I was about to post about an idea – “Who is going to W3C2007, Xtech2007 …”, when Jean-Claude Bradley beat me to it.
Going to Science Foo Camp
I just got an invitation to attend Science Foo Camp in August 07, a unique meeting organized by Nature, O’Reilly and Google. Based on what I heard from last year’s attendees this will be an amazing opportunity to bounce ideas around.
I’d like to hear more from others who are going or who attended last year.As before, we will be inviting around 200 people who are doing particularly interesting work in a wide range of scientific disciplines, as well as in areas of technology and culture that influence, and are influenced by, science. The aim is to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas, creating a unique opportunity to explore topics that transcend traditional boundaries. Of course, senior colleagues from Nature, O’Reilly, and Google will also be present.
Well I’m also going, J-C!
But I am going to a lot of meetings and I thought there might be a way of pre-meeting on the Web. Maybe this is already answered – if so please let me know – but if not…
Could we use del.icio.us – by tagging the registration page (or some other) of the conference with a simple set of tags. Like “arriving saturday”, “no yet made arrangements for sunday dinner” “would like to meet anyone interested in scientific XML”, and so on. Also I might say “am hoping to spend a few days in Bay area before FOO camp” – and see if anyone would like to meet up pre-meeting.
So here are 3 of my upcoming conferences:
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WWW2007 (going 2 days early)
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XTech 2007
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ETD 2007: Added values to e-theses
- Anyone going?
It is great that you’re going Peter!
If you set up any del.icio.us tags let us know so we can subscribe. By the way scifoo is being used as a tag on Connotea.
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Maybe a “Going to Camp” group on Nature Network? Anyway, I created one
http://network.nature.com/group/scifoo
(3) Richard – this seems like a good idea but I have to register with nature.com and presumably expose myself to commercial spam. Any insights?
And although this works for Foo camp, it doesn’t work for anything else.
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It’s really an issue of centralised discussion vs. decentralised.
Decentralised works best if we agree on a common tag, and it may miss some of the discussion – either by not indexing blog postings, or by missing comments entirely (the whole commentspace is not well covered by any search tools).
I will be tagging everything scifoo2007, but I expect others will be only using scifoo.
(If we had better tools and consistent usage, I would tag scifoo 2007, and one could filter discussions that way, e.g. scifoo+2007+attending.)
There are lots of ways to track decentralised discussions. delicious wouldn’t be my starting point, I would use just a tag search on Technorati. HitchHikr is another way to achieve the same results, once a conference entry is set up – and it’s a good place to set consensus for the conference tag. But to get full coverage you probably want to have searches running in Google Blog Search and Bloglines search as well.
http://technorati.com/tag/scifoo2007
http://hitchhikr.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=scifoo2007&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss
etc.
With centralised, the challenge is not what tag to rendesvous on, but what site.
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/ ?
Google Calendar comments?
social network site?
wiki?
blog?
Of course, conferences could make this easier if as soon as they announced they 1. declared the common tag for the event and 2a. created a discussion space (probably a conference wiki) or 2b. create a conference “planet” site that harvests tagged discussions
If you have a wiki or other discussion space that can consume RSS feeds, you can do a bit of a hybrid, where you get both local discussions, as well as a display of any other tag or search matches found elsewhere.
My inclination tends to be to a centralised discussion which is why I created the Nature Networks group. One major downside of centralised tends to be a high barrier to participation – people tend to be much more comfortable writing in their own personal blog spaces, at least until the initial central discussion starts getting a lot of contributors.
(6) Richard this is great. Specifics:
It’s really an issue of centralised discussion vs. decentralised.
Decentralised works best if we agree on a common tag, and it may miss some of the discussion – either by not indexing blog postings, or by missing comments entirely (the whole commentspace is not well covered by any search tools).
I will be tagging everything scifoo2007, but I expect others will be only using scifoo.
(If we had better tools and consistent usage, I would tag scifoo 2007, and one could filter discussions that way, e.g. scifoo+2007+attending.)
PMR> I would opt for scifoo2007 and I suspect others will follow
There are lots of ways to track decentralised discussions. delicious wouldn’t be my starting point, I would use just a tag search on Technorati. HitchHikr is another way to achieve the same results, once a conference entry is set up – and it’s a good place to set consensus for the conference tag. But to get full coverage you probably want to have searches running in Google Blog Search and Bloglines search as well.
http://technorati.com/tag/scifoo2007
http://hitchhikr.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=scifoo2007&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss
etc.
PMR> Just in the last 2 days I have come to value Technorati and I’m sure I’ll find the others useful.
With centralised, the challenge is not what tag to rendesvous on, but what site.
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/ ?
Google Calendar comments?
social network site?
wiki?
blog?
Of course, conferences could make this easier if as soon as they announced they 1. declared the common tag for the event and 2a. created a discussion space (probably a conference wiki) or 2b. create a conference “planet” site that harvests tagged discussions
PMR> Yes – and there will be many people who only want to leave their IDs – not use blogs.
If you have a wiki or other discussion space that can consume RSS feeds, you can do a bit of a hybrid, where you get both local discussions, as well as a display of any other tag or search matches found elsewhere.
My inclination tends to be to a centralised discussion which is why I created the Nature Networks group. One major downside of centralised tends to be a high barrier to participation – people tend to be much more comfortable writing in their own personal blog spaces, at least until the initial central discussion starts getting a lot of contributors.
PMR> I think will develop strongly over the next few months
Planet Scifoo is an idea. We could easily do something like that here – I’ve got a folder in Vienna (my feedreader) filled with the blogs of everyone I’ve found ‘I’ve been invited!’ posts by. (We’re past 5% of the invite list, which is not bad going!)
I’m on Nature Network as well.