Note: see also the official invitation published on March 31st

Experts in Tuscan hydrology might be puzzled recalling that the confluence of the Farma Creek and the Cecina river does not exist. In fact, they are not even part of the same catchment, so what’s up?

However, at times confluences may be created among territories and people. Unlike water, these occasionally flow not following the currents and -without having to oppose the flow – will propose thoughts and actions dealing with environment, resources, and culture.

Tomorrow, Friday Apr. 7, from 6 to 7PM CET, there will be a webinar by Andrea Giacomelli, aka pibinko, PhD and MS in Environmental Engineering with over twenty years of international experience in geographic information systems together with Dario Canal, Simone Sandrucci, Pietro Marini, and Luigi Ciampini (i.e. four out of five of the Etruschi from Lakota).

The presentation will review activities conducted over the past ten years, which from 2015 saw growing interactions among the authors in the area of outreach and dissemination intertwining scientific topics and music.

Mixing science and music or other performing arts is not innnovative in general, nor for the authors, who have been dealing with music for years: Etruschi as professional musicians and pibinko as creator of events and producer of projects with varying levels of musical presence. Indeed, the peculiarity of this experiment is in the process through which it started, i.e. connecting territories which are not far away but are normally disconnected, and outside of “traditional” scientific or artistic research.

After about a year of brainstorming, things went operational in December 2016, with the Farma Valley Winter Fest, where Etruschi from Lakota were the main act of the event, in parallelo with the presentation of the “alpha version” of the Farma Valley Community map.

This first gig paved the way for a subsequent poster presentation at the FOSS4G-IT conference at the Faculty of Engineering in Genoa, Italy, on Feb. 9, and the closing set related to the presentation of the updated Farma Valley Community map as one of the events in the International Open Data Day in  Castelnuovo Val di Cecina. Now we wait for tomorrow’s webinar.

This originates from a call for topics by two international networks:  GeoForAll, composed by over 100 open-source geomatics labs (if you are not in the business, figure folks working with multi-colour maps on large computers) spread across five continents, and the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS).

The webinar will be in English, and since a significant part of the audience is expected to be in the USA, the time will be from 6 to 7PM CET.

To follow the webinar you may register and be online tomorrow, or see the recording which will be published by GeoForAll after the event.

This is not the first international presentation we have on our BuioMetria Partecipativa project on participatory night sky quality monitoring, open-source mapping, or promotion of unknown parts of Tuscany. Since 2007 we gave presentations in the USA (Illinois and California), Scotland, Germany, China, United Arab Emirates, Romania, and for the European Commission. Furthermore, we invited international experts in the Farma Valley in 2012 and 2015. Still, there is interest from the hosting organizations to hear experiences from our “lesser known” territorities and -vice versa- we are curious of the feedback we will have from a very remote audience.

In the presentation we will also give some highlight on the Spring-Summer calendar of events representing the promotinal part of our team’s activities. After the webinar the information will be added as an update for pibinko.org’s calendar.

For more information: info@pibinko.org.