Two Online RTI Groups? (was Underwater RTIs)

[Dennis Piechota]

Hi all,

Graeme (and Taylor) your questions are not out of turn at all. As the initial admin for RTI_help (now with co-admin Kathryn Piquette) and as a member of the CHI Forum I welcome discussion of whether two online 'communities' are needed or desirable- whether the hassle of two discussion locations has any benefits.

As background, I set up this Google Group after attending a CHI workshop. When I asked Carla Schroer, CHI Founder and Director, about the idea of a discussion group, she mentioned that CHI planned a fee-based group similar to many online expert technical groups where users receive expert support in exchange for an annual membership fee. 

To my mind a peer-to-peer group would have a usefulness separate from an expert-practioner group and would not conflict with the great work of CHI.

Subsequently CHI made its forum free which is great for all users of the technologies. But speaking just for myself I think Carla's instincts were right when she wanted to make it a fee-based expert resource forum. In order to keep going CHI needs support and free forums are a time sink best maintained by groups of practitioners with time on their hands. A fee-based forum allows us, in addition to gifts and donations, a way to support CHI in return for their assistance.

Also I like the idea of resources developed by an unstructured group of interested members- the peer-to-peer model. Everyone brings something of value to the table. Having the shared google docs (glossary, bibliography etc.) and website developed by non-experts as a learning experience in conjunction with occasional expert review is a nice collaborative model for personal learning and for the development of a new field as a whole.

Finally building upon a backbone constantly monitored, maintained and updated by Google may provide a level of protection and stability that is needed in our constantly attacked internet.

Thoughts?

Meanwhile Kathryn and I have begun thinking about how to lessen the hassle of twin discussions. As a first step I've signed myself up to follow all CHI forums and will look into aggregating CHI posts and posting links to them here on the list as needed or posting to our Build_RTIs website in our shared doc, RTI on the Web. There is a way.

Dennis

Dennis Piechota

Archaeological Conservator

Fiske Center for Archaeological Research
UMass Boston
Office: 617-287-6829

RTI Group Co-Admin

RTI_help

On a related note wouldn’t it make sense just to have one RTI forum and for all of us to post there? The CHI forum supports following of posts etc. and so whilst I am very grateful that this one exists too it just seems a bit of a hassle to keep referring from one to the other? Apologies if this is out of turn!

 

Cheers,

 

Graeme

 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Taylor Bennett <taylorb...@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 3:09 PM
Subject: Re: Underwater RTIs?
To: rti_...@googlegroups.com
Cc: RTI_...@googlegroups.com, dennis....@umb.edu


Some RTI_Help users might be interested to know there's also a discussion of underwater RTIs over at the CHI forums, here:
http://forums.culturalheritageimaging.org/index.php?/topic/230-rti-underwater-a-research-project-university-of-southampton/

Several of the postings here would be of interest there as well, and it would be good to gather the discussion on this topic in one place, but I'm not sure what would be the best way to do that.

Best,
Taylor

On Sunday, July 15, 2012 7:44:47 AM UTC-7, Dennis Piechota wrote:

Does anyone know of attempts to apply H- or D-RTI methods to underwater archaeological sites?

 

It's a tall order but there is currently a move to leave artifacts on the seabed (with no or little artifact retrieval to land) and create video links between coastal museums and the sites for research, education and monitoring. D-RTI imaging of artifacts in situ would add greatly to that experience and to our ability to interpret finds and their matrix. Objects viewed underwater look completely different from land. With specular imaging and other rendering modes those artifacts and the seabed surrounding them will be amazing. 

 

Dennis

Dennis Piechota

Archaeological Conservation and Micromorphology

 Fiske Center for Archaeological Research

UMass Boston
Office: 617-287-6829

[Dennis Piechota]

Hi all,

Below is a response to my post by Carla Schroer, Founder and Director of CHI. Carla is not a member of the RTI_help group so I cc.ed her in my original post and will also copy to her all discussion.

Dennis

______________________________________________________________

Dear Dennis and members of RTI_Help,

We appreciate Dennis including us in this discussion.  We want to make a few things clear form the CHI point of view.

