I attend conferences fairly regularly, mostly representing Nature. Once upon a time, someone asked me what I actually do at conferences. I had to sit and think about this for a few seconds, but my honest answer was ‘hang around in bars’.
You know the drill. Academic conferences usually go on too long, with too many parallel sessions showing too many papers, the best of which will describe material already published, the worst of which should really have been posters – but the poor soul delivering the paper would only have been able to have gotten funding to go on condition that they delivered a platform presentation.
There is almost always no time for discussion.
The poster sessions are too crowded and infrequent.
Most of the real action – where you get to learn interesting things from interesting people – happens in the corridors, between sessions, at coffee breaks – and, yes, in bars. Quite often my most valuable interactions have come when I have been able to meet someone interesting and take an hour or two for coffee, lunch or dinner.
I’ve just returned from the SciFoo Camp, which has all the good parts of conferences and none of the boring bits.
First, the hosts – Google – laid on the most wonderful facilities. Lots of rooms, all of them wired, with food and coffee on tap most of the time. Thank you, Google. May much karma extend forever Googlewards.
Second, it was an ‘unconference’ – which means, broadly, that the delegates make up their own agenda as they go along.
All the rooms are provided – but you, the participants, decide what you want to do with them.
The concept originated with Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly media (co-hosts of the SciFoo camp, with Nature Publishing Group). ‘Foo’ just stands for ‘Friends Of O’Reilly’. The result is that the entire conference is, in effect, one weekend-long coffee-break in which you can talk about all the things that interest you, with like-minded people (an opportunity which, however, can leave one tongue-tied in awe given the mighty company among which one is constrained to mingle…)
Some of the sessions started as formal presentations – but most worked best as seminars or brain-storming sessions.
Some highlights; I got to attend a seminar hosted by Eugenie Scott, tireless (and prodigiously well-informed and articulate) representative of NCSE, on the generally creationist atmosphere that seems all-pervasive in the United States – and what should be done about it. And managed to have lunch with her afterwards (with PZ Myers of the very popular science blog Pharyngula.)
I joined a particularly enlightening session on science blogging, chaired by prolific blogger Coturnix, and attended by many luminaries of the blogosphere.
Diary note: Coturnix is hosting a conference on science blogging on Saturday 19 January, 2008, at the Sigma Xi Center at Research Triangle Park, NC.
And, on a whim, with my Futures hat on, I decided to run an hour-long seminar entitled ‘Science Fiction – What Is It For?’, which was attended by several well-known SF authors (notably Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson – truly, I Am Not Worthy) as well as interested scientists, technologists and bloggers, and an entertaining time was had by all, especially me. Where else could you decide, one evening, to host a scratch seminar the very next day, with participants of this calibre?
I got to meet several of my heroes (I was privileged to have had breakfast – twice – with James Randi, on sparkling form), and catch up with old friends and colleagues such as Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail.
But I met many more people of whom I had not heard, but all of whom were interested in some sphere of activity with which I was unfamiliar – whether designing new electronic publication architectures or working on advanced energy generation solutions – and were so passionate, informed and articulate that I came away feeling generally empowered and enlightened.
And we had the time to discuss such things in depth, without feeling obliged to rush off to another lecture on the off-chance that it might have been interesting.
Someday, all conferences will be like this. Someday.
I totally agree. At the risk of sounding corny, I think that the unconference format, with such a freeform agenda, really helped to open up the mind and get people thinking broadly, asking unconventional questions and thus spurring on discussion that probably wouldn’t happen at other conferences.
Of course, the California sun and the constant stream of free food, soda and coffee may have helped. :)
This was not my first unconference, and all I can say is that it is certainly not going to be my last. Of course, Unless I get invited back, I am unlikely to see such a concentration of smart people, both famous and not so famous, again.
It was a blast. So nice meeting you in person. Oh, and the link to the Science Bloggging Conference needs a little fixin’.... I hope you can make it to Chapel Hill in January – beer is on me.
Bora,
This year, I have it in my calendar already. I am definitely going to try my best to make it to the conference
Great to hear that, Deepak! Spread the word!
Until this years SciFoo blogging hype I was not aware of the term ‘unconference’... Within the open source Java chemoinformatics community (CDK, Bioclipse, basically a a subset of the Blue Obelisk movement [1]...), we have been organizing ‘workshops’ with roughly the same setup: at most 1 hour of short presentations, allowing people to introduce a problem or their work. These topics tend to be advertised in advance, but for the rest it is a undecided program until the day itself. I guess some differences with the ‘unconference’ likely includes that during these workshops we do not just talk, we write source code too, and that normally tends to be only one sessions. But that mostly because of the scale of having just around some ten participants instead of 250.
There is no new workshop planned; maybe time for a BOCamp?
Anyway, with our experience of such workshops I can totally agree that a more informal design of conferences is worthwhile. I do anticipate problems for PhDs who rely on travel funds from organizations who require approved contributions like posters, oral, etc. SciFoo is famous enough to not have this problem, but this will be a problem for less high-profile ‘unconference’s.
1.http://www.blueobelisk.org/
I will also try to make to the science blogging conference this time. It would be fun to meet so many of the bloggers I read.
Hi Bora – sorry about the link – I see it has gone a little wayward. Perhaps you could give me the latest up-to-the minute one, and I’ll fix it. Sorry for being noncommunicative – have been offline for two days with DSL hardware problems and am typing this as fast as I can before it browns out again… the engineer comes Monday … fingers crossed…
http://scienceblogging.com/
resolves nicely….
Thanks Bora – all done.
If anyone here wants to experience the unconference format, try and go to a BarCamp in your area. It’s an open equivalent to Foo Camp, and having been to a couple, tons of fun.