IOSA.it Open Archaeology

There is a great conference in Turin in 11 days: COMMUNIA Conference “University and CyberSpace”. The list of speakers is just amazing, if you would like to talk about open archaeology and cultural heritage in general, please come and find me.

We have finally managed to put online the video footage of the seminar "Diritti d'autore e banche dati per i Beni Culturali" that we had last year in Genoa on 7 May 2009, organized by grupporicerche.
You can read a brief report and watch videos at this URL: http://www.iosa.it/diritti/ - video files are in the open and free OGG Theora format, and hosted at the Internet Archive. It's all in Italian, we haven't managed to create subtitles yet. If you need help, don't hesitate to ask.
We really hope that this material will be useful to anyone trying to push for open archaeology. More meetings like this one will certainly help clarifying the main issues in the field of copyright assignment and dissemination of archaeological data under free licenses.

ArcheoFOSS 2010, the 5th Italian workshop on “Free software, open source e open format nei processi di ricerca archeologica” took place in Foggia, 6 and May. First of all, it was very good. I'm satisfied with this meeting. Why? Here are some thoughts I sketched while traveling back to Siena.

Lots of talks were about the results and methods of research done by MA and PhD students (myself included) - and this means one of the most important pieces of research, perhaps the most important at all, and the most underrated at the same time. Our community shows a strong connection between education and research. Making this connection stronger is part of our habits, I believe

Tomorrow in the early morning I'm leaving for Granada. CAA 2010 starts on Tuesday. I'm giving two talks, unfortunately both are in the same session so I hope it's not going to be a one-man show (I don't like the idea of an open source ghetto session). As a side note, I noticed that three out of four authors are from Italy.
If you're already around tomorrow in the afternoon, drop me an e-mail and maybe we can arrange for a dinner.

Yesterday 26 March I was in Torino and I had a chance to follow some sessions of the EVPSI meeting, organized by the NEXA Center for Internet & Society, Regione Piemonte and others. EVPSI is acronym for Extracting Value from Public Sector Information.

The entire bulk of information held by public bodies, while primarily produced and maintained for their institutional tasks, can be a “gold-mine” for lots of diverse consumers: commercial users, other public bodies and citizens.

These are some rough notes taken last week at Late Antique Archaeology conference 2010 about Local economies? Production & exchange of inland regions, that took place at King's College, London, Friday 12th to Saturday 13th March 2010. Overall, this conference was interesting, and I had a chance to meet lots of nice people working in Late Antique Archaeology. Inspiration for my PhD research was just great.