While we were initially thinking of a paid membership model for the forums, after study and discussions with members of the RTI community, we made the decision that a free forum was the right thing for CHI.  We will not charge for membership on our forum. This is a commitment we have made.  While we may choose in the future to offer some other kind of paid service, the basic forum we have now, and the content that is generated there will remain free. We do offer consulting and phone support for anyone who wishes to receive personalized, more detailed support. This service can also provide confidentiality for any project where that is a requirement.

We were able to carve out some funds from an existing grant to pay for the forum software and for some hours for CHI staff to set up the forum and get it going. This included populating it with common questions and answers, and responding to new questions. During our annual fund raising campaign we will ask people using the forum to become CHI donors when and if they can afford to do so (think Public Television).  

It is really helpful to us at CHI to have good data about how many people are using the software tools we and our collaborators develop.  While the tools we produce are deliberately open source, and legally can be redistributed by anyone (within the terms of the GPL3 license), we believe it is a benefit to CHI and to users to get the software from the CHI website.  

The benefit to CHI is that we have download counts to quantify our work's dissemination impact. Granting agencies and private donors love quantification and this is one factor in our "why your dollars will be well spent" story. To clarify, we do not collect any personal information from users to download material from our site - just standard analytics data, such as number of downloads, types of browsers, data over time, etc.  

We think there is an advantage to users as well, if people put up links to our downloads rather than allowing the copies to be downloaded from their own sites. The reason is that the users will be sure to get the latest software as well as updates to any of the associated user guides. Our downloads area releases new material, such as recently released Spanish translation of the capture guide, and we provide downloadable sample data for working with the software.

Also, in the next 2 months we will be releasing updates to RTIBuilder (version 2.1) and RTIViewer (version 1.1) as well as updated user guides and new written materials.  This work is nearing completion. The developers working with us on these updates, along with CHI staff, will be answering any questions about these new releases in the CHI forums.

We understand that Dennis started this group because he didn't want to wait for the CHI forum to get set up. This intuition proved helpful to the community because it took us much longer than we thought to get the chiForums working the way we wanted and hosted in a relatively secure location.(In modern times, it isn't clear that any solution is truly "secure") It was a learning experience for us also, since we hadn't hosted a forum before. Dennis also prefers mailing lists to a forum. Of course, folks have their own preferences and tastes.  We decided to use a forum approach because we felt it was easily expandable to support new topics and folks can follow their areas of interest without following everything. It also makes it really easy to find things that have been posted in the past, and to look for content you haven't yet read. The information there is publicly available and indexed by search engines.  You need a free membership to post there (to prevent spam).  This means that someone using RTIBuilder can type into Google "RTIBuilder unknown error" and find information about that error message, enabling people to find useful information without having to know about the existence of a mailing list.

I'll stop there, and I hope this is helpful to the discussion.

Carla

 

Carla Schroer
Founder & Director
Cultural Heritage Imaging
http://culturalheritageimaging.org

Dennis Piechota

Archaeological Conservator

Fiske Center for Archaeological Research
UMass Boston
Office: 617-287-6829

XRF Group Co-Admin

pXRF for Cultural Heritage

RTI Group Co-Admin

RTI_help

[Taylor Bennett]

Thanks, Dennis and Carla (and Graeme), for responding to my initial comment about the Underwater RTI topic.  I really appreciate the time and effort you and Kathryn and the CHI forum administrators put in to moderating and responding to questions from users of this technology.  In the instance of the Underwater RTI topic, the comments at RTI_Help seemed very relevant to the discussion that had started more recently at the CHI Forum, and I was just hoping to encourage information sharing on this subject; I didn't realize it would lead to a larger discussion of the roles of these communities.

I can see the uses of both ways to interact with peers and experts, and I see their features as somewhat complementary.  For example, the Google Docs section of RTI_Help allows sharing of some file types (e.g., MS Excel) that aren't allowed to be uploaded to the CHI Forum, presumably because of security concerns.  I appreciate that the topics on CHI Forums appear in search engines and allow CHI to track user interest, downloads, and innovative applications of the technology.  Perhaps there's a way to further the collaboration between the CHI Forum and RTI_Help group by cross-linking to each other--I'm not knowledgeable enough on the web mechanics to know how this would work.  I also encourage contributions to CHI, and I'm glad they've kept the forum available for free.  

Best,
Taylor