate family,” “extended family,” that sort of thing).

And ideally you’d be able to import/export GEDCOM. :)

Again, I’m not sure how much of this is possible, but it’s good to think out loud without worrying about what is and isn’t possible, because half the time the boundary between the two is soft to the touch.

Thoughts?

Technorati Tags: Geni, Facebook, genealogy

I’m back! :)

I’ve switched over to using a wiki for my productivity needs (to-do lists, research notes, etc.), and I’m more and more convinced that it’s perfect for genealogy research. It’s freeform, laughably easy to store, and the hyperlinks make it a piece of cake to stitch things together where needed (and when you think about it, researching genealogy is just that: you stitch evidence together to form people and then stitch them together to form families and lines). And wikis are collaborative, and most support revisioning.

The only real downside I can think of is that there aren’t any set fields for things like names and dates, so searching is basically just a full-text search unless you have some kind of parser that picks up fields automatically. (And it would be easy enough to add some codes to the wiki markup to let users specifically designate portions of text as dates or names or places or what have you.)

And in reality, doing it this way is far more flexible, which makes it much nicer when you move to the international playing field, dealing with hundreds and thousands of different languages and cultures. The rigidity of existing record managers has been acceptable, but we’re in a new era now, and we need something organic, something that can grow and mold itself to the needs of the user. And users have vastly different needs.

Graduation is next month. Beyond is on the back burner. I’m hoping that after I graduate I’ll have time (and energy and desire) to make something happen. I’m getting rather burned out with programming, though, so there’s no guarantee. Anyway, I’m alive. The end. :)

Back in November I mentioned my idea for a lightweight record manager, and here’s a mockup of what I think it’ll look like:

It’ll be very, very simple. Basically, there’ll be a small set of metadata for each person (the name, gender, and birthdate, as you can see in its own box), and then a wiki page where the user can enter whatever they want. It’ll use Textile for the editing (and to edit, you’ll just click on the wiki area, I think). There’ll be a modification to link to other people in the database (the green links) and to non-people pages (the red Anson County link). Other than that and a basic search, the only other feature (for now) will be the history tab, which keeps track of revisions.

And that’s it. It won’t take too long to put together, really. I’m not going to worry about GEDCOM import or pedigree charts or anything just yet — I’ll stick with the bare minimum, to ensure that this actually happens. :) The idea is to let the user organize their data the way they want to. To get out of the way, in other words. Not everyone wants that, of course, but I think it has the potential to be a very good thing. We’ll see if I’m right. :)

Oh, I upgraded to Rails 1.2 earlier but it didn’t work for some reason, so I’m reinstalling and hoping that it’ll decide to cooperate. If not, I may write the prototype in Python/Django instead.

As for the name, I figured I can’t keep calling everything Beyond. :)

Technorati Tags: Beyond, genealogy, family history

I wasn’t able to make it to the LDS tech talk session a few weeks ago, but Dan Hanks recently blogged about it, and I really wish I’d gone.

The church is also now in the design stages of a new open-source personal record manager that will interface with the new system and will perhaps take the role that PAF plays now.

Very good. It looks like they’ll be writing it in Java (or something similar), which is really quite a pity, but at least it’ll be something. (If only they’d realize how much better Ruby and Python and Perl are. ~sigh~) It’ll be a while before anything comes of this, though — several months at the very least. But since it’ll be open-source, with any luck they’ll keep it open from the beginning so that people can use it as it develops, rather than having to wait until a release.

Anyway, people keep asking me how my “PAF for Mac” (as this project originally started) is coming along, and it’s always disappointing to have to tell them it’s in suspended animation. But hopefully not for long! (And yes, I realize I keep saying that, but someday it’s really going to change. :))

Technorati Tags: LDS, PAF, genealogy, family history

Nothing new to report, other than that school and other endeavors are keeping me busy. I’m still itching at the bit to write a simple web app that will help me keep track of my research, though. I’ve already created most of it in my head, watching the outlines start to become solid, so it shouldn’t be too hard. All I need is time. Anyway, while it’s unfortunately taking a long time, hopefully we’ll see some real, usable stuff coming out of this before long. I’ll try to make it more of a priority. :)

A couple of weeks ago I came across Family Wheel, Buck DeFore’s ActionScript-based genealogy app:

You can read more about it on the project page. Quite an interesting visualization technique (meaning, as the main “pedigree” of the app; circle charts have been around for ages, but they’ve always been something you printed, not something you worked on directly). The app is fairly simple, too, which is nice.

Technorati Tags: genealogy, family history, Family Wheel

Alrighty, here’s a proof-of-concept for the linker I mentioned in my last post. After I’d used Flickr for a while, the drag-and-drop organizing became addicting, and I realized that it’d be perfect (I think) for organizing the people in your database. Here’s the Flickr layout:

You find your photos in the strip at the bottom, then drag them into the set you want them in. It’s that easy. So, taking the same idea and applying it to genealogy, I came up with this:

It’s quite rough, I’ll admit, but the gist of it should come across. The software would be smart enough to re-order the children in birth order, I’d imagine. The “Family” text in the upper left would create a new family. (It should be labeled “New Family” instead, on second thought.) “Other” would create other kinds of relationships — friends, employers, neighbors, etc.

So, instead of starting with the pedigree and filling in the blanks, you would enter people instead — without caring (at first) who goes in what families. After you’ve entered the people you’re interested in, then you’d go to the linker, find the people you just added, and drag-and-drop them into families.

Since it’s still just an idea, I don’t know if this is better/easier/faster than the traditional methods. Thoughts?

Technorati Tags: genealogy, family history, Flickr