Family archives in WeAre.xyz

We went to the tip shop this afternoon, and bought a bookshelf. There's something about old-ish solid timber furniture that just makes it seem worth spending $5 on it. Got home and spend an hour or so sanding it, reinforcing the joints (with screws, because I'm really not up for doing much proper woodwork at the moment), and getting it ready for re-polishing. Maybe I'll get around to that.

In the evening I watched a webinar from the Society of Australian Genealogists about the new-ish service WeAre.xyz, presented by Simon Davies. It appears to be a custom WordPress system, with specific functionality for family trees and things, and one of their main selling points is about the long-term preservation of the data — although they don't really go into details about what steps they're taking beyond what's pretty normal for all web hosts. He did say that it "won't go away, it'll go into viewer mode", and hinted at the idea that each customer has separate S3 keys and that they don't have access to that. It does look like it does lots to encourage collaboration between family members.

But yeah, I don't think I'll be signing up any time soon, not for $AUD37.49/month.

The questions coming from the audience were really great: How's it storing things? Do the blogs have news feeds? Does it do anything special for document transcriptions? Who owns the data? How do you handle copyright? I've not been to many SAG meetings, but they seem to be a pretty technically aware bunch (moreso than the WeAre.xyz fellow anyway!).