Recent replies to "What will the format of the conference be like?"

Reply from Jean-Claude Bradley

Jean-Claude Bradley — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:46:04 -0000

I helped set up the ACS meeting and would be happy to help with this one. Corie/Joanna – lets meet on Second Nature to discuss.

Reply from Corie Lok

Corie Lok — Wed, 14 May 2008 20:25:54 -0000

Thanks everyone for your feedback about the format of the conference. We’ve talked it over and Matt got feedback from the folks at the Royal Institution as well, and we’ve decided to make the format a hybrid one. Most of the sessions and speakers will be set ahead of time, based on ideas suggested by you all in this forum, but we will leave a few of the rooms and time slots open for sessions that are self-organized the morning of August 30.

With that, we are now soliciting ideas for talks/sessions/workshops! Please post your ideas under Sessions Wanted and Sessions offered

About a poster session: it’s not clear yet whether we’ll have the right facilities at the RI to hold a proper poster session. But we still want to give you the opportunity to showcase your work/ideas in a non-session, non-talk format, such as a demo or very short presentation. So please post those ideas here.

Reply from Corie Lok

Corie Lok — Wed, 14 May 2008 20:24:53 -0000

We are definitely looking into running something on Second Life concurrently with the conference and/or after it. Are there any volunteers who want to help us run this? Email us if you’re interested: network@nature.com

Reply from Joanna Scott

Joanna Scott — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:09:30 -0000

On the suggestion of a poster session, I went to the American Chemical Society conference and they held a virtual poster session in Second Life immediately after the real world poster session.

20 posters were picked, they were uploaded to SL and their owners given avatars to stand next to the posters and chat to visitors.

The idea was for all chemists who couldn’t attend to get a chance to see posters and talk to the presenters live and for poster-owners to get a chance to see what all the SL fuss was about.

Not sure if it would work in this context but there do seem to be quite a few people who want to make it and can’t, so could maybe give it a try?

Reply from Katherine Haxton

Katherine Haxton — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:52:01 -0000

I agree with Corie. As excited as I am by the prospect of a science blogging conference near enough for me to get on a train for, I want to know a lot more about the format, structure and content of the day before I commit to coming. (and I know much of this will be forthcoming once rooms are looked at etc.)

I love Martin’s poster session suggestion with comment space.

Reply from Cameron Neylon

Cameron Neylon — Sun, 11 May 2008 21:12:21 -0000

Wikis seem to work pretty well at pre-organisation of conferences as well. Gives people an opportunity play with ideas and write down suggestions. The other thing of course prompted by Barbara Axt’s recent post. Is there a twitter hashtag for the conference yet? If not can I suggest #londonsciblog ?

Reply from Corie Lok

Corie Lok — Sun, 11 May 2008 01:15:09 -0000

Heather, forgot to say, I like the idea you suggest: sessions offered and sessions wanted. We will very soon start up new threads for these. We just wanted to figure out first how many rooms we’d have to use at the RI…that’ll determine how many sessions we can have.

Reply from Corie Lok

Corie Lok — Sun, 11 May 2008 01:01:54 -0000

I’ve been to two unconferences, both 2-day (Sat, Sun) ones, where the whiteboard exercise and schedule-setting happened on the Friday night and took at least an hour. I’ve never been to a one-day Barcamp. My understanding is that Barcamps are local in nature, right? If so, people attending don’t have to travel far to attend and (I would suspect) don’t mind spending time in the morning setting the programme.

But for this conference, some people will be traveling from outside of London to attend. So I would think that if they’re going to the trouble and expense to take a train or plane to attend just a one-day conference, they would want to spend as much of their time that day taking in the content of the conference, rather than figuring out what that content will be (that’s how I would feel anyway). Plus, a few people have said that to get funding for this trip, they need to know ahead of time that they’ll be speaking/giving a poster.

So Matt Brown and I were thinking that for this conference, we can still open it up to everyone to suggest and vote on sessions. We just do that online in this forum before the conference starts.

How does that sound, MattW and others suggesting the unconference format?

I do like the idea of a poster session though. Let’s see if the venue can accomodate that first.

Reply from Maxine Clarke

Maxine Clarke — Sat, 10 May 2008 22:56:41 -0000

Posters are a good thing, I agree for the reasons you say, Martin. Matt B will probably be able to say more about that when he reports back on what the RI space is like.

Reply from Martin Fenner

Martin Fenner — Sat, 10 May 2008 06:10:45 -0000

I would like to repeat my suggestion for a poster session as part of the schedule. A poster session would allow a large number of people to present their ideas. And the format is open enough for interesting discussions and new directions. In our context a poster would be a (prewritten) blog entry and there would of course be white space for comments. Maybe this can even be combined with the other suggestions, e.g. by starting with a 90 min or 2 h poster session during which the following sessions are decided.

I have never been to an unconference. The format looks attractive and the previous experience appears to be positive, but I would have the same objections as Maxine.

