It seemed obvious that I should write something summarising Rootstech. But the parable of the blind men and the elephant came to mind – anything I could write would only be a description of one part – a trunk? a tail? a bit of a leg? So what follows makes no claim to be a verdict on the event.
To be frank, I found it overwhelming. The one “General Assembly” I attended felt like a mixture of Oprah and Nuremberg. The buzzword was “story”, now a requisite part of every sales pitch. And it went on for almost two hours.
One part was genuinely moving and surprising, though. David Isay’s StoryCorps is a wonderful oral history project that deploys mobile recording booths across the US allowing families and individuals to tell their own stories and then storing the results in the Library of Congress. Some of the samples he played were truly extraordinary – a murderer who had become a surrogate son to the woman whose son he killed; the father of an Iraq veteran gone off the rails who refused to give up on him; a black surgeon paying heartfelt tribute to the uneducated father who had always helped and believed in him.
At first I thought “Only in America”. Then I remembered the good old Irish confessional, a dead ringer for those mobile booths. An Irish version of StoryCorps would be brilliant.
By far the most interesting talks I attended were on the techie side. I didn’t know there’s an entire eco-system of Software Developer’s Kits for FamilySearch, allowing developers to plug in and use it from the inside. When I get time …
The continent-sized exhibitors’ hall was also a bit much for me. Many fantastic products and stands
, but so, so, so many of them. I ended up fleeing to my hotel room.
Where I worked on inventing the ideal Amercan food, at least based on what the TV was telling me. Bacon-wrapped Steak N’ Lobster deep-dish pizza, anyone?