 Hello, live from Roots Tech today. There's a big crowd here and we're enjoying meeting so many people. Today, we're gonna talk to Eamon Langloff, the forest elf of WikiTree, and Chris Whitten, our WikiTreeer in chief. And we're gonna talk about all things collaboration and WikiTree and what's happening in the future of genealogy and where that's gonna take us. And we think it's gonna be a collaborative effort. Isn't that right, Chris? Yeah, yeah, what was I supposed to say, that the future of genealogy is collaboration. There you go, he's so good about that. Collaboration is what WikiTree is all about. WikiTree is made up of about close to 400,000 volunteers who work together collaboratively on single profiles on the global family tree. And Eamon does a lot of work in helping the collaborative effort. Eamon, how do you find wrangling so many people who are working collaboratively in something so big? You just get a really good rope and you wrangle them in. You wrangle them in, that's it, that's it. No, it's great. We have a lot of different avenues for people who want to come and participate. We have a very active genealogist forum for people with questions and our members are very generous with their time in answering questions and helping others. And we have projects that are focused on different areas of research to help people collaborate and be able to work together and a lot of different ways for people to just come together. To make it, to do something really good. When she says our members, she's talking about volunteers. One of the things that Chris Whitten has promised the WikiTree community is that WikiTree will always be free. And Chris, how did you come to that decision to make WikiTree free for everybody? Well, you know, we don't have a lot of fixed expenses. We don't have paid employees. Right. You know, we're not indexing content like the big databases. This is user generated genealogy. I mean, these are people's own genealogy. So that if you're doing it right, there's really no reason that you should have to be charging for people to share their genealogy or to work together on it. Well, in collaboration is not a word that's used in genealogy a lot. And WikiTree is all about collaboration. Right. When you thought of this community effort to build a global family tree, was collaboration the top of your list when you started doing that? And is that, is the future of what WikiTree is going to do even more collaboration? Well, look, you say, and that's what it's been from the start, is it's built on collaboration. I mean, I guess to me, I almost just sort of took it as a given that that's what we were doing. That's what we were contributing to genealogy. I've, I mean, in a way, it never made sense to me to do genealogy any other way. Right. You know, like I've, in fact, I wasn't the best genealogist in my family ever. You know, I have a cousin, Becky, who's better than I am. Right. She's built on the work. Shout out to Becky. Becky, Cypher's built on the work that her mother and father did. And so I felt anything that I was doing was just building on that, you know, adding in another side of the family. So I didn't want to replace what she was doing. I didn't want to replicate what she was doing. I wanted to have an environment to work together. You know, and then my wife, there's another genealogist on that side of the family. And when you think about it, you know, families aren't square boxes. No, they're not. They shouldn't be walled in. Right. But that has been the model for a long time. I mean, if you're paying for a subscription or you're downloading software and you're growing your tree on your computer, you know, inevitably there's this wall around it. So the idea of WikiTree was to break down those walls. To break down those walls and make it collaborative. In the future, it really is going to be collaboration. We've gotten too big. Isn't that right, Ewan? Though the genealogical community is a whole, not to have a WikiTree. Yeah, it really has. It's just the interest in genealogy has grown so much, just even in the last few years, that it has to go to collaboration. There's so many different aspects of it with DNA and with online trees and everything needs to come together and work together for it to really be effective for people researching. Yeah. And people who are just interested in knowing. Well, so you mentioned that we have 400,000 members, but that's not the scale at which collaboration happens. I mean, WikiTree is one environment, but that's because these collaborative groups overlap. So we have projects that work together, surname groups that work together. Sometimes we have challenges and that it's one-to-one ultimately. People who share our ancestors come to conclusions together and they communicate. So a lot of what our job is hosting WikiTree is to facilitate that communication and to make sure that it can be productive. And productive, that is a really good word that I would use to describe how the projects and the volunteers work. They're very productive. There's a lot of stuff going on constantly. There's so much stuff on WikiTree that new members actually get a bit overwhelmed. And thankfully, we have a very collaborative environment in our G2G forum. That's genealogist to genealogist forum where people can come together and find information or get help with research. And WikiTree is not about people helping people. It's about genealogists helping genealogists to move forward in their passion. So WikiTree is all about that. And WikiTree is all about moving that forward for the future. Yeah, it really is about the members. I mean, I'm so thrilled with the Greeter's project. That's something that I never anticipated or tried to push myself. And then mentors, certainly not. Like that was completely bottom up. You're a mentor, you're really involved in that. Yes. But the fact that people, genealogists do want to help other genealogists getting started with WikiTree. Because it is intimidating. I mean, there are some technical things. And then because it sprawls, because there are so many different projects, so many different ways that you can contribute. A lot of people naturally get intimidated by that. And I think they get intimidated because it's open. Right, it is open. They know that they can't... Well, if they make mistakes, other people will see them. And then that's kind of scary. Yeah. You make mistakes? I think making mistakes is part of the collaborative process. So many genealogists will come to WikiTree and say, well, I'm not ready to publish my genealogy yet. You know, I'm not ready to put it out there. Right, no, yeah. You have to put it out there. You have to put out what you think you know, what you do have so that other people... Yeah, if you never make mistakes, you never learn. Right. Absolutely, absolutely. So, I think that we are gonna probably move on to DNA in our next segment, which will be tomorrow. And we really appreciate everybody being here and enjoying this video. And we'll talk to you again soon.