Friday, February 3, 2012

RootsTech Presentation: Collaborating with Mom via P2P


Well, my presentation is done.  I'm happy to say that I finished enough of my tools to show off the essential parts:
  • A tool where users can watch their shared file-system folders for changes from others
  • ... which (diffs) can be reviewed and then accepted or rejected
  • ... and where users can record their identity (from IDs in GEDCOM files and HTML files with microformat markup) and be notified when items of interest in their own ancestry get updated in their shared data files.
However, I'm sorry to say that my whole presentation was misguided:
  • The user stories were too broad and ambitious to really fit the simple thesis implied by my title (where I originally aimed to make it a very simple, easy-to-use tool).
  • The technical elements I reviewed and combined were more suited toward more advanced developers (and not the audience I attracted... which was small, by the way).
Basically, I still have a lot to learn about giving an effective presentation.  Well, it's been a good learning experience.  I've put online the syllabus and the final presentation, for what they're worth.  Let's hope I get a chance to refactor/reformulate/resurrect this again.