We’re in the heat of the Scifoo unconference at Google, hosted by Nature, O’Reilly and Google. It’s a fantastic experience – I’ve been fortunate to be re-invited. It’s about what you can help to create in this atmosphere – how can we change the world. We’re discouraged from real-time blogging and direct quotes without permission so this gives at atmosphere of trust and excited collaboration.
We all introduce ourselves in 3 words (and woe betide if you overrun) – Mine were OpenData, Chemistry and Hacking. We’ve spent time before we came contributing to a Wiki and bouncing ideas off each other. How can we create human 2.0? how does knitting relate to migraine? Anything.
Then we post possible sessions. These are topics people might be interested in joining. So Cameron and I have put up two – one on OpenData and one on Wave. Google’s rooms are either very large or quite small. So you have to guess whether your topic may attract people. Great fun.
I think I can reveal we had a presentation from Steph on Wave yesterday and there are lots of ideas on what we can do. (Wave is from Google in Sydney.) So we’ll have a developer there in the afternoon and see what happens. Wave is Java, XML, Python – with robots on the server and gadgets on the client. In true Aussie style the robots all end in -y – spelly is the spellchecker, rosy etta does translations in real time. So it looks a dead cert to translate OSCAR to OZ and become OZZY. (Except that you lot have now got 4 centuries for 5 wickets I can’t bear to watch any more). Anyway OSCAR can act as a robot which translates written chemistry into semantic chemistry. This is a great way to get programs out.
We also want to see what we can do in the client. Can Jmol run there? We’ll find out.
On Open Data this morning we’ll see who comes before we decide on the program. We can show the Panton principles, The OKF IsItOpen and also collect ideas of where open data works in Science – and where it doesn’t. When it doesn’t I expect the main problems to be:
restrictions by publishers, including universities
lack of a naming scheme
no examples of why this is so exciting.
But it will be foolish to guess what will happen. After all we are at Scifoo and it’s all about the future, even when we look backwards.
I registered for wave beta as soon as I saw the first videos from Google. I finally received an invite at the weekend, but was severely disappointed when the registration form failed to work for me. I have yet to find a way to contact google to rectify this problem (although I did post on the google help forums – http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Docs/thread?fid=5c2d974724d43f1e00047039ded5b542&hl=en ).
Hopefully I will get a chance to play with this soon as I expect I will be able to do some really quite cool things.