I’m putting together a proposal for a presentation or two at RootsTech, a conference put on by FamilySearch.org around family history technologies. The focus will be on Social Media. I have a few ideas – what else do you think would be interesting in terms of interesting uses of social media for family history?
Opening the Web for Humanity (This would actually make a great Keynote if they’re interested) – This would cover ways to make our human data more open, more searchable, and easier to find. I would talk about ways to help Google recognize individual ancestor records better, and ways to help Google and other search engines traverse the social connections available for each family history record on the internet.
Facebook – It’s Not Just for the Living – In this presentation I’ll show how to use Facebook as a way to not only connect living individuals to each other, but ways people can use Facebook Pages, Events, and Groups to connect people around historical records. I’ll also show ways people can turn their own individual records on their own websites into Facebook Pages and store timelines of information about each individual in history.
Facebook for the Living – I’ll show unique ways people can use Facebook Timeline and Groups for storing records about living individuals. I’ll share experiences I’ve had with storing my own personal history on Facebook, tagging old friends, uploading old photos, and getting back in touch with my past as a result.
Connecting the Living to the Dead Through Social Media – This will be a much broader presentation on all the different means of using social media for identifying living connections to identify dead connections. I’ll show examples of ways companies have identified the dead through the social graph of living connections we have. I’ll show other companies and products that are using social media in unique ways to collaborate and identify dead ancestors through social media.
What do you think? Any other presentations you’d like to see? I will likely only pick one, but I’m going to submit a few to see which they prefer.
