So, this Hillforts Atlas thing. http://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/hillforts-atlas.html
Just shy of £1m to replicate and publish work that's already largely been done. There's some discussion about it on TMA http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/forum/?thread=69114 and there was quite a bit of noise on Twitter when the project was launched yesterday.
But what does the team here think? It seems a lot of money to me for what is essentially rework and collation of existing info. Henry Rothwell on Digital Digging http://www.digitaldigging.net/hillforts/index.html has already made a good start on mapping and describing many of the major sites, but the emphasis on 'an army of volunteers' as described by the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-23203500 smacks a bit of Cameron desperately trying to show the 'Big Society' in action. Just a guess, but I strongly suspect it ain't gonna happen. As Rhiannon stated on the TMA thread, there seems to be no way (yet) of finding out who's doing what, so the possibility for duplication of effort is immense. And what if two teams on the ground come up with different surveys of the same site? And what if both of those dispute previous documentation? Is their work going to be ignored, cast aside? How will discrepancies be handled? Will there be any training for this 'army'?
Over to you...