This post is redundant, because it’s so late in coming. Consequently it’s more of an aide-memoire for me rather than anything else. For the uninitiated e-Biosphere 09 was an International Conference held at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, London from 1-3rd June. The conference brought an international mix of about 500 people working on the rather nebulous topic of “biodiversity informatics". The conference was coupled with an invite only meeting (dubbed the Silverbacks meeting) where the great and the good got together to produce a roadmap for the discipline. Here is a personalized list of the conference highlights, lowlights and outcomes:

Twitter: I’m an intermittent twitterer (vsmithuk), issuing the occasional tweet at a meeting or about my work. But Twitter came into its own at e-Biosphere. Under the hashtag #ebio09, twitter became the true voice for the conference – Indeed most people seemed to avoid the official conference forum. Twitter provided a space for participants (both real and virtual) to highlight key topics, provide alternative commentaries and offer a dissenting voice in real time. I may be late to the twitter party, but it was this meeting that made me a true believer.

Cybertaxonomy: I define cybertaxonomy as the “use of computers and networks in a program of taxonomic research” but there were not may users in the breakout group on cybertaxonomy. Perhaps as a result, the session had all the atmosphere and excitement of a morgue. Attempting to inject some dynamism into the discussion (and to avoid slitting my wrists) I tried to mix things up a bit, offering my more controversial views about how informatics and publication can be used to better serve the science we do. None of this made it through to the summary presentation the following day, which was a travesty in its own right, but I don’t think the damage is lasting.

The Street Fare: As part of the meeting a street fare of projects, stands and demos was organized just outside the main conference hall. This was a tremendous success, especially from the perspective of the Scratchpad project. My colleagues on the EDIT stand reported that 50-70% of the enquiries were about the Scratchpads. Alas, I never made it around all of the stands (let alone the posters) as I kept getting interrupted. If the conference is ever done again we need more dedicated time for the street fare and dedicated time for the posters.

Redundancy: Time and time again, we saw the same thing presented slightly different way. Indeed, I’d say that 90% of what we want to do in the field has already been done by somebody, probably 60% of this at least twice! Because these efforts are so scattered, fragmentary and not adapted to the real needs of users, most never achieve the critical mass required to be sustainable. Fortunately natural selection kicks eventually, so many of these projects will never be heard from again. A few of the better ones make it through, but evolution takes time.

The Silverbacks: Many of those with most to say on biodiversity informatics, have the least to practically contribute. These are the people with the networks who can (at least we are told) influence the decision makers and provide the cash. These politicians (and a handful of the good guys) got together at the post conference workshop to thrash out our future. Specifically, a roadmap that will outline the future of the e-Biosphere brand and more broadly, biodiversity informatics. I understand that a month on from the meeting, the roadmap report is still in development, so it had better be good!

The people at e-Biosphere were a mix of stakeholders with different backgrounds and very different understandings about informatics. This meant that people were sometimes talking at cross-purposes or were unaware of the state of the art in the field. Nevertheless, e-Biosphere was a very positive development. It was a leveler for the community, akin to putting everyone on the starting blocks of a racetrack. From here we can make a common start, just so long as those supposed to be leading us, know where we are going.