GenMarketplace

GenMarketplace - the market that makes getting family history help easy

Genealogy requires diverse expertise

It can be difficult to know what skills and knowledge will be required for discovering the needed facts and sources on the next branch of your family tree. You may not have the expertise appropriate to your tasks. For example, you may be an expert on 19th century English probate records, but know nothing about christenings in 18th century Lithuania. Nonetheless, different branches of your tree may require both of these kinds of expertise. Family history requires knowledge and skills in working with different locations, time periods, languages, and online tools.

The existing professional services market focuses on people with relatively large budgets for family history

When a person lacks the requisite expertise, she may not even know what type of expertise she requires.Today’s existing professional genealogy services already seek to tackle this problem, matching professionals to customers who need their specific skill sets. However, these services focus on customers who can spend a relatively high dollar amount on a big project. For example, Ancestry’s ProGenealogists service starts at $1,900 - $2,500 for 20-25 hours of work. For many people, that’s too much.

GenMarketplace will not compete in that space.

GenMarketplace will focus on people with smaller family history budgets.

GenMarketplace aims at the larger market of those interested in family history who have more modest budgets. An ideal candidate for our services is someone willing to spend $20-$50 dollars a month. Our aim is to encourage new customers to spend an initial $20 to find out how much they can get done.

GenMarketplace facilitates small dollar, specific transactions

GenMarketplace’s focus is not the big project, but the small, specific job. Characteristics of jobs on GenMarketplace include:

• Each job is tied to an individual PersonID on FamilySearch
• Each one represents a single piece of information
• The type of information requested is standardized as the "job type." An example of a job type is "Add Death Location."
• Each job type has explicit standards for what counts and what doesn't
• Jobs start at a low price and increase in price over time (Dutch auction)
• Jobs are paid with prepaid balances.
  
• Jobs are only visible to other users when the person posting the job has sufficient funds to pay for that job.

The experts who want to do the work are better at identifying what help they are best able to provide than the people who need help are at identifying who best can help them. Our prices are set via Dutch auction, allowing everyone to focus on family history rather than price negotiation, and enabling our customers to get as much help as they can afford.

GenMarketplace uses a Chrome extension and partners with Find-A-Record to make it easy to create jobs

Creating jobs is free and easy. We encourage our customers to post many jobs. Experts are able to select the jobs they find the easiest or the most intriguing, focusing on the jobs that they are best able to do. The quickest and easiest jobs will be done first at lowest cost, more difficult or tedious jobs will take longer to be selected and will cost more over time.

In addition to creating a job manually through the site, there are two automated ways to create jobs. First, our Chrome browser extension allows a user to create a job from an individual page within the tree section of FamilySearch.org in 3 clicks:

1. click on the browser icon
2. select the job type desired
3. click submit

Another way to create many jobs quickly is through our partner Find-A-Record. Find-A-Record integrates with FamilySearch to identify what information is missing for individuals within the family you are researching. Users can create multiple jobs on GenMarketplace with a single click.

We're available for testing now and we will launch next month at Rootstech

I started the GenMarketplace project at the end of November. We've made great progress and we are excited about our launch at Rootstech. Come see our booth!

Currently the initial desired functionality is complete and we are just beginning testing. Current functionality includes:

• Adding money to your account through a credit card or Paypal
• Creating jobs through the site, Find-A-Record integration, or our Chrome browser extension
• Ability to comment on jobs
• Complete workflow around jobs, including reserving jobs, claiming a job, approving or rejecting a claimed job and the associated transfer of money
• Ability to list and work jobs based on points rather than dollars
• Additional Chrome browser extension functionality includes:
  • Ability to see which people in the same family have jobs available
  • Ability to see which jobs are available for an individual
  • Ability to reserve a single job or all jobs for an individual
  • Ability to claim a job

In March we will gather user feedback and prepare for our next release in May which will focus on usability.

Built With

• chrome-browser-extension
• drupal
• elance
• javascript
• jquery
• pantheon
• php