Genealogists' Declaration of Rights - Sign at Jamboree

Not coming to Jamboree? Click to sign online.

Hear Ye, Hear Ye!

Calling all family historians to sign the Genealogists' Declaration of Rights next week at Jamboree.

The Board of Directors of the Southern California Genealogical Society strongly endorse this ambitious effort to protect the access to the birth, marriage, death and other records that are critical to successful searches for our ancestors.

Jamboree will dedicate an exhibit hall booth -- Booth 105, just inside the main door -- to collect signatures from California residents. Jamboree guests from other states will be encouraged to sign online.

Copies of the signature pages will be provided to the Records Preservation & Access Committee, a joint committee of the Federation of Genealogical Studies, National Genealogical Society, and the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies.

"Our goal is to collect RPAC with 1000 signatures from the genealogists and family historians who attend the Family History and DNA and Jamboree events," explained David Burde, president of the Southern California Genealogical Society.

Jordan Jones, President of the National Genealogical Society (NGS), a sponsoring member of the Records Preservation and Access Committee (RPAC), announced the Genealogists’ Declaration of Rights before a crowd of more than 2,500 genealogists attending the Opening Session of the NGS 2014 Family History Conference in Richmond, Virginia, on 7 May 2014. Jordan will be speaking at Jamboree on Friday afternoon.

Over the next few months, the Declaration will travel to the 34th IAJGS Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Salt Lake City, Utah, 27 July–1 August 2014 and the Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference in San Antonio, Texas, 27–30 August 2014. Jamboree is the first to feature the Declaration at a genealogy conference since it was introduced at NGS.

Jamboree - There's a Blog Post You Need to Read

The Ancestry Insider is one of my favorite bloggers; and even when I'm hard-pressed to find a spare minute, I make sure to take some time to keep up to date with him. Today's post, #NGS2014GEN Planning Your Time at a Conference, is terrific, for a couple of reasons.

First, he does a very good job of reviewing his use of the conference app used at the National Genealogical Society's conference that was held in early May. Before you yawn and stop reading this post because it doesn't pertain to you, let me remind you that the same developer, Core-Apps, is responsible for both the NGS and Jamboree apps. It very much pertains to you if you're on your way to Burbank in a couple of weeks.

Core-Apps seems to have become the vendor of choice for many of the genealogical conference mobile apps. They have worked with FamilySearch, IAJGS (the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies), NGS and Jamboree. When SCGS launched the first mobile app for a genealogy conference back in 2011, we selected the developer with the most experience and best product. It's gratifying to see so many other organizations using their services.

So, when the Ancestry Insider described in detail how he used the NGS app, even I got insight into how the features can best be used.  You too can learn from his experience using the schedule feature, deciding which sessions to attend, how he coordinates the schedule with his Outlook calendar.

Take a few minutes and read what he had to say. You'll learn a lot about using the Jamboree app. You might not agree with his method of selecting one session over another, but you'll get a good tutorial on how to make use of the features.

Now for the second reason that I love what he wrote. It has to do with conference handouts. Specifically, this:

Sometimes a session lacks a handout, demonstrating the presenter’s lack of respect for attendees...

Yeah. That.

AI, thanks for putting this into words. We have had blank pages in the syllabus in prior years, and we have some this year. We've had one-page outlines that could have been texted while the speaker waiting in the drive-thru at Starbucks. It makes the speaker look bad, it makes the speaker's organization or business look bad, and it makes our conference look bad. I wish more speakers understood that.

One feature that AI didn't mention on the app is the speaker evaluation. Our attendees are going to have a chance to provide feedback about the syllabus materials, as well as other aspects of speaker performance, for every class session. The speakers will get scanned copies of hand-written evaluation forms, and we will provide them with digital copies of the app comments.

I hope everyone takes the comments to heart.