HAMP: Harmonizing Across Multiple Platforms

First post in a new series

For a few weeks, I’m letting you know here when I have a new post up at the new site:

This week, we’re talking about collaborative genealogy tools as part of a new series of posts looking at the relative merits of each tool.

A Journey through collaborative genealogy

I've been working with collaborative platforms of one kind or another since about 2006. (See The Backstory here!) For several years, between 2008 and 2012, I taught courses on using collaborative media to federal employees. So I have observed for myself how people use or abuse the tools available to them, and have seen them succeed (Wikipedia is a great example of success) and fail (too many to mention).

Collaborative tools have been a part of genealogy for a long, long time. Sites like FamilySearch, Find-A-Grave, and WikiTree are the best known and the most open, but a lot of people shy away from exploring them because of that openness. I'd like to take a deeper look at each of those sites and how they work, but before we do that, we need to talk about "expectations" and define the difference between flaws in a collaborative tool and flaws in the users of any given collaborative tool.

In other words, I need to make sure we're not blaming the technology for our own personal quirks.

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