Slides from the January 11, 2011 Webinar for the OpenGen Alliance

1. OpenGen.org Alliance Meeting • January 11, 2011

2. Participant Summary – OpenGen Webinar
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Participants for the webinar included:
• Doug Blank Bryn Mawr College
• GeneJ Composer Family Historian / BetterGEDCOM
• George Farkas XGenML
• Rysa Pitner AppleTree.com / OpenGen.org
• Scott Mueller AppleTree.com / OpenGen.org
• Tamura Jones Independent Consultant / Computer Scientist
• Tom Hendricks - no affiliation provided -

3. Housekeeping – OpenGen Webinar
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• Webinar Housekeeping
• This webinar is being recorded
• Recording will be available at OpenGen.org tomorrow afternoon
• BaseCamp Writeboard as Reference for this Webinar
• “January 11 Working Session”
• A list of webinar attendees will be included in the slides published at
the close of the call
• The webinar slides will be posted at SlideShare following the webinar,
and commenting will be enabled
• Comments and questions are welcome during the call
• Please use the G2W tools to pose questions, raise hands, or chat with members
during the webinar.
• Questions: Ask written questions to the presenters using this dialogue
• Raise your hand: Request permission to speak directly to the group via your
voice connection
• Chat: Offer comments/questions to the entire audience or a specific member

4. Agenda
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• • OpenGen goals review
• Needs assessment
- End user
- Developer
• Definitions of minimal viable product
• Process for collaborative development of a model
- wiki-style
- http://www.gliffy.com/publish/2211457/
• Development timeline review
• Nominations for elections to the Board

5. Update
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• Slides from last webinar on SlideShare
• Membership Update
• Currently 43 members signed up
• Members listed on OpenGen.org

6. OpenGen Goals
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• Collaborative and inclusive process for creating Genealogy
standards
• Invite membership from all industries and interests
• File format that enables lossless data exchange, portability
across systems and long-term preservation
• API for real-time data interoperability
• Open source software facilitating genealogical data
interoperability
• Available at no charge
• Maintained and supported
• Examples
• Translators to/from other genealogy file formats
• Source citation generation
• Testing/verification tools and data

7. Needs Assessment
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• Developers
• A portable file format capable of archiving all
information
• Lossless data translation from existing genealogy files
to new format
• Internationalization through UTF-8
• Users
• Portability between users and systems must be
seamless
• Backward compatibility
• A single file containing all data
• Source citation definitions
• Repository table

8. First Draft (File Format)
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• Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
• GEDCOM’s level of data
• No religious information (discuss?)
• XML Schema

9. Consensus model for development
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• OpenGen will openly construct a model
• Openly published through Gliffy
• Initiative led by developers
• Inviting comments and feedback from anyone
• Providing, redirects, feedback, and responses
through webinars
“Getting an idea (a "vision," if you must) through the
technical and philosophical obstacles in the
committee can be infuriatingly slow and difficult.”
- Bjarne Stroustrup, Creator of C++

10. Roadmap
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Task Date
First Draft of File Format Mid 2011
Open Source Translator (GEDCOM) Mid 2011
Open Source Verification Tool Late 2011
Second Draft of File Format Late 2011
New/Revised Open Source Translators (2) Early 2012
Third Draft of File Format (Genealogists) Mid 2012
New/Revised Open Source Translators Mid 2012
Open Source Citation Generations Late 2012

11. Board of Directors
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• Process for nominations
• Who are the notable participants?
• Timeframe

12. Next Meeting
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The next scheduled meeting for OpenGen is:
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
1:00 p.m. PST / 4:00 p.m. EST / 9:00 p.m. UTC
GoToWebinar details will be available at
OpenGen.org