Conference Report (updated)

Thank you to all those who came to the Open Data Conference on Saturday 30th January and especially to John Sheridan (Digital Director, the National Archives), Simon Tanner (Pro Vice Dean Research Impact & Innovation, King's College London) and our own Trustee Richard Light, for giving such enjoyable and illuminating talks.

Welcome slides with notes and the new Free UK Genealogy Open Data video can be seen here. A (poor quality) video of this section can be viewed here.

John Sheridan's talk can be seen here (we apologize for the poor quality of the recording). Simon's slides can be seen here and Richard slides can be viewed here.

The formal presentations were followed by a presentation of a new Free UK Genealogy video explaining why we believe Open Data is so crucial to the future of the organisation and projects, and hence the need for a new transcribers agreement.

Whilst the 'in person' attendees were able to join in the lively debate, online attendees became increasingly frustrated with streaming issues that were caused by the WiFi provision at the Linnean Society, not within our control unfortunately.

We understand how disappointing this must have been and are now working hard on editing the conference video, which will be published with a transcript as soon as we can.

Thank you for your patience if you tried to join us via one of these methods, and as one of the Trustees commented we need to ensure that technical issues do not undermine the messages of the day. It is important to ensure that all transcribers get an opportunity to hear the case for Open Data and get easy access to the proposed transcriber agreement and consultation process.

  • The proposed Transcriber Agreement Consultation can be found here.
  • Please use the consultation process to let us know your views on the proposed transcriber agreement and
  • please check FAQs if you have any questions. We will be adding the questions raised at the conference to this page shortly. If you still have questions please email us at info@freeukgen.org.uk

Press coverage:
Digital adventurers - Family Tree Editor Helen Tovey gets to grips with 'Open Data' and what it means for family history http://family-tree.co.uk/2016/02/digital-adventurers/