[Cross-posted on the BeyondGen list as well. This reiterates a number of thoughts I’ve already written about on here, along with a number of new ones.]

Collaboration is key

This seems obvious, but it’s worth stating if only because it changes a lot of the dynamics of genealogy software. Instead of a single, isolated researcher working primarily on data with occasional GEDCOMs sent out and merged in, the new genealogy world has to be *connected*. Researchers should be sharing notes, resources, advice, experience, and anything else that helps move the work along. No one is an island. There’s a goldmine of research out there, and the more connected people are, the less work will have to be duplicated and the more advances we’ll make.

I don’t think this means that anyone has to give up their own personal copy of the data, but instead means that my filing cabinet turns into a node on a network, with interchange of data and ideas flying back and forth all the time. Through all of this collaboration, communities will form, and the resulting collective community knowledge will be immensely useful. There are groups that have already formed — RootsWeb, mailing lists, and so on — but there needs to be more of it, and more research tools.

(As far as community knowledge goes, there’s the Genealogy wikibook, WeRelate.org, and WikiTree.org as wikified examples. I think wikis are a great way to harness it, but other models will also work well, each supplementing the rest. There’s been some discussion about the possibility of using a wiki format to store each person’s/family’s data, for ultimate flexibility. Thoughts?)

With multi-user systems, you’d also want invites (ala Gmail), privacy controls (Flickr has a good, simple model — family, friends, and everyone else), change histories (Wikipedia), and so on.

Know what’s out there

There’s also a lot to be said for creating connections between ancestors. Whether this means combining individuals or linked loosely, I need to be able to find out who else is researching my ancestor Abram Houchins, for example. And while family relations are the point of genealogy, there’s a largely untapped potential in including non-family relationships — friends, neighbors, business partners, etc. If I know that Abram’s neighbor was James Jones, I’d like to be able to link him in and (hopefully) find research on James that his descendants have done. Collateral research can help when one runs into a dead end.

Beyond that, I think it would help to expose records more. What I mean is, if I have the Shanks family Bible but no one else knows I have it, it’s only helping me. But if I make it known that I have it, along with Robert Shanks’s will and whatever other records I have, then other people can ask me to look things up for them or get copies or what have you. And then it’d be easier for me to find out if someone in Robert’s neighborhood kept a journal around the time he was there, giving me access to a firsthand account of what life was like then and there, just twenty yards down the road. Records live in libraries and archives, but they’re also in the possession of people, and I think access to those records needs to become easier and more widespread. People would, in effect, become small archives. :) (I do realize that some people won’t want to share records, but quite a few will, I think.)

Online sites and apps could also have requests for help, kind of like “Help Wanted” ads, where users list skills they have (reading 14th century Latin handwriting, for example, or a lot of experience with 18th century Italian research) or nearby libraries/archives they have access to (the Cabarrus County Public Library or the Family History Library or the National Archives or whatever), and the sites would then be able to connect people who need help to people who are able to offer that help. Even rudimentary things like recognizing what language a record is written in would be helpful. As for whether people would be willing to help out like this, for free, I don’t know. I hope so. :)

It’s also cool to show how you’re related to other people, both in your tree and other users — “You are Abram’s great-great-great grandson,” or “User smithjbm is your sixth cousin, twice removed.”

Integrate with the web

Online apps need permalinks for individuals and families so that people can talk about them. For example, my uncle asked where on our tree I wanted him to start researching. There was no easy way to point directly to the family I had in mind; instead I had to circuitously describe which people they were and how to know for sure they were the ones I intended and not others with the same name. A permalink would have made it extremely easy to e-mail him the URL and know that he’s seeing exactly what I’m seeing. It’s also handy when blogging and creating other websites.

RSS feeds and SMS/e-mail notifications are also biggies — feeds/notifications for changes in the database, search results, comments (and comments could be another way for people to collaborate), etc. Microformats would also be useful. And there should be tight integration with other online media — Flickr and company for photos (images of records, pictures of ancestors/places, etc.), Odeo for audio, Google Maps for historical maps perhaps, etc. Maybe even Skype.

Blogs are the research logs of the 21st century. Genealogy apps should take advantage of that, either through offering built-in blogs (modified to include whatever data should go in a research log) or through linking in an externally hosted blog via RSS. (Meaning, if I’ve already got my genealogy blog hosted somewhere else, the app would recognize that and pull in my recent posts as part of my profile on the site. I’d also be able to post to my blog via the app, using one of the blogging APIs. It could even specially format my post, adding in permalinks for people I mention in the post, etc. — kind of like LibraryThing touchstones in the message boards.) In addition, it’d be nice to include little pedigrees when writing a blog post, so the app could provide a “snippet” feature where it exports a two- or three-generation pedigree in HTML/CSS which is precooked and ready to pop into a blog post as-is.

Tags? I don’t know yet if these are truly useful or not. They’d probably be primarily for users to overlay additional semantic meaning — they could mark certain people/families/lines as “@library” or “call uncle jim” or “mary” (meaning Mary’s working on it) or whatever.

Thinking about and preparing for the growing popularity of other online access technologies like mobile phones, for example, is also wise.

Be open

People’s data is their own, and that needs to be recognized especially in a multi-user online system. Let them own it, because people are more likely to take care of something they see as “theirs,” even as they’re sharing it. (Saying that, I think of Wikipedia, where no one really “owns” anything. Even so, users kind of claim virtual territory — they have a stake in whatever articles they’ve contributed to — and it has the same effect.) Also, let people import and export in a variety of formats, so they won’t worry about getting locked into proprietarianism. :)

Well, this is long enough as it is. What do y’all think? (Feel free to add comments here or on BeyondGen.)

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