Please suggest speaker/session ideas!
Corie Lok
Tuesday, 26 May 2009 17:30 UTC
We are looking for ideas for sessions and speakers (panel discussions, keynote speakers, demos, etc). Please post those ideas here or submit them by email to topics@scienceonlinelondon.org by June 19, 2009.
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Panel Discussions: (I’m big on overcoming barriers at the moment)
- overcoming barriers to engagement with web2.0 ‘stuff’ within the science community (research tools, commenting on articles, networking/collaboration tools)
- cultural issues in online science communities: language/cultural/social barriers, managing expectations, role of moderation, differences between science communities and ‘other communities’, encouraging diversity/debate whilst maintaining some sort of order etc (closely related but perhaps more general than the first)
Keynote: someone who can speak about the impact that online science ‘stuff’ has had and speculate (wildly) about potential impact. Or someone who is as funny as Ben Goldacre was last year!
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I like the cultural issues suggestion, but I usually think about this in an “offline” way: people outside of science are generally surprised when I explain that physicists and biologists never really meet. They think of “scientists” as this general global group (“scientists say that…”) and probably picture us all hanging out in the same labs, but of course it isn’t like that. Is this a problem? (Does this cause confusion among the public? Does it lead to missed opportunities and reinvention of the wheel between scientific disciplines?) And if it is a problem can the internet help overcome this, for example though social networks, or will people still group together with their own kind and just displace the cliques/disciplines that already exist from the real world to the web? Or worse, will it lead to even more distribution, where now people within previously uniform groups are split into those that make more or less use of the web?
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I suggest Oliver Morton as a keynote speaker. He’s about to leave the staff of Nature, but has (among many other things) chaired some of Nature’s real-world debates at King’s Place, written science books, and run the odd blog or two. I think he’d have some great opinions and other things to say about online science, and he’s very well-informed on these matters (practically speaking).
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Another suggestion: rather than just
twitteringthinking of how scientists interact with the web as a social tool, what about someone talking about effectively using the web to collect or produce data. Example: Galaxy Zoo, Foldit, distributed computing (SETI or the protein folding one), semantic web to collect citizen science tagged data, etc.
I can only think of people in the US off the top of my head, but there must be someone in the UK who is involved in that kind of stuff.Or, what about the web as a subject of scientific research. Think network science, and the work of eg. Duncan Watts and Albert Laszlo Barabasi (“Networks” is also the topic of this year’s Subtle Technologies conference in Toronto, which I sadly have to miss, but which other NN members might be attending) Or think about social networks as subject of study (eg. Danah Boyd’s work)
I probably have more ideas, but these were the ones that bubbled to the surface.
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One more: Genres within science blogs.
Often heaped on one pile, for example in things like Open Laboratory or conferences like this or people’s blogrolls, “science blogs” actually describe a wide variety of different types of blogs. You can’t really say which is the “better” science blog if you are comparing stories from the lab with journal club essays or pictures of birds with list of links to cool websites. And yet, “science blogs”, in all its variety, is not even a category of the general Bloggies awards, which lump it in with Tech blogs.
Proposed: interactive (fun!) session to try and subdivide the genre and maybe design some geeky badges to show on your blog which genre(s) you belong to (prerequisite: agreeing that there are many different types of science blogs.) -
How about online public participation / dialogue. Increasingly initiatives have been started (I can point out a few in NL) to engage the public through online discussion. The general public, or very specific publics (patient groups, etc.) engage in an online discussion with various experts (medical, policy & science). Ideally all parties involved will learn. The whole thing is moderated by an expert-moderator who ensures that all voices are equally heard/represented/respected. If you are interest, I can point out a few of such experts to you…
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Are speakers from the States a possibility? I suggest Clive Thompson. “Here he is talking about his blog”http://web.mit.edu/knight-science/fellows/interviews/thompson.html.
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Declan Butler, senior News reporter and Paris correspondent of Nature, would do a great job on some of Eva’s suggestions – eg the differences between science blogs, and networked/online science. He’s extremely well-informed on the next wave, and only a Eurostar journey away.
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If you (or PLoS?) can find the money, it would be great to get Bora over as a a speaker. Perhaps we raise money by selling tickets to an all-in wrestling contest between Bora “PLoS” Z and Declan “Nature” Butler.
I like the idea of a session on getting more scientists to use Web 2.0. Something about building communities online might be interesting too. After the NC ScienceOnline I had a pile of suggestions for sessions, but now I can’t remember most of them.
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Not sure how relevant: but the power of personality/celebrity in promoting science online?
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