To help members decide I asked both Heather and Steve to respond to:
Q1. What are the biggest challenges (no more than 3) facing the Society in the upcoming term and how will you deal with them?
Q2. What innovations can the Society undertake to help people researching their Ontario ancestors?
As you will see there is a difference in approaches.
As their responses are quite long I'm putting them in separate blog posts that follow.
Who to Choose for OGS President — Heather McTavish Taylor?
Who to Choose for OGS President — Steve Fulton?
Comment. Heather and Steve receive my thanks for responding to give us a clearer idea of why they're running. The Society is fortunate to have two experienced candidates for this role willing to dedicate a large personal effort on Society members behalf. They deserve our thanks for standing.
OGS/Ontario Ancestors members please show your appreciation by registering and attending the AGM. Find out how starting at the Members Corner — https://ogs.on.ca/members-area/.
Good morning, John:
ReplyDeleteThere's one question I would like to have asked both Steve and Heather. What does Ontario Ancestors plan to do with Canadian Headstones, since they took it over from Jim McKane? The site is pretty well static at the moment and one cannot upload new records to it. Some records that were already uploaded are no longer available.
I have a personal interest in the site as Cemetery Coordinator for Halton Peel Branch, Ontario Ancestors, and would love to have heard some plan from either Steve or Heather as to the future of Canadian Headstones.
Thanks for your post on the upcoming election.
Dorothy
Dorothy has posed a very good question and I would like to respond with my thoughts. I too am disappointed with the way that Canadian Headstones stands today, I think we denigrated the site as we brought it into the OGS fold. Bottom line, I don't think we have the depth in technical ability to build upon this site. We are reliant on a handful of volunteers with varying abilities and if anything happens to one of them, then we are out of luck. With that being said, I would recommend that we put a project plan together for the "update" of Canadian Headstones. The project can be lead by a technical person on the board (we have many) but the work to develop the site, upgrade it to increase functionality, ensure the links are working (to Ancestry for example) and provide technical support - should not be managed by volunteers. It should either be outsourced or managed by a member of the OGS staff with links to technical support. Canadian Headstones has so much potential and if we want it to deliver on this, we need to do something different than what we have been doing for the past two years.
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