Post suggestions and new invitees here
Corie Lok
Monday, 13 August 2007 13:31 UTC
This topic is for SciFoo 2007 attendees to post ideas on how to improve the event next year, and who to invite.
I’ll start. I think we need more young scientists and more people from other parts of the globe.
Don’t post specific names and email addresses here. Instead, please email Timo with them and we’ll follow up with them.
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Replies
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Yes, I agree on youngsters and foreigners, and also artists, anthropologists, philosophers and historians. And more evo-devo folks to counteract the over-optimistic DNA jockeys.
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I agree with more young scientists and more scientists from around the world. As an enterprise architect, I know it’s always difficult to move people from thinking about the present (the “current state”) and into envisioning the possibilities of the future (the “target state”). Here a concept for getting people envisioning what’s possible:
“for 20 minutes, anything is possible” – or maybe "for 20 minutes, no one over 30 talks :) "
o Have only two 20 minute keynotes Friday night. One someone who has done something incredible (Charles Simonyi was a great choice), and one a young scientist – get Eva Vertes or Andrew Walkingshaw up in front of the whole group talking about what they’ve accomplished (also this will make the keynotes shorter – can you tell I was jetlagged :)
o “target state facilitation” – there are Enterprise Architecture techniques for eliciting more forward thinking – basic things like “for the next 20 minutes, there are no constraints, you’re in your idea scholarly communication future… what does it look like” or “what can we do to make this possible, rather than finding reasons it’s impossible”There were some sessions where I saw amazing things, like the “professional lifestream” personal impact factor idea/alpha that Euan showed, but then the discussion drifted back to the current research assessment and impact factor and why it was impossible to change how the system works.
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If the folks from The Beagle Project are invited, they could raise some visibility (and perhaps get businesses involved):
http://www.thebeagleproject.com/ -
Strangely enough there was not enough of a computing presence. People running huge climate simulations, doing protein folding, in silico disease modeling, etc. Of course, if they have all those, they BETTER invite me back :).
Timo/Tim mentioned an email address as well. Not sure if it is OK to post here, but perhaps someone will put it up on the wiki.
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You can email Timo with names of people you think we should invite next year. Just go to his profile and click on “send user a message.”
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