I’m co-organizing SciBarCamp which is kind of like SciFoo, but different. It was definitely inspired by it. After hearing about SciFoo, some people in the Greater Toronto Area thought: ”Hey that’s cool, I wish I was there—you know what, let’s organize something ourselves, over here in Toronto, where there are lots of scientists and technologists and artists!”
And so we did. It’s filling up pretty fast. I love how diverse the particpant list is, and am looking forward to meeting everyone in person!
I wrote a bit more here about the reactions we’ve had, and about my SciBarCamp experiences so far.
I have family in Toronto and would love to make it to this gathering but I’ll be arriving in Boston just 2 weeks before and I’m not sure I’ll have the time (or $$$) to make the trip.
Maybe next time. It looks great.
Eva, so glad to hear you are doing this. Melanie Swan pointed be to SciBarCamp recently. Might not be able to make it, but will try. On a related note, it would be great if we can do multiple Science Bar Camps done. Boston, Vancouver, San Diego and the Bay Area would be good venues to expand this idea.
Definitely! One of our goals is to set up a model for others to copy in their community. Other BarCamps have done this quite succesfully, so our goal would be more to get scientists aware of and interested in this model (the tech community is familiar with it already) If another city hosts a SciBarCamp in response to this, we’d be beyond thrilled!
Eva
Did you talk to the barcamp folk at all about Scibarcamp?
Not so much beforehand I think, but they know about it. We’re linked somewhere from a BarCamp website.