Thank you to all those who came to the Open Data Conference on Saturday 30th January. Thank you 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.

The Open Data Conference

You can see welcome slides with notes and the new Free UK Genealogy Open Data video here . You can view a (poor quality) video of this section here .

John Sheridan’s talk can be seen here (we apologise for the poor quality of the recording). You can also see Simon’s slides here and Richard slides here .

A presentation of a new Free UK Genealogy video followed the formal presentations. The video explains why we believe Open Data is so crucial to the future of the organisation and projects. This is why we need 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. These issues were caused by the WiFi provision at the Linnean Society and were outside of our control.

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

We want to hear from our transcribers

Thank you for your patience if you tried to join us online. 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. We also want all transcribers to get easy access to the proposed transcriber agreement and consultation process.

• You can find the proposed Transcriber Agreement Consultation here;  .
• Please use the consultation process. Let us know your views on the proposed transcriber agreement and;
• Please check FAQ s if you have any questions. We will be adding the questions raised at the conference to this page shortly. Email us at info@freeukgen.org.uk if you still have questions.

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/