Rootstech Innovator Summit

Liz Wiseman

Wednesday, the first day of Rootstech, was the Innovator Summit Day. The keynote was Liz Wiseman from The Wiseman Group who talked about “Rookie Smarts”, the key message of which was that sometimes we are at our very best when we know the least. In that position we can often come up with unique ways to approach a problem because we don’t know how it has always been done. And sometimes that can lead to great successes.  She has written a book about this idea – Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work.

After her talk a few of us got to chat to her and much of the time was spent discussing some of the ideas from another of her books – Multipliers: How the Best Leaders MakeEveryone Smarter.

Her definition of a Multipliers are

leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities of the people around them. When these leaders walk into a room, light bulbs go on; ideas flow and problems get solved. These are the leaders who inspire the people with whom they work to stretch themselves and surpass expectations. These leaders use their smarts to make everyone around them smarter and more capable.

In contrast, other managers are Diminishers, holding back their employees.

We then had the showdown for the semi-finalists for the Innovator Challenge.  The 10 semi-finalists were

1. QromaTag – tags photos with all sorts of information which is stored in the metadata and is preserved forever with the photo. Not only can this include names and places, but it can also include voice recordings of people talking about the photo.
2. JoyFLIPS – another photo program similar to the previous one. One aspect of this I loved was that you can scan the front and back of a photo and store them as a 2-sided digital copy. This program is freee, and can be run as a app on a phone or via a web interface
3. Cuzins – this shows you what celebrities you are related to. It uses the data from the FamilySearch Family Tree to see the connections. It only runs on Android and there is a free version that lets you see how one celebrity is related to another, but you will have to pay to see how you are related to the celebs.
4. CSI: Crowd Sourced Indexing – this manages group indexing projects for family history societies, controlling the allocation of pages to be transcribed.
5. Kindex – a free searchable archive that anyone can build and share with anyone else.
6. Rootsfinder – makes genealogy easy by integrating with FamilySearch, Ancestry etc. It captures sources, screen shots and more
7. Champollion 2.0 – a transcription tool with all sorts of ways to improve the quality of the original image and to link the image to the transcription
8. emberall – a smart phone app that records a person’s life through questions asked of the person, capturing their voice and storing the results in the cloud
9. Double Match Triangulator – a great tool for doing DNA Triangulation
10. OldNews USA – a mobile app that does targeted searches in the newspapers included in Chronicling America by the Library of Congress

The finalists that were chosen were the Double Match Triangulator, emberall, kindex, OldNews USA and QromaTag.