About Electronic Field Notebooks
Electronic Field Notebooks Pty Ltd (EFN) runs, supports, and develops Fieldmark®, an open-source platform for collecting field data offline. It hosts Fieldmark for research groups and organisations, designs notebooks alongside researchers, answers their support requests, and builds custom field applications. That revenue, rather than grant cycles, maintains the open-source platform, which EFN develops in public so anyone can run the upstream software themselves.
History
Morning fog on an excavation, 2009. Photograph: Shawn Ross.
EFN was registered on 5 May 2020 by current and former Macquarie University researchers, whilst they rebuilt the Field Acquired Information Management Systems (FAIMS) mobile platform with funding from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). The rebuild ran from June 2020 to June 2023, led by Macquarie University with CSIRO, Aarhus University, UNSW, AARNet, and La Trobe University as partners. The rebuilt platform launched as Fieldmark in December 2022, and the hosted service followed in 2023.
EFN is a spin-out from Macquarie University, which holds a stake in the company and a seat on its board. The platform’s history back to 2012 is on the Fieldmark website.
The founders
Electronic Field Notebooks was co-founded by five researchers: Brian Ballsun-Stanton, Steve Cassidy, Penny Crook, Shawn Ross, and Adéla Sobotkova. Four had worked on FAIMS since 2012, and Steve Cassidy joined them for the rebuild.
Brian Ballsun-Stanton. Dr Brian Ballsun-Stanton is a co-founder of Electronic Field Notebooks. He was Data Architect for the FAIMS project at UNSW from 2012 and its Technical Director at Macquarie University from 2015, delivering more than 70 field data-collection modules across archaeology, geology, ecology, and oral history. His PhD is in the Philosophy of Data. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie, where he leads the Faculty’s work on generative AI.
Steve Cassidy. A/Prof Steve Cassidy is a co-founder and Director of Electronic Field Notebooks and has been its technical lead since 2020. An academic computer scientist, he has worked on speech and language technology, research data management, and data science over the last 30 years, and developed the storage architecture implemented as the Alveo Virtual Laboratory. He was an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at Macquarie University, where he is now an Honorary Associate Professor.
Penny Crook. Dr Penny Crook is a co-founder of Electronic Field Notebooks, where she looks after client support, outreach, and partnerships with researchers. A historical archaeologist, she specialises in urban assemblage analysis and digital data management. She was part of the team that established FAIMS in 2012, and returned to its leadership team for the rebuild in 2020. Based in the NSW Southern Highlands, she is also principal of The Artefact Post, a post-excavation archaeology practice.
Shawn Ross. Prof Shawn A Ross, FRSN, FSA, is a co-founder and Director of Electronic Field Notebooks. He co-founded FAIMS in 2012 and has led it since. He was Director of Data Science and eResearch at Macquarie University for five years, and is now an Honorary Professor there. His research covers landscape archaeology, long-term Mediterranean history, and research applications of technology.
Adéla Sobotkova. A/Prof Adéla Sobotkova is a co-founder of Electronic Field Notebooks. She was the FAIMS project manager at UNSW from 2012, and her contribution to fieldwork is the development of mobile digital technology for cross-disciplinary field data capture. A landscape archaeologist, she has done fieldwork in Bulgaria, Greece, and south-eastern Australia. She is Associate Professor in digital history at Aarhus University, where her current work explores the spatial footprint of Cold War civil defence in Aarhus.