24 March 2005 - Family History and Technology Workshop

The Family History and Technology conference is a one day event where presentations are given on the latest innovations in the world of computerized genealogy and the technology we use to help us in our genealogy research. The conference opened with a very interesting keynote address presented by Ransom Love (Director, Strategic Relationships, Family & Church History Dept. for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). He spoke about his vision of the future of computerized genealogy and described a system that follows an open community based model at its core that everyone can contribute to, but expands so that vendors can offer rich data services based on this. It was exciting to hear more people talking about using an open model for genealogy software.

John Finlay, PhpGedView Project Manager, gave two presentations at this workshop. The first was about Open Source genealogy software, and why we need more of it.
Read the final paper submitted to this conference. (MS Word)
View the slide presentation. (PPT)

The second presentation was about the PhpGedView web services that are used to connect the GDBI client with a PhpGedView server and how this might be expanded to allow for linking genealogy databases on multiple servers to build a distributed world tree.
Read the final paper. (MS Word)
View the slide presentation. (PPT)

During lunch, John also gave a demo presentation of PGV. They later gave awards for the best demo presentations, and the PGV demo one first prize.

25 March 2005 - Computerized Genealogy Conference

The Computerized Genealogy Conference is a two day conference geared towards the users of genealogy software. This year there were over 400 attendees who came to learn how to use computers when doing their genealogy.

John and Melissa Finlay gave a presentation about PhpGedView to a packed audience. Thier presentation focused on how to use PhpGedView as a collaborative genealogy tool.
Read the syllabus for this presentation (PDF)

John Finlay also gave a presentation about Open Source genealogy software and demonstrated several of the top open source projects on sourceforge.net. Refer to the Open Source presentation from the FHT conference to read the final paper and view the presentation.

During this conference John also setup a vendor booth in the vendor area of the conference. The time at the booth was very busy as many people came to ask questions and find out more about PGV.

Overall these conferences were a major success for PGV.