Sharing technical operational experience between CTOs, Lead Developers and Head System Administrators so as to assure that internationally we are all DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) i.e. saving technical operational money by learning from each other's previous experiences.

SITS meetings are specifically for lead developers, chief technical officers and head system administrators who are currently working on large scale scholarly systems that are reused by multiple partners.  These meeting are intended to be reflective on technical operations currently taking place in these major infrastructure systems.  Topics addressed will primarily be operational technical experience with new system components, e.g. use of a new apache project or testing of a new messaging systems architecture, etc.

SITS meetings occur semi-annually and are bootstrapped onto significant events in the scholarly technical community, e.g. conferences, forums, hack-a-thons, etc.

The reason for the "SITS" acronym comes from the simple observation that when two or more developers sit down with one another and look over each other code to the point where they trust the code, then that is the moment of achieveing interoperability.  The SITS meetings hopes to further encourage developers to SIT down with another to share experience of their code with one another.