SciFoo Camp 2008!
Wow – I got an invite to Nature and O’Reilly’s Science Foo camp 2008! Without question my experiences last year led me to conclude that this was simply the best science gathering ever. To get reinvited back is a real honor. This unconference brings together people working on the bleeding edge of their fields, who are helping to define the future of science, art and technology. The eclectic mix of invitees dynamically build a schedule over the course of the meeting, which (as in previous years) is held over three days this August at Googleplex in Mountainview, CA. As George Dyson noted from last years experience, the resulting schedule presents you with "the impossible choice" of deciding which sessions to attend.
I would be interested to hear from any other invitees, especially those working in the biodiversity informatics area. I’m not sure what I will talk about this year, but given the difficulties facing the EOL project in authoring and quality control of 1.8 million species pages, this seems an obvious choice. If anyone is interested in co-running a session with me on this (or a related bioinformatics topic), let me know.
PS. I’ll try to better document my experiences this year. Alas my 17” powerbook is a little obtrusive. Perhaps I’ll have to invest (or more likely borrow) an Air!
- Vince Smith's blog
- Add new comment
- 61 reads
Del.icio.us (my top 50)
Flickr (my last 10)
Comments
Suggestions
> On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 9:18 AM, Donat Agosti <agosti@amnh.org> wrote:
> Why not talk about the issue of scientific publications and how its content
> could be or is being made accessible for web2.0, what the elements are what
> we need to develop so the flow of information is smoother, and the
> traditional publication model could be changed to a quality check tool for
> pages like your scratchpads or those of EOL.
Hi Donat,
If last years meeting was anything to go by this area is will be a major theme of the meeting. Arguably the whole reason Nature is involved in this is because as publishers they recognize the changing form and role of the scientific publication as part of the science communication process. What is is interesting is that Nature (at least for now) have little to worry about from these changes. It is the small fry, low impact, and long tail journals (like most of those publishing taxonomy) that should be running scared - but this is a different discussion. SciFoo talks (based on last year) tend to fall into the standard style talk (these are usually about some cool new discovery or insight into a particular high impact problem) of more the form of a facilitated discussion, alongside a few slides or a short presentation. I'll probably prep. something along the lines of the latter, focusing on some of the changes happening in biodiversity science (things like developments with Rod's database of everything [iPhylo to give it Rod's more boring name], what you are doing with plazi, the Scratchpad project, Zoobank, BHL and of course mentioning EOL). There are a number of social barriers (and a few technical ones) to moving these systems from toys to production environments. Things like quality assurance, author credit for mashed up content, measuring impact, persistent identifiers so this all hangs together etc. This is coupled with the fact that most science funders (and many of our peers) don't understand any of this. But I don't want to be too boring - this is a very broad audience and many of the invitees will be aware of these issues, even if they don't know what is happening in the back yard of biodiversity science.
Cheers,
Vince