I’ve been rather offline these last few days while taking some time off at home in Canada, but I’m back now. I’m in California, attending Sci Foo, the Nature, Google and O’Reilly (a technology publishing company)-hosted 2-day conference at the Google headquarters.
It’s unlike any conference you’ll attend: Powerpoints are not encouraged, there was no agenda until we all arrived last night, and it drew an amazing mix of people: from Nobel laureates like Andrew Fire and Frank Wilczek to leading scientists like Eric Lander, Lee Smolin and George Church. Also in the pack are scientists from various fields (astrophysicists, cell biologists, chemists, bioinformaticists, etc etc), science fiction writers, futurists, artists, librarians, journalists, bloggers, museum folks, members of the digerati…even Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, and Martha Stewart are in attendance.
In the intro session last night, everyone—yes, all 200+ of us—had to introduce themselves: name, affiliation and 3 tags that described themselves. My jet lagged brain had trouble keeping track of them all, but I was pretty blown away and humbled by the variety and breadth of activities and interests and accomplishments. Still there were some common themes: open access, open science, digital publishing and communities, the intersection of science, technology and the web.
The agenda was built last night wiki-style: giant boards twice my height were presented to us, along with magic markers. On the boards were blocks of time where any of us could write in a session that we wanted to host. Talk about freeform conferencing. I had to squeeze my way through the crowds to write on the board. I’m scheduled, along with my colleague Natalie DeWitt at Nature Reports Stem Cells to lead a talk about how to get scientists to care about web 2.0.
more soon.
And what were your 3 self-descriptive tags?
journalist, online-networking, community-builder
Hmmm…. I think mine would be: big-picture, entropy, and sideburns.
Did you get to do the session on how to get scientists to care about Web 2.0? If so, how did it go? I’m at the NASA Astrobiology Institute; we’re a virtual institute of about 700 scientists. I and others here are at the central office are exploring options for an online network for our community. A big question is: will our scientists use it? Similar questions for other Web 2.0 aspects like virtual and mirror worlds.
Hi Wendy,
I helped moderate the session about how to get scientists to care about Web 2.0. It was one of those sessions where you come away with more questions than answers. Getting scientists to use online networking is a challenge. A key issue we talked about is incentive. What’s the incentive for scientists to use an online network? I think the key will be content: the online network has to provide important information that can’t be found elsewhere. It’s not enough to simply build and release the tools. And user profiles I don’t think we’ll be enough content either.
I’m glad the Astrobiology Institute is thinking about online networking. I’m finding more and more scientists are doing the same. If you want to talk in more detail (we at NN have some ideas for incentives), send me an email and we can talk by phone. I’d be glad to help you and your colleagues out with the Astrobiology group you just formed.
Forgot to say, you can find my email here
There are two aspects to this I think, one of these is the content issue that Corie notes, it is important that this is seen as community generated content, eg the blogs, the forum topics etc.
The incentive one follows on from this, incentives to signup and to keep coming back. Making your community space the place that fellow scientists turn to for informal advice and information.
This is not about the software, that is definitely true.