RootsTech 2011: Day 1

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Yes­ter­day was the first day of Root­sTech, a new con­fer­ence on geneal­o­gy and tech­nol­o­gy held in Salt Lake City and spon­sored by Fam­il­y­Search Inter­na­tion­al, the geneal­o­gy infor­ma­tion arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints.

The con­fer­ence start­ed with a lit­tle bit of con­fu­sion: It seemed that there was a rush to the reg­is­tra­tion table just pri­or to the keynote address. This kind of thing can be min­i­mized, of course, by open­ing reg­is­tra­tion the day before, or by send­ing all the light­weight items (tick­ets to lunch­es and events, lan­yard and badge) ahead of time, and then sim­ply exchang­ing one of those tick­ets for a stan­dard back­pack or lap­top case and any oth­er schwag and late-break­ing news.

In any case, the orga­niz­ers offered to let peo­ple reg­is­ter lat­er; they were not going to check badges for the first event. This was some­thing I def­i­nite­ly took advan­tage of, since I did­n’t want to miss the talk by Shane R. Robi­son (Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent and Chief Strat­e­gy and Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer, Hewlett Packard) A World of Infor­ma­tion and Jay Verkler (CEO, Fam­il­y­Search Inter­na­tion­al) Turn­ing Roots, Branch­es, Trees into Nodes, Links, Graphs.

I am not sure what the more genealog­i­cal­ly and less tech­no­log­i­cal­ly mind­ed atten­dees thought of Shane’s speech. It was a well-deliv­ered dis­cus­sion of the future of cloud com­put­ing and glob­al­iza­tion. I found it fas­ci­nat­ing. Of course, with so much of the world so pop­u­lat­ed, and with these oth­er pop­u­la­tion cen­ters (Chi­na, India, Brazil) poised to dra­mat­i­cal­ly move into more of a mid­dle-class exis­tence, there are seri­ous chal­lenges for glob­al sus­tain­abil­i­ty. I was glad to see that Mr. Robi­son had sus­tain­abil­i­ty in the cen­ter of his group of pri­or­i­ties for Hewlett Packard.

Mr. Verkler got up and tied this all back into geneal­o­gy, point­ing out that cloud com­put­ing is hap­pen­ing in a big way already in the geneal­o­gy space: All of the new Fam­il­y­Search web­site is host­ed on Ama­zon EC2 servers in the cloud, not on servers Fam­il­y­Search owns itself.

Lat­er in the day, I spent some time man­ning the NGS booth, looked around at the exhib­it hall, and attend­ed some talks. IBM has a space in the exhib­it hall with games: non-vir­tu­al (pool, air hock­ey, chess) and vir­tu­al (Microsoft Kinect). They were also giv­ing away mas­sages. I also attend­ed jQuery and Web Ser­vices, a talk by Logan Allred. He was cogent and clear. Over lunch, I heard Chris van der Kuyl of bright­sol­id dis­cuss Fam­i­ly His­to­ry in the Age of the Cloud. He did­n’t real­ly talk about the cloud much, but it was an inter­est­ing romp through the inter­sec­tion of tech­nol­o­gy and geneal­o­gy, and a good intro­duc­tion to bright­sol­id as a com­pa­ny.

Jim­my Zim­mer­man’s Ruby Library for Fam­il­y­Search API was also a great talk, so full of details, it was prac­ti­cal­ly a code review. I regret to say that Bar­ry Ewell’s talk, Dig­i­tal­ly Pre­serv­ing Your Fam­i­ly Her­itage, did not impress me. He’s very knowl­edge­able about the top­ic, but his speak­ing style grat­ed on me. He would start a sen­tence, stop in the mid­dle, say a cou­ple of sen­tences that were rel­e­vant to him, then fin­ish the orig­i­nal sen­tence. Maybe he was hav­ing an off day, or was a lit­tle ner­vous in the lights, but it did­n’t make for a good pre­sen­ta­tion in my opin­ion. Michael Buck­’s Top Ten Web Appli­ca­tions Secu­ri­ty Risks (based on OWASP rec­om­men­da­tion) was clear, well thought out, and easy to fol­low.

At the end of the day, bright­sol­id spon­sored a Night at the Plan­e­tar­i­um. There were nachos, sand­wich­es, and pop­corn, but also IMAX films, as well as all the plan­e­tar­i­um exhibits. A great end to the day … except that I also head­ed to the Fam­i­ly His­to­ry Library, which was open until 11.