I recently went to the latest SciFoo lives on @ Second Life since I didn’t attend the real deal. It was a cool experience and it offers an alternative way to spread the goodness of science, be it open or not.
After the virtual conference, I popped back to RL and went on a quick video hunt for SciFoo talks or other big science conference talks but my search came out empty. Why is this?
So much hype over video websites that focus on science but when it comes to gathering the big honchos and having them show their stuff, only those present are allowed to see and listen?
Why not record audio/video of these conferences and make the info available to those that couldn’t attend or couldn’t attend all the talks that took place?
I’m sure Google can manage a couple extra gigs of video for this… :)
I thing this is a cultural thing. In the tech world now, video has become ubiquitous and at a number of “web 2.0” conferences all talks are recorded and uploaded to YouTube/Google Video, and in many cases the slides show up on slideshare. Now if only every scientific event would start doing that.
In this particular case I don’t think it’s a scientific cultural think at all. It’s a Foo Camp thing.
The original O’Reilly Foo Camps (which are focused on technology) don’t provide recordings of the sessions either. (Someone tried to record some of the first Camp but it went down very badly.) Trying to issue recordings of SciFoo would be a bit like trying to do the same for a cocktail party. There are too many parallel discussions going on, and participation, not observation, is key. We asked people at the end of SciFoo ’07 whether or not they would have liked recordings and the vote was heavily against.
The unfortunate reality is that to experience SciFoo you need to be there — and even then you can only aspire to absorb perhaps 5% of what’s going on. Sticking a camera in people’s faces would only make people tense up and risk ruining the freewheeling spirit of the event, to eveyone’s detriment.
The best way to spread the SciFoo goodness is not to disseminate videos, but for those who attended to continue the discussions in other forums. I’m delighted to see that’s what’s happening here.
Timo, thanks for that great comment.
I still think there are two sides to this issue where if video is not available, maybe digested “reports” of what went down in each presentation would suffice.
Discussion does go on via blogs and forums, but the problem is that the chit-chat is all taken place as if those in conversation had been there, whereas if someone like myself didn’t get that chance, would be catching the story half way.
And I personally feel that in light of all the openness that the scientific community is embracing, spreading the SciFoo love would be very much appreciated.
Timo agree on Foo camp, which has always been video free. The amount of blogging allowed this year was a first, and there is some stuff that I have not blogged about since it was off the record.
However, in a more general sense (ACS meetings, BioIT world, etc), video is still not common in scientific conferences, especially amateur video, unlike say Gnomedex, where a good 25% of participants had camcorders and the whole thing was being streamed live on UStream. The day that happens at an ACS meeting, I’ll become vegetarian for a month :)
I think one of the issues is intellectual property. We have seen this at meetings where there has been a very serious crack-down on taking pictures of peoples posters and limited dissemination of recorded speeches (usually just the keynote address). I think there is still a protectionist mentality by many, at least in the bio-medical sciences, that will continue to keep recordings limited.
Ricardo, I understand exactly what you’re talking about. We’ve all been there. In the case of SciFoo, my hope is that the people who were there can update the people who weren’t, whether in person or via blogs or whatever. But we’ll have a think if there’s anything that the organisers can do to encourage or assist this. (If anyone has good ideas then let me know.)
Deepak, I agree that video from more formal scientific conferences would be great — there should be more of it.