What do Eric Lander, Frank Wilczek, James Randi and Martha Stewart have in common? The answer can be found at Nautilus: all attended the recent Science Foo Camp, co-organized by Nature Publishing Group, O’Reilly Media and Google, and hosted at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.
The ‘Foo Camp’ format has been pioneered by O’Reilly, a publisher of computing books and organizer of technology conferences, as an antidote to restrictive formal conferences, where the best conversations seem to happen in hallways and during coffee breaks rather than at the main sessions. Foo is self-organizing, unpredictable and rather anarchic — but also quite wonderful.
Visit Nautilus for links to fuller accounts of what Henry Gee calls in his ‘End of the Pier Show’ blog “a gathering of some of the coolest and most influential scientists, technologists, engineers and thinkers on the planet”. You will be directed to Gee’s blog on Nature Network, an essay by George Dyson on the Edge website and Timo Hannay’s account on Nascent. There is lots of other blog coverage which can be accessed from this summary page.

Nature 448, xiii; 23 August 2007