"Empty" projects

I'm good with deleting shell projects. They irritate me. :-)

The problem is that you cannot remove some projects (discussions cannot be reomved) - I started recycling them

recycling them! what a great idea!! ....I see we currently have 10533 projects.....

I had funny comments though as Alex suddenly found himself in something different

You meant Randy Stebbing

Hi,

Here is the link to the old post on "Empty or Abandoned Projects" www.geni.com/discussions/96313

The post includes some analysis that I did in June 2011 on the magnitude of "abandoned" projects. That thread also lists what my own definition of abandoned projects is.

One year latter the problem has not improved.

--Randy Stebbing (not Randy Schoenberg:))

Randy Stebbing, that's a Curator only discussion. want to summarize what you wrote for the general public?

In June of 2011 (last year) these were the results of my project analysis:

Each project had an average of 6.3 profiles
Each project had 2.6 collaborators.
Most projects had only minimal text explaining the purpose of the project in the "About" section.

39.98% of all projects could be considered abandoned or just barely started based on what makes an active project in my judgment.

Here is my criteria for ACTIVE projects...

If a project includes or meets ANY of the following conditions it is active.
1) One or more collaborators (or)
2) One or more discussions (or)
3) One or more included profiles (or)
4) Projects "About", front page narrative contains some text. (or)
5) Project was created in the last 30 days. (or)
6) Project includes one or more attached documents.

So under this criteria a project that doesn't have any profiles is still active as long as the "about" section includes some text to explain the intent of the project.

Likewise a project that has 2 collaborators, even if everything else in it is blank, would still be "active".

39.98% of the projects last year were in need of some help to get them going and viable.

I am concerned that there is some structural problem because projects that should be taking off are not finding their audience. The Holocaust projects are a good example. There must be many, many people out there who would add profiles to these projects if they (a) were aware of the project, (b) understand that it was good to add their profiles to the project, and (c) understood how to add their profiles to a project. Somehow the viral approach is not working with projects, which is why we are geting very limited buy-in to just about all of them.

Bravo Randy Stebbing! Like Like. In point 5 I might give the project 60 days to 'expire' though - just in case.

Agreed Randy Schoenberg.
The South Africans try to advertise the existence of other projects by:

1) creating a community to advertise these projects to – by getting all SAs to follow an overarching SA site: http://www.geni.com/projects/South-Africans-Geni-Landing-Site-WELKO... and our FaceBook SA Geni Chat Site: http://www.facebook.com/groups/243811932355680/

2) listing and hypertexting (ie not just attaching) all our projects on the overarching SA Site: http://www.geni.com/projects/South-Africans-Geni-Landing-Site-WELKO... in categories so people can scan & find them easier:
Eg SA Projects by People; SA Projects by Historical Timeline; SA Projects by Place

3) the nesting and cross referencing to pertinent other projects as a standard hypertexted ending on every SA project: ie http://www.geni.com/discussions/111277

There is, of course, a pre-existing SA community set here; but I'm not sure that it isn't possible to find other types of interest groups on Geni to 'advertise' projects to.

The point about the cross-referencing in the project text as an advertising mechanism is to create a LOGICALLY structured TRAIL TO FOLLOW between PERTINENT projects;
rather than the arbitrary and often meaningless 'related projects' list that is presently attached on the right hand side, which provides neither of these features, and can be a time-consuming process involving looking at lots of abandoned projects, or ones whose connection to the project may only have been obvious to the person who attached it .

If we could search by location only, then it would be easy to find people who have relatives who died in one of the camps or ghettos and alert them of the projects. But until that feature is available, the Holocaust projects will be stalled.

That's true. And sounds the most effective solution.

Pending which,
I did put them all in a sub-category on the WWII project http://www.geni.com/projects/World-War-II/11528 - but I think others felt they were a bit many to go there as a sub-category.

Collecting them in a hypertexted subcategory on the 'International War & Military Projects' http://www.geni.com/projects/International-War-and-Military-project... (only 4 of them are there right now) will help too, but that still needs us to develop a 'following' audience on that page.

I'll advertise it to the SA's on the FB page for starters.

Wonder if we could get Michelle Elena Kempner to advertise for followers on potentially high interest umbrella projects like the War Topic one?

Sharon, you are amazing. My experience is that people engage with projects only when there is someone driving the activity. If there are questions and reports on progress in the public discussions and if I see activity from my collaborators in my newsfeed, I'm much more likely to contribute myself.

Randy Stebbing, George Homs, and you and the South African users all seem to be masters at driving your projects.

As a work-around for not being able to search properly on Geni, there is always google, as Bjorn likes to remind us. Just adding site:geni.com to a google search will limit the results to Geni pages. A good way of finding profiles, I suppose. But I wish Geni could do it for us.

I think Sharon hit upon something Randy Schoenberg. We have a Jewish Ancestry Guide project, but there's no one place that is active that those descended from Jews can go to ask questions about the variety of questions that doing Jewish genealogy today requires:
- how do I find the town my family is from?
- what are the sources for the rabbinical family XYZ?
- how do I find relatives who died in Holocaust or who perhaps survived in the Soviet Union?
- what can DNA testing do for me

etc.

Hatte, that has been one of my problems as well. If I need to answer a simple intro question about Jewish genealogy, I have to ask you or Shmuel. I'm saving Adam and Randy for later, when you get tired of me ;)

Also, notice Sharon's comments about having a FB presence.

And, I'm in love with her idea http://www.geni.com/discussions/111277 about hypertexting a navigation structure, so that people see how the project relates to others.

The thing about Jewish genealogy is it's like peeling back layers of an onion and it takes years. I'm just realizing that I have to now immerse myself in the history of various rabbinical families of Volhynia and that I have to push back to the early 1700s in Brest and Grodno and figure out how my family got to Suwalki, Lomza, and Trakai regions on on side and to Volhynia on the other. I am just being able to ask the questions and I suspect from my dealing with Geni users that many descendants have no idea how to begin.

Ah, Justin and Hatte - you made my day by noticing and liking. Thanks for the praise.