Talk:Benefactor

Hi all,

Some thoughts I wanted to share about the Rodovid Foundation.

We now have a Foundation, and with it – members and benefactors. I've been thinking about the first benefit we could offer that's quick to deliver: unlimited access to Rodovid. This solves two problems at once – supporters get real value, and hosting costs stop being my headache.

Another quick win would be full-text search, which could be implemented pretty fast as well.

The proposed model: $20/month or $180/year makes you a Foundation benefactor – a special group in Rodovid with extra privileges.

Thoughts? --Baya 07:49, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

Creation of a responsible network

Dear Rodovidians,

Rodovid has been a place to play and work with the genealogical data for twenty years. All of this, thanks to its infrastructure created and maintained by Baya aka Yaroslav.

Last year we established a charitable foundation officially called The Rodovid Charitable Foundation, of which I, Stanley aka Stanislav, happen to be the director, to support the further development of the Rodovid website and allow its current and future supporters to become its benefactors, i. e. support this common effort with their own means.

Now we are coming up with an invitation to everyone on this website to unite into a responsible network of Rodovidians who care about the future of their genealogical contributions and strive for more functionality. This extended functionality will be solely available to Rodovid's benefactors who accept the invitation and start donating on a permanent basis, just like a membership fee, using the financial instruments available to the Rodovid Foundation.

Currently, we are primarily concerned about keeping the project going by securing a relatively modest sum of money to pay for its hosting fees. The development fees can be discussed later by our benefactors.

The extended functionality can be as follows:

• a dedicated, lightning fast server available solely to our benefactors
• extended search based on Elasticsearch engine, which can help you work with your data much faster and more efficiently
• privacy of genealogical records you choose to hide from the general audience (though this requires a significant development effort from Baya)

As the director of the Rodovid Foundation, I constantly seek external grants to help develop Rodovid.org further. Last year we secured a $1,000 grant from Amazon AWS and this month a €500 from a benefactor in Germany. Also, I would like to express our deepest appreciation to all those of you who have already donated for our two hosting rounds.

I am personally eager to start working on previously announced thematic projects that can include the following:

• Toponyms — arrange all the names of settlements on the historic timeline with all the given names so that they can be used effectively in our genealogical records
• Curated trees — a very promising project that can be divided among different teams working across the globe to create family trees of famous persons on the basis of verified data from the archive, private collections, and so on
• Educational materials — this project will result in the development of special courses for schools, universities and online courses to study history of different nations from the perspective of its people

Please comment what you are up to.

Stanley (talk) 13:23, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

Hello Stanley / Baya

Maybe some other special functions could also be added on the middle term to attract people with a personal or professional interest to genealogy :

* a tool to establish the degree of relationship between two persons of the database

* a tool to visualise on a map the origin of people and surnames

* the possibility to import trees (from files or other sites)

* maybe a visual editor

Dn Gov (d) 17:59, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

* a tool to visualise on a map the origin of people and surnames

— I have connected with a developer of such a tool on LinkedIn. Maybe we will be able to implement it on Rodovid.

* the possibility to import trees (from files or other sites)

— GEDCOM import will be made available to all the benefactors after the Elasticsearch tool is implemented

— Stanley (talk) 18:40, 28 March 2026 (UTC)