There has been an ongoing discussion in the research community about how to assess the impact and quality of research outputs. Much of this is driven by the desire of funding agencies to fund the best research and of employers to employ the best researchers. These are good things that everyone would agree with. Yet, how do you measure good research?
That is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
A couple months ago I attended the second annual RootsTech conference in Salt Lake City. For those not familiar with RootsTech: it is a conference hosted by FamilySearch International to bring together genealogical software creators and users.
Since I never wrote about my experiences with RootsTech 2011, I will try to summarize my thoughts about RootsTech in general in this article. Some of my thoughts may not be specifically about RootsTech, but more of a response to the current state of the genealogical software industry.