As it happens, both my wife and I were members of Bob Velke's original development team for TMG in one of Dick Eastman's back rooms at CompuServe in the early '90s. (That's how we first met, in fact.) If this project is meant to function as a full-dress desktop application for recording genealogical research -- perhaps among other, more general types of historical research -- I would be very interested. I've just spent some time browsing through the info at the website you linked to and I've already begun making a list of comments and points to consider.
I've been doing this stuff since the early '60s, before I even did my first history degree, so all my original family research was pencil-and-clipboard. I still do "regular" history research, mostly of the local history variety -- but, to be honest, I've never needed software for that. Still just a pencil and clipboard, with the addition of a digital camera a decade ago.
Michael K. Smith
On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 9:58 AM, Michael Maggs Michael@maggs.name wrote:
There has been quite bit of discussion over the years about how the Wikimedia movement could engage with those who have research interests in family history or genealogy, and a centralised discussion page [1] has been set up on Meta.
I am posting to ask whether there would be Wikimedian developers who would be interested in joining an open source project to create a free platform independent application called History Research Environment [2] (‘HRE’) for the serious genealogist or historical researcher. Considerable effort has been put into high-level planning over several years, and we are now ready to start writing code.
While the proposed software is not currently an official Wikimedia project, if there is enough interest we are open to it becoming integrated or affiliated in some way. The plan is, in any event, that the software should be interoperable with Wikidata to allow (subject to the agreement of the Wikidata community) the exchange of a variety of structured data including verified and fully sourced family trees.
I'd be happy to answer queries.
Michael Maggs
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_genealogy_project
[2] https://historyresearchenvironment.org
(please excuse cross-posting for greater visibility, as the [wikimedia-genealogy] mailing list still has very few subscribers)
Wikimedia-genealogy mailing list Wikimedia-genealogy@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-genealogy