Introduction and request (s)

[Chris Puttick]

Hi all

I have a couple of requests, but as I've only just subscribed I thought I had better introduce myself first ;-).

I am not an archaeologist, nor do I work in a profession commonly associated with archaeology - that is I'm an IT/IS Management professional who happens to work for an archaeology organisation (Oxford Archaeology) and until starting work here 8 (long) months ago had no more than a passing interest in archaeology (occasional TV shows).

Now I'm here I am a little confused to find that despite its strong acamedic roots and specialist nature, archaeology is mostly spending money on IT in the most upproductive fashion i.e. in buying licences for software (my bias is showing already!). Digging around the Internet mostly brings me back to the IOSA site, so I guess the assembled list members are about it for interest in applying and developing open source solutions in the field of archaeology.

So, to the requests...

In the interests of spreading the word, an archaeology special interest group has been formed under the auspices of the Open Geospatial Foundation - this is vey much a fledgling group, having kicked off at the FOSS4G conference last week, but the more who sign up now, the easier it will be for me to get interest from the parts of archaeology who still ask "what is open source and why". So if this is of interest, please sign-up at the wiki page:

http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Archaeology (Stefano already did - thanks Steko!)

UK list members could also sign up for the UK local chapter, again usefully lending their collective weight to an initial "launch" effort:

http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/United_Kingdom

The other request to the list is that, until there is sufficient OSGeo-sig membership or it becomes inappropriate, we get people to sign-up to this list for SIG discussions - any objections/concerns?

Cheers

Chris

Chris Puttick
CIO
Oxford Archaeology: Exploring the Human Journey
Direct: +44 (0)1865 263 818
Switchboard: +44 (0)1865 263 800
Mobile: +44 (0)7914 402 907
http://thehumanjourney.net 


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