Unconference sessions
Matt Brown
Tuesday, 01 July 2008 09:41 UTC
In the afternoon, we’ve set aside three parallel ‘unconference’ sessions. They work like this.
At breakfast coffee, we’ll have a big whiteboard or flip chart upon which you can volunteer yourself to give a talk or lead a discussion on a topic of your choice (i.e. one not covered in the main programme).
At morning break and lunch, delegates will then vote for their preferred talks.
The three with the most votes will be slotted in to the unconference sessions.
Ahead of the big day, we can use this thread to bounce a few ideas around.
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Sounds good to me, though I’ll have to check out Cameron’s posts to see the rationale for the rants, as I think I may see it differently!
It seems to me inevitable that there will be lots of people and organisations trying to do things with this new medium (if not new to people with Cameron’s expertise, new or unheard of to most scientists) – that’s just entrepreneurism and “what happens” when people see opportunities to create new services or businesses using any medium.
Although it might be fun to witness a rant, I don’t see why one is strictly necessary. The applications of the social web that scientists (or others) find useful will emerge from the mass of start-ups and succeed, the others (probably most) will fail because nobody (or not enough people) will find them useful. What’s the problem with that? To the contrary, those who do find the social web a useful tool or “entity” are spoilt for choice at the moment — and having signed up for the latest new application, one can just ignore it if it is not useful. For the applications Cameron says are proliferating, it is evolution in action (adapt to survive).
So yes, good topic for a discussion! -
Overall I think it would be helpful to look at whether anyone is actually using all these different services and if so, then what for, and what we can learn from those usage patterns. What I am trying to get towards is that if we can see what is good (and not so good) about specific services then rather than taking a ‘winner takes all’ bloodbath approach it might be possible to actually design something for the future that combines many of the good characteristics – I only use the word ‘rant’ because the blog posts got a pretty positive response.
Martin, definitely API (and underlying data model) is a part of my agenda. I believe strongly in federated approaches – many services, loosely coupled. See some of the buzz around Ubiquity from Mozilla to see what can be done if a service is setup properly and openly. And imagine rather than doing prosaic things like organizing lunch it is ‘google all people who’ve used this dataset:crossref against papers on platelets and people who attended last weeks conference:are any of them in my timezone and available for a discussion’
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Cameron, I agree that the usage patterns should reveal a lot.
As I mentioned, though, the social web is unknown to the vast majority of scientists. It is my impression that the existing services are being used by a relatively small group or groups of scientists who are in programming-related disciplines (eg bioinformaticians). So we should not exclude the point that not useful services for one group (the early adopters) could still be useful for other groups (the not-yet adopters).Definitely an excellent topic for discussion, and also the topic of the British Library’s next seminar (Scientific researchers and web 2.0) on 24 Sept (at which Timo Hannay of NPG is speaking), so I hope you and other people in reach of London will be able to make that. See their NN forum for further details.
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Part of the problem, as Cameron has already mentioned, is that even the best-intentioned of us scientific “web 2.0” users have a hard time even being aware of the full array of the plethora of options.
One could conceivably imagine any given user trying a few such tools, finding none meet their needs but that they seem to offer similar (useless, Facebook-clone) services, and write the whole thing off. That’s a waste of time and effort for both developers and users when there is so much potential out there.
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Unfortunately, waste of time never stopped anyone! But what Cameron suggests – defining web 2.0 tools or resources that are useful for scientists to enable them to do what they want to do for their science, is the key. Perhaps more so than bothering too much about excessive duplication of services.
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I agree with Cameron that we should actively participate in how social software for scientists is evolving. Some conference participants are actually involved in developing software for scientists. I would have a few questions to ask Ian Mulvany, Euan Adie or Alexander Griekspoor. For example:
- What are the plans for Nature Network / Connotea integration?
- Will there be an OpenSocial API for Nature Network?
- What can we expect from version 2.0 of the Papers software?
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I think that’s a good point Maxine. Focus on creating soemthign useful. Good and useful services will survive; dull and lazy services will die off.
I keep thinking back to the days when Bionet newsgroups were the hottest thing around. There were attempts to control the proliferation of different newsgroups but utimately groups survived or failed according to the level of participation.
It can be helpful (for the new user) to have a listing/catalogue of different services with some description of their characteristics. Gerry McKiernan’s SciTechNet makes a start on this.
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Again, Maxine points out that relatively small numbers of people are using these sites. In some ways that is nice for us – if the number of users were to increase by a factor of 10 or 100 they would become quite different I suspect. The number of discussions one tries to follow would leap to an unmanageable level. The proportion of people that you recognised would drop considerably.
New tools to help users manage will be needed if popularity does grow.
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Thanks for the linke to SciTechNet Frank, I hadn’t come across that. Will definitely be trying to get to the the session at the BL in September.
I think Maxine cuts to the core of the issue here. Wasting time and making friends is fun and all but there are lots of good services for that. Can we tease out the (I think relatively small) number of really useful things that various of these services do and ask how they might be combined effectively?
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