SciBarCamp is less than two weeks away, and we’re pretty much filled up in terms of participants (We secretly had room for slightly over 100! 112 people are registered as of this moment.)

One of the things we want to do ahead of time is get people thinking about some topics. Even though we will establish the program on Friday night, it helps to come prepared. We have a topics page where so far only two people have written a suggestion. The first suggestion is about science and art, which I’m sure will be covered since we have musicians, poets, and artists attending. The second suggestion is my suggestion: I thought that in a group of scientists, technologists, and artists, we could talk about what the general public really needs to know about science. If you have this conversation with a group of scientists it will tend to get technical (“everyone should know about protein translation!”) but with some balance it could get very interesting.

My original blog post with the topic suggestion
Micheal Nielsen’s response
Chad Orzel’s response

And unrelated to ScibarCamp I also found Chet Raymo’s blog post about what sixth graders should know about science

So tell me, what do you think everyone should know about science?
I’ll bring the contributions of people who are not attending along to SciBarCamp (it’ll be like being there). I want to get a giant piece of paper on which people can write their ideas, and I’ll just print and paste the internet ones.

Are there any other topics in general that you think should be covered at SciBarCamp? Roughly, our participants are working scientists, graduate students, science writers, science bloggers, artists, musicians, technologists, entrepeneurs or multiple of the above.