Robin Lamacraft’s Europe and USA Trip
Stop 1: Salinas, California – Laney McGlohon (Lead – Archive Spaces NFP project) 1 Day: Laney very interested in HRE and at that stage was keen to contribute. Later in my trip I received a message from Laney that for various reasons she wanted to opt out because of work commitments – I intend to keep in contact with her.
Stop 2: Tisvlde, Denmark – Michael Erichsen (IT Consultant – TMG User)2 Days: Michael and I spent 2 solid days in discussion and demonstration of what he had been working on. We got along very well. Michael was about to return to contract job on the Monday. Later that week, I got an email to say that he had fallen ill and it may take him some time to recover.
Stop 3: Olso, Norway – Nils Tolleshaug (retired IT communications engineer)
1.5 Days: Nils and I discussed the features of HRE generally. Nils had previously provided Michael with considerable help in designing and implementing the Client – Server communication demonstrated at the December 2018 RUG presentation. We discussed other use cases beyond that first design. I asked Nils to look into methods for recursive searches to find common ancestors, etc.
Stop 3: Winchester, UK – 4 weeks – Michael Maggs, Terry Dansey
(Staying with Paquita, my 1st cousin and first responder to queries on the HRE Website). I spent most of my time drafting documentation or answering HRE email. I also met with Terry Dansey of Coopers Livery which has a large archive back to the 1530’s. He is in the IT business and recognized the issues facing us to create HRE. Additionally, it was possible to have a discussion at Heathrow over lunch with Michael Maggs (HRE Board member) before I flew out to Washington.
Stop 4: Washington DC, USA – 2.5 days RUG Presentation and meetings
On Thurs and Friday, I continued on the preparation of the RUG presentation. I also met 3 volunteers who want to be coding for HRE development. More on them in the future once their roles are identified.
RUG presentation: There were about 20 attendees in the room and about another 25 listening from the Web. I explained that we have been constrained by lack of suitably skilled volunteers and the sudden loss of others for health reasons. I reminded them that TMG itself took about 7 years to become a released product. The second reminder to the audience was that many existing packages are dying as they are not commercially viable products. There are virtually no new applications coming to the market. But it will take a little longer for HRE to reach the first release.
The task ahead of us is breaking new ground – we are steadfast that we will get there, but it will take a little longer. All questions from the audience were already covered by features that we intend to include in HRE.
Volunteers Wanted ….
PROJECT MANAGERS
The HRE Board is looking for volunteers who have had experience in managing project development in the software industry.
It has become apparent that to streamline the development of HRE there needs to be a separate team that coordinates and reports on the progress to the HRE Board. This team would ideally be at least 3 persons, one of whom to be the senior manager. This way the load can be partitioned. The aim of this is strategy to remove some current workload from Robin Lamacraft so that he can concentrate on other technical issues.
If you are interested and have the time to commit to this task please go here
https://historyresearchenvironment.org/volunteer-contact/
and send us a message. Please put “PROJECT MANAGER VOLUNTEER” at the start of the message.
USER INTERFACE DESIGN CRITICS
The HRE Board is looking for several long time TMG Users to become part of a team that reviews these designs.
This team will be like editors who identify omissions, reordering of content and splitting of windows, etc. Where a change is suggested, it has to be justified with an example that shows the problem. These people should work together in a coordinated way. There are a large number of proposed Graphical User Interface (GUI) sketches already documented. Unfortunately not every desired GUI layout or action can be coded. [We don’t want to implement something that most other users would consider hard to use.]
If you are interested and have the time to commit to this task please go here
https://historyresearchenvironment.org/volunteer-contact/
and send us a message. Please put “INTERFACE DESIGN CRIPTIC VOLUNTEER” at the start of the message.
USER INTERFACE JAVA IMPLEMENTERS
The HRE Board is looking for several long experience and highly skilled Java GUI implementers who explain why a GUI concept is not possible to easily implement.
These volunteers would have two roles:
To act as an advisor to the User Interface Design Team
To implement collections of windows related a particular HRE feature according to agreed common HRE implementation rules.
If you are interested and have the time to commit to this task please go here
https://historyresearchenvironment.org/volunteer-contact/
and send us a message. Please put “INTERFACE IMPLEMENTER VOLUNTEER” at the start of the message.
Meet the Newsletter Team ….
VOLUNTEER – FIRST CONTACT PERSON – Paquita Lamacraft
When you register yourself as an HRE newsletter subscriber the acknowledgement email will come Paquita Lamacraft.
Paquita is Robin Lamacraft’s cousin, lives near Southampton, in England and with a background in leading IT Transformation combined with a fascination with the history of places and periods – see www.discover-interesting-places.com, She is eager to see HRE become available to non-genealogy users for their diverse research needs. In 2018 she has published 2 quite different books, on business improvement ‘Shrapnel Free Explosive Growth’, and the other about travel ‘The Cuban Approach: The art of letting go’.
NEWSLETTER – COMPOSER and DISTRIBUTOR – Tracey Milligan
The HRE Newsletter is composed by Tracey Milligan.
Tracey grew up in Woodland Hills, California.
He has been a TMG user since 1997. Since years before TMG, he had become his Family’s ‘de facto’ Family Historian.
He has studied computer science and Geographic Information Systems. Working for Alcatel for 16 years, he began there as Technical Support Engineer, then later as service & support administrator. He was an early – 1981 – IBM 5150 computer adopter, is an avid history buff , likes all things computer related and eagerly awaits the debut of HRE.
History Research Environment 
You must be logged in to post a comment.