Reply from Matt Wood

Matt Wood — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:17:32 -0000

At barcamp, structure didn’t seem to be a problem, and not too many egos were massaged (or dented) in the progress! However, one thing the uncon approach can potentially lack is direction and flow.

If the purpose of such a blogger meetup is to provide a profile of the blogging landscape, an unconvention ‘camp’ would be a good fit. However, such a meeting would benefit from editorial control should particular, predetermined themes be selected for exposition.

In that light, what might these themes look like?

Reply from Maxine Clarke

Maxine Clarke — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:48:04 -0000

I haven’t been to an unconference, so I have no experience and I may be writing out of turn, but I have been to plenty of “unstructured” meetings which turn out to be an opportunity for some to grandstand and flaunt their egos, while others never say a word the whole time (but if they had an assigned slot, what they say could be even more interesting than the people hogging the attention).

It must depend on whether it is such a free for all that “the schedule [is] decided on the day based around those who arrive ready to talk”, as Matt W describes, or (sounds better?) “the three most voted-for speakers running parallel sessions”, as suggested by Matt B?

Reply from Matt Wood

Matt Wood — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:25:21 -0000

The Barcamp was only a single day, and it worked reasonably well.

We went through the audience, asking each person to introduce themselves in only three words, which was a great way to start. We then had coffee, and as people mingled, interested parties wrote up their suggested topic on a white board and we went from there.

The same approach works at SciFoo with around 200 people: although I guess they had a bigger white board. ; )

Reply from Matt Brown

Matt Brown — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:56:35 -0000

Matt – can the format work well in a one-day conference, where we don’t want to be spending too long making decisions on the day, and only have a limited number of slots for speakers?

Maybe we could have an unconference section to the day, with the three most voted-for speakers running parallel sessions.

I’m visiting the Ri on Tuesday, after which we’ll know much more about the rooms available.

Reply from Matt Wood

Matt Wood — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:52:41 -0000

I would definitely vote for an ‘unconference’ style format. I organised a science Barcamp here in Cambridge last year, which worked really well.

For those unfamiliar, the format is open, with the schedule decided on the day based around those who arrive ready to talk. This format really fosters discussion and interaction, and works very well in ‘grass roots’ style conferences. We ended up with more talks than we could fit in, but a quick show of hands indicated which talks we should make time for.

This approach would mix well with a couple of ‘invited’ keynotes too, should that be a possibility.

Reply from Heather Etchevers

Heather Etchevers — Fri, 09 May 2008 07:38:49 -0000

Timothy Campbell posted his experience from PodCamp Toronto. One of the best suggestions in my opinion is to set up, perhaps in this forum, a “List of Sessions Offered and Sessions Wanted” as they did there.

From my limited experience with open lab notebooks and resistance from other members of my lab, both on principle and in execution, I’d advise against working this with a wiki. They are just not user-friendly enough, in my opinion. Although potential Science Bloggers attendees are perhaps a more savvy group of people.

Corie, Matt, perhaps open up a brainstorming thread and let us rip?

Reply from Matt Brown

Matt Brown — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:45:13 -0000

I’m going for a look around the Royal Institution in a couple of weeks, to get a better idea of the new layout and to discuss the logistics.

This will give us a better idea of room sizes and therefore the different formats we can support.

So I suggest we hold off discussion of format and speakers until I’ve gathered the facts.

Reply from Corie Lok

Corie Lok — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:05:18 -0000

Martin,
We will soon be starting a new forum topic here asking for session ideas, so please hold your thoughts for now. When we start that thread, can you repost your idea there? Sorry, we just want to keep things organized, rather than having session ideas scattered across different threads.

You guys are so keen, we’re having trouble keeping up with you! :)

Reply from Corie Lok

Corie Lok — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:03:09 -0000

Maxine, Matt and I will soon be posting more information in this group’s profile about the overall aim of the conference and its intended audience. To answer your question though…the conference is open to anyone with an interest in science blogging, including science bloggers, readers of science blogs, people interested in learning more about the science blogosphere. So no, you don’t have to be a scientist and you don’t have to have a blog.

Reply from Eva Amsen

Eva Amsen — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:47:33 -0000

SciBarCamp had 130 participants (about 100 at any given time) and we planned the schedule for Saturday on Friday night by having people put up their suggestions for talks, and walk around to look at all the proposals and meet people. There was a voting section on the proposal sheets, but all the talks were slotted in – the votes were used to allocate rooms. In the morning we had one big room, so everything was centralized. In the afternoon we had smaller rooms. (This division of space was the same at the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging conference. I didn’t go in 2008, so don’t know about that.)

However! In all the feedback we’ve received, the only thing that people commented on as needing improvement was the schedule... But they all had different comments about the schedule, so it’s very hard to even say exactly where it needed improvement. Well, everyone pretty much agreed that we should start and end later, that was the only thing that’s clear…
You can read some comments on our NN forum and I reply to a few others on my blog here (scroll down to “the schedule”). We also had a session at SciBarCamp to evaluate and get feedback, but I don’t have notes from that. (I think Jen Dodd does).

Hope that helps!