Between 6PM and 7PM CEST (Rome Time) on Friday April 7 pibinko, with the support of some colleagues, will be giving a webinar explaining “How Free/Open Source Geomatics can integrate in Rural Communities to improve Resilience and Quality of Life“. The event is kindly hosted by the American Society for Photogrammetry & Remote Sensing and promoted by the Open Source Geospatial Consortium’s Geo for all initative.
The presentation will provide a showcase on ten years of projects undertaken primarily in the Metalliferous Hills of Tuscany, about 100 km South of Florence, but very often with an international reach. The webinar will tell how free/open source geomatics -integrated with other skills- systematically helps to make our day and, with a little help from our friends (mainly, but not exclusively, residents), might also provide one of the assets to develop the area. Key highlights will be represented by initiatives related to ancient hand ball games (apparently disconnected from FOSS geomatics, but only apparently), light pollution, community maps, and biodiversity. We will also give some outlook on our plans for the current year, and make an invitation.
The presentation will be given by Andrea Giacomelli aka pibinko (www.pibinko.org):
MS Environmental Engineering Politecnico di Milano, PhD Politecnico di Milano
working with geographic information systems since 1993 and with free/open-source geomatics since 1994, being in the first generation of Italian users of GRASS. He is a documented contributor to Shapelib, and in 1998 was the author of the apr2html extension for ArcView (basically allowing a read- only but “open” access to ArcView projects).
Working in numerous GIS projects applied to environment, tourism, industrial sites, utility management and more, dealing with all aspects of a system’s life cycle.
In 2006-2007 he was part of the founding team for GFOSS.it, the Italian OSGEO Chapter, taking care of outreach and media relations through 2009. He then left the association and created in 2011 Attivarti.org, while in parallel working as pibinko.org
In 2006 he started proposing his own projects related to protection and promotion of lesser known assets in the fields of culture, environment, and open innovation.
Between 2010 and 2012 he acted as a facilitator for one of the working groups for the INSPIRE Directive data specifications.
Since 2011 he runs his operations from two small villages in the hills of Southern Tuscany (Torniella and Tatti), travelling when necessary and often hosting projects and organizing events.
Toward the end of day 2 of the Spring days by FAI (Fondo Ambientale Italiano, Italian Environment Trust), Pietro Crivelli showed up at our info point with pibinko and Attivarti.org. As a painter and a musician, he grabbed a LAG acoustic guitar casually dropped by the info point, and entertained us with some old standards and some of his own compositions.
See here an instrumental version of “Nobody knows when you’re down and out” (for which he told us he prefers the Bessie Smith to the Clapton version), possibly performed for the first time in a medieval castle in the middle of the woods.
The report on the three meetings will follow, but the two-hour jam session featuring some of Etruschi from Lakota, Wolfgang Scheibe and Pietro Crivelli needs to be shared now.
To make a long story short, during the preparations of the talk (between 5.30 and 6.30PM) Crivelli and Scheibe, laid out a warm-up session with bass and guitar.
Andrea Giacomelli MS PhD then had about half an hour of presentation…calling the musicians for a closing theme a variable-geomtery musical session started and went on until about 10PM with an acoustic set: banjo, bass, washboard, harmonica, snare drum with a table and four guitars (not all at the same time).
Below you will find three videos…the quality is not high, but they give you an idea of the mood:
Thanks to Wolfgang Scheibe for the photos and to Association il Tiglio for the organization (and the soul)
As far as I have seen in my almost fifty years of roaming in the area, Southern Tuscany is -sadly- not a land with a lot of Irish presence…but if any lads and lasses are in the area of Pomarance, not far from Pisa and Florence, why not join this event?
You will also meet some of the folks which were part of the Farma Valley Winter Fest (some of them will be on stage, and others in the immediate surroundings):
Saturday March 11 the presentation given a Fa’ la Cosa Giusta (the largest Italian fair on sustainable lifestyles) about participatory mapping closed the Winter tour by pibinko.org & Attivarti.org: fifteen events between mid-December and mid-March, with presentation in four Italian regions, and scouting missions in four more (including Côte d’Azur, Corsica, and Sardinia).
The tour (or the episodes from a serial?)
A mobile office – January 2017
Eight out of the fifteeen events also had some form of musical score, spanning from real concerts, to jam sessions, to improvised poetry.
After the opening, represented by the Farma Valley Winter Fest, we logged some 5000 km, combining cars (due to the payload or the fact of having to reach off-the-beaten path locations), train, ferry, and feet. The tour was split in three segments, always departing from Torniella, our home base in Southern Tuscany, and was spiced up by interesting features, like extreme weather conditions blocking ferries for a week in Corsica, landslides in Sardinia, brasilian visitors looking for Italian ancestors, books on the bronze age read by shepherds, teleporting on Mount Amiata and involuntary re-enactments of parts of the “Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona” movie. Most of these stories have been documented along the way by pibinko in his News section (mostly in Italian on this occasion, so if you go to the News section and you see blog posts missing, try to switch to the Italian version), and many anecdotes have been embedded in the actual presentations during the tour.
The topics
This tour de force was partly engineered: the 2006-2007 Winter was the period when pibinko started proposing his projects intertwining culture, environment, and open innovations, and engaging teams to collaborate. Ten years after this phase, we wanted to share in a kind of interdisciplinary kaleidoscope the developments deriving from those early days. This was not done in a nostalgic mood, but to explain the collaborations, the services, the contents and the locations that we are proposing and which we would like to further develop in the future.
Sunbeams reflected from a wall – Ajaccio – January 2017
Among others, the BuioMetria Partecipativa Project on participatory night sky quality monitoring keeps finding curious and bewildered expressions of people learning about the at-times-tainted relationship between artificial light at night (lamp posts, billboards, and other man-made sources) and the natural light at night (reflected by the Moon and emitted by the stars).
The Farma Valley community map, first announced during the Farma Valley Winter Fest on Dec. 17-19, 2016, also raised great interest, both in the Valley where it originated, where it was presented during the Fifth International Open Data Day (march 4, 2017), and in the presentation given at Fa’ la Cosa Giusta.
Jam session in Castelnuovo Val di Cecina (Pisa), March 5, 2017
Last but not least, in several of the events we had a professional photo coverage (day and night, given his feel for nocturnal photography) with Federico Giussani .
Links between places
What felt different, compared to past editions of this type of ramble (started in 2007), was the sense of relationship between locations: during the Winter we made a substantial effort to connect sites which are not traditionally related, where it not for local soccer championships (Farma Valley, Cecina Valley and Scansano hills). In response, we received not just expressions of interest, but also the first collaborations by local actors. Operating in network mode is no news for pibinko.org and Attivarti.org (it’s been like this for almost 25 years), but the feedback received by the Winter Tour in some areas was definitely something interesting and to be further developed.
Next steps
The March 11 presentation closed the pibinko.org/Attivarti.org Winter tour, and now we’ll take a couple of weeks’ break from the outreach side of things.
In parallel, over the past months we have been working on our Spring-Summer calendar, which we are planning to release before Easter (April 16, this year).
To make sure you won’t be missing the upcoming action, we recommend you to check out the Per essere sicuri di non perdere le segnalazioni potete seguire il pibinko.org calendar(and the Attivarti.org one to also learn about events by our partner organizations). Better still, you may subscribe to our mailing list, in order to receive our announcements by e-mail.
Then, if you really want to not miss at least one of our events: why not organize one together, in your home town? Maybe Southern Tuscany, or the other locations in the current version of the calendar are not easily in your reach, but we are willing to travel and can adapt our schedule to many variations (with adequate lead time). Contact us if you are interested.
Coming up next we have:
March 26 in Torniella, an info desk, during the visit of a delegation of and Italian trust for the protection of the environment (in collaboration with Pro Loco Piloni-Torniella)
Here is a patchwork of accessories used during my the three days at Fa’ la Cosa Giusta: press clippings on the Farma Valley Winter Fest, a map of the fair, a sky quality meter, a luxmeter, the palla a 21 ball, the guest pass, a guitar, the Farma Valley Community map (beta Version).
The name of the Valley was pronounced at least four times per hour for three days, sometimes becoming a kind of mantra (Maval Leyfar / Maval Leyfar…). It still remains a lesser known location, like many others around the world, but several people were enticed by our stories and they might come to discover it now that the Winter is fading away.
Supporting the pibinko.org + Attivarti.org operation
If you like the projects you see through the pibinko.org and Attivarti.org sites, you can support us. Please contact info@pibinko.org for more information on how to do this.
Acknowledgements
This list is not exhaustive (if you’re not here but should be, please write), but covers the core of the team which supported in different ways the pibinko.org + Attivarti.org Winter tour.
Antonella Pocci – secretariat and planning
Elisabetta Vainigli – more planning, permits, and coordination with the Torniella Band
Giulia Ceccarini (remote support) and Paola Bartalucci (local tortelli) at Casa del Chiodo
Andrea Bartalucci – we need him!
Mario Straccali – miscellanea and liaison with other organizations
Giorgio Panerati, Alberto Bartolini and Casa Bazar – print service
Carlo Nardi – mapping support
La Filarmonica di Torniella – spaces in Torniella and permits
La Pro Loco Piloni-Torniella – local promotional support
Federico Giussani e Riflessi Associazione Fotografica di Grosseto – spaces in Grosseto and photo coverage
Pietro Crivelli – live performances and paintings
Etruschi from Lakota – live music (rock!) and audio service
Attivarti.org – mailing list
Andrea Giacomelli / pibinko.org – whatever the others didn’t cover
Wolfgang Scheibe di Tatti Stampa – hand-made Winter Fest T-shirts, single string bass, washboard, and bread
Giulia Rabissi – drafts
Antonio Mori e Ilo Ferrandi – assistance with permits
Piero Panerati – video coverage
Enzo Panerati – historical notes
Fabiano Spinosi e Liano Cenni: audio service
Lucio Monocrom e Orsola Sinisi – video postproduction
Loriano Bartoli – Strawberry juice
Fernando Tizzi, Elino Rossi, Niccolino Grassi – Improvised poetry
Matteo Ceriola – Support in Scansano (Tuscany)
Gabriele e Daniele Sanna – Support in Sassari (Sardinia)
Highlights of the three-day set of events related to our Southern Tuscan participation to the International Open Data Day.
The main square in Scansano, the location for our Southernmost events, mostly known for its wine production.Cafe “La Posta”, the venue for our talkOn Saturday we returned to Torniella. This the “disclosure” of the community map to the Farma Valley residentsMany citizens found references to places they actually forgot, or just heard in conversations but never located on a map.At the end of the event, potential developments are discussedAn excerpt from the community map: place names missing from the official base maps have been recorded via interviews to old hunters, mushroom seekers and other “Farma Valley insiders”The third event was in Castelnuovo Val di Cecina, with the presentation followed by an extended jam session:
Kudos for the three-day marathon go to: Matteo Ceriola, Luca Pau from the “La Posta” cafe, Fernando Tizzi, Elino Rossi, Mario Straccali, Luigi Ciampini, Pietro Marini, Dario Canal, Simone Sandrucci, Pietro Crivelli, Wolfgang Scheibe, Enrico and the girls from the ARCI community centre in Castelnuovo Val di Cecina